Fiber Raven Soiree

Penrose

When I am knitting away on something rather elementary and boring like seed stitch, as I was doing last night while working on Mist, my survival instinct kicks in, making my mind very active until there is not the least bit of something to think about any more.

How many of you have heard from your non-knitting friends "I just don't have the patience to do that?" It has little to do with patience in my book, and more to do with living inside your head. What follows is an example of this.

Seed stitch. Knit, purl, knit, purl, knit, purl, knit, purl... I wonder who named it seed stitch. It does look like little seed pearls arranged precisely. I wonder if anyone has knit seed pearls into stockinette and called it seed pearl stitch. With this many seeds you would think something would eventually sprout. I wonder what it would be. This is purple... maybe indigo plants? But I suppose that would be called Sprout Stitch. I wonder what sprout stitch would look like.

Why is this named Mist, anyway? Is the mist asymmetrical with uneven hems? I think not. Maybe it was just a mist-ake. Heehee. And actually "they" call it moss stitch, which it isn't, but you know the British. They like to be different than the rest of the world, drive on the wrong side of the road and all that. Anyway, why is moss stitch called moss stitch? I've never seen moss that looks like that. Moss stitch should be long and misshapen and fuzzy.

Wouldn't it be fun if someone designed a fair isle something that represented a lot of these stitches with what their names suggest rather than how the stitch is rendered? Seed stitch could be rows of watermelon seeds, moss stitch is obvious. Feather and fan would be especially fun, feathers and fans intermingled in some Starmorial relationship with unlikely colors. Ooo, ooo-- fluted rib! Can you imagine a rack of barbecued ribs served with a topping of flutes? And how about trinity stitch? How does one portray the father, son and holy ghost in fair isle? Brioche! That would be enough to spoil a diet.

Scary, huh?

I told you that on Sunday I read The DaVinci Code. Well, that got me to thinking about Phi, the golden ratio, 1.618. I moved my lazy fingers enough to look up some info on it. GoldenNumber.net is really interesting and discusses Phi's relationship to the Fibonacci series, art, architecture, and color. Check out the really cool Phi Bar app under the color link.

I eventually descended upon the Penrose tiling and discovered Stephen Collins application, called "Bob" that generates Penrose tiling. Using only two rhombus shapes, tessellations are made that do not repeat and can never fill a specified area completely. If you have known me long, you have guessed the leap I took (a small one): Figure out how to knit these two diamonds, and put together some very interesting...er... articles. I'd think that an irregularly shaped afghan or table mat would be wow!

Here's an example of a Penrose tessellation generated by Bob:

Isn't that a cool shape overall? I think I could find animals in there.

Then I thought about how I would apply color. Mostly you see the tessellations in two colors like this:

But that gets boring after a while. I decided to see what I would get if I started with two colors, used the Phi Bar to get the next color for the shape that lies between my first two colors, and keep doing that to get my next colors. It takes a long time, but here is the result of a few colorings. I think it is very exciting.

Now I need my swatch slave to figure out how to make
1. A diamond with sides of equal length and inner angles of 72º and 108º
2. A diamond with sides of equal length and inner angles of 36º and 144º

I did the first one but it looks dorky, the decreases and increases are ragged. I then tried to use domino knitting techniques and failed miserably.

Enough from me. More knitting photos tomorrow. Dragonfly is progressing as well as Ballerina and of course Mist.

Posted by Sheila at April 21, 2004 09:55 AM | TrackBack