Foofaraw excites Toscana

What kind of person would *experiment* over and over with a simple pattern to obtain a reproducible results? Hint: (knitting) geek.

I love that phrase.

Reproducible results.

As a designer, I'm supposed to be all over that concept and it was incredible to think so-called similar yarns were NOT going to play nice together.

Experiment #1, 2, 3: I started out mixing Koigu with Colinette. Both the tone and yarn size combo flopped, nix nix rip.

The little stats table from yesterday was created and studied. What stood out for me was the similarity in yardage between the STR Lightweight & Jitterbug. I wasn't too sure about the color combo but knew from past experience a little shell pink might be a very good thing in small quantities.

Into ye olde test tube went a skein of STR "Foofaraw" and the Jitterbug "Toscana".

It took about two inches to blow up into a very funkified pool so frustrating I had not the will to photograph it. This loss of will has never happened to me before (perhaps because of the Can Do/I WILL Make it Work clause in the Declaration of Geekitude, who knows).

But I tried again, this time draping the color I liked the most in the STR halfway across the midpoint of the scarf, after the border was worked and guesstimated the length needed to center the run by going backwards towards the beginning of the row to start the working yarn from there. This was better for awhile but it also puddled and rebeled. WTF?!!?

Nothing was left to do at this point but to play on the computer (wanted to find out what was wrong with Heath Ledger's teeth in "the Lords of Dogtown"). Ate a great junk food lunch of pizza and chips because it was Sunday it was sunny and dropping crumbs into one's keyboard is very lucky. (Ask Bill Gates.)

Sustained by cheese, I went back to the Chevron. This time I pulled out lengths of each yarn and really looked at them.

In common:
yarn diameter
yarn content and finish (scary–looked exactly the same to me)

Different:
length of color runs of the paint jobs

Then I looked at the stitch pattern, a lovely take on an old Shetland favorite. At one point in the rendering, there's a lot of decreasing going on.

The color runs of the STR were much longer than the color runs in the JB.

Maybe I could vanquish the pooling by using the longer run yarn in the most decreased row. Maybe the color would move back and forth instead of clumping and humping like lonely sticky little raisins.

VOILA

click on picture for larger picture

You know.

Supersymmetry relates the particles that transmit forces to the particles that make up matter.

String Theory.

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