Now that I'm halfway done this project and no longer
routinely swearing and ripping it out, I think it's time to
show off my progress.
The project was partially conceived out of a desire to play
with triangle-based fractals and partially out of a desire to
make myself more comfortable with lace.
The bottom panel is a Sierpinski sieve after three iterations
of the algorithm. Each panel goes back one iteration, until
nothing remains but a triangle.
I'm currently knitting said triangle. After I'm done that,
I'll go forward two iterations into the 2-dimensional Koch
curve (or Koch snowflake). At the size I'm knitting, I only
have the resolution to knit two Koch curves.
However, the Koch curve pattern (which I've sketched, but not
yet plotted out with all its decreases) has the fortuitous
property of being half again as large as the Sierpinski
triangle. Hence, two Koch curves will be as long as three
Sierpinski triangles.
I had a few false starts with the Sierpinski pattern, though.
First, I misguessed how to angle the decreases, resulting in a
random web of yarn. Second, I saw that once I'd knitted more
than half the triangle, the corners of the fabric drooped
dramatically. To fix that, I spread out and flattened the
scarf, then placed a straight edge from the middle over the
drooping corners and noted the row that it intersected.
Having done that, I cast on with twice the number of stitches
that that row had outside the pattern (twice 14 --$gt; 28). From
there, I increased every row without a corresponding decrease,
until the scarf was 45 stitches across, the width of the
pattern.
I intend to, on the second Koch curve, decrease every pattern
row for the last third of the pattern, giving it the opposite
curve to the bottom of the scarf, rather than the simple curve
that would result from casting off on a flat edge.
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2 comments:
Quite impressive! I like it for its simplicity.
Happy knitting,
Janey
janeyknitting AT yahoo DOT ca
(replace caps with symbols and lose the spaces)
Thank you. I think someday, I'm going to knit a 160-row Sierpinski fractal as a triangular shawl, starting with four stitches and increasing two each row.
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