I know I said I wasn't going to bore anyone with further progress on my North Truro Counterpane, but I did get to an interesting point yesterday, and my inbox has been graced with several questions.

First, the show and tell:



As you can see, I finished a couple more side squares of Motif #3, and seamed in most of the other little triangles that I knit over the weekend. That let me join #3 onto the two units I had already completed. I like the accidental trillium flower of negative space that forms where three motifs join. I'd love to say that was intentional, but it wasn't. There's lots that science doesn't know about this designing stuff, yet.

Now for the mailbag:

Aren't you going to have a bushel of ends to deal with?

Two bushels. Even though I'm knitting the squares out from the hex center, there's two for the center hex, plus two for each for six squares, plus two each for six triangles, minus one for the hex end I use to do the first square, and one for the end that doesn't get started at the outset of that first square. 24 in all for each motif. As you can see in the pix, I like to leave them long so they're available for sewing the motifs together. As I get further into the thing, I'll know WHICH I need to leave particularly long, and which I can plan to be shorter. Still, I plan on darning in ends incrementally as I go along rather than waiting for the end of the entire project.

Why aren't you blocking the motifs before sewing them together?

Good question. Sometimes I do block the motifs before I assemble them. This time I didn't. This particular no-name yarn and needle combo seem to produce motifs that lie relatively flat, showing the openwork well without the block. I suspect my squish problem WOULD be partially fixed by blocking, but leaving the hex motif live on the circular as I finish out the squares isn't exactly conducive to the knit-block-assemble production method. Plus pinning out each night's production means leaving the ironing board up to do the blocking, and I don't want to trip over it for the next umpteen months.

Are you going to leave the edges wavy?

I could. You can see that the lower edge makes a nice gentle wave. I could leave the thing raw, edge it with I-cord, or sew on a (yet to be designed) complementing edge strip just as it is. But I probably won't. Just on the principle that the biggest fun comes from the most abstruse and useless effort, I'll probably do up half hexes and half squares to produce a nice straight edge, then affix that as yet mythical edging to it.

Lovely crib blanket! You're nuts for spending so much effort on a baby blanket.

Huh? This is destined to be an oversized Queen-size spread for my own bed. (I've knit a blankie for each of the kids, why can't I have one, too?) If you think I'm addled for attempting this as a mini-throw, I'm sure you think I'm a gibbering raving loon for doing one that big.

I was busy this weekend past.



I worked out the plain triangle and made two. Both are sewn into the growing group. One is indicated by the arrow. I do have a bit of a scrunch problem, but probably not so much that it can't be ignored. The sides of my triangle are less tall than its base is wide. Therefore, when I'm sewing the bases of the patterned triangles onto the sides of the plain one, I have to squish them up a bit. You can see the slight rumples that result.

I do however like the way the points of the stars align. While the orientation I tried last time had more movement in it, because the stars were offset, this one will have less background area.



For those who have asked how I add arrows or other annotations to my photos - I use Macromedia Fireworks to slim, retouch, or otherwise manage my images. I cheat - the arrows are Wingding font "letters" added with the text tool.

Shoe size chart

Some people have pointed out that their European shoe sizes are off a bit from the chart shown yesterday. Mostly at the upper end. The chart's represented equivalent for US shoe sizes Women's 9 and above seems to work out one unit larger than people are reporting. So a 10.5 would be closer to a 42 than a 43. Grains of salt are advised.

I came across this on an Adidas shoe box, and thought it might be of interest to sock knitters, especially those knitting socks as gifts knowing nothing but foot sizes. It's a chart showing adult men's and women's shoe sizes in the US, the UK, France, and Japan. I've added the red line to show my own giant size - US Women's 10.5 (Euro 43, if such a beast exists).

Now by the official centimeter length my giant size works out to a squidge over 28.5 cm. I find my own wool and wool blend socks fit best if they are about 25-27 cm when measured from heel to the tip of the toe: stretchier, finer yarns at the smaller end, less stretchy or heavier yarn at the top end. The one pair of cotton socks I made was about 27.5 cm, to allow for that yarn's lack of stretch.

Why do I make my socks shorter than my actual foot length? If your feet feel like they're swimming in your socks, your socks are too big. Socks NEED to stretch just a bit for optimal fit. Otherwise one gets bunching and foot blisters where the fabric accumulates in folds inside the shoes. Too big socks also wear out faster. All that sliding and rubbing oversize socks do inside shoes translates to extra friction, and friction is a sock-killer.




Click on image above for full size chart

More bits and pieces are accumulating. You can see I'm more than half way done with the second meta-motif. I've got two triangles to sew on (I don't actually do the stitching until the squares on both sides of a triangle are complete.



In this photo you can better see what the motifs look like individually. The center hex is pretty straightforward. The triangle is knit base to tip. The tip's center is a textured stitch. The square (shown attached to the center hex at the bottom right) also features the same textured area in the parallelograms that flank its center spine. When the motifs are placed together, these textured areas join up to make the star-shaped framing device that surrounds the center hex's flower.

Unfortunately this sort of project isn't very good for blog progress reporting. From here on in it's going to be more photos of exactly the same thing, done again and again and again and again. You get the idea. I'll probably mark the completion of each meta-unit, and show a couple more photos of significant milestones - like joining the motifs using the plain triangles I wrote about last week, but I'll try to avoid boring everyone with needless repetition. Which means I'll have to think up something else to write about.

In the absence of any knitting progress, I offer up another embroidered tidbit.



This is the last pattern in my New Carolingian Modelbook. It's the same one that the SCA Lady Lakshmi used to make a hat for her friend Mistress Morwenna.

As you can see (in spite of my lousy camera work), my panel isn't centered on the middle of the repeat. Instead I've skewed it a bit to focus on one mermaid, and to show the second bounce center - the twist at the panel's extreme right. This is in part because I wanted to work one full cycle, but was limited by the size of the piece of linen I had available. For the record, this is done on 30 count linen (about 15 spi) using one strand of standard DMC embroidery floss.

This is one of the pieces I entered in the Woodlawn Plantation embroidery exhibition over the years. It won an honorable mention prize (feedback was that the judges didn't like the skewing of the repeat). Amusingly enough, my brazen, bare-breasted mermaids must have offended some sensibilities. The piece was displayed at the very top of the wall in a room with 15-foot ceilings. The prize ribbon was clipped athwart the bosom of one mermaid, and a yellow sticky note was affixed to her sister's.

I was out webwalking again and came upon this:



It's a report of a bit of performance art/industrial control/knitting that boggles the mind. The artist is directing the production of a knit US flag, using aluminum street light poles as needles and giant strips of felt for yarn. The actual knitting was performed by two John Deere excavators, handled with amazing delicacy and precision. The image is from a story on iBerkshires.com, reporting about the event which took place at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

The artist in question is David Cole. This isn't the first exploration of knitting (giant or human scale) he's done. He's also done a previous bit of oversize knitting with construction machinery, working up fiberglass insulation into a giant slouchy teddy bear. His other works can be seen at his website.

I can't say that the gauge of the flag was in fact 1 st=3 feet, but one has to admit that it's pretty huge. I'm especially boggled at the thought of someone deconstructing the movements to produce a knitting stitch, then reproducing that series behavior using the controls of the excavators. I'd love to applaud not only Mr. Cole (for his imagination in thinking up this concept), but also the equipment operators. "Knit a flag" is an incredible thing to put on one's equipment resume, and is quite a testament to their skill.

Where are all you people coming from? Not literally, of course, but I have been wondering of late.

Blog City has introduced new statistics tools. Among the other things it does is maintain a list of the top read blog pages since the feature came on line. The list is pretty much what I expected. The poncho write-up is my most popular, fueled in part by the fact that the link has been widely collected by people maintaining pattern indexing sites. My Stupid Stitch Marker Tricks piece and the one on double-edged I-cord strips has also been in mailing list and other blogs' discussions of late - no surprise there. Make your own stitch holders also has had lots of traffic, as had the column on the history of the Kitchener Stitch name.

In fact, all the bits I've marked as "Reference" both on the right hand margin, and in the categories index are things I expect to see visited often. Reference pieces are bits I think might be more broadly useful than the rest of the drivel I usually post. But there are also some surprises on the list.

The piece I did on the baby booties has had a huge readership, with most of the hits coming from Japanese websites. My guess is that the step by step photos have helped Japanese knitters who were struggling with the English instructions. Another page that has had a phenomenal number of hits (almost all of them occurring in the last 10 days) has been the More Knitting Fun piece. That one I just don't understand. I can't find any referrers to it, and the write-up itself is rather plain. It's just an all-prose report on stumbling across a remarkable knitted object - a knit-covered bicycle. Yet in the past week or so it has had over 2,000 visitors. That's more than double the number who looked at the poncho page in the same period.

Go figure...

Of course, the Referring Web Pages tool that shows up on each page of the site should be giving me a clue. I do know from that roughly where people are hopping in from, at least for some of the pages. Thanks go to QueerJoe, the first blogger to send traffic my way; Curmudgeon Marilyn, who's prickly writings I enjoyed for a long time, and whom I've not yet managed to annoy; to Wendy, crossroads of the blogworld; and to all the other leaping off spots that launch people in this general direction.

As you can see, I'm making slow progress on my counterpane.



Athough you can't read the tape measure, one meta-unit unblocked measures around 15.5 inches across.

I've started the second motif, and done the hex,? half of its squares, and one triangle. Here I've lined up the two as I intend to sew them together. I will need a fourth motif when I finally get enough done. It will probably be a solid stockinette triangle, to go in this spot:



Either that or I need to engineer something with lines of YOs that match up with those on the bordering squares.

I did spend quite a bit of time trying to make a triangle knit from the tip down that is as close as possible to the one I've got that's knit from the base up. So far no dice. I just can't get a congruent pattern on the rows that use YOs and double decreases in the original. My triangles end up being rather rotund, and I lose the lacy openness of my original. Plus the nifty lines formed by the YOs are shifted somewhat, and no longer align with the squares when all is to be sewn together. My counterpane will have to remain assembled from lots of smaller pieces. Perhaps the next one I play with will be an honest dodecagon rather than this assembled one.

And for those who have written to say that I'm a crazed loon for trying to knit this higher complexity tesselation instead of sticking to plain old squares or hexes, you're not telling me anything new. Go play with geometry.