Knit Meter

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

It's a Mystery

Way back in 2006 I joined a Yahoo group based on Elizabeth Zimmerman's Pi shawl. Her concept was simple, every time you double your stitches, you double the number of rows you knit before you double your stitches again.

For example: you cast on 4 stitches, knit one round, double stitches to 8, knit 2 rounds, double stitches to 16, knit 4 rounds and so on. (Or etcetera, etcetera, etcetera to quote Yul Brynner.)

The group has an awesome designer, who designs the mysteries. She thinks of a theme and each time the stitches are doubled she produces a set of patterns to fit the theme from which you choose one. I made a small round tablecloth the first time and then the shawl for my mother-in-law.

The mystery this time is different as she has created an oval. There is a centre rectangle with a semi-circle at each end. The stitches in the semi-circle are increased like a Pi but the rectangle part stays constant. So it feels like the knitting is proceeding faster. The one thing I hate about circular knitting is that it is so quick to start and then gets slower and slower so that when you have in excess of 600 stitches it can take all night to knit one round in lace.

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