Anomalocaris

Recently I've been watching David Attenborough's new series, First Life. It's an amazing series about some of the earliest known creatures on the planet, reconstructing some of the earliest developments which made life as we know it possible.
This is full of all kinds of weird and wonderful creatures, one of my favouries being the Anomalocaris. It's one of the first known predators, using a circular mouth and long claw-like limbs to hunt, a system of fins to swim freely and (probably) surprisingly complex compound eyes.
I think what really fascinates me about these creatures, though, is that they were pioneers, just working out which body arrangements would work, developing new senses and entirely new strategies for living. That's perhaps romanticising it a bit, especially since this is happening on evolutionary timescales.

So the, plan is to knit an anomalocarid. The basic structure will be a tubular body , a system of fins on each side, claws and eyes on the front and tail fins on the back. The interesting part will be getting the segmented structure -- I'm planning to cast off and pick up a few rows earlier to leave an overlapping flap for each segment. Looking forward to seeing how it turns out!

Hugh.

Dolls!

Quick post today, and indeed, quick knitting.
Local geek Ayla collects ball-jointed dolls and asked me if I might make some knitted accessories for them. I know almost nothing about ball-jointed dolls, probably limited to:

• They have ball-and-socket joints, which allow them to articulate in human-like ways
• They're popular in parts of asia, which seems to lead to them being linked to anime and anime culture
• If you love them too much they will gain a soul and come to life.

I made up a couple of quick things -- a ribbed scarf and a little shawl. It's fun, they're very quick and simple. Here they are modelled by Leona:


I really like how the scarf works, she looks very warm in it. I'm not too convinced about the shawl though, it looks a bit too heavy and warm to really work as a shawl.

Feathery shawl

Hey folks.
So, I've been playing with lace shawls! I've been playing around with the Floe shawl as a basis for more complicated lacy designs. I'm planning to make a couple of these, so hopefully this'll be just the first.
The aim was to look like a feathery layered look, with the overlays getting shorter and shorter towards the edge, and representing a bird's wings.
The pattern is really quite simple -- the lace itself is just a K2tog, YO, K1, YO, SKP, and the 'breaks' are achieved by just offsetting this by a couple of stitches. I wasn't sure if this would make the distinction clear enough, until I blocked it and pinned it out (although come to think of it I'm not sure if this yarn will actually block?), so I'm very happy with how it turned out. If I did again though, I would have used a slightly larger repeat so that the offsets are clearer, and more regular.

The shawl has adopted itself a friendly Canadian, as you can see here. Yay!

Hugh.

Even more computer-generated knitting!

Oh, apparently I forgot to post this one here -- following the fun with the javascript hat-matron, I decided to write up another quick javascript pattern generator, this time for a less trivial pattern.
I picked the Universal Cover Scarf, since I already have that mostly coded up, and just needed to convert it across.
You can see the result here:

Scarf-matron

A friend also pointed this website out to me, which does a similar sort of thing, only much better, and in php:

Knitting fool

I particularly recommend their sweater generator, which has a huge number of variables, a selection of different constructions and even comes up with graphical representations so you can see how it all works. It's very cool!

Hugh.

More computery fun: JavaScript

I've been playing around with learning some javascript just recently, and came up with this little sample program:
Hat recipe program
The program lets you choose a collection of parameters, and then generates a hat pattern to those specifications. The hat itself is very basic -- it's a beanie-type with a ribbed brim and circular shaping at the crown -- it's probably the simplest thing you can knit with any shaping to it at all, so you're unlikely to want to actually knit from this.
Still, I'm interested in this approach to knitting patterns -- if it were easy to write more complicated patterns in this way, you could make them accessible not just in a range of sizes, but in any size anyone cared to knit. You could also provide other customisation, say to fit different body shapes, or just to add variety. And you would never have to worry about yarn substitution, because the pattern would be tailored to your yarn and tension.
Of course this isn't a totally new idea -- there is commercial software which does similar things, and the KnitML project aims to provide a common language to allow this to work. So yeah, I'm quite excited about the potential here to change out whole approach to knitting patterns!

...but this is really just a tangent, and I'm just enjoying playing with javascript :o)

Hugh.

Hey look!

My "geometic knitting" talks are now up at Toroidal Snark!
This means I am now totally famous-on-the-internet.

Thanks Sarah-Marie!
Hugh.

Aromantic hat latest

A couple of posts ago I talked about a plan to make an "aromantic" hat, combining the symbol for benzene with some heart shapes, by way of some really awkward coordinate systems.
The key step in this is to make a colourwork pattern for a heart knit with these unusual increases, and this was done by computer (did I mention I'm learning C at the moment? That may be a theme here).

So, the current status of this project is that the program is up and running, and I've knit a couple of test pieces from it, and am quite pleased with the results.
The one you can see here is a smaller version of the heart shape I'm planning to use. It's a little fuzzy around the edges because the shape is so small, and the increases do distort it quite a bit. The final version will be quite a bit bigger, and I may rotate it 90 degrees to that the point doesn't coincide with the increases.

But it's really the program I want to talk about. It works by setting up three types of point, one in cartesian coordinates, one in radial, and one in special coordinates which encode the pattern of increases used to get this hexagonal shape.
It then works through each of the stitches using the 'special' coordinates, converts these into radial coordinates, and compares them with the given curve. If they lie inside the curve, they will be brown, otherwise purple.
One added complication is that the curve is given parametrically, so to compare a given point with the curve you need to solve a (difficult) equation of the form, which then needs some kind of numerical solution. Rather than running a numerical solver on this for each stitch, I broke the curve up into a number of linear segments at the start -- it's then simple to find the appropriate segment and interpolate linearly when we want to know if a point is inside the curve.
The really cool thing is that it's very simple to put in different functions. It would be straightforward to modify it to work with different patterns of increases too (although not necessarily *easy*).

So yeah, I'm very pleased with how this is going, the next step will be to choose yarn and scale this up to hat-sized, then get knitting on the real one! I'll also post the program itself at some point, though it could probably do with some tidying up first.
Hugh.