Some work in progress

Got the usual all clear run away early word at about 1pm yesterday so I ran some errands on the way home with an eye toward being safely home before the first of the happy hour drunks hit the roads.

What followed was a nice boring that had me tucked up and tuckered out well before 2008 made its entrance here on the Pacific Time Zone.
Onto the current non-functional mad maths knitting project. So far I have several modules done using the multi colour for the centre pentagon and purple for the short row extensions.

Since I haven't been able to find the additional purple ball of yarn, rather than delay the knitting for the search, I've been working the centre pentagons and storing them on a single circular needle on the outside chance that the other ball of purple shows up. If it doesn't I'll go to plan B once I figure out what plan B is.

I've been worrying joining the modules on several fronts.

First, although I'm sure that somewhere there's an additional ball of both the purple and the blue of the crap acrylic I picked up at Rite Aid, I can't find either one of them. I'll need to mix things up make three colours work for this bit of knitting rather than risk running out of the purple and having to throw an odd ball blue sore thumb module into the mix.

Second, I've been trying to use a variety of different drawing tools to diagram how the parts combine.

So far none of the tools I've played with allow me to get the angles right. In some, I can draw pentagons and triangles but trying to join them to each other, when successful, results in a group that can only be manipulated as a whole. In others I can't even get a good mating of the two different polygons. It may just be that I've not mastered the tools but it has been annoying to put it mildly.

On the last front there's the technical knitting side of things. I already know that the short row extensions, when bound off, tend to give a rounder/softer edge than when they are long rowed back or left as live stitches.

That has been a factor in this project too as the inspiration pieces have sharp angle joins. Indeed, the quilted version used cardboard to give definition.

Knitting will generally yield a softer soft sculpture than sewing and if I didn't have the short row extension issue this would be a good reason to bind off and sew (or mimic that with three needle bind off) rather than grafting.

And my original idea was 3-needle bind off or 3-needle join followed with a bind off to provide stability and provide structure. I'm also considering i-cord bind off and/or an applied bind off.

For now though, the live stitches of the modules to be blocked have been prepped and are sharing space on various stitch holders so that I can work a 3-needle bin off using 2 needles.