KNITTING UP DULWICH ROAD

Not gonna lie, I’m ecstatic about this square. It was hard won, with lots of blind alleys along the way, but the result is pretty and I think it does the real hedge justice. Easily the hardest piece of knitting I’ve ever done, and I’m not sure what kind of designer that makes me.

Here’s the hedge again, for immediate comparison. Not bad, eh?

Once I’d abandoned the impossible plan to ‘grow’ letters out of the background with reverse stocking stitch (Test 1, Test 2 and Test 3) and decided on intarsia, I was bothered by two things. How to avoid the letters looking like they belong on a varsity sweatshirt? And how to give the whole thing a sense of the organic?

As ever, these questions took me to Sharp Works in Herne Hill, where Susan and Rose indulged me as I mooned from one green yarn to another in search of two shades that would be perceived, but only subtly. I found two lovely Adriafil yarns that seemed different enough in the shop, but back at home they melted into each other in the knitting. So back I went for more umming and aahing, picking up yarns and putting them down until, once again, it was Kidsilk Haze to the rescue – one shade deepening the slightly darker of the Adriafil yarns just enough, the other lifting the lighter one. Question number 1 solved.

And with the mohair of Kidsilk Haze, suddenly the knitting sprang to furry life. Take that, question number 2.

I did a few little tests to firm up my choices: a candy stripe to formally rule out the high-contrast ‘varsity’ look and a bit of a B to test the beads again. The candy stripe was clearly a no-no, and the beads finally proved themselves a distraction. I then tried out one L above another in a part working of what I intended as the final design, to try out other colour combinations, and gauge needle size and stitch/row numbers.

The tops of the two Ls were knitted with the Adriafil/Kidsilk Haze pairs and I liked them best. But I had made a mistake with the L test because I did it as a stranded piece rather than intarsia. And why did I do that? Because I was lazy. Because I didn’t want to load bobbins before I needed to. Well, I paid for it, didn’t I, because as I knitted up the final square in intarsia, the piece was half an inch short at what should have been the half-way point.

But, but, BUT… that led to the unexpected and exciting addition of a central panel.

The square was running perfectly to size across the width so, to reach the eventual 7 inches, I needed to add content to make it taller. I couldn’t add rows to the letters because they would become skinny. So, after a little head-scratching, I found a lovely 8-row pattern for stranded colourwork in Andrea Rangel’s AlterKnit Stitch Dictionary (p. 38) that would fill the missing inch to perfection – and I knew this because of my naughty little stranded test 😊 The new panel is the addition that makes the piece, I think.

Oh, go me!

It is a crazy-hard piece of knitting. For me, but I think perhaps for anyone. At one point the intarsia letters require 10 bobbins plus an extra piece for the B holes. The yarns around all those bobbins consist of two strands, one a mohair that will slip out of sync with the other yarn and can felt a little. And it’s mohair so it drifts about! The square has to be worked slowly, with absolute discipline because if you let your bobbins unwind, you’re done. But all that effort means mammoth sense of achievement at the end. Right? I’ve included some advice in the pattern.

Speaking of…

PATTERN

The pdf has all the information needed to knit this square.

NB – Yes I know I should be using metric measurements, but my blocking board has inch measures, so blah!