Completed Transformer mittens

I knit them in the round, so there are no seams, and the logos are done in intarsia. I was expected the intarsia in the round to be complicated, but it's really suprisingly simple. There was a bit of.. confusion, and the left hand one ended up being a bit smaller than the right, but hopefully that won't be too noticeable. I'm not entirely happy with the top of the autobot logo, I think the black crest is way too big, and it would probably be better to have left this out or at least have made it a lot smaller. The decepticon one I'm very happy with though.

A couple of knitting points:

First, intarsia in the round. I think people make this out to be quite a bit more complicated than it is, and the dpns particularly help a lot. If you put all the stitches for one intarsia block on one needle, then all you need to do it knit up to that needle, twist the yarns together as you would in normal intarsia, then purl back to the other end. When you get there, knit along that needle until your yarns are back together, twist, and continue. If your intarsia bit isn't a rectangle, once you get the two yarns together, slip the appropriate number of stitches from the intarsia needle onto the adjacent ones, and carry on. Essentially you're just knitting two flat pieces and twisting the yarns at the end of each row to hold them together. I suppose it might be a little trickier if you had a lot of different intarsia blocks.

Second, the mixed stranded-intarsia thing. For the purposes of these mittens, the logo forms one block with two yarns worked as stranded knitting, and the rest is the other. If you're doing this, I think you need to be very careful about how tightly you work the floats, particularly on the turns. (You can see me doing this wrong at the top of the autobot logo) I found working the other block first each time helped a lot with this, but otherwise I'd just try to leave the extra thread very loose. Maybe this is just me knitting too tightly though.

Third, there's a purl row just above the cuff to form a border, which is immediately followed by some increases for the wrist. I think this makes the border a little uneven, and with hindsight I would have put in a couple of plain rows between the two. I suspect not putting shaping too close to borders, where there are straight lines to disrupt, might be a good general principle.

Anyway, I'm very happy with them, and am trying to think of excuses for more mittens so I can play with this more :o) The mittens will be on their way to their new home sometime in the next couple of days.
Hope you like them!
Hugh.

Transformers

Ok, attempts at transformer swatches! The first photo is the stranded version - I decided that the cable version wasn't really working, and this is probably the right way to go about it. I'm reasonably pleased with how this turned out, although I'll need to check it with my local Transformer-geek to see if it needs any revising. It's probably a bit taller and thinner than it should be.
There's a couple of mistakes in the eyebrows because the chart I was working from wasn't clear enough about what to do with the WS rows. Looking at the size of this motif I've decided this would go well on a pair of gloves - then I can have the Autobot logo(this one) on one glove and the Decepticon one on the other.


This is the cable version. I'd really like to do more of this kind of thing, but I think I need to do a lot more playing to work out some details. Couple of things that I need to fix:
(i) the cables are raised, but where they need to make a horizontal edge the reverse stocking stitch in the background wants to be in front. I was playing with casting off and picking up from the back of the cast off edge(I tried that on the top of the eyes). This is better, but still not ideal.
(ii) cabling the edges of raised blocks makes the edge stand up way too much(as on the eyes and crest here), it'd probably be better to work out some way to work these bits with increases and decreases to avoid this.
(iii) The points of the triangles are very wrong. Because you need to start with one raised stitch that then moves in both directions cables are not good. Just generally making cables come together is tricky because you really have to put one on top of the other.
(iv) Because the cables pull the stitches on either side together, I think you really need to add some increases to make the finished piece end up rectangular.
I think there was a good article about this on Knitty, but I can never find it. Anyway, things to play with sometime! If anyone knows how to deal with these, please let me know!

Hugh.

Transformer logo

So, Transformers!
A friend of mine is very keen on Transformers, and suggested I might knit something Transformer-based. I decided the autobot logo would be a good motif, being big and clear. I'd like to do this using cables, to give a nice embossed feel to it.

I'm not sure how well it'll work, one problem is that I think the cables will need to be raised, which would make the pattern kind of reversed. If this doesn't work, I think it will be possible to work it in reverse(with the cables lower than the main part) provided the indented parts are thick enough. Failing that, I can always just use colours. I'll have to make a couple of test versions to see how well it shows up.

A bigger problem will be what to do with this motif when it's done. I think it'd work best on a jumper, but other possibilities include a pair of gloves and the front of a hat.

Hugh.