One of the blogs that I follow,
here, has a recent discussion on the process of designing a knit fabric, and they use the term "experiknitting". I think that is a clever word mashup that definitely applies to what we're doing here. I've also been playing around with Instagram lately and so I decided to see if that is a hashtag being used there and indeed it is (that and #experiknit, and many more!). If you're on Instagram check it out - there's a lot of knitting going on over there.
My most recent experiknit is the waves of wheat lace used in the Kohi Shawl, which I have written about in several previous posts. When I left you last, I had finally figured out how to translate that lace pattern from hand to machine knit, and decided that I would forego the triangular shape for a rectangle. Here it is:
I cast on 69 stitches, and was able to get 290 rows out of the ball, which translated into a wrap that measures about 56" long by 16" wide. I absolutely love this colourway (Restful Rainbow). If you look closely at the picture though, at the bottom you may notice that there are a few rows of orange that aren't where they belong. This is my third ball with this yarn, and the first one that had a knot, where a colour completely out of sequence was tied on. Lynne has experienced this with several balls and was able to exchange them at Michael's. Since this one was at the end I will probably just take out those rows and cast off before the yarn break.
So here's a close up of the lace pattern:
If you want to do this project, it is a lot of hand manipulation of course, but to me it was worth it, and still much faster than hand knitting it. I think the lace pattern works really well with the colours, and you can get into a pretty good rhythm that carries you across the row in no time. I decided not to do any edging at all for two reasons - the first being that I didn't want to do anything that would fight against the natural zig and zag of the edge. Secondly, whatever edging I might have picked would pretty much have to be done "as you go" in order to ensure that the edging was the same colour as the body of the wrap. Doing something after the fact would, in my mind, interrupt the gradual flow of the colours from one to the other.
A fringe at the top and bottom would be nice, but fringe takes a fair bit of yarn and would certainly shorten the body of the wrap, although you could argue it adds at least that much length (or maybe more) visually. But thinking of the colour again, in my opinion the best way to fringe it would be to save enough yarn at the beginning of the ball so that you can fringe the cast on edge with yarn of the same colour, and then stop short in time to save enough yarn at the end of the ball to fringe the bound off edge. I didn't come up with that thought until I was about half way through the wrap, so it was too late to save fringing yarn at the beginning of the ball.
I still have a couple of balls of the yarn, and I may try this lace again in a triangular shawl closer to the original Kohi pattern. If I do of course I will post about it. In the meantime, don't forget about our Shawl in a Ball LIVE workshop at the library this coming Saturday, March 10, 2018. Let us know if you plan to attend. And even if you can't, if you're working on a shawl on your own, or another project that you'd like to share, let us know in the comments!
And lastly, congratulations to the Metro Machine Knitting Guild on their new meeting space at Michael's in Dartmouth Crossing. Their next meeting is this coming Thursday, March 8, from 10 AM to 2 PM.
Nancy
