A Stitch a Day (28th March)

I spent Earth Hour today with a candle light dinner. Whilst it is not such an unusual experience, as we have power failures several times a year, switching off the light today was a conscious decision.

I always think at such occasion about the many centuries during which people had no electricity, no light during the dark hours. I find the long nights during winter hard even with light. But not so long ago people did live without electricity at all. Still they managed to write the most amazing texts, manuscripts, and built the most beautiful buildings.

Many years ago I read "The Name of the Rose" by Umberto Eco. I couldn't understand the fascination with jewels and precious stones of some of the actors he described, until some time later I visited the Pfalzkapelle in Aachen, where I saw some of the artefacts, embellished by these coloured stones, shown in a rather dark room, lighted, as if lit by candle light.

In his Art and Beauty of the Middle Ages Eco wrote:

" We have seen how medieval theorists looked upon beauty as something intelligible, a kind of mathematical quality, ... But when it came to their experience of colour, - of gems, materials, flowers, light and so on - the Medievals revealed instead a most lively feeling of the purely sensuous properties of things....

Their love of colour and light ... was a spontanous reaction .... The beauty of colour was everywhere felt to be beauty pure and simple, something immediately perceptible and indivisible ..."

One doesn't have to wonder why, I suppose.

Here is the pattern for today, the last in this series. Only two colours in this one, more colour sequences are possible:

A Stitch a Day (27th March)

Here is yet another version:

A Stitch a Day (26th March)

This is still the same fabric, in a further colour version:

A Stitch a Day (20th to 25th March)

More work done in the garden.

So I load the patterns for the missed days up here in one post.

Now, these are in some ways different to the patterns that we had here before. I was trying to find patterns that are suitable for knitting machines, because these can't do the 4 elements in one row. They need special devices for garter stitch and ribbing, as they normally only knit, and don't purl. I learned that with these special devices slip stitches are not possible. So only a subset of the possible patterns of my technique is possible, that is the one consisting of only knit and slip stitches.

Therefore the right part of the charts below, which is normally for knitting in the round, should be possible to work for knitting machines.

These fabrics also curl. I wondered how I manage to scan the swatches. I found out it works if I let their edges curl "around" a piece of card board. It's not perfect though, that's why I hope you don't mind if some appear at an angle here. It wasn't possible to scan the other side, but that's not really necessary, as these fabrics do have a right and wrong side, I'd say. The wrong side looks a bit like in fair isle or mosaic knitting.

They are similar to mosaic knitting, but not the same. You do not, like in mosaic knitting, always have two corresponding rows.

As always, different colour sequences of rows yield different patterns for the same structure, and that is how the patterns below emerged.

I forgot to mention another difference to the usual patterns. Here one should cast on loosely. The bottom edge tends to curl upwards. A loose cast on diminishes this.

20th March

21st March

22nd March

23rd March

24th March

25th March