Pron and a Plan

So one of the Retreat sessions I took at SOAR was Playing With Carders And Fiber.  Actually, I forget the official title, but that's totally what it was about.  Denny and I set to it with a vengeance, not stopping for anything as wasteful as actual spinning to see how the batts turned out, preferring to use our creative juices for naming our blends.   I confess, some names I have forgotten (though I have the tags somewhere), though the white skein above results from our Feng Shui blend.  My favourite name by far is the one that resulted from Denny's desire to create a blend called Dead Clown, and being faced with the fact of no more primaries left, and having to make do with magenta and purple instead of red and blue, which led to Dead My Little Pony.  I think it's somewhere there in the blue marl skein or perhaps the green.

The green, I think.  I see sparkles.

Anyway, I have perhaps two ounces of fiber which really ought to have a purpose, y'know? And I've been going round and round.  Given that I Knit Sweaters (and occasionally socks, but only using commercial sock yarns because I hate spinning worsted and I'm tired of handspun socks with holes), and given that I'm bigger than newborn (a sweater for same might actually require no more than the little pile above), I had to be thinking about something interesting and inventive to do with colours.

Stripes are dull today.

I thought that a short-rowed yoke with built-in garter stitch neckband might be fun, though probably not all that attractive.  

Icelandic-style yokes are on my Meh List.

I do immensely admire Norah Gaughan, and if we weren't (probably, I think) around the same age, I'd yearn to grow up to be her, at least my knitting self would.  I'm not sure who my spinning self wants to be, nor my beading self, nor my opinionated self - but I digress.  Norah has been fitting geometric shapes together the last few years, which so plays to my weakness (as in "I love modular knitting", not as in "oh no, I'm weak in geometry"), and so it came to me:

Pentagons.

Because their symmetries are not (oh, what's the correct mathematical term for it? I haven't been in a math class since a quarter century ago) perpendicular - in other words, the lines which divide pentagons in mirror-image halves are not at right angles to each other - when you join a chain of them one to another, you will not get a straight line.  Hexagons and octagons, on the other hand, line up rather neatly.

What you get, when you join one pentagon to another ad nauseum, is either a wiggly line of pentagons (if you've chosen a connecting side willy-nilly) or - drumroll please - a curve. Eightish pentagons should make a circle that doesn't quite lie flat, whose outside circumference is a little small, that might just, if placed over a head, mimic quite nicely the shape of shoulders.  The edge of the curve closest to the face is nice and smooth, but the edge closer to the arms is ziggy-zaggy.  How convenient! If you pick up stitches along the zig-zag edge, you're perfectly set up for some variation or another of any number of chevron-type stitches (of which Old Shale and Feather & Fan are two well-used members), which also lend themselves rather well to increasing evenly in the round.  Which means no raglan, no set-in sleeves, just a nice circular yoke flowing organically off multicolour pentagons around the neck.

In theory, at least.