Forwards and Backwards

Still using the beaded beads, but this one seemed to need something more.

A biggish rivoli with frosted glass teardrops and a lovely chalcedony drop, framed with the same beads as in the beaded beads. And a very pretty brass clasp. I wish solid brass in interesting designs was more widely available.

No pictures, but there's been a bit of undoing on the mitred square skirt which I haven't mentioned in ages, but on which I have been working pretty consistently (check the "Last Movie I Saw" in the sidebar because the more the movies change, the more knitting I've been doing).

Probably a good few hours, possibly a day or two of knitting (were I a Knitting Professional who worked eight hours a day), in part my own fault (as usual), but in part because the only way to reliably check the size is to knit it all the way from the hem to the hips, or waist, or wherever the top of the skirt is to reside.

My skirt starts at the hem, with a round of rotated-by-forty-five-degrees mitred squares (so they look like diamonds). The next round of mitred squares each has one less stitch per side, the round after that yet fewer stitches and so on. The thing about the size (not the gauge exactly) is that the neighbours (top and bottom) of each individual square influence how big it is - so a square is not a square because the top two sides are slightly shrunk by its smaller top neighbours, and the bottom two sides are slightly stretched by its bigger bottom neighbours.

Then too, the weight of the knitting, as well as the fact that it's all essentially on the bias, ensures further distortion, so really, you just can't tell how big it'll be until it's done.

A self-imposed constraint for both practical purposes as well as design considerations, is that there is absolutely no breaking (or cutting) of yarn, so that each colour swirls diagonally up from the hem to the waistband. This means that at the very least, each time the skirt gets longer by one round, it also has to get wider by one square.

This is the way I should have started it, rather than by working an entire round at at time, since the length is only somewhat but not entirely predictable as I mentioned before, and the length determines how small the top square is, and the size of the top square determines the size of the waistband, and if I don't want bulk in this area, I need to select only as many squares (i.e. diagonal swirls) as I need to make the waistband fit me.

What this seems to have turned out to mean is that I started with too many hem squares, and since I worked the first three or four rounds in their entirety, and since undoing one colour requires removal of the square above it and since each colour appears diagonally, this is substantially more undoing than if I had instead chosen to make each square unrotated and to have started from the top instead of the bottom, but that's a design for another day (realistically for another year).