What's Going On

UPDATED AUGUST 30, 2018 - SEE BELOW

As promised, here is a list of fibre-related events happening in the Maritime provinces this year that I know of, but please let me know if there are more!  In date order:

April 6, 7 and 8, Maritime Fibre Arts Retreat, Atlantica Oak Island Resort & Conference Centre.  As you can see this is happening tomorrow and I believe is fully booked, but keep it in mind for the future.  No website that I can find but they do have a Facebook page.

April 14, Fundy Fibre Artisans Spring Fling, Picadilly, NB.  A one day event hosted by the Fundy Fibre Arisans.

July 6 and 7, Truro Fibre Frolic, Farm Equipment Museum, Truro, NS.  For more information check out the Truro Fibre Frolic Facebook page.

July 13, 14, and 15, Salty Socks Workshop, Hooked Rug Museum of North America, Hubbards, NS.  This is a cranking and machine knitting workshop/retreat sponsored by Shirley Baxter Knits.   For more information go to Shirley's website or the Salty Socks Workshop event page on Facebook.

September 28 - 29, 2018 Maritime Machine Knitters Seminar, Rodd Royalty Inn, Charlottetown, PEI.  This year's seminar is being hosted by the Island Knitters Club and Diana Sullivan is this year's demonstrator.  For more information go to Glen Valley Custom Knits website and for more information on Diana Sullivan you can visit her website and YouTube channel - links are in the sidebar of this page.

September 30, Follow the Yellow Balloons Creative Event Tour, Eastern Shore, NS.  Open studio tour of the Eastern Shore.  For more information check their website and Facebook page.  Event cancelled.

October 5 - 13, Celtic Colours International Festival, Cape Breton Island, NS.  I'm not even going to try to describe this.  Go to the website - it's an amazing festival of everything - music, dance, art and craft.

October 9 - 13, Nova Scotia Fibre Arts Festival, Amherst, NS.  Check out their web page and Facebook page for more information.

October 27,  Fibre Art Retreat, The Old School Community Gathering Place, Musquodoboit Harbour, NS.  Watch the website for more information as this event is still in the planning and organizing stages.

Nancy

Loose Ends

I just couldn't leave it undone - it was a loose end, a job half done, a "noncompletion" as the online thesaurus suggested.   So I made the Kohi Shawl, and I'm very pleased with it, and with myself, truth be told, for tending to that final loose end of the Shawl in a Ball series.   Here it is!

I still have to block this (and literally weave in a couple of loose ends as you can see), but you might be able to get a sense of the unblocked size from the red rocking chair rocker peaking into my shot in the top left hand corner.  As with hand knit lace, once a piece is blocked it can grow quite a bit, but even if it's only a bit I'm quite happy with the size.  In case you're interested, the cast on was 12 stitches, so the narrow point to the left of this photo, the straight edge is the top edge, the increase edge is the bottom diagonal edge, and the cast off is the edge to the right on the photo.  The colour on this one is called "Soothing Blue".   Here's an "in progress" picture to give you an idea.

I think the purl side of this lace is just as pretty as the knit side.  And yes, that is a chart (done on Excel) in the background, but honestly once I got a rhythm going I really didn't need to look at it. 

It is so gratifying to be able to take a hand knit pattern and convert it to machine knit and pick up new skills along the way, and it is great fun to share the progress on this blog.  If you try it yourself please leave a comment or question in the comments below, or send me a photo to share in a future blog post.  I'm happy to help or just to cheer you on.

And speaking of sharing (and inspiration, and cheering), I'm gathering an already impressive list of fibre and machine knitting related events in the Maritimes this summer and fall which I will detail in my next blog post, so watch for that in the next few days and get ready to save some dates!

Nancy

Shawl in a Ball LIVE Round Up

Thank you so much to everyone who came out to newly and awesomely renovated Musquodoboit Harbour Public Library for our Shawl in a Ball LIVE workshop.  We had familiar faces along with new faces, and we also had library patrons wander in to see what we were up to!  I always find it inspiring to spend time with such a creative group of people.

We'd love to have a few of these workshops scattered throughout the year, so watch this space regularly, and let us know in the comments below if you have any ideas for things we could cover in a future get together.

And speaking of workshops, The Island (PEI) Knitters Club has announced the 2018 Maritime Machine Knitters Seminar.  This year's seminar will be held at the Rodd Royalty Inn in Charlottetown on the 28th and 29th of September.  Diana Sullivan of Austin, Texas, will be this year's demonstrator.  If you are not familiar with Diana, there is a link to her blog, Diana Natters On About Machine Knitting to the right on our blog page.  She has a very extensive collection of videos on her YouTube channel that I highly recommend.  For more information on the seminar and how to register, please visit the information page on the Glen Valley Knits website.

Finally, a little "Knitting in the News" - for those of you who might be fans of Marvel Comics, the recent blockbuster movie "Black Panther" has the knitting world buzzing.  Check out "Nakia's Infinity Scarf" on Ravely, a free pattern in both machine and hand knit made available by the costume designer himself, Jeff Gillies, and also check out this BuzzFeed article on the movie and the shawl.

Nancy

#experiknitting

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

Check Your Bias

Did you figure out what I did wrong?

The question was this:  why did my machine knit swatches not look like the lace in the pattern when I followed the chart?  In my previous post I said that I knit the machine knit and the hand knit swatches using the exact same chart provided in the Kohi Shawl pattern.  For sure I did, but when I did the machine knit swatch I started the repeating pattern as I had highlighted it in the chart below on the left.

I did this so that I could pair up the decreases and increases so that when I made the first eyelet I would have a matching decrease (columns 14 and 11 in the photo) for the transfer to the right.  A conscious decision, but not fully thought through as you will see.

When I did the hand knit swatch, I didn't "cherry pick" the start of the lace repeat, and instead just started at the bottom of the chart as you would.  Here's an image of more of the chart, on the right, and the highlighted area on the bottom right of the image is the repeat I knit from.  I had a theory now that changing the start point was what went wrong, so I went back and did one more hand knit swatch knitted from the top part of the chart and lo and behold, the bias is gone just like it was for the first two machine knit swatches.

The fact that the first eyelet has no matching decrease on the right, and the last decrease has no matching eyelet increase on the left, is the key to making the lace "wave", or bias.  It does match up over the course of the row - the increases and decreases cancel each other out and you have the same number of stitches in work.  But over the course of the first ten pattern rows (even-numbered rows are knit plain) the fabric biases one stitch to the right five times.  Then on the next ten row repeat where you start with an orphaned decrease instead of increase, it biases in the opposite direction five times (or stitches) to keep everything balanced overall.  On a knitting needle, you have the same number of stitches per row every row, and you happily work away.  On the knitting machine, the actual needles in work on the bed have shifted over by five stitches to the right, and then in the next section five stitches to the left, and you're more likely to notice, and in my case, think something is perhaps wrong, because not only is the texture of the fabric "undulating", but so is your actual work space on the bed of the machine.

What that also means for the machine knitter is that you have to take into consideration this 5 stitch movement back and forth, and so for a 150-needle bed, as mine is, my maximum work space for this lace would be 145 needles.

Because there is quite a lot of hand manipulation involved in this pattern, and because it will be travelling back and forth five stitches on the machine bed, and finally because I don't like to over-complicate things (I see you rolling your eyes and laughing), I've decided that this shawl will be a wide rectangle.  I've also decided that I'm going to try it on 69 stitches (9 stitch repeat 7 times, plus three edge stitches on each side).   I decided on that by looking at the cast off edge on the first two shawls, which I know is almost 150 stitches wide, and that about half that would be a nice overall width.   I haven't quite decided on the edging, so if anyone has any suggestions please leave them below in the comments. 

In the meantime, I am reminded of Bob Ross, and his wise and liberating advice, to feel free in our creative pursuits to put a little tree here and a little stream there, where ever we feel like it.

Nancy

The Undulation Conundrum

Or:  The Curious Case of the Missing Curves

I have run into a very unexpected challenge in converting the Kohi Shawl's lace pattern from hand knit to machine knit, one that perhaps a more experienced machine knitter might have anticipated and have an immediate solution for, or perhaps not.  I can tell you, though, it nearly broke my brain.  So let me lay out for you this curious problem.

First, have a good look at the picture of the shawl (link above).  It is a very nice and basic eyelet lace with a vertical wave, and the lace pattern is actually called "waves of wheat" (or "wheat waves", or "waves of grain", depending on your source).  The chart for it is as so (highlight added by me to show the repeat):

Not bad, right?  The three-pronged transfer tool should do the trick for the hand manipulation, with a single prong on the opposite end to deal with whether or not the decreases should be 2-step or 1-step (more on that later).

To test the lace pattern I used some scrap yarn and just made a small swatch like so:

Look at it carefully.  There's maybe a tiny bit of "wave" but nothing like in the picture that accompanies the Kohi pattern.  I wondered if perhaps my swatch was too small to show the effect, or maybe I wasn't translating the decreases properly?  So I made a second swatch on the machine, and did 2-step decreases to see if that would make any difference.  A 2-step decrease is where you move the fourth stitch over to the third stitch of the set of three you are moving and then move the set of three to the right or left to fill that empty needle left by the fourth stitch (depending on which direction you are going with the decrease).  The tan swatch below is the second of my machine knit swatches.

If anything this is even less wavy and I am left scratching my head.  I go back again to the swatch and the picture of the shawl in the pattern and the two swatches.  Could the chart be wrong maybe?  So I look up the "waves of wheat" pattern on the internet and find another link (given above) and study that chart and, no, it's essentially the same - longer vertical waves, but that's really the only difference.  And the picture of the swatch looks essentially like the Kohi shawl.  So now I'm really perplexed, but with more study I note that in my machine knit swatches, the eyelets are lining up vertically as they do in the chart, but in the hand knit version they are offset, and it's not just because of the pull of the fabric made by the decreases.  They seem to be actually offset even though they are not in the chart.  So I decide to pull out my hand knitting needles and make yet another swatch, here:

Wait, what?  There it is - the pattern effect I've been looking for, from the exact chart I've been using, but this time with my knitting needles instead of my knitting machine.  The universe is toying with me.

At this point in my story, I'm going to encourage you to try this yourself if you don't believe me, because I barely believed me.  I can happily report that I did finally figure out why the difference, and I made a successful machine knit swatch last night after modifying the chart to how a machine knitter would read it.  Here's my machine knit swatch and my new chart:

The "wave" part of the pattern in the machine knit swatch isn't quite as well defined as it is in the hand knit swatch, so I may swap the types of decreases by changing the "ssk" to a one-step and the "k2tog" to a two-step to see if that matters, but honestly I'm pretty happy with that little swatch and that I actually found the missing curves.

I'm going to leave you in suspense for a few days as to the full explanation of why it made a difference in the first place, and I'd love to hear from you in the comments if you've tried it and especially if it's no surprise to you at all.  I do love a good mystery, especially when I can find a solution and learn a whole lot in the process!

Nancy

Shawl in a Ball LIVE

Join us on Saturday, March 10, from 10 AM to 5 PM at the Musquodoboit Harbour Public Library to knit your very own shawl!

We are just about at capacity so let us know soon if you would like to attend so that you can be added to the email list to get the full details.  If you're not sure, read up on the project in my previous posts here and here.

Some of the things that we will cover as we work through the shawl will be increasing and decreasing methods, using a garter bar, tension, embellishing, and other ways of modifying and customizing the project.

In the meantime, I'm working on translating the hand knit lace pattern of the Kohi Shawl, by Pineapple Bird Knits, to machine knit, also using the Shawl in a Ball yarn, and I have encountered some very unexpected challenges that have made this project a very valuable learning opportunity.  I hope to be able to post about it soon, and to also talk about it during our workshop at the library.  At the very least there will be lots of samples to show and tell!

Nancy