The Knitting Fiend

I bet some of you are wondering how the shawl is coming along? It’s coming along as slowly as I predicted!

Now, for most people, slow knitting just means slow knitting. For me, it means thinking about how the design could be “improved.”

Mind you, the structure of the simple popular and classic pie wedge shawl is just fine. It looks fine on Colocha. I’ve seen pie wedge shawls knit using the planned construction and they looked fine.

So, how could it be “improved”? Well, while knitting, I couldn’t help agonizing over the fact that, strictly speaking, the geometric design is not symmetric. When knitting a large pie wedge shawl (or examining other bloggers pie wedge shawls in progress) you will likely notice this asymmetry. (If you’ve begun one, don’t be frightened. You will also notice the asymmetry will practically vanish during blocking.)

To see what I mean, look at the photo above left. Notice how the “red” edge on triangle 1 is sort of long and very curved? Then the red line (which is a guide line between triangles 1 & 2 is a little curved? Scary , huh?

Are you wondering why this is? Well, the “general idea” for knitting a pie wedge shawl is that you a bunch of triangles which are “seamed” together — except, the “seaming” isn’t actual sewing, you just start knitting the second triangle along the live edge of the first one. This distorts the shape.

Let’s see how.

The “ideal” shape of these triangles or wedges is shown in the sketch to the left. Notice there is a long edge and two shorter edges.

When you follow my instructions, I have you use waste yarn to cast on a number of stitches (say 100 to have a round number). I cast on in red. Then, I have you attach shawl yarn and knit a row with 2 stitches, turn, knit back. Then you knit a row with 3 stitches, turn and knit back. You begin to form a “right triangle’ or ‘wedge’. The longest edge of the triangle would be along the waste yarn cast on and is indicated in dark blue in the sketch just above and to the left. The live stitches for a row make one of the short edges– and corresponds to the lavender line in the sketch above left.

Ok, to the left you see a perfect triangle with nice straight edges. If you cast on very, very loosely, the first triangle would look like a perfect triangle as you knit it.

But if you look top left, you’ll see the edge of my triangle has a very curved red line edge. Why? Well, if I had cast on 100 stitches and just started knitting full rows, that number of stitches wants to be short like the length of the lavender line in the schematic. But the actual edge wants to be longer– because it’s not just 100 stitches wide, it’s 100 stitches wide and 200 rows deep! It turns out it “wants” to be nearly 40% longer than the length of the waste yarn cast on.

Forty percent longer means the edge can either gather up or the individual stitches can each distort slightly. The “bottom” of the stitches can squish together and the tops widen. Because knit stitches are very elastic, it tends to curve. Which is fine– and in fact, it’s what I prefer.

In any-case, when the waste yarn comes off and I bind off loosely, most of that curve will go away!

Notice the line between triangles 1 and 2 is also curved? That happens for a similar reason. It’s less distinct because the knit fabric at the end of triangle 1 is better able to stretch than my waste yarn cast on. Still, you’ve seen these sort of spirals in hat tops and other knit objects all the time. They happen when you are “seaming” a long edge to a short edge. You usually don’t know you are “seaming”, because it’s happening as you knit; that’s the magic of knitting!

Anyway, I’ve shown you the curve, and I’ve told you this curving can be blocked out. If fact, I showed this with Colocha’s shawl. So, why worry? Beats me. But, engineer by training it bugs, bugs, bugs me! Because, I know that less severe blocking will be required if I knit this thing to be symmetrical!

It also bugs me because I know how to easily eliminate the “problem”. Instead of thinking about making the shawl using 5 identical triangles (idea 1 below), you modify the triangles a bit (idea 2.)

Once I even think of a sketch like the one just shown, it bugs me so much, that as I knit, I can hear an angel on one shoulder arguing with a devil on the other!

Says the former, “Don’t be anal retentive. It’s going to be fine. If you ‘fix’ this, you’ll end up boring your readers explaining. Can you say ‘ZZZZZZ’?!”

Says the latter, “Fix it! To heck with your readers. Bore them to bits! At least when you wear this, you can show wear this to “Stitches Midwest” confident that your shawl is “perfect”, while theirs only look perfect!!! Muuaaahhh haa haa!!!! “

I periodically put down the knitting. I had a few stiff drinks. I watched some soccer. I knit s_l_o_w_l_y.

The demon rum along with the spectacle of Zizou head butting Materazi tipped the scales in the devils direction leading me to dramatically change “the plan” from making a shawl following “idea 1″ to making a shawl following ‘”idea 2″.

Notice the “idea” for the simple pie wedge shawl is to make 5 identical wedges. All wedges begin with a 2 stitch row, you always increase 1 st/ 1 rows until you are working enough stitches. The “idea” for the “diabolical” pie wedge shawl is to start exactly as for the simple shawl.

Then when knitting the third wedge, increase 2 stitches ever 2 rows. When you reach the final row, it’s half as wide as the first two. So, it’s a “skinny” triangle. You can see that in the photo to the right.

Or course, I know need to reverse shaping to make a mirror image. So I didn’t knit a row of 2 stitches at this point. Instead I knit nearly all the stitches, turning when only 2 were left unkint. Then I began decreasing 2 stitches every two rows.

Afterwards, knit two “fat” wedges but start with a row knitting all the stitches, and knit 1 fewer every 2 row. These will be mirror images of the first two.

So, now there are “4 types” of triangles! Sounds a bit scary to beginners, but it’s pretty darn easy. You also get a perfectly symmetric shawl!

Is there a disadvantage to doing it this way? Of course. The main disadvantage is this: the pattern directions are longer. You’re probably thinking: So what? Well, longer directions a) don’t fit inside of yarn labels and b) often scare beginning knitters. Since, as I said, the difference after blocking is relatively modest, you’ll see the directions for the slightly less symmetric shawl more often!

But, you can also see that when spending a lot of time knitting a full size shawl, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it!