Tesselated Bat Cowl

When I saw Instructables were doing a pattern competition, my immediate thought was an Escher-style tessellated knitting pattern. After some studying of pattern design and a bit of playing around, this is what I came up with.

Inspiration/further reading:

1. M.C. Escher: The Graphic Work
2. Designing Tessellations by Jinny Beyer

Supplies:

1. paper, pens, scissors and acetate, for design work
2. around 320m 4 ply/sock yarn in 4 colours (I used around 40m per colour for the front, and a further 160m of the fourth colour for the lining)
3. 40 8/0 seed beads
4. 2.25mm circular needles with a minimum of 65cm cable
5. 1 2.25mm double pointed needle
6. accurate weighing scales
7. tapestry needle

I decided on a bat motif, as I wanted to work on a relatively small scale, which with knitting rules out curvier shapes. I started experimenting with a basic cell, mirrored it, and then decided it would add interest to have a column of right way up bats, followed by a column of upside down ones.

After I'd come up with a rough design, I held the paper version in front of my computer screen, and traced the outline onto a grid (with intarsia, the type of colourwork used here, the 'pixels' are not square, because each knitted stitch is wider than it is tall. I used charting software called Stitchfiddle which allows you to enter your vertical and horizontal gauge for design work: this is why my pixels look rectangular).

I then continued playing with the design, duplicating and flipping the prototype until I had a design that tessellated perfectly.

In order to work out how many repeats I needed to make a cowl, and to test my pattern, I knitted a swatch using one full repeat of the pattern and two selvedge stitches on either side, then measured it.

I got a gauge of 16 horizontal and 25 vertical stitches per 10cm, and based on this decided to cast on 164 stitches: 5 full repeats and 4 selvedge stitches.

I also weighed the swatch, and found that each bat took around 1.1g of yarn, so I could measure out each intarsia block.

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I cast on the 164 stitches using the dark green yarn and my favourite provisional cast on: tie your working yarn to a length of scrap yarn, and go over and under the scrap yarn with yarnovers.

I knit one row in dark green, then began the intarsia bats. I cut the length of yarn for each bat as I came to their row, and twisted the yarn together when the colours met. Each bat (or half bat next to the selvedges) uses one single length of yarn, even when it's bisected by the chart.

In terms of yarn wrangling, I just let it all hang loose, and detangled every time I came to a new colour. I don't do intarsia very often, but I believe some people swear by using kumihimo bobbins for keeping their different colours separate. I also made sure to snip off any longer lengths of yarn once their particular bat was finished: this reduced tangling.

I knit three full vertical repeats, plus one partial repeat stopping after row 18. I switched back to dark green, and worked two more rows in stockingette. At the beginning of the next row I cast off two stitches, and purled the rest of the row.

I decided to block my work so far flat, embroider, and then continue in the round for the lining. First I gazed in horror at my 12,000 (approx) loose ends, and decided there was no way in hell I was weaving all those ends in. Since I was lining it anyway, I chose to knot the ends together in pairs, and daubed a little clear nail polish on each knot to keep it secure. This is extremely bad form, but it worked.

I then embroidered the wings onto each bat according to my diagram, and gave the black and white ones fangs, plus I embroidered French knots on the white ones for eyes. I decided to add the beady eyes for the black bats after blocking, as I planned to steam block and I didn't want to risk damaging them.

I pinned the knitting out onto blocking boards (still attached to the needles) and steamed it with a hand steamer.

I seamed the two short ends of the cowl together using mattress stitch, matching the bisected bats together. Once that was done, I began working in the round on the lining. I knitted one round in orange, and then began my twisted ribbing: (k1tbl, p1). I worked twisted ribbing until my lining was the same length as my cowl front, around 15cm. I switched to dark green and knit one round, then purled one round.

Before joining the final two ends, I weaved in any ends that might leave a gap in my knitting, and bound off the four selvedge stitches at the original cast on end.

I cut the working yarn leaving a very long tail (around 170cm), and folded the bat part of the cowl inside the lining. I used the double pointed needle to pick up around 15 stitches from the provisional cast on at a time (realigning any that were twisted from that particular style of cast on as I went), and grafted them with the lining stitches using Kitchener stitch. I continued doing this until I'd completed the bind off, then weaved in the final end.

I decided to block a final time to neaten everything up again. Once that was dry, I called it done!

If I knit this again I will swap out the green and orange for higher contrast yarns, as I think the results were a little muddied (I was stash diving and didn't want to buy anything in especially), but I'm really proud of my bat army!