Four O'Clocks, Knitting Leaves

This is why I save my four-o'clock roots year after year: what our son as a toddler called "pitty fow," the pretty flowers. The yellow speckled one and the red one on the right are growing from the same plant. Hummingbirds will come to these, but they don't open here until around 6 pm despite the name, and they close up in the morning when the sun hits them. I love them for their sweet light scent. The white ones were beautiful last night in the moonlight.

Here is what I was doing yesterday morning before I started abusing my hands and wrists pushing the mower and unscrewing every screw in the screwed-up washing machine.

This leaf pattern is from page 67 of The Ladies Knitting and Netting Book: First Series.

I started out knitting one repeat, but decided I better have at least two to get the full effect. This pattern biases strongly, leaning to the left. Like a couple of the Sampler M patterns, it uses a purl rib emphasized with a twisted knit stitch between pattern repeats.

Another interesting thing about this pattern is that it uses a left-leaning decrease: "slip 1 stitch, knit 1, pull the slipped stitch over the knitted one".

The pattern directs you to cast on 45 stitches (three pattern repeats) on each of three needles, then to knit nine repeats and use the resulting tube as a pincushion cover.

The other leaf pattern I tried was the last pattern in the book, titled "A new Leaf Pattern."

Both of these patterns have two increases and only one decrease in one row, with the second decrease in the next row. This one uses K2tog as the decrease. I'm not sure I like how that looks, so I'll probably knit a second repeat using SKP.

They were written for knitting in the round, but I knitted them flat. I ended up having to chart the second one, because I couldn't keep the wrong-side rows straight in my head.

A very pretty little leaf, rather like pattern 6 from Sampler CM.

(We haven't had any new patterns on Sampler CM for quite a while. I wonder what's up.)