Randomizer Your Knitting - Part 3



The Knitting Wheel of Fortune is finally taking shape! I'm really looking forward to launching it at Edinburgh's Mini Maker Faire on 19 April.

This weekend I acquired some gaming dice and started trying out different stitches. This activity has to be something complex enough to be interesting but reliable and quick enough to be "performance knitting" - not just in public but with a participating audience - and it has to produce something that doesn't look like a waste of yarn. So, a bit of tinkering with the initial conditions is required.

I'll be using the Knitmaster Zippy 90.  It's light enough to transport easily and compact when it's set up too. It works with chunky yarns so things will grow quite quickly. There's no punchcard and manual colour changing is very slow so each piece will be one single yarn.  I didn't want to just randomly generate stripes - there are websites that can do that for you, like this very nice one on Biscuits and Jam. Instead, I've stuck to textures and shaping like these ones.



The basic options (cables, change width, eyelets etc) will be chosen by spinning the wheel and then decisions will be made using different dice depending on which style comes up.  If I start with 30 stitches and work 24 rows of each spin with two rows to separate the sections then we should end up with scarves of different lengths.

The plan so far is this

  1.  cast on 30 stitches
  2. knit 2 rows
  3. spin wheel & throw dice to choose pattern
  4. knit 24 rows of chosen pattern
  5. repeat from 2.

As any coder will tell you, when you're writing patterns with lots of repeat loops like that you need to plan a way to stop it too. Lines 1 to 5 above are a recipe for infinite knitting and a very weary arm!

Stopping can take one of three forms.  First of all, if we run out of yarn it has to stop. Also, the Knitting Wheel of Fortune includes a "change width" option. The dice will tell you to increase or decrease and the number of rows between each increase or decrease row. This can bring about the other stopping conditions. If the work decreases to zero stitches we're done. If it increases to more than will fit on the machine we're also done.

Once I worked that lot out, I made a sampler scarf. I wanted to have something that definitely included all the basic options to show what the stitch styles look like.  So it's not been made exactly as described above (I've yet to make the actual wheel.) - though it could have been. All the decisions about stitch variations were made using the dice and it started and stopped the same way.  Anyway here it is.




You'll be able to see the real thing and control the new work at Mini Maker Faire on 19 April - come and take a chance with the Knitting Wheel of Fortune!



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