As far as production goes, this weekend was not exactly what you’d call stellar. It got cold here Friday night so I was looking for slipper patterns and ran across the old multi-square one. You know, you knit (or crochet) seven little squares and then assemble them into this:
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Schematic
This is then sewn into a slipper shape by connecting various edges together. Kinda cute! But I thought I could maybe avoid knitting seven separate little squares (and therefore, having 14 little yarn ends to tidy up) by knitting the whole thing in one piece. This seemed brilliant to me, so I took the directions and fiddled with them, hauling out my very spotty knowledge of Euclidean geometry to get the width of the base diamond shape. It was supposed to be 3.25” on each side. So, theoretically, a^2^ + b^2^ = c^2^, the diagonal should be about 4.6”. Theoretically…
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Step 1
Okay - cast on 2 stitches, increase each end every other row in garter stitch until a width of approximately 4.56” is reached. Then decrease in the same fashion until you’re back to 2 stitches. Seems reasonable, right?
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Step 2
Then increase back up to twice the width and then decrease back down till you have half the stitches, that is, the width of the single diamond shape. Now, you’ve got those two pieces hanging off either side of the end - what do we do with those? Aha! Those are going to get sewn up the center for the heel, so why not just knit them together to begin with and decrease as we go along! I tell you, I was very pleased with myself for figuring this all out. Mrs. K’s little girl is no stoopnagle!
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Step 3
So, now I had a 1 piece version of the schematic and had even managed to avoid the heel seam. Cool beans!! Right?
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Slipper?!?
This is what I wound up with. I pulled it apart and sewed it together twice and it still looks like it was made for a club-footed donkey. And even if it had been the right shape, it wouldn’t have been the right size. Make that a small club-footed donkey.
Right - stoopnagle it is :)
Oh well…
So I set that effort aside to marinate and began trying swatches for a fancy scarf for a dear friend who’s birthday is coming up in August. There was this…
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EEK!
...and this…
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ACK!!
...and this.
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OOOK!!!
The first (from the Barbara Walker Treasuries) is a combination of Gull-wing lace and a Gull cable which I thought was pretty poetic. It might work if the cables framed the lace rather than the other way around but I have my doubts. The second (from Vogue Knitting) is a cable, bobble, seed concoction called Hollow Oak. It looked lovely in the book but less than lovely in real life and really, a bit clunky for a fancy scarf. The third (365 Knitting Stitches a Year Calendar) is called, for some enigmatic reason, Crocus stitch. It’s not terrible and seems to work up nice and flat - but it’s awkward as the dickens to do (therefore slow) and I only have until August.
I just wanted you to know that I did knit this weekend :)
Note: As I was proofing this post I figured out (I think I figured out) what the problem with the slipper is. Stay tuned for further developments - LOL!
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Your progressively more horrified photo captions made me laugh out loud this morning, Robbyn! Thanks for the perfect wake-me-up! Will stay tuned for the latest on the club-footed donkey slipper.
Heh - well, all I have to do is lop off a few toes and it’ll work just fine as it is :) But I don’t think I want to do that - at least not just yet!
That slipper schematic reminds me of modular knitting things where you’d pick up the stitches along the edge of one square to work the next. Haven’t tried so don’t know if it would work or not.
Hi Charlotte - Thanks for dropping by :) That’s a great observation; I hadn’t even thought about that. It would be another way to approach the situation - thanks for mentioning it!
Well, I love the quote on Nanette’s blog, something like the most successful folks are those who failed and failed and then succeeded? Obviously not enough Gingko today…. anyway, loved the entry and the idea. Keep on trying! As far as the lace swatches, it kinda looks to me like you need to be using a larger needle size? Then I think they’d actually look very nice.
