Unvention

I'm feeling better today and the weather was just gorgeous! This morning I only had mental capacity for socks, but I spent the better part of the afternoon working on my Frost Flowers and Leaves Shawl.

The last time I wrote about this shawl, I described how I was planning on using circulars as DPNs. I think it took me this long to pick it up again because I was anticipating that the result would be messy. I wasn't wrong, but the technique is simple enough.

I put a point protector on every end that isn't active. The shawl lives on three circulars. I knit each one in turn onto the fourth circular. When I get to the end of the needle, I take the point protector off the next needle and place it onto the newly full one.

It looks like cyborg knitting.


The best part of this technique is that as long as I can beg, borrow, or buy more 4mm needles I can knit this out for as long as the wool lasts. Of course, I'm not willing to knit a carpet for a football field either, Elizabeth.*

*A reference and a tip of the hat to Elizabeth Zimmerman who used this analogy in the Knitter's Almanac when describing that one could, in theory, use the Pi formula to knit a shawl of any dimension. Elizabeth also used the term unvention to describe a technique that she discovered because she was certain that some other knitter, at some other point in time, had likely come up with a similar technique. That is exactly how I feel about using circulars as DPNs. Surely someone, somewhere, has tried this harebrained scheme before!