Friday, November 30, 2007

FLAK Preview 2

After picking a texture I needed to graph the cables and make a cable gauge. Only one problem, I wanted a diamond cable on my sweater and there were none in the pattern as written. So off I went in search of a diamond cable. Sigh that took some time but I finally found one that I thought would work. So back to my graphs. I originally thought of simply replacing the center horseshoes and rope combination with three diamonds as shown in the graph.

I did drop a wave cable that was in the pattern as it did not play well with my diamond. While pretty this made the center section too wide for my space. I dropped the center of the three diamonds and replaced it with a narrower section of Seed stitch. There were some problems with this attempt. My diamonds were not showing up well as they were two crowded in between the other cables. Also my little rope cable was being swallowed up by the Seed stitch. Back to the drawing board.

So I fiddled and fiddled and fiddled but nothing was striking me as a good solution. Then by accident I dropped the following sequence of cables on my blank "paper"


Hmmm now that looked interesting. Counted stitches and fiddled around some more until I found two possible solutions to my problems AND something that I liked. Both are nearly identical. I still have a pair of diamonds for the center AND I got one fitted in on each side of the the sweater for a total of 4 small diamond patterns. Both also have the honeycomb/plait/honeycomb combination that I liked from the original pattern. Where they differ is how I treated the space between the two center diamonds...

Attempt 1. Keeps my texture stitches between the diamonds but drops the ropes that were in the original changes. The yellow spots represent Seed stitch. This panel is 10 stitches wide.


Attempt 2. Replaces the Seed stitch with another honeycomb like I have used between the other cables. This one also adds some space between the honeycomb and the diamonds.


Which do you like best?

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

FLAK preview

In my last post I was off to make a swatch of texture patterns. That done I picked two patterns I liked seed stitch
row 1 K1 P1
row 2 P 1 K1
and a pattern called Sand Stitch from Barbara Walker Vol 1. Sand Stitch is a bit like a broken Seed Stitch grin. This stitch is a 4 row repeat even number of stitches.
row 1 and 3 knit
row 2 K1 P1
row 4 P1 K1

Okay so now I had two texture stitches. I liked both and both were fairly easy for me to do in my current state of mindlessness. Said state lead to difficulty in choosing just one for the sweater. Since I had to make a 4 inch or more square of my chosen texture stitch to get my gauge for this sweater I simply made a swatch that gave me about a 5 inch square of each texture. The photo shows my gauge swatch. Sand stitch on top seed stitch below.

I choose the Sand Stitch for my main texture stitch as i really like that shadowy diamond effect.

Thursday, November 8, 2007

textures galore


texture swatch 1
Originally uploaded by spindledreams
For a couple of years now I have been trying to get up the courage to make myself a sweater but lets face it me, depression, and multiple pieces that must match each other in gauge meant it was not going to happen.

This year I really looked at this pattern. The Follow-the-Leader-Aran Knitalong is so prettty and it turns out this beautiful cable sweater pattern is knit in ONE PEICE! YIPPIE! I love cables.

Then I reread the instructions and there is this line something like pick a texture pattern and knit a gauge swatch...

HUH pick a texture pattern with no way of knowing how it will look in MY yarn for MY sweater no way. So begins the story of my swatch.