My latest pattern comes from an idea I had swatched a year or two ago. What brought it to the top of the queue was a need for grief knitting. My aerospace friend, Bob Greene, passed away from cancer in the early morning hours of Thursday 8 October 2020. He was in hospice care the final three weeks of his life. I spent a fair amount of those three weeks sitting bedside with him. I also drove out and back to Mississippi to fetch his granddaughter, and then did the same trip three days later to take her home. On my last day with Bob I downloaded the audiobook of The Martian and played that. Bob and I shared a love of all things outer space. I will miss him every time I see space news. I hope to live long enough to see humans walk on the moon again or even Mars for the first time. Bob dearly wanted to see that, too.
The grief knitting turned out to be Penta Benda. The pattern is based on an interesting way of arranging right triangles, so they create an octagonal spiral.
I used a gradient set of yarn purchased for $5 a skein at the North Georgia Knitting Guild annual auction in March 2018. There were two skeins of colorway 62171 Berry Pie Mix. I overdyed one of them with Jacquard color 622 Sapphire Blue back in 2018.
I knit all five skeins in 15 days.
The cable is based on something I already knew from other patterns — that a reversible cable makes a beautiful selvedge. I thought about adding patterning to the main section of the triangle. I sat in on a Zoom presentation with knitting designers earlier this year where a successful designer said she starts with what she wants to knit and then eliminates 75% of her design. Simplify. Okay, I've simplified this one.
I did end up with a couple new techniques. (Of course.)
First, I needed a way to add a knit-purl pair at the end of a row. My initial instinct was to use the Y-increase. It didn't work. The edge ended up being too tight. Instead I used a maneuver similar to Italian cast-on to add those pairs. If you don't care for this solution, a couple backward loops will probably also work.
The second thing I needed to do was to attach the modules as I work. This is sometimes called "join as you go." I wanted to keep the fabric reversible. The maneuver is essentially a right-leaning reversible decrease, just using stitches from both the old module and the new module.
When worked right-leaning, as I have, the new module ends up pinching or encasing the edge of the old. If I wanted the old module to pinch the new, I could do the same maneuver as a left-leaning reversible decrease.
The final shawl is heavy and warm — after all, it is almost 500g of
wool-alpaca blend! The shape wants to curl around your shoulders. The
reversibility gives it options for styling.
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