I’m delighted that the The K a p o w Cowl is up and lovely. Anyone want to hear how the fabric pattern came to be?
I was doodling a swatch one day just after unventing the Christmas Tree Increase that matches a Multiple Slipped Decrease. I wondered what would happen if I used them in a bauble. I liked the way that the stitch lines ran in a circle just like the bauble itself, but it didn’t bubble very much. In fact, it looked more like a coin than a bubble. I wondered what would happen if I picked up and knit a stitch at the base of the bauble, then put a few rows on the swatch behind the bauble before re-attaching it, and when I did that, it sat like a flat polka dot on top of the fabric.
So did I rejoice?
Nah, I set that idea aside … I even lost the swatch.
I’d never been too into polka dots, although the polka dotted clothes my daughter received from the great-hand-me-down-homeschool-chain were charming.
A year later, I noticed that a Christine Guest Designs blog post about finding where the blank stitches went in a ring cable chart got WAY more hits than most of my knitting blog posts, using the search term “knitting spots.” So there was a desire for knitted polka dots out among the Google-ing public.
Having just read Tara Swigger’s Market Yourself pdf, emphasising the need to listen to your people, I decided to find out what it was about polka dots that they liked, so I could like them too.
I searched Pinterest for polka dots, and “liked” the ones that I thought were cute. Did you know there is such a thing as a polka dotted stiletto? I found that both the half drop and hexagonal arrangements of dots could be adorable to me, and that I could like or dislike strong color contrasts and medium ones. Since it wasn’t the arrangement of dots or the colors, I held my ruler up the the screen. All the dot patterns that pleased me had a proportion from the Fibonacci sequence between the dot measurement and the white spaces between them.
Oh, of course! Proportion! White Space! (or pink, or green or whatever space)
What about other series beside the Fibonachi? What about random arrangements? What about arrangements decided by a hand dyed yarn?
Why didn’t I realize how fun dots could be earlier?
I guess I needed to hear from blog readers, even if only by way of Google Analytics.