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jenettIn which I discuss the actual design parts for those curious. If you don't want to do an epic blanket, some of the info in here will still be useful for rummaging for designs to use in other places.
So, why this particular structure?
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alternity, a collaborative transformative work project in an alternate Harry Potter universe. As I write this in January 2014, we've been doing it for 5.5 years, and have a little under a year and a half to go. Because one epic longrunning project wasn't enough, and because I wanted something physical to remind me of all the awesomeness that is Alternity, I came up with the idea of doing a blanket to reflect (some of the) major events of the game.
How big a blanket?
There's 7 years, so I'm doing 7x7 squares for the body of the blanket, with a border one square wide around. (The corners will have the House heraldry, and the other border squares are very dark gray on one side and medium gray on the other side.) That means coming up with 7 designs for each year.
However, my squares are not quite squares - they're more rectangles. I'm doing 44 stitches wide and 50 rows tall, because it turns out that fits most of the charts I was looking at, and allows me to get 4 square sides out of a ball of yarn. In the end, it's going to make a very generously sized lap blanket, about big enough to cover a full size bed, but without any overhang.
What yarn?
Choosing the yarn was a combination of colour choices and price. I knew when I set out to do this design that I wanted the eight colours for the canonical houses, plus probably a couple of others. And I knew it was going to be a *lot* of yarn.
What I ended up going with was Knit Picks Palette yarn. They have 150 colours, so finding the 8 I wanted was much easier. I ordered a bunch of single balls of individual colours to test what I wanted, and to see how many squares I could get out of one ball (four, as it turns out) and then worked out a spreadsheet for the rest.
How'd you do that?
Calculated how many balls I needed for the squares I'd had planned (I'd planned almost through Year 5 at that point), rounded up to the next whole number, and then added one for good measure. (And for the border colours, that, plus a couple of the asphalt, which I'm using for the joining.)
(2 years = 14 square sides, so that gives me lots of leeway for colour choices, because I generally use a given colour only 2-3 times in a row.)
I wanted to get all the yarn at once so I wouldn't have to worry about dye lots or a colour going out of stock or being discontinued. (And since the Palette yarns run under $4 a ball, getting all at once was a chunk of money, but I am adequately supplied for hobby materials for, y'know, two years or so.)
I'm using size 4 needles: I'm using KnitPicks Sunstruck because I like wood, and the 16" cable is a perfect length for this project.
How did you decide what colours to use?
I wanted to have a unified colour palette - that means that all squares in the blanket are done in one of 8 colours. They are:
garnet heather - deep red
golden heather - rich golden yellow
marine heather - rich blue
aurora heather - deep green
finley heather - silver gray
marble heather - medium gray
asphalt heather - very dark gray/black
brindle heather - vibrant medium brown with some orangey and bronzey tones
In terms of the house colours, you have the garnet and golden (Gryffindor), golden and asphalt (Hufflepuff), marine and marble gray (Ravenclaw, using the movie colours because blue and brindle doesn't stand out well), and silver gray and dark green (Slytherin). I chose the heather colours because I wanted something with some subtle variation and 'aliveness' - and one of the things we've talked a lot about as authors in Alternity has been shades of experience, perspective, and values rather than absolutes.
I ordered a few sample colours when I was trying to decide what to do with the borders, and have kept them for occasional embroidery of darker red-brown and deep blue. (I also tried their bronze, which didn't work right against the other colours.)
I thought a bit about whether I wanted a couple of accent colours (notably pink for Umbridge, and there's a shade of green that's *just* the right colour for Avada Kedava. I decided I didn't want to do that. Also, after a still-recent year of Umbridge in play, I wasn't quite sure I wanted to look at the colour pink enough to knit it.)
How do you decide on designs?
There's a sort of perfect place between 'can be done in two colours' (or maybe 'two colours plus a little duplicate stitch') plus 'simple enough to do in double knit' plus 'can be done in colours that don't do odd things to the overall design'.
Double knitting tends to look best (I discovered) if you generally have at least 2 stitches together in the double knit.
(You can look at the camping trip - 7th block, first year - to see why - there's a line of single diagonals that are not incredibly satisfying.) There are also some concepts that are far easier to get into a symbol suitable for knitting than others.
I also looked at what I could find designs for. Mostly, I rifled through dishcloth charts - they're linked off of each square in the project, even if I modified them heavily (usually to simplify a bit, sometimes to make single stitch lines double stitch patterns). For some, I have had to create my own. (Sometimes, I also had to chart the design, because double knitting works much better charted.) Year 3 has a bunch of charts I designed myself, for example.
Some years were really easy to sort out symbols for (fourth year was pretty easy). Some years were really hard. Some years came together only very slowly, and with moving things around a lot (fifth year was like that.)
What about the overall layout?
If you look at what is there so far, you can tell (if you know Alternity) that it's not purely sequential chronologically.
I did want to make sure that I did not end up with clumps of colour - several squares of the same background colour together, for example. I did not worry about what the design colour was and whether that clumped, because that way lay misery. (And in practice, if they don't clump on one side, they shouldn't clump too horribly on the other side.)
How are you joining it?
After a bit of experimentation, I've decided that what I like best is more or less whipstitching in a solid band (i.e. the yarn overlaps) along one side, then along the other (square to square in the same row, and then row to row). This is rather tedious but it seems like the most effective method given that double knitting produces some unevenly coloured borders, and I wanted to cover most of that.
I'm thinking that the overall edge will be an i-cord border for the same reason. I'm also contemplating little tiny tassels in whatever yarn bits I have left at the end, but we'll see.
How do you plan the layout?
I start by figuring out what things I want in that year, and then moving them around a bit and poking at the colours until they come out without huge splodges of a single colour (in general, I allow two diagonal but not three of the same base colour on the same side, and no two in a row of the same base colour horizonal or vertical. That includes the border colours.)
As to why the borders are two colours - it's really really miserable to double knit a square of entirely the same colour or nearly the same colour. There's currently one and a planned second square on the blanket that are blue on one side and green on the other, with things duplicate stitched on after, and that is quite bad enough - it's very hard to see the distinction in anything but very good light, and I do a lot of my knitting in a darkish room at night.
My plan is that the bottom left corner (as you look at the 'right' side) starts with Slytherin, and that the top right corner on that side will be Gryffindor. Because that progression amuses me.
I have not yet planned the squares for years 6 and 7 - for one thing, I don't know exactly what we're going to put in those years yet! I did plan overage in yarn to allow me to have plenty for whatever combination we're likely to need. I am fairly certain what the last square in year 7 is going to look like (but reserve the right to change my mind.)
Does everything get a square? Every character?
Not every major event or plot gets a square. And not every character does, either (we have 70+ characters, so the math should make that clear). Some squares are also in a particular place on the blanket because they were a long-running plot element, and that was a convenient place they fit (in terms of sequence and colour).
The events of the year roughly progress left to right on the 'right' side of the blanket, but I did not fixate on that when colour or other considerations were a factor. In some cases, the colour reflects the character (Sirius's paw print in year 2 is red and golden yellow) and in some cases it doesn't. (The opening square of year 3 - an ink pot representing private messages - is brown and silver because that fit the surrounding colours nicely.)
As of right now (February 2014, the middle of Year 6), I have about 8 potential ideas for the last 14 blocks, and I'm sure I'll have more ideas as the plot falls into place. One of those is what I'm fairly sure will be the final square.
How long does each square take you?
If I'm knitting regularly during the week, about a week. Casting on and binding off take a bit longer than my average row time, but I average about 8 minutes a row, assuming I don't get distracted in the middle by email or something else. (That means that I can do about 10-12 rows in two episodes of whatever TV series I'm watching on Netflix, which is about what I need to do most nights in order to keep up with this.)
In practice, I have days where I don't knit at all, and days (mostly weekends, obviously) where I do 20+ rows in a day. I also periodically take a break for other projects, or go through stretches where I'm not knitting much.
I usually have two squares on needles on at any particular point: one is the patterned square I'm currently working on (and I'm now working my way through in sequence), the other is a border square. I knit on the border squares when I'm in a situation where I can't look at the chart easily, like if I'm travelling, or at a presentation or hanging out and talking to people.
Some squares have additional details done by duplicate stitch (that's basically embroidering over the top) - these take varying amounts of time. The most complicated planning was figuring out how to do three visually distinctive snakey things (and leaving room for a possible fourth, depending on how relevant Nagini might be) - the ouroboros, the Slytherin heraldry, and the basilisk.
About those charts...
I open them as a PDF on my iPad, and put in marker lines for my main stitch groupings (10:10:4:10:10, which comes out to, in terms of actual stitches, 20:20:8:20:20 because each charted square is two actual stitches). I then have a line pointing each direction to remind me how to read the chart and show me which side I'm on. (I colour my charts, because it's easier on my eyes: I use conditional formatting in a GDocs spreadsheet, to be specific.)
My usual knitting habit is to watch something on Netflix on my computer, have the knitting in my lap, and have the chart on the iPad in its keyboard case on the arm of the couch next to me. Each time I finish a row I move my reminder lines (which tell me which row, and which colour is the background and which is the design, and which direction to read the chart).
About creating the charts
This is a lot of trial and error. In my blanket spreadsheet (a Google Sheets document) I have a template tab that has the stitches and rows. I then set up conditional formatting (usually with one color for squares without anything in them, and one colour for a period so that it isn't very obvious, but is easy to type.) and then I go to work drawing.
There is a lot of fussy stuff out on the Interwebs about how knit stitches are not perfectly square (which is true) but really, I just make my charts on squares and remember they'll come out a little differently proportioned when I knit them. (Specifically, stitches are a little wider than they are tall.)
I also end up charting anything that started as a written-out pattern (because trying to double knit from a written pattern is miserable) and anything I want to make adjustments to. Some patterns, like the inkwell at the beginning of Y3 are a combination of patterns: I looked at a bunch of inkwell designs, modified heavily, and then added the lettering in.
So where did you get patterns?
Like I said, some of them come from dishcloth designs. Some of them come from other sources - Ravelry has an excellent search engine, and I tried a bunch of terms as I was brainstorming squares. Searching for "Harry Potter" turns up a lot of options. (I do encourage you to look at the pages for designers who have one thing you like: I found a lot of other useful squares like that.)
Some of the designs are free, others are paid - you can find the originals from my links where relevant.
I note that there are some really weird gaps - I went looking for lots of pirate options for Regulus, for example, for Reasons, and while you can find a bunch of skull and crossbone designs, finding anything else doesn't work so well. (So I charted my own).
I also - as noted - have adapted a bunch of patterns, mostly to make there be lines two stitches wide instead of one of a given colour, because it works much better for double knitting, or to adjust a pattern into the appropriate size. (The rat square, for example, is double the size of the original.)
One of the other places I poked through for ideas was the Hogwarts at Ravelry group (over here for Ravelry members). Not all projects transfer to this kind of design, but it gave me a good idea of some things to try or adapt.
So, why this particular structure?
I am one of the player-authors in
alternity, a collaborative transformative work project in an alternate Harry Potter universe. As I write this in January 2014, we've been doing it for 5.5 years, and have a little under a year and a half to go. Because one epic longrunning project wasn't enough, and because I wanted something physical to remind me of all the awesomeness that is Alternity, I came up with the idea of doing a blanket to reflect (some of the) major events of the game. How big a blanket?
There's 7 years, so I'm doing 7x7 squares for the body of the blanket, with a border one square wide around. (The corners will have the House heraldry, and the other border squares are very dark gray on one side and medium gray on the other side.) That means coming up with 7 designs for each year.
However, my squares are not quite squares - they're more rectangles. I'm doing 44 stitches wide and 50 rows tall, because it turns out that fits most of the charts I was looking at, and allows me to get 4 square sides out of a ball of yarn. In the end, it's going to make a very generously sized lap blanket, about big enough to cover a full size bed, but without any overhang.
What yarn?
Choosing the yarn was a combination of colour choices and price. I knew when I set out to do this design that I wanted the eight colours for the canonical houses, plus probably a couple of others. And I knew it was going to be a *lot* of yarn.
What I ended up going with was Knit Picks Palette yarn. They have 150 colours, so finding the 8 I wanted was much easier. I ordered a bunch of single balls of individual colours to test what I wanted, and to see how many squares I could get out of one ball (four, as it turns out) and then worked out a spreadsheet for the rest.
How'd you do that?
Calculated how many balls I needed for the squares I'd had planned (I'd planned almost through Year 5 at that point), rounded up to the next whole number, and then added one for good measure. (And for the border colours, that, plus a couple of the asphalt, which I'm using for the joining.)
(2 years = 14 square sides, so that gives me lots of leeway for colour choices, because I generally use a given colour only 2-3 times in a row.)
I wanted to get all the yarn at once so I wouldn't have to worry about dye lots or a colour going out of stock or being discontinued. (And since the Palette yarns run under $4 a ball, getting all at once was a chunk of money, but I am adequately supplied for hobby materials for, y'know, two years or so.)
I'm using size 4 needles: I'm using KnitPicks Sunstruck because I like wood, and the 16" cable is a perfect length for this project.
How did you decide what colours to use?
I wanted to have a unified colour palette - that means that all squares in the blanket are done in one of 8 colours. They are:
garnet heather - deep red
golden heather - rich golden yellow
marine heather - rich blue
aurora heather - deep green
finley heather - silver gray
marble heather - medium gray
asphalt heather - very dark gray/black
brindle heather - vibrant medium brown with some orangey and bronzey tones
In terms of the house colours, you have the garnet and golden (Gryffindor), golden and asphalt (Hufflepuff), marine and marble gray (Ravenclaw, using the movie colours because blue and brindle doesn't stand out well), and silver gray and dark green (Slytherin). I chose the heather colours because I wanted something with some subtle variation and 'aliveness' - and one of the things we've talked a lot about as authors in Alternity has been shades of experience, perspective, and values rather than absolutes.
I ordered a few sample colours when I was trying to decide what to do with the borders, and have kept them for occasional embroidery of darker red-brown and deep blue. (I also tried their bronze, which didn't work right against the other colours.)
I thought a bit about whether I wanted a couple of accent colours (notably pink for Umbridge, and there's a shade of green that's *just* the right colour for Avada Kedava. I decided I didn't want to do that. Also, after a still-recent year of Umbridge in play, I wasn't quite sure I wanted to look at the colour pink enough to knit it.)
How do you decide on designs?
There's a sort of perfect place between 'can be done in two colours' (or maybe 'two colours plus a little duplicate stitch') plus 'simple enough to do in double knit' plus 'can be done in colours that don't do odd things to the overall design'.
Double knitting tends to look best (I discovered) if you generally have at least 2 stitches together in the double knit.
(You can look at the camping trip - 7th block, first year - to see why - there's a line of single diagonals that are not incredibly satisfying.) There are also some concepts that are far easier to get into a symbol suitable for knitting than others.
I also looked at what I could find designs for. Mostly, I rifled through dishcloth charts - they're linked off of each square in the project, even if I modified them heavily (usually to simplify a bit, sometimes to make single stitch lines double stitch patterns). For some, I have had to create my own. (Sometimes, I also had to chart the design, because double knitting works much better charted.) Year 3 has a bunch of charts I designed myself, for example.
Some years were really easy to sort out symbols for (fourth year was pretty easy). Some years were really hard. Some years came together only very slowly, and with moving things around a lot (fifth year was like that.)
What about the overall layout?
If you look at what is there so far, you can tell (if you know Alternity) that it's not purely sequential chronologically.
I did want to make sure that I did not end up with clumps of colour - several squares of the same background colour together, for example. I did not worry about what the design colour was and whether that clumped, because that way lay misery. (And in practice, if they don't clump on one side, they shouldn't clump too horribly on the other side.)
How are you joining it?
After a bit of experimentation, I've decided that what I like best is more or less whipstitching in a solid band (i.e. the yarn overlaps) along one side, then along the other (square to square in the same row, and then row to row). This is rather tedious but it seems like the most effective method given that double knitting produces some unevenly coloured borders, and I wanted to cover most of that.
I'm thinking that the overall edge will be an i-cord border for the same reason. I'm also contemplating little tiny tassels in whatever yarn bits I have left at the end, but we'll see.
How do you plan the layout?
I start by figuring out what things I want in that year, and then moving them around a bit and poking at the colours until they come out without huge splodges of a single colour (in general, I allow two diagonal but not three of the same base colour on the same side, and no two in a row of the same base colour horizonal or vertical. That includes the border colours.)
As to why the borders are two colours - it's really really miserable to double knit a square of entirely the same colour or nearly the same colour. There's currently one and a planned second square on the blanket that are blue on one side and green on the other, with things duplicate stitched on after, and that is quite bad enough - it's very hard to see the distinction in anything but very good light, and I do a lot of my knitting in a darkish room at night.
My plan is that the bottom left corner (as you look at the 'right' side) starts with Slytherin, and that the top right corner on that side will be Gryffindor. Because that progression amuses me.
I have not yet planned the squares for years 6 and 7 - for one thing, I don't know exactly what we're going to put in those years yet! I did plan overage in yarn to allow me to have plenty for whatever combination we're likely to need. I am fairly certain what the last square in year 7 is going to look like (but reserve the right to change my mind.)
Does everything get a square? Every character?
Not every major event or plot gets a square. And not every character does, either (we have 70+ characters, so the math should make that clear). Some squares are also in a particular place on the blanket because they were a long-running plot element, and that was a convenient place they fit (in terms of sequence and colour).
The events of the year roughly progress left to right on the 'right' side of the blanket, but I did not fixate on that when colour or other considerations were a factor. In some cases, the colour reflects the character (Sirius's paw print in year 2 is red and golden yellow) and in some cases it doesn't. (The opening square of year 3 - an ink pot representing private messages - is brown and silver because that fit the surrounding colours nicely.)
As of right now (February 2014, the middle of Year 6), I have about 8 potential ideas for the last 14 blocks, and I'm sure I'll have more ideas as the plot falls into place. One of those is what I'm fairly sure will be the final square.
How long does each square take you?
If I'm knitting regularly during the week, about a week. Casting on and binding off take a bit longer than my average row time, but I average about 8 minutes a row, assuming I don't get distracted in the middle by email or something else. (That means that I can do about 10-12 rows in two episodes of whatever TV series I'm watching on Netflix, which is about what I need to do most nights in order to keep up with this.)
In practice, I have days where I don't knit at all, and days (mostly weekends, obviously) where I do 20+ rows in a day. I also periodically take a break for other projects, or go through stretches where I'm not knitting much.
I usually have two squares on needles on at any particular point: one is the patterned square I'm currently working on (and I'm now working my way through in sequence), the other is a border square. I knit on the border squares when I'm in a situation where I can't look at the chart easily, like if I'm travelling, or at a presentation or hanging out and talking to people.
Some squares have additional details done by duplicate stitch (that's basically embroidering over the top) - these take varying amounts of time. The most complicated planning was figuring out how to do three visually distinctive snakey things (and leaving room for a possible fourth, depending on how relevant Nagini might be) - the ouroboros, the Slytherin heraldry, and the basilisk.
About those charts...
I open them as a PDF on my iPad, and put in marker lines for my main stitch groupings (10:10:4:10:10, which comes out to, in terms of actual stitches, 20:20:8:20:20 because each charted square is two actual stitches). I then have a line pointing each direction to remind me how to read the chart and show me which side I'm on. (I colour my charts, because it's easier on my eyes: I use conditional formatting in a GDocs spreadsheet, to be specific.)
My usual knitting habit is to watch something on Netflix on my computer, have the knitting in my lap, and have the chart on the iPad in its keyboard case on the arm of the couch next to me. Each time I finish a row I move my reminder lines (which tell me which row, and which colour is the background and which is the design, and which direction to read the chart).
About creating the charts
This is a lot of trial and error. In my blanket spreadsheet (a Google Sheets document) I have a template tab that has the stitches and rows. I then set up conditional formatting (usually with one color for squares without anything in them, and one colour for a period so that it isn't very obvious, but is easy to type.) and then I go to work drawing.
There is a lot of fussy stuff out on the Interwebs about how knit stitches are not perfectly square (which is true) but really, I just make my charts on squares and remember they'll come out a little differently proportioned when I knit them. (Specifically, stitches are a little wider than they are tall.)
I also end up charting anything that started as a written-out pattern (because trying to double knit from a written pattern is miserable) and anything I want to make adjustments to. Some patterns, like the inkwell at the beginning of Y3 are a combination of patterns: I looked at a bunch of inkwell designs, modified heavily, and then added the lettering in.
So where did you get patterns?
Like I said, some of them come from dishcloth designs. Some of them come from other sources - Ravelry has an excellent search engine, and I tried a bunch of terms as I was brainstorming squares. Searching for "Harry Potter" turns up a lot of options. (I do encourage you to look at the pages for designers who have one thing you like: I found a lot of other useful squares like that.)
Some of the designs are free, others are paid - you can find the originals from my links where relevant.
I note that there are some really weird gaps - I went looking for lots of pirate options for Regulus, for example, for Reasons, and while you can find a bunch of skull and crossbone designs, finding anything else doesn't work so well. (So I charted my own).
I also - as noted - have adapted a bunch of patterns, mostly to make there be lines two stitches wide instead of one of a given colour, because it works much better for double knitting, or to adjust a pattern into the appropriate size. (The rat square, for example, is double the size of the original.)
One of the other places I poked through for ideas was the Hogwarts at Ravelry group (over here for Ravelry members). Not all projects transfer to this kind of design, but it gave me a good idea of some things to try or adapt.
