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The World of Illusion Knitting

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PICKING UP THREADS

This was written in
2007
so is now very dated

Another copy of MT provided the next idea. This wasn’t a copy from the pile in the cellar but one that dropped through the door one morning. It contained an article, by a young teacher, entitled Don’t let anyone tell you Maths isn’t beautiful. We might have called it Pythagoras Tree Gone Mad as there are very close links between the drawings shown and our Pythagoras Tree from some years previous though it had been generated by a class investigation to construct patterns and perhaps contemplate infinity. The final drawing consisted of a total of 65 squares and 108 triangles, each in four different sizes.

When the journal arrived Fibo-optic was still being made. I never (well, hardly ever) have more than one item under construction at a time so this one had to wait a little while. I knew exactly what yarns I wanted for Pythagorean Ripples. It had to be a variegated yarn in bright colours, for the triangles, and four plain colours picked out from the mixture, for the squares.

A day or two before Fibo-optic would be finished I went off to the market where I knew I could buy what I wanted. Horror! The previous day an adjoining building had burned down and the entire area had been evacuated because it was unsafe and it was likely to stay that way for some time. I toured round various other shops and markets but without success.

In desperation I phoned Mark Barnes at King Cole Ltd which is not far from where we live. “Mark, have you got any of that horrible bright spotty stuff?” It wasn’t the most tactful question! “Come and see me,” he said.

When I arrived he met me with a bag in his hand and said, “Is this the horrible spotty stuff you want?” It was exactly right. It turned out that this particular bag had been returned by a lady who thought it was faulty. That type of yarn tends to look different depending on whether it is used in short rows or long rows and how often the colour changes crop up. She had knitted two sleeves and was unhappy because they were not the same. She had been refunded and the partially knitted yarn was about to go in the bin - until I turned up. It was perfect for my purposes. I unravelled the sleeves and also used some of the new balls. More has been used in cushions and other items since and a quantity still lurks in the cellar.

The colours of Pythagorean Ripples are garish but they seemed to fit perfectly with the drawings the kids had produced and with the notion of our other, more sophisticated, design having run riot.

Occasionally we have a disaster! There is a well-known photograph of a café wall tiled with alternate black and white tiles. They are perfectly normal tiles but, because of the spacing between them the rows seem to get wider and narrower and move around as you look at them.

We had tried to use this illusion before. We had made a hat where the tiles were embroidered onto plastic canvas. The effect worked fairly well despite being on a curved surface. We also tried it on a sweater. It didn’t work. We put this down to the constant movement in any kind of garment and finally decided to make a wall-hanging that could hang flat, like the tiled wall. To have the greatest chance of success it had to be as regular as it could possibly be. This meant it needed the precision of a knitting machine.

I started to make long strips, alternating black and the most vivid pink you can imagine (because we had decided white would get dirty too quickly). Ben was here at the time and it wasn’t long before he took over the knitting while we attempted to join strips together. We tried this many ways and it became obvious that it was essential for there to be a continuous black line between the pink squares, otherwise there were no lines to even begin to confuse the eye. The most accurate way was to crochet the join from the right side.

The afghan looks good. The colours are dramatic, the arrangement of squares is interesting but the optical illusion just doesn’t work. The piece is too big. If you focus on part of it, the lines do start to move around but it is almost impossible to continue to look at one area without being tempted to look at the rest. When it is scaled down as a photograph, or seen from a long distance, it becomes easier to see the illusion. We still have it but Striptease rarely sees the light of day. Don’t ask why the illusion will work at the size of the café wall but will not work as a hanging – because I have no explanation for the phenomenon.

Next came Square Root which is derived from the same idea as From Square To Eternity. It has seven nested squares beginning with pale cream in the centre and working out through shades of yellow to brown at the outside. As with so many of our designs it has an ambiguous name. Did it get its name because it uses the square root of 2? Because it branches out from the centre root which is a square? Does it depict a route through a series of squares? All of the above!

Click here to see more about Pythagorean Ripples
Click here to see more about Striptease
Click here to see more about Square Root

19c. CUSHY NUMBERS continued