Patterned netting

February 11, 2011 at 12:03 am | Posted in Netting | Leave a comment

Ever since reading another SCAdian’s website about mezza mandolina, I have wanted to figure out how to do patterned netting. I’ve tried several times to follow other people’s directions, but it just never worked for me. The resulting net ended up a big ugly mess that was in no way attractive, never mind coming close to the pattern it was supposed to resemble.

This week I yet again tackled the “learn how to net with interesting patterns” self-challenge, but this time I came at it from a different direction. Rather than trying to follow someone else’s direction to produce a specific pattern, I decided to just mess around with various stitch combinations to see what would happen. At first it was more of the same: unattractive mess. But then something clicked, and suddenly I was doing it! My experiments produced everything from rectangles to honeycombs to parallelograms. They aren’t perfect and I’m still getting a handle on how to create the patterns without distorting the net, but I already have some thoughts in that direction . It occurred to me after my first attempt that when I chose a “large” gauge and a “small” gauge I had randomly selected a 5 mm knitting needle and a 2.75 mm knitting needle. If I’d had a 5 mm and a 2.5 mm – in other words a small gauge that was exactly half that of the large gauge – that the net would have looked nicer as I increased from 7 large meshes to 14 small meshes and then decreased back to 7 large meshes again.  The proportions would have lined up perfectly in that case. I tried it, and my second net came out much smoother. Math! It’s not just for classrooms!