Sometimes I think my brand of crazy would traumatize me if I stopped and considered it too closely.
Instead of being content with my new project(s) or better yet being all enthusiastic about finishing my Firefly Cardi which is seriously a sleeve and a seam from being done, or finding a pattern for the Black Magic yarn or even working on finishing some of my other spinning projects I am having a weird kind of creative freakout/geekout.
I have somehow managed to restrain myself from any major geek knitting meltdowns since I finished the Deadpool mitts (half-finished and stalled out N7 gloves notwithstanding - I anticipate they will be back in progress either this winter when I start wishing for fingerless mitts again or when ME3 approaches depending on my relative flakiness and the availability of a good gunmetal gray sock yarn which I never did locate).
Anyway. I've been good dammit.
I have however had it in my head since sometime during watching season 2 or 3 of Supernatural that the Devil's Trap Heptagram would make a really really sweet circular shawl.
Seeing as a) Circular shawls are a pretty big time and yarn investment and b) I have never actually knit a circular shawl before I managed to stuff this into the back of my head for later.
Seriously.
I held out like a whole two months.
Anyway, the design that was used in the show appears to be based on a pentacle from the Key of Solomon (which - real book and everything) taken with some artistic licence and a scorpion thrown in. It features a Heptragram inscribed inside a Heptagon inscribed inside a circle. The original pentacle its likely based on actually has a second heptagram inside the larger one inscribed in its own circle.
For the sake of my sanity I decided straight off to ignore the additional details of the design (mostly writing) and for the sake of not having a huge block of nothing in the middle I decided to use a second heptagram in the interior of the design.
This is what I'm trying to acheive (roughly)
There actually end up being 3 Heptagons and 3 Heptagrams in the design. I considered having the interior second Heptagram inscribed in a circle instead but I'm struggling enough with how I'm going to handle rounding the outside edges. Its just easier to either have all flat planes or all round edges. I may yet wind up with a Heptagon shawl rather than a circular one simply because my only possible solution so far is a buttload of short rows.
The nice thing about this overall is that, even though I'm going to be making it because I am a huge geek it doesn't scream "Huge Nerd" the way the DP mitts do (or the N7 mitts will). The design ends up being just attractively geometric.
And face it - if I'm going to bother to knit this giant thing its going to be something I can wear around without it being too obviously dorky.
Rough design sorted I have charted, knit, torn out, re-charted, re-knit and torn out the interior rows working out how the increases should fit. The upside to this is that I am fairly confident now that the rate of increase I have worked out is going to work fine. The downside is that I'm pretty sure this is all getting pulled out and restarted again.
I started out with some of my Arucania Lonco and its giving me gauge problems. If I try to tighten up the stitches I'm fairly confident that this shawl will end up weighing about 10lbs, but its not going to bloom enough to look right at the gauge its being knit. Also I am considering that I may have waited too long to start the interior Heptagon and if I continue on I will be knitting less of a shawl and more of a blanket. A really big not attractive 10lb blanket.
Unfortunately my yarn alternatives are a little slim. I have some Malabrigo lace in a sufficient amount but that means the shawl will be purple... which... purple doesn't feel very badass-demon-hunter ya know? and I have some Wollmeise in Red... but its this really cheerful candy apple red so... again not exactly what I was going for. There is some laceweight merino in light teal which I am tempted to over-dye into a more sinister blue (expect that I actually really like the teal) and some white sock yarn that I could dye into a dark red or navy. I've also considered possibly going with Knit Picks because I can get the needed quantity of Shadow for around 12$ (It even comes in a suitably sinister color called "Nocturne") and that might just save me enough angst to be worth breaking my yarn diet.
What all this amounts to?
I have probably clocked around 15 hrs of knitting time in the past day and a half and all of it has been or will be torn out.
I think I'm going to go work on my Aeolian for awhile and not think about that.
I have been futzing a lot with the circular shawl, trying to work out how to fit the heptagram design into a lace pattern that still looks like a lace shawl and not just some random mess of lines but that's still obviously a heptagram. I've been trying beading on the outline of the main design elements:
I'm working again with the red Arucania Lonco. I'm still not sure that this is the best yarn choice but it has the advantage of frogging well and being fairly WYSIWYG while I sort out the layout of the interior motif. I'm pretty happy with the pattern of the star and the inner heptagram but still on the fence with the beads. I'm concerned about the weight they add (I've used about half a 20g tube just on the inner design and the outer is likely to take something like 10x that) and also the way they shift the weight due to only using them on certain design elements.
I have been hunting like mad for the perfect shawl to make from my Black Magic yarn. I want to do something like Panache because IMO the long repeats look their best with something that has a strong repeating wave or chevron. I've done Revontuli before and while I loved it, I'm not in a hurry to be repeating patterns right now. Unfortunately I'm short on yardage for the smaller Panache and its not looking like a particularly easy pattern to resize.
I really love this shawl. I really loved spinning the yarn for this shawl and I really loved knitting this shawl and I really love the way this shawl looks and the way it feels and I just really, really love it.
