Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Circledoodles!
I continued my experiments with doubleknitting with a scarf featuring circles and dots. I'm still fascinated by the reversibility of doubleknitting and the freedom it allows in designs.
Making circles is harder than making squares and rectangles like I did in my first doubleknit scarf. After doing a couple of circles following charts, I moved on to improvising as I went along as to the placement, size and shape of my circles. Some came out rounder than others, but I like to think this approach gave the scarf design a fresh feeling. It certainly made it more fun to knit. (Knowing exactly what I will be doing until the end of a project makes me feel a bit like a worker bee. Isn't it more exciting to not know exactly where you are going?)
I was bothered by some irregularities and especially an extra dot that made one of the circles look like the letter Q so I embroidered around many of the circles with a simple chain stitch. I concentrated on the more misshapen ones and did it until it stopped being fun; I decided not to embroider around every single circle.
I'm wondering: do you enjoy an air of uncertainty when knitting or do you prefer to know exactly what you are aiming at?
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4 comments:
I love your double knitting projects and yes, I like to make things up as I go along...adding more variety to the knitting project. But I don't have quite enough experience knitting to make this a completely useful approach....
Yes yes yes. That is brilliant. There is definitely a double knitting tea cosy on the drawing board. I love this technique too.
Great scarf. Great colours. Great pattern.
Me too -- love your double-knitting scarves, that is. I bet they have a pleasant heft to them, too.
The circular chain stitch adds another element and makes me think of those Klimt paintings that are so textured. But I can see why you wouldn't want to go on with them all over the texture of the scarf.
As for your question, it depends on the nature of the project. The few times when I have been brave enough to "design on the needle" without a road map, I have loved the experience and the results. But then there is that other questioning voice on some projects that I find I ignore at my own risks and perils. A knitter's version of multiple personalities, perhaps?
Hi! I appreciated all your thoughtful comments. I think that double-knitting is an underused technique. It gives tremendous freedom in designs and I can't wait to see, for example, what the Grand Purl Baa comes up with. As to my scarf, it is quite drapy because the yarn is light sport weight and alpaca tends to drape. I've very happy with its feel. Using worsted for a double-knit scarf would probably be too heavy. Except for the weather we've been having this week in Madison!
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