Lost Arts studio

A lot of the fiber arts I enjoy are things like tatting, netmaking, chair caning, and even weaving, where people will come up to me when I demonstrate and solemnly tell me, "That's a lost art."

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Location: SW Outer Nowhere, Michigan, United States

On the Internet, nobody knows you're a chicken. (With apologies to Peter Steiner.)



12 August 2011

On Following Directions

As I was looking for something else to knit the other day, I went paging through Andrea Kunststricken Sonderheft, 0802, and I noticed that three of the charts in it were Christine Duchrow charts.

They're very distinctive charts, with their rs for knit stitches (from the German rechts) and IIs for yarnovers.

I hunted through my Christine Duchrow books until I found all three.

Duchrow 81.5:
Duchrow 81.8:
And Duchrow 73.5:But what was the matter with the knitted example in the photo?

The original 73.5 photo showed two large holes at the end of each flower petal, and a border of lacy little holes.

I had to knit and find out.

This pattern has not one, not two, but eight notes relating to different chart lines. Some are obvious things like knitting three plain rows following a pattern row. Others are a lit-tle more involved.

The points of the petals are formed by knitting 16 stitches alternating with 15 triple yarnovers in one row, then in the next row, dropping those yarnovers, elongating the 16 stitches, and knitting all 16 together into one stitch!

Just to make that whole process more fun, before and after the whole dropping-a-triple-yarnover process, you also make two new triple yarnovers before and after the petal point to form the two large holes. Wow.Creating the lacy border involves moving the start of the round by one stitch in three different rows. If you skip those moves, you end up with the laddered border in the Andrea photo.

If you follow the directions, you get the lacy holes that match the original photo. So important sometimes, following directions!

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7 Comments:

Blogger roxie said...

So you just whipped this little confection out in an idle moment, following a chart written in a foriegn language, because - - - Because you could! Right? You totally knock my socks off!

9:56 AM  
Blogger Rebecca said...

Excellent sleuthing!

I am both unnerved by the intricacy of that dropping-a-billion-yarn-overs-to-k16tog move, and delighted by those beautiful points that result.

Also, that Andrea photo!!!! Arghghghgh. Surely the sample knitter knew that something was wrong! How could you NOT!

12:19 PM  
Blogger Knitting Linguist said...

Wow. Just wow. What I always wonder, is who figured these things out? Imagine thinking - a triple yo will be just the thing here! (Well, OK, you probably do think that, but I'm not sure I would ;) )

4:23 PM  
Blogger Donna Lee said...

You make me feel so inferior. I'm going off to sit in the corner. You are amazing! That is a beautiful piece.

11:24 PM  
Blogger Knitting Linguist said...

I just wanted to drop back in to say thank you so much for the quote - it's absolutely wonderful (in a teeth-grinding sort of way), and so interesting to see the same themes playing out over time. I just gave a paper last year, actually, on exactly that - the way the same themes play out again and again in talking about knitting (although I was more focused on the positive ones, like the way knitters talk about why they knit, which hasn't changed much in a couple of hundred years), but this pairs almost exactly with some of the modern quotes I have about knitting being anti-feminist! So interesting...

6:05 PM  
Blogger catsmum said...

[[speechless]]

7:51 PM  
Blogger Solveig said...

Its beautiful!

6:10 AM  

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