Randomizer Your Knitting part 2

Following on from my last post about dice decision knitting, I'm now looking at making holes instead of stripes to create a lacey effect. This involves many more decisions than the stripes you have to decide how far apart the holes are, vertically and horizontally. You also have to decide how often to repeat that pattern  before changing to another.  You could also use the dice to set the starting parameters and to decide when to stop. It depends whether you want a wearable piece or a high concept art piece.

For the piece in the photos, I set the parameters for a scarf in aran weight yarn and decide to stop after 400 rows or whichever dice decided section brought me close to it. I used different shapes of dice to decide each aspect of the placing of holes. This gave me some control over the process, setting different ranges of outcomes in each case. A purist might  have used the dice to decide which dice to assign to which decision but you run the  risk of developing an infinite regress of dice made decisions. Also I wanted the outcomes to be reasonable within the scarf format.

As I worked through this piece I realised that there were even more things that could be controlled be dice decisions. For instance, in machine knitting the holes look slightly different depending on whether you move the stich from the left or the right, especially when they're close together.

The next development in this work should be to wtrite an exhaustive decision tree covering all possible choices for lacey knitting.  Which is a great excuse to buy a really big notepad 