KNITTING UP DULWICH ROAD

What’s with the space invaders? Here’s how they happened.

I love the tiny window above a door into the old church, and its big sister here on the right. The more I look at the building, the more pleasure I find in its design. I’d never noticed the playfulness of these windows and others in the main facade. I hadn’t seen the charm of the stonework and the symmetry of the whole construction – because of course I hadn’t really seen any of it. It was just a church, except not really now that it’s an office building.

Anyhow, I love it and it will be inspiration for four squares.

Brickwork

I don’t want to ‘show’ the St Jude’s bricks in knitting as I have for Brockwell Lido. Instead, I looked for a one-shot yarn with the right balance of grey and sand to mimic the colour of the stone as a backdrop. To get at it, I made a now well-trodden beeline for the Felted Tweed section of Sharp Works in Herne Hill. (Ah, the bliss of having a yarn shop within walking distance!) The texture and colour interest in every shade of Felted Tweed offers so much potential for expressing the natural and built world, hence the heavy reliance on it for this project.

Sadly, there was no immediate saviour on this occasion. All the shades were either too grey or too yellow or hinting at green, and I was casting about for an alternative yarn when Susan Sharp reminded me of a way to create my own shade (you get that Susan owns the shop, right?). Use Rowan Kidsilk Haze alongside Felted Tweed to nudge the colour – and if I look from the image of brickwork around the small window in this post and then up to the space invaders, I think my combination is a pretty good fit.

Now to those space invaders.

Windows

The aim of the test was to see if I could render the very small window using the sort of repeated approach used by LuluKnits in the I Heart Knitting Hat. I wanted them to be just 7 stitches across rather than the hat-heart 9, to keep the idea of ‘small’.

Yes, well, it’s not possible at this size, is it? Beginner’s fail. To create a nice rounded edge you need to increase or decrease the shape by one stitch per row and that grew the width too quickly, quite clearly needing more than 9 stitches.

The test includes the results of several different small charts, each of which left me with something more of a triangle than a trefoil and all of them looking like space invaders.

For the large aliens I focused on the bottom left chart, for the small it was bottom right. Bottom centre was an attempt to chart the big sister window, which is ludicrous and I didn’t bother with it. Obviously, I knew what was coming before I started knitting, but I couldn’t let it lie. I was testing the brick yarn anyway (I told myself).

I’m half tempted to stick with space invaders as a wry commentary on how the forces of mammon have breached the building’s spiritual purpose, but that won’t make the square look any less silly (and would be unfair to the occupying publisher that produces supportive professional magazines for people working in trades). More importantly, it would not do the building’s lovely details justice, so I need a new plan.

First, the reflection on this test.

Resources

• Yarns
  • Rowan Felted Tweed, shades Clay (177), Shadow (224) and Carbon (159)
  • Rowan Kidsilk Haze, shade Lustre (686)
• 3.5mm knitting needles

What I did

• Cast on 39 stitches using Clay and Lustre, held together.
• Tried out a number of the small charts across a repeated pattern, to see if any would come close to the original shapes. (They didn’t.)
• Used Shadow for most shapes and moved to Carbon for the top row, to see if the darker shade would be more effective. (It was.)

For Test 2

• I’ll work out a chart that develops both window shapes fully, regardless of size, and then decide whether I want to use them or if I need to rethink the approach entirely.
• If I decide to test the larger shapes, I’ll use old stash yarn so as not to waste the good stuff.
• I may end up having just two shapes in two corners of the square, in which case I could use one-stitch dots to break down the background.
• I would probably use Carbon for the main shapes, but both Carbon and Shadown for the breakdown.

Annoyingly, this new test will have to wait because a minor hand injury means I need to put the needles down for a couple of weeks. Tiny death for the obsessive knitter.