Ridges

What do you do when you pick up a yarn that is absolutely beautiful in terms of the yarn quality, and absolutely difficult in terms of the colour palette, and you picked it up just because you were getting 800 metres of pure lace goodness for $3? (I sometimes wonder, does anyone else do this?) 

This one (3 balls of it for $9) were bought last year Christmas sales, and has been sitting there, I did not know what to make of it. It has a bright shade of blue, followed by a bright shade of neon green, followed by a dark sienna type shade and for some strange reason is called Apple Mix! On the good side, its wonderful to feel and you can tell it is good wool, and a pleasure to knit with. 2 ply. 

So, after much thought, raveling and unraveling, I am happy to be producing something that REALLY suits the crazy colour scheme - its looking wonderfully textured and ripply, as THICK RIDGES, feels all mountainy-greeny-skyish and most importantly, wearable as a super casual T-shirt - jeans kind of scarf. I am happy to have rescued it :) 

Stitch Pattern Notes: No lace (colours too wild), knit only, no purls, yarn held double throughout. Aim: Produce nice thick but soft fabric, to show off the colours but also to mix them sequentially. Ripple increases and decreases on the right side, All knit on the wrong side. Increases: yarn over, knit, yarn over. Decreases: slip two stitches, knit one, pass two slipped stitches over. On the wrong side, to prevent lacy-ness: knit through the back loops of the yarn overs. Put as many stitches as you want for the "slopes" between alternate increases and decreases, I have put 6 here.  

Baby surprise jacket, cap, and simple blankie

My mum is here, visiting for a couple of months. And when mum or mum-in-law are visiting, somehow, my knitting and crocheting activity peaks up. Has to be one of the best friendly things in the world, just sitting in the sun with a hot cup of tea and coffee and making new things. 

So a good friend's baby shower brought out this joint effort. It is the very first time I have made the EZ's Baby Surprise Jacket. Actually, I did not make it, I "instructed" my mum, reading out the EZ instructions, and mum made it. And she did the cap. 

Like so many of her generation, my mum does not knit from written instructions - and while I marvel at the amount of knitting knowledge my mum, grandma, and mum-in-law simply carry in their heads and execute it at the right time, they instead marvel at all those wonders that exist in the knitting world, that they never knew about because they never "read" knitting. Like this Baby Surprise Jacket for instance - my mum was just completely bowled over by the construction of it, and she was anticipating the outcome like a little child while she was making it, and chuckling like a little child by the end of it! 

The blanket - well that's another story. Sometime last year, I had these two balls of Paton's Baby yarn, a very baby yellow, with no complete project coming out of it. So, mum-in-law (who was visiting then), sat and did these yellow squares, and we hoped that someday it would turn into something. And so, last week, I got some white, and turned it into a baby blanket, all ready for the new baby to arrive. Work is super busy right now, so this has to be the quickest bit of crochet I have ever done, trying to find odd bits of time to joining a square here and a square there (there was a time deadline, the baby shower invite). And yes, I did follow EZ's instructions and had it hanging around the kitchen, and even with my Mac on the train! (I can sometimes produce code and woolly things together, funny the two processes actually help each other). 

So, this gift had the fortune of having three knitters on it, me, my mum, and my mum-in-law, a true family project, a super welcome for a super new baby. 

Randomized Permutations and Partitions

A little while ago, I posted the Permutating Friends of 3 Scarf Pattern. I also joined the Woolly Thoughts group on Ravelry, and started talking to the great folks there. Woolly Thoughts is one of a kind: combining math and generative knitting, and it turned out that at some point, they too had thought about putting together knitting with permutations. And so, some crazy new thoughts emerged in my head.

I was basically pondering on the idea of scaling and visualizing permutations and partitions: how quickly things scale up in mathematics, (for example, see this link on MathStackExchange), and therefore, how quickly it becomes completely impossible to visualize these permutations and patterns exhaustively. So, if I left out the constraint on exhaustive visualization, the design challenge is to come up with a pattern that plays with any number of partitions of any given number. So, relaxing the requirements on exhaustive visualization where ALL possible k-partitions have to be visualized, could I simply use randomization as a generative idea? I also deliberately wanted to leave k and n as parameters, since that way using a single idea we can produce as many patterns as we would like, but at the same time ensuring that no two patterns are the same! 

So, I quickly put together some Matlab code: a function to generate randomized permutations of k-partitions of any given number n. Code is attached at the end of this post, please feel free to use it or modify it in any way, but please acknowledge this original source if you do. 

Here are some interesting results:

Say you want to generate randomized partitions of the number 30 into 2 colours. Cast on 30 stitches in colour 1 (blue), use the good old garter stitch, and simply follow the chart here (this came out of the Matlab program by setting n = 30, k = 1). The magic of this type of computation, of course, is that every time you run the program, it will show you a different pattern.

To follow the chart, every row shown needs to be knit twice in garter stitch. So, for example for the square below:

1. Row1: Beginning from the bottom right, k1 in colour 1 (blue), change working yarn, and k29 in colour 2 (red). 
2. Row 2: Turn, k29 in colour 2, k1 in colour 1.
3. Row 3: In the next row, there are 18 stitches of colour 1, 12 of colour 2. So, k18 in colour 1, carrying along the colour 2 yarn, then k12 in colour 2. 
4. Row 4: Turn, k12 with colour2, and k18 with colour 1. Sine in the subsequent row, the pattern is k10 with colour 1, and k20 in colour 2, carry colour 2 along loosely by knitting the first 4 stitches in colour 1, bringing yarn forward, twining colour 2 yarn around working yarn, taking working yarn back again, and continuing to do this, till you reach the colour 2 yarn to the correct stitch. 
5. Row 5: K10 with colour 1, k20 with colour 2. If you have brought yarn forward from the previous row, colour 2 yarn should be available to knit at the correct stitch. 
6. Row 6: K20 with colour 2, k10 with colour 1. 
7. Row 7: K18 with colour 1, when you come to colour 2 after 10 stitches (refer to previous row), carry along colour 2 yarn along back of work in the usual way of twining around the colour 2 yarn around main working yarn for 8 more stitches, then k12 with colour 2. 

Continue in this way, bearing in mind to look at the subsequent row and deciding to what stitch number you must carry along the other yarn. I will try and post a photograph of a completed square soon. 

Here is a 3 colour pattern of 30 stitches:

Here is a 4-colour pattern of 30 stitches:

And then, the obvious next step is that you can start putting them together to bring out afghan patterns or wall hangings. Here is one in which 9 different squares of 100 stitches on standard 4 mm needles can be put together, with 3 colours (all the 9 squares are unique): 

Here is one in which the same square is knitted 9 times, and put together one after the other:

And here is one in which the same square can be knitted 12 times, and you can rotate, invert, or do anything you like to produce interesting variations:

Here is where you can go crazy, set n = 300 (the number of stitches, say for a full afghan on 4 mm needles), set k = 9 (this means you are looking at 9 partitions of the number 300, and using 10 colours to represent them) and follow the number chart to produce this: 

At this point you must be thinking, as the numbers and sizes go larger, how do we follow the pattern as we knit? The program below produces a matrix of numbers called R, along with the visual representation. After you choose and fix a colour paletter, R tells you the count of stitches, row by row, that you knit for each successive colour. So, for a 3 colour pattern, if the first row of R = [4, 15], this means knit 4 stitches in colour A, then knit upto the 15th stitch with colour B, and the last remaining stitches in colour C. A bit tedious for some, but not a great deal for those who are used to following charts, or doing any kind of fair-isle, or lace knitting. 

What excites me most about this kind of designing, is that, just like many known biological or mathematical generative rule based systems, all the patterns look "similar" or belonging to the same "style" or "typology" of patterns, and yet, no two of them are exactly alike! Instead of the randomization idea, the other extreme would be use a regularization idea, and put together partitions in some deterministic organized and growing way, so that regular visual patterns can emerge.

If anyone decides to knit anything using these ideas, I would love to see links to your work! If you are unable to run programs and would like me to send you some R matrices and charts, set to some number specifications, please do let me know. If someone develops another version of the program, say in something universally available, like Python, that would be most exciting too! I think the code is working fine, but if there are errors, let me know too. Enjoy :)

Ravelry link to pattern.

PS: Special note for those new to garter stitch special properties: Each coloured row in any of the above patterns here to be produced by using two rows of garter knitting, that will produce 1 "ridge". Thus, each coloured row means two rows of knitting. Carry along the yarns as needed for the next row. 

function [A,R] = randomizedPartitionSquare(n,k)

%Function to generate randomized partition squares

% Author: Somwrita Sarkar

% Version: 1

% Date: 6 Jan 2014

% n is the number of stitches, that is the size of your knitted square

% k is the number of partitions. For example, if k = 1, then a number can

% be divided into 2 parts, for example, 5+5 = 10; if k = 2, one possible

% partition is 1 + 1 + 8 = 10; and so on. The number of colors needed to

% knit the square is equal to k+1. 

% Run the program as many number of times as the needed numbers of squares.

% Since each square pattern is going to be different, you can think of

% innovative ways to put them together. 

% Examples to run code:

% 

% Generate initial matrix / square

A = zeros(n,n);

% Now generate the square

for i = 1:n % for each row

    for j = 1:k

        r(j) = floor(rand*n); % generate partition vector

    end

    r = sort(r); % sort it in ascending order

    R(i,:) = r;

    p = 1; % set initial counter for number of columns

    c = 1; % set initial color counter, starting color 1

    for m = 1:k 

        A(i,p:r(m)) = c; % first partition set to color 1

        p = r(m)+1; % then add number of columns, i.e., for next loop, p goes to (r(1) + 1:r(2));

        c = c+1; % for next loop, next color, i.e., color 1 goes to color 2, etc. 

    end

end

figure

imagesc(A)

% % Initial code for a 3 partition

% for i = 1:n

% r1 = floor(rand*30); % partition 1

% r2 = floor(rand*30); % partition 2

% if r1 < r2

% A(i, 1:r1) = 1;

% A(i,(r1+1):r2) = 2;

% end

% if r1 > r2

% A(i, 1:r2) = 1;

% A(i,(r2+1):r1) = 2;

% end

% end

% figure

% imagesc(A)

end

Moderne, Part 2

Mindless and meditative holiday knitting, as I play with my little man, write some code, cook, clean home, and do some home-moving packing...Yeah, its growing nicely, from what it was last week. Excited and close to adding in the fourth colour, the dark green!

Do you know what this type of knitting reminds me of, and gives me a feel of? Remember those thick markers, thick brushes, and thick paints in childhood art classes or school time art? There was some strange kind of joy and pleasure in slowly and gradually filling in a blank sheet of paper with solid, opaque colours, and watching an abstract play of colours simply emerge. I would lose myself in the thick quality of the paint, and how it felt on the sheets of paper (this was very a very different feel from say thin water colours on the same sheet of paper). That is what it feels like while knitting something like this: like I am holding a thick marker or brush in my hand, and slowly and surely filling up the blank sheet of air with opaque colour. 

Leftovers can be hiding a potential winner: Studies in modular colour-coordination

I have tons of cheap acrylic leftover yarn. From numerous projects. Much as I agree that most of the times acrylic is no match for wool and cotton, there are a couple of things for which acrylic yarn is really really good. Top of the list: baby blankets and baby clothes, and also throws and afghans over the sofa for really really rough everyday use. The only condition, of course, is that the acrylic needs to be soft and good quality. Simply because they can go into the washing machine multiple times, with babies (or us) free to be as messy as can happily be, and the objects in question being used and washed and used and washed and really used, till they simply wear out.

So, from various projects, I have tons of cheap acrylic leftovers. And therefore, a couple of months ago, I started on this modular blanket. I set myself the following rules: 

1. I will design with colour and colour families in mind; i.e., I will not use any colours just to finish off scrap yarn. 
2. If I need to buy tiny amounts of new yarn to follow Rule 1, I will do so. This, of course, is not a problem, because a single ball of acrylic yarn is quite cheap. 
3. I will work on this patiently, and not set any deadlines to finish, so it can actually grow over a number of years. Thereby, gradually using up any extra leftover yarn from current and future projects, and keeping the stash manageable.

Obviously, its growing really slowly, but that's ok. I am using a particular visual pattern idea from the excellent book called Modular Knits. Design rules for colour planning and structure design are as follows: 

1. The whole blanket is going to be composed of large garter stitch squares, with each large square made out of 16 small squares. This gives me ample opportunity to potentially include many colours, some of which, in leftover terms, may be in very very small amounts. 
2. Each square can have single or multiple, dark and light colors, but the dark and light colors have to symmetrically organise in some visually pleasing way to the chosen visual pattern (in my case, the flower like figure defined by the dark yarn and the light background; of course, including permissible inversions of figure-ground).
3. Here is my design for knitting the little squares. Each little square is made by starting with 3 stitches, and increasing 1 stitch on every row, till I get to 30 stitches, then knit 1 row, then change colour and knit one row, then decrease one stitch every row till I get to 3 stitches, then knit 3 together. I am doing this with the standard 8 ply yarn, using 4.00 mm needles. 

Here are the modest beginnings of one complete square and the other three-fourths: 

Ravelry link for project

Moderne

I have always wanted to do this one: the Moderne log cabin blanket. So, christmas and new year present this year from hubby and son was all this yummy cotton yarn. The blankie will be for our new couch, in our new home! And because we celebrate a summer Christmas and New Year in the land down under, the yarn of choice right now is cotton. Our new lounge is going to be a dark brown with some mustardy yellow kind of mixed in it, so the greens and yellow seemed good.

Ravelry link to project

The yarn is from Bendigo Woollen Mills. I think it is the only place in Australia you can buy good stuff at reasonable prices. The yarn goodie shops in Sydney that I know of are all so so so expensive, you would not dream of doing something as large as a blanket with them, unless of course in a moment of madness you go completely decadent and spoil yourself. There is course, Lincraft and Spotlight, but surprisingly, this yarn is so much yummier than anything I've ever bought from these stores.

One thing about new yarn and me is: I have to cast on right away. This is independent of how many other projects I have on my needles at a given moment. So, here is the modest beginning from last afternoon's start.

I love the texture of the good old garter stitch. My grandmother taught me how to knit when I was about 5 or 6, and millions of garter stitches down the road, I still love the way it comes out, and I still have these moments of anticipation pondering about how a particular colour and yarn is going to lend itself to the stitch.

By the way, I started this yesterday in the afternoon, and after some really feverish TV-time mindless knitting in the night, the piece is now considerably bigger than what is seen above. A word on log cabin knitting: I love the almost meditative silence in which this blanket is growing. The exciting part will come when I start to add in the second colour, then the third, then the fourth...