#short rows

[unfinishedsweaters]

[calendae-creations]

There's a whole new section in my shop! Currently I have a bunch of knitted potholders (Star Trek, flowers, and a butterfly), dishcloths in assorted colours, and two blue and white knitted snowflake trivets, all available for sale.

Shipping outside the USA is not currently available through the store, but I can and do ship internationally – just message me about it and pay me directly through paypal or venmo or with a card through my ko-fi, once I can get you a shipping estimate.

Online orders of 2 or more items come with a free watercolour bookmark. Any purchases, commissions, donations, or even just reblogs, are always greatly appreciated!

[lphaneuf]

Loved this test knit for Sierra Morningstar. Nicely written pattern, 45th Parallel was published this week. Fun to knit and great details.

[woldten]

Knitting up another Lindal Cardigan sample. Trying this one in Making Tracks LITE from Junction Fiber Mill. Using US6 and had to go up three sizes to get the right width. Running about 1.5” shorter than Length A and I’m loving it!

[myriad-rainbows]

Image description: a work-in-progress photo of a knit shawl in a white, gray and black gradient yarn. The shawl is made up of narrow right triangles that gradually increase in size around an arc. The effect looks sort of like a splayed hand of cards. End I.D.

The design for this shawl took shape from my ongoing love affair with short rows, geometry, & optical illusions, and my perpetual dislike of the way triangle/rectangle/semicircle shawls constantly slip off my shoulders. Construction details below the cut.

This shawl is knit in garter stitch on US 10/6.0mm steel needles. The yarn is Lion Brand "Shawl in a Ball", which I bought many years ago and have tried to knit into a couple different projects that never turned out quite how I wanted.

I started with a 61-stitch crochet cast on. Row 1 a full knit row on the wrong side (after the first stitch, anyway, which is slipped) for the sake of consistency with subsequent triangles, and also because keeping track of which end is the "starting" end is easier when it's got the tail.

The triangles are shaped using short rows that increase in length by 3 stitches on each "right side" row, with a slipped selvedge—so, sl1, k2, wrap and turn, knit back to beginning of row; turn, sl1, k5, w&t, knit back to beginning of row; turn, sl1, k8, w&t, knit back to beginning of row; etc. I placed stitch markers every 6 stitches because for me that was the sweet spot between "minimize counting" and "minimize how often I have to interrupt the knitting motion to slip a marker".

Using this specific short row method in garter stitch—a wrap-and-turn where you DON'T pick up the wrap and knit it together with the stitch it's wrapped around, just let it hug the base of the stitch—is something I learned from one of Elizabeth Zimmerman's books; I think The Opinionated Knitter, but I don't have it on hand to check. It blends in really nicely with the garter stitch and gives a nice definition to the end of each ridge.

The last "normal" RS row for each triangle stops 4 stitches from the end of the row (followed by the usual w&t, knit back to beginning.) The final row, which is also the setup row for the next triangle, goes: BO the first 6 st, (k2tog, yo, k1) (this means stitches 7 and 8 are knitted together, and you pass the last of the bound-off stitches over that k2tog) to 7 st from end of row, k6… and use the 1 st remaining on the needle as the starting stitch for another crochet cast-on, adding 9 st. This means the stitch count for the next triangle is 64 st, the final stitch of which will become the base of the the next crochet cast-on—the method I came up with results in a crochet cast on that appears continuous, but nevertheless matches the color of the triangle it "belongs" to—and didn't require me to know when I started how many triangles I would end up with.

Binding off 6 stitches and adding 9 whenever I begin a new triangle means each of them is one row taller than the last, so it's a very subtle size increase. I tried keeping all my triangles the same size at first (with a 9-st bind-off at the beginning), but I really didn't like how the shape was coming out. I thought about trying out a more rapid size increase, but I wanted the bind-off to be at least 6 st to make the triangles look really distinct, and adding more cast-on stitches at the end of the row would result in a less pronounced "curve", so I chose not to do either of those things, and it's turning out to be a good choice. Maybe for another shawl, I'll try offsetting my short rows by 2 st instead of 3, and make the size increase between successive triangles slightly more dramatic—making the triangles wider increases the rate of curvature, so it would compensate for the shallowing out that adding a larger number of stitches would cause. On the other hand, the proportions on this iteration are incredibly aesthetically satisfying to me, so maybe I'll repeat a knitting pattern for once in my life.

[knitposting]

Sakura Scarf

Map of the World Sweater

Wavy Triangle Shawl

Modern Mondrian Afghan

[kikiknits]

I did the thing!!

I did the German Short Rows!!

[knitsandprints]

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