All By Myself

In the heady days following the class I took with Annie Modesitt last June I was all about taking ownership of my knitting - in particular choosing increases and decreases that I thought suited the task at hand. While I did think about this over the summer I didn't really have anything to which I could apply it with any significant affect. But I found a place to be fully contrary with decreases in the Breast Cancer Scarf I'm working on.

This is the scarf for which I'm using the eyelet cable pattern for a VK sweater that is next in my queue (if I ever sort out the nasty business going on with my Fair Isle Cardigan and Tangled Yoke!)

The eyelets are created with Yarn Overs paired with decreases. The decreases are k2tog on the right so as to encourage the eyelet to appear to lean towards the centre of the pattern while

those on the left are ssk's pushing the YO to the right towards the centre.

The thing is, the sweater is designed to be very close fitting with lots of negative ease which then opens up the eyelets. Scarves are generally bunched up though so I worried the eyelets would be lost. (The fuzziness of the yarn I'm using for the scarf is a further hindrance to the visual prominence of the eyelet openings) So I decided - all by myself and fully contrary to the pattern to reverse the decreases - to use the ssk's on the right and the k2tog's on the left to force the lean on the eyelets outwards against the grain of the pattern and lo and behold it worked!

The eyelets aren't just visible, they're actually prominent. How great is that?

Coincidentally, while I was feeling very pleased with my "heretical" knitting behaviour, I happened to read the letter from the Editor of VK from the Winter 06/07 issue and noted the following...

"We have scores of readers (who)...take a cable from here, an edging from there to create something entirely their own...We encourage you to use our work as the basis for yours..."

All taken together I'm starting to regard my collection of knit magazines more as a stitch dictionary and a large array of knitting ideas rather than just a finite body of patterns. With that realization my pattern "library" felt like it instantly grew to many times its original size (but without taking up any more room on the shelf)!

Thanks for dropping by today!