Thursday, December 01, 2005

Crazy exponential necklace


I was chatting with a lady who was working on 3 knitting projects while waiting in a doctor's office. She showed me this cool wavy decorative scarf and told me how easy it was to make. "Cast on 96 stitches, knit the first row, on the second row, knit and increase, knit and increase every stitch to the end, knit the third row straight, on the fourth row knit and increase every stitch to the end, each row alternate knitting straight and increasing, repeat this 5 times." It sounded easy enough. The scarf looked a bit unfinished to me though. It just hung in a straight line, not very wide and the center looked like it was being pulled too tight. So I designed this one, completely circular with some fun fur cast on the first row to soften the center.

While I was knitting this, it became apparent to me that this was an exponential explosion of stitches. I didn't actually count the cast on stitches, it was probably around 100. The first increase brought it up to 200 stitches, the second 400. At that point, it was getting mighty crowded on the circular needle. I figured, OK, I will try for just one more increase. Then I had 800 stitches and it was nearly impossible to knit. It was all smashed together and very hard to move down the needles. Grandma came and wanted to borrow my circular needle in that size (6), so she offered to finish it off. It just needed the last 1/2 circle to be knitted (straight) and then cast off. She kept complaining the whole time that it was too hard to knit, and at some point, she managed to unscrew the needle from the cable and stitches started tumbling out everywhere. We then ended up using a bunch of DPNs and then another circular needle to finish it. It started looking really long and I thought it was going to be a disaster. But as the casting off started, it started showing the wave and I got excited. In the end, it was a fantastic necklace that everyone loved, especially Adam who it was knit for.

If I were to do it again, I would transfer it onto 2 circular needles or more when it got crowded to save some aggravation.

November 15, 2018 - After updating this photo in anticipation of Flickr deleting all my photos because I won't pay, I realized that this is the perfect project for crochet, not knit. You don't have to worry about where the increased stitches go because once it leaves the crochet needle, it's done.

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