Friday, October 30, 2009

Variations

In 1843, Miss Lambert gave directions for working a "Star Pattern Shawl" using a pattern stitch that boiled down to:

Row 1: *yo, sl 1, k2, pass the slipped stitch over the two knit sts; rep from *.
Row 2: purl

The directions were complicated just a little by the fact that she shapes the shawl with an increase at the beginning of each right side row. She notes: "As the increasing adds an irregular stitch, some rows will have one and others two knitted stitches at their commencement." Unfortunately, she doesn't specify which rows will have one and which will have two. They were also complicated by the fact that she changes colors every row.

At this point I abandoned Miss Lambert (for the time being, anyway) and spent a day playing around with different combinations of a yarn over and this particular decrease, knitting in the round rather than flat.



I'm not sure yet whether I'll actually use any of these in a finished object, but it was an interesting exercise.

2 comments:

junior_goddess said...

Miss Lambert later went on to produce instructions for Vogue Knitting.

smariek said...

Well, you're certainly organized by tagging your knits. I'd be too lazy to do that.