September 2013

I haven't decided yet if I'll be concentrating on gruesome knits or fancy dress but I am going to start with a pattern based on the beetle I made last month.

26/09/2013

Adventures in Social Media

I've been dipping my toe into the frightening world of social media. I have a tumblr now. I plan to use it to collect pretty pictures, shamelessly plug my family's artwork, gather inspiration for future designs and the show off the odd knitting project that's not an original pattern – such as this mysterious hooded figure.

Of course what I'll actually use it for is anyone's guess, it's all so new and scary!

15/09/2013

Heh Heh Heh. Bottom.

It's that rarest of occasions where I'm happy with what I've made on the first attempt. Here's the underneath.

It's not a specific species of beetle but I'm going to let that pass this time. With hundreds of thousands of beetle species in the world it most likely looks like one of them.

14/09/2013

Scale

Last month I knitted a beetle for playing beetle with. I mentioned that it came out much larger than I was intending (my own fault, I didn't knit a tension patch, I just jumped right in). As an early Halloween pattern I'm going to knit a scaled down version that I'll sew together.

Scaling down patterns is straightforward when the edges are straight lines, even if they're at an angle. Luckily last months beetle can be considered as a series of (mostly) straight sides.

For example the garter stitch bottom of the beetle looks like this.

You'll notice that I've described the shape of the base without saying anything about how many stitches across it is, or how many rows long. In fact, I have described how to knit a beetle base without making any reference to size at all. This diagram describes the beetle I made last month and the miniature beetle I'm going to make this month and a 30 foot beetle that I will need a lot more free time on my hands before I attempt.

To make a beetle half the size of the original I would keep the same increase/decrease regularity but do half the number of rows.

Curves are more complicated to resize which I why I am pretending everything is straight lines and fudging the pattern a bit as I go.

13/09/2013

The Big Knit

If you're a knitter based in the UK there is still two weeks left of the Innocent Smoothie Big Knit. Send in your little knitted hats by 1st October and Innocent will donate 25p to Age UK for every be-hatted bottle that is sold.