More anomalocaris!

Ok, the anomalocaris is done!

I had a lot of fun making this. The exciting bit is making the "segmented" effect on the body. The body is knit as a tube in the round, then a few rows are knit flat to make a flap, before casting off these stitches, continuing in the round and picking up an equal number of stitches at the beginning of the flap.
The number of fins (and the sewing required) is a little intimidating, and they all need to be placed quite precisely, so that they hold down the side "segment" flaps, as well as overlapping slightly. Fortunately this turned out not to be as time-consuming as I thought, and I'm very happy with how well this turned out.
I'm not totally convinced by the eyes -- they're knit as little hemispheres and lightly stuffed, to give them a bit of a boggle-eyed effect. I think anomalocaris's eyes were raised, possibly even extended on stalks, so this is fairly realistic, but I don't think it looks good here. Possibly the sharp contrast in colour, when the rest of the body is so uniform, is what makes this look so out of place.

Still, I'm very happy with my new anomalocaris! There are more pictures here, including more from the anomalocaris's expedition into Edinburgh's recent snow.

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.