JCBriar Knitting newsletter, April 2018

April 2018

Rosalie • BrSl • New brioche classes • FO report • Now what? • In other news

Rosalie

Remember that bit of startitis I mentioned last month? The little “but what if?” swatch? It’s turned into Rosalie.

Knit in The Fiber Co. Canopy, Rosalie is a “boomerang” wrap that – like Jesse – grows rapidly along one edge and decreases slowly along the other. You wouldn’t know to look at the bird’s-eye view, but it’s a super simple knit: just stripes of garter and Fleurette.

A simple knit, yes. And seriously fun to wear.

I’m pleased to say that Rosalie is now available on Ravelry. Bonus: because the design really is just stripes, you can knit Rosalie in pretty much any yarn, to any size. The pattern includes suggestions for knitting more or few stripes, or knitting stripes of whatever height. That gives you the choice of knitting your own Rosalie just like the sample, or to your own heart’s desire.

Get to know Rosalie

BrSl

In case you hadn’t heard, Stitch-Maps.com now handles brioche stitch patterns, via the “brSl” abbreviation and the

and

symbols.

Why a brand-new abbreviation? Why two brand-new symbols? You can read the details in this news article. But in short, it’s to allow stitch maps that show brioche patterns – like those in Knitting Fresh Brioche – with unprecedented clarity. Consider the brioche version of Thistles:

You can clearly see the ribbed nature of the fabric, with columns of knits and columns of purls. You can also see where new knit columns are created via increases on wrong-side rows, and where decreases join knit columns together.

Knitters have already mapped a handful of brioche patterns. Here’s the one I want to swatch first:

As you may have guessed, I’m pretty tickled by this new addition to Stitch-Maps.com.

Side note: I’ve updated the PDF for Jesse such that it has a link to Jesse’s stitch pattern. (If Jesse is in your Raverly library, you should’ve received an update message a couple days ago.) This’ll let you view the stitch pattern interactively at Stitch-Maps.com, with row guides and current row highlighting and all that good stuff.

Read the full article

New brioche classes

Brioche is so popular right now, I’ve added four new brioche classes to my class list: Brioche Wristers, Patterned Brioche, Next Steps in Brioche, and Syncopated Brioche.

As always, you can check out my full class list on my website – now, with drop-down menus that make it easy to find just the right class.

Peruse my class list

FO report
I finally finished the brioche hat that first appeared in my Instagram feed in January.

I’m really happy with how it turned out – super warm and cozy.

That said, I’m not planning on writing up the pattern. Simply put, knitting that hat was a nutty thing to do: Fine yarn and needles, lots of stitches, intricate patterning, and the need to shift the beginning-of-rounds marker every eight rounds meant really slow going, and lots of opportunity for error. I’m glad I knit the hat, more or less to prove to myself that it could be done. But I’m not inclined to infect other knitters with that kind of nuttiness!

Now what?

With Rosalie and the brioche hat done, and with the Fjords and Highlands cruise coming up quick, it’s high time I decided what projects to take on the cruise. I’ll probably need a lace project or two, plus something simpler. But what? A multi-directional scarf? Something with a simple brioche pattern? Hmm. Maybe I need to go stash diving, and see what inspires me.

Or – I know! – I could go through my “Things to swatch” collection at Stitch-Maps.com, and swatch. I like swatching.

In other news

Stitch-Maps.com got a mention in The Atlantic!

It all started a few months ago when johannab said, “Hey, wouldn’t it be fun if we got a neural net to produce knitting patterns?” She convinced aiweirdness (a non-knitter! with a fondness for making neural nets do weird things) to give it a try. aiweirdness “primed the pump” with stitch patterns contributed to the project, and stitch patterns from Stitch-Maps.com. And the results... well, as anticipated, the results were hilarious, with names like “brachiopod 2 with added bed right frame” and “square doling zig in the round.”

Two things about this experiment really struck me.

how successfully the neural net – dubbed “Skyknit” – was able to deduce the “rules” of knitspeak from knitspeak samples
how willing knitters were to “forgive” bad instructions, to muddle through, and to interpret creatively in the pursuit of bizarre knits

If you want to learn more, check out the article in The Atlantic, the Skyknit collection at Stitch-Maps.com, or this discussion thread on Ravelry.

Read the article

Our mailing address is:

JCBriar Knitting

1441 NW Terracegreen Pl.

Corvallis, OR 97330

Add us to your address book