curiosity knitting

I think I’ve finally accepted being a knitting researcher at heart. My shawls are complex and intellectually interesting, and sometimes beautiful–but elegance takes a backseat to something complex enough to keep my mind engaged. the shawl I’m currently working on promises to be one of these: it’s a circular shawl done up as a series of rings, and it’s been teaching me a lot about how to make shawls. It’s very simple: for every n rows, you must add roughly 4n stitches to keep the shawl flat. That’s all there is. Whether you add it in a single row with lots of increases (Elizabeth Zimmerman’s pi shawl technique) or an even number of stitches every row or every other row (square shawls and octagonal shawls), whether you add it evenly over the entire shawl or concentrate it into the “corners”, doesn’t matter. If you’re knitting in the round and add an average of four stitches every round, you’ll be doing fine.

Elizabeth Zimmerman’s pi shawl technique uses this: you double the stitches every time the row count doubles. So, you have

row 1 8 stitches
row 2 16 stitches
row 3 16 stitches
row 4 32 stitches
row 5 32
row 6 32
row 7 32
row 8 64

which compares well to

row 1 8 stitches
row 2 12 stitches
row 3 16 stitches
row 4 20 stitches
row 5 24 st
row 6 28
row 7 32

Looking at it this way it’s clear that Zimmerman does her stitch increase early, so there are initially “too many” stitches, but the correct number at the end. Knitting is fortunately stretchy enough that this doesn’t cause problems, though the difference in density at the changeovers is pretty obvious in pi shawls (often it’s disguised in a pattern change).

So from here it’s clear that if you want to use the rings technique, you just add 4n stitches to the shawl before you start a pattern with n rows, e.g. if you want to do a ring 40 rows long you need to add 160 stitches to the shawl before starting the ring. That’s all there is to it; the rest will work itself out.

There’s also no reason you can’t mix the ring technique with gradual increases–all that matters is that you average adding four stitches per row. If you want to create something with corners, just add the stitches in the same place every time (square shawls). If you want a round shawl, scatter the increases around the circumference. You can even increase in a pattern if you like, creating a lace pattern with the holes. There are endless possibilities.

Anyway, that’s my insight for the day: you just need to increase 4 stitches for every row. It doesn’t matter where.

Free! Free! I’m free of all those rules and patterns w/r/t shawls in the round. I understand it now.