I worked on a pattern stitch yesterday.  All day.  I’m trying to adapt it for a particular purpose and not having much luck so far - not that I’m going to give up.  But I got nowhere so fast, so many time yesterday, I’m lucky the knitting police didn’t bestow a handful of speeding tickets on me :)

The pattern stitch is called Dragon Skin and comes from the Barbara Walker treasuries.  It’s one of my favorites and produces a fabric of beautiful, overlapping curved “scales”.  There’s a nice example at Much Ado About Knitting.

I went as far as charting the pattern yesterday because I thought that might help me see how it all falls together.

Actually, that did help a bit.  As I get used to charts, I begin to understand how valuable they can be, especially in terms of seeing how the stitches come together to create the pattern.  And a chart is neat and concise whereas a pattern may run to pages of written instructions.

Here I just swapped the sections.  A large swatch from either chart would give you pretty much the same result, but the starting point is different in each of them.

What I’m trying to do is to work out a way that the pattern may be worked into a triangular shawl, starting with the point and working up to the shoulders.  If you substituted YOs for the M1s, (“M” in the chart) you’d get a lacier appearance, though I’m not sure the result wouldn’t be more leaf-like than dragon-scalish :)  I haven’t succeeded in making it work yet - but I expect I’ll continue to fiddle with it as the idea is very appealing to me.

The “warshcloth” is done but I won’t bore you with another picture of it - it’s just a washcloth.  I like it though, the colors are great and the cotton (Classic Elite Spotlight) is so soft.  I may have enough yarn left to make another one.  Wouldn’t that be something?  I’ll have to change the pattern though.  It wouldn’t do to have two identical items amongst the assortment.  They’d feel self-conscious and the others might pick on them :)

I have a question. I know, so what else is new?  The fancy scarf is coming along very nicely and I’m approaching the end of the first ball of yarn.  This is acrylic microfiber; it’s very slippery and has very little twist.  I’m at something of a loss about how to join the new ball and how to handle working in the ends.  Does anyone have any suggestions or ideas?  Because this is intended to be a dressy piece (and a gift to boot) I want things to be as nearly invisible as possible and I can’t think how to manage it with this slick stuff…