The author of one of my current blog reads, Lolly Knitting Around, apparently also coordinates a challenge-your-creativity-type knit-a-long (but not a knit-a-long–it’s more of just a “be creative”-a-long): Project Spectrum. This year’s theme is the cardinal directions. Each compass point has been associated with a colour and it’s our job, as participants, to create something using that colour as inspiration.

The exercise begins in March with North. The colour for North is green.

I toddled off to Flickr in search of green inspiration and, among a couple of real standouts, this photo just grabbed me:

This is someone else’s photo so I can’t show it here but you really must go see it

Now that, my friends, is inspiring. Inspiring enough, in fact, that I charted out a pattern to make some “Rush” socks. Each round is made up of only three repeats and the pattern takes 25 rows to finish a single iteration. I have some ivory Regia Silk sock yarn kicking around so I started working on them.

After finishing the cuff ribbing and about half of the first set of rows, I decided the gauge wasn’t working for me. The sock was ripped out and started over, this time with 66 stitches instead of 60. That meant rejigging the pattern for the extra stitches. No problem.

Right around row 20 of the next version, I realised that the pattern wouldn’t work out to be as random as I wanted. Each needle being worked would be great but, when considered as a whole, the sock wouldn’t be a series of three repeats. Obviously, that wouldn’t do…

The sock was ripped out again and restarted. This time, Needle 1 started with row 1 of the 25 row pattern, Needle 2 started with row 8, and needle 3 started with row 16. (My inspiration for this approach was singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” in the round during Grade 4 music class.)

Yes! It worked!

I had the randomness I was after and it looked like I had rushes growing up my socks!

Too bad I didn’t like them.

Yes, that’s right…I didn’t like the way the segments in the rushes were formed (with purl stitches) and so I ripped out the whole works, turned the page on my charted pattern, and decided to head off in another direction.

On the way to somewhere else has led me here:

I’m loving the pattern of these lacy little numbers (which, unfortunately, you can’t see very well because they’re not blocked) and, so far, they seem to be a very, very quick knit. That last bit might be because I’m using US 2 needles. After my Peapod Socks (72 stitches on 00s, oh my!), I thought I wanted something quick. Unfortunately, I forgot that one reason why I love the Peapods so much is the density of the fabric produced.

So, these will be a prototype pair and I will finish them just to see how the pattern looks overall. After that, the pattern will be reworked for tiny stitches on tiny needles.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 15th, 2009 at 12:28 pm and is filed under Knitting, my designs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.