Whilst knitting I was thinking about how the long colour repeats are made in Noro yarns. It looks like it's all done in the spinning. The yarn is a single ply and the colour changes are gradual when the different coloured fibres meet and are spun.
I am a spinner and I am planning on having a go at this kind of effect myself. It will be trial and error, if I spin too little of each colour the stripes will be too short, too much and they will be too long. I'll keep you posted with my results.
It is quite easy to get a Noro effect using sock blanks, just knit a blank and hand paint it with wide stripes but that got me wondering... When you knit a shawl like Northern Lights as the rows get longer the stripes get narrower. I wondered if you could calculate the ratio of stitches so you could dye a sock blank that would enable the stripes to be even width throughout the shawl? It would be possible but might take a bit of working out! Something for the future I think.
Actually, yes, you can do the math required to determine how long each of your stripes needs to be. And yes, as the circle gets larger, you will need a vastly greater amount for the same width of stripe. I know!
ReplyDeleteThere was a lady several years ago who did just that. She wanted to have her lace shawl be worked in the colours in the exact correct place, and she spun her yarn to the exact length required so that they all fell in the spots she wanted. It took a lot of planning, but she did it. She then also did some spot dyeing to emphasize a particular design on her lace shawl. Quite striking, and a marvelous feat of accomplishment.
As you say, it can all be predicted, knowing all that you know about knitting, and gauge and circumference and area. All that math and geometry just might finally pay off!