The deep end of the pool

I've been a bad, bad blogger. But I've been knitting up a storm!

I wanted to do a pooling project with my wollmeise yarn (regenbogen/rainbow colourway), and cast it on a few weeks ago. I spent a lovely hour with Barbara Walker's knitting pattern dictionaries, and narrowed it down to a handful of stitch patterns which would work with the stitch count I thought I'd need for this project.


Would you like a closeup shot?


And then it was just knitting and knitting from there, until I'd finished the entire skein of yarn.

It was about 4' when I cast off, and then stretched out to about 6' once it was blocked and pinned.

And here's the glamour shot, with Vancouver's Stanley Park and North Shore mountains as a backdrop.

Would you like the project details and pattern?

Yarn: Wollmeise superwash, Regenbogen (rainbow) colourway, 575 yards

Pattern: Rainbow Arches Pooling Stole (Ravelry project page)

With a US 7 needle, cast on 87 stitches with the "e" or backwards loop cast-on. This cast-on is hard to manipulate for the first knitted row, but is best for maintaining the colour repeat.

Setup rows:
Garter stitch for 4 rows. If you knit like me, make sure you knit these rows loosely because your tension will change when you hit the pattern rows. (I had to start this over 3 times to get the right stitch count once I got to the pattern rows. so don’t worry if you have to do the same.)

Here's the chart for you, and the written pattern follows below. (NOTE: This chart was updated on June 13 because I caught an error in the pattern, and added the purple note.)

Pattern rows: Multiple of 14 stitches – the repeat is between the asterisks below.
Rows 1, 3, 5, 7, 9: K2 * Purl * K2
Rows 2, 4, 6, 8, 10: K2 * yo, k3, ssk, yo, sl 1-k2tog-psso, yo, k2tog, k3, yo, [k1 on all repeats but the final repeat in the row]* K2
Row 11: Knit all
Row 12: K2 *Purl* K2

End with a row 11, and then do garter stitch for 3 rows to parallel your setup rows.

Use the Elizabeth Zimmermann sewn bind-off (loosely!) to keep the colour pooling lined up. If you pull the stitches out too tightly, your colours will start to fall behind the pooling of your stole.

Colour pooling notes
The critical thing here is to figure out how your yarn will pool, and here's a quick way to visualize that possibility.

Here’s the yarn for 3 rows of my stole. If you unwind a couple of loops of your skein, you can zigzag it back and forth on the floor to get an idea of how much yarn one row will use, and how it will pool as you work through the skeins.

Put a safety pin into the "fold," where the yarn will end at one row, and begin the next row, and knit up that row of yarn to figure out how many stitches you'll need with your tension and chosen needles. With my knitting yarn tension and on a US 7, I get around 87-90 stitches for each "line" of Wollmeise. I have to knit very loosely when it's just a knit row, just a little loosely when it's a lace row, and very tightly for my purl rows. (Apparently my purl stitches eat up more yarn than my knit stitches.)

Different handpainted yarns will have different skein lengths, so make sure to wind your yarn out first and do a couple of rows in it to see if you can get it to line up with your stitch count.

And choose a simple lace pattern for your first pooling project. It's hard enough to play with tensioning your yarn as you knit it up — you don't need to be fussing with a tricky lace pattern as well.

Though what I love about this pooling technique is that I'll be able to do lace with highly variegated handpainted yarn — and have the lace work show!

Watercress Leaves pooling stole

Would you like another pooling pattern? I bound this off last night. It was so much fun to work on. You may recognize the leaves from the Flower Power Stole — the were a little lost in that one, and I loved them so much that I thought they deserved their own full pattern. This one's going to Teri, who donated the gorgeous bags to our Ride2Survive cancer fundraiser — thank you so much, Teri!

The yarn is Wollmeise 100% merino, and the colourway is called Bob. The colour is described as:
Green, yellow and orange like nasturtium (literally "nose-twister" or "nose-tweaker"), as a common name, refers to a genus of flowering plants.

Wikipedia's comment: The name Nasturtium comes from the Latin nasus tortus, meaning "twisted nose", in reference to the effect on the nasal passages of eating the plants.

As an aside: I did think about calling this the Twisted Nose pooling stole, but then I realized that people probably wouldn't want to knit something with that name.

Note: If you're new to the pooling technique, please read the first pattern in this series to get a good idea of how to figure out where your yarn will pool. Also, if you need any additional support, there's now a Pooled Knits discussion group on Ravelry (registration required), which has quite a few people who are experimenting with different pooling projects, and are happy to help out with beginners to this technique. 


Watercress Leaves pooling stole

Using an "e" or backwards loop cast-on, cast on 83 stitches onto a US7 needle. Please see my previous posts about figuring out your own "magic number" to cast on, depending on your tension on the needles you've chosen.

Knit garter stitch for 6 rows.

Start working with the chart below. The stitches in orange are your garter edging. My edging had 2 edge stitches on either side (4 total), but your edging will be different depending on your stitch tension, so please add or subtract stitches as you need to.

(Click on the chart to get it in a larger, more printable size.)

Jan 19, 2021 - / is k2tog (knit 2 together).

End with a Row 1 or Row 7 (to close off a leaf tip).

Knit garter stitch for 6 rows.

Bind off very loosely using a sewn bindoff, to maintain the pooling.

Block and pin out the stole.

Pooling diamonds and fall leaves

It's fall, the season of pumpkins, pumpkin pie, turkey dinner (we've already had our Thanksgiving dinner here in Canada) and, of course, lots of knitting!

Andrew and I went to the pumpkin patch with his Grade 1 class. This photo was taken when the rain had taken a brief intermission down to a light mist. About 10 minutes after this, the skies opened, and the wind came on, and we had sideways rain and rain so hard that it actually bounced off the puddles and mud and you had to call it upside down rain. (Yes, we probably have about 50 different terms for wet precipitation in this town.)

And then last night, there was more rain and wind, and when we came out this morning, our cherry tree had dumped half its leaves into the yard. So the boys and I raked up a lot of it, and they had a little bit of a leaping competition. (Andrew won.)

And I've been knitting on another pooling project, so I'm pleased to offer up another pattern. This one's going to Angela in San Francisco. I first met her on Ravelry when I ran out of yarn for my Icarus shawl, and she offered to wind off some for me and send it to me.

She sent me this skein of yarn as a surprise treat for me, so I turned it into a stole and I'm sending it back to her -- and you get a free pattern out of it!

Pooling Diamonds Stole

Here it is on Ravelry!



(Note: If you're new to the pooling technique, please read the first pattern in this series to get a good idea of how to figure out where your yarn will pool.)

Using an "e" or backwards loop cast-on, cast on 83 stitches onto a US7 needle. Please see my previous posts about figuring out your own "magic number" for your tension on the needles you've chosen. For this pattern, it's pretty easy to subtract pairs of edge stitches if you need to use fewer stitches to get the pooling to happen.

Knit garter stitch for 6 rows.

Start working with the chart below. The stitches in yellow are your garter edging. My edging had 3 stitches in it, but your edging will be different depending on your stitch tension, so please add or subtract stitches as you need to.

(Click on the chart to get it in a larger, more printable size.)

End with a Row 9 or a Row 19.

Knit garter stitch for 6 rows.

Bind off very loosely using a sewn bindoff, to maintain the pooling.

Block and pin out the stole. I added light scallops for interest, though you can also pin it out flat.

(For this project, I used Wollmeise 80/20 Twin yarn in Versuchskaninchen 1. It has a little less yardage than its 100% cousin, so this stole blocked out to almost 5' long, as compared to the almost 6' length that I get from the 100% superwash yarn. But it was worth it to discover that this yarn has a lovely, silky feel to it.)


And here's a sneak peek at my next pooling stole colourway -- Wollmeise 100% in Okzident.

True Love pooling stole pattern

You've already seen the auction for this stole -- now here's the pattern! (And there are still two more days to bid on it!)

Note: If you're new to the pooling technique, please read the first pattern in this series to get a good idea of how to figure out where your yarn will pool. Also, check out this thread on Ravelry, where people are sharing their pooling projects and tips.

This pattern is a little different from my previous ones because I did a little bit of needle juggling to get the candleflame edging to work out properly. There's also going to be a kitchener join, while pooling. (If you know how to do the Kitchener stitch, it's just a wee bit fussier than the sewn bindoff.) You'll be able to tackle this pattern if you've done previous pooling projects and know what your gauge is and which needles you'll need to get gauge.

Using an "e" or backwards loop cast-on, cast on 87 stitches onto a US7 needle. Please see my previous posts about figuring out your own "magic number" to cast on, depending on your tension on the needles you've chosen.

Knit one row. (Note: this line was added on May 23, 2010.)

Start working with the candleflame edging chart below. (Note: There are no garter rows on this pattern as the first few rows are in "reversed" garter.) Click on the chart to get a larger version, or download the edging chart PDF.

The stitches in yellow are the edges and the stitches in white are the centre repeat of the candleflames. Follow the yellow stitches, then do five repeats of the candleflames (in white), then the final yellow stitches.

If you need to add more stitches to keep the colours pooled, add garter edge stitches to each edge. If you need to subtract stitches to maintain colour pooling, try going down a needle size. I had to go down a needle size (to a US6) for the 87 stitches in the edging.

Row 30 (back): K2, purl to last two stitches, K2
Row 31 (front): Knit all stitches
Row 32 (back): Knit all stitches (will be a row of purls on front of work)
Row 33 (front): Knit all stitches
Row 34 (back): Knit all stitches, decreasing 4 stitches evenly across the row (K2tog every 15 stitches works well), to 83 stitches total. If you went to a size smaller needle for the edging, try going up one needle size for the body chart.

After Row 34, start with row 1 of the body chart below. Click on the chart to get a larger version, or download the body chart PDF. (The purple squares are only colour-coded to show you the "flow" of the pattern; you will purl or knit them as indicated.)

Do the first 16 stitches (this is the right ripple edging). Repeat the 13 stitches in blue 4 times (these are the flames/ribbons in the middle), then continue to the 16 stitches of the left ripple edging.

For my Wollmeise 100% merino yarn, there were 18 repeats of this chart. If you're using the same yarn, you may want to stop at row 11 of your 17th repeat until the next step is done. (I only had about 3 yards of yarn left over; it was a bit of a squeaky finish.)

Now, here comes the tricky part.

Knit another edging piece. I cast on from the other end of my working ball of yarn and used another set of needles.

After you've knit your second edging:

Row 30 (back): K2, purl to last two stitches, K2
Row 31 (front): Knit all stitches
Row 32 (back): Knit all stitches, decreasing 3 stitches evenly across the row (K2tog every 20 stitches works well), to 84 stitches total. (This will be a purl row across the front of the work.)

When you've finished knitting the second candleflame edging, take a look at your working ball of yarn.

If you think you have enough yarn to do an 18th repeat of the body chart, go for it. For your final repeat of the body chart, end with a row 11.

Knit one row (will be a row of purls on the front of the work).

Now you'll put the two pieces together and join them with a Kitchener stitch, while maintaining the pooling colours. (Knitty Kitchener tutorial here, and video demonstrations here.) This kitchenered row will become the knit row between the purl rows.

Block and pin out the stole. Wear with pride because you've deciphered my pattern.


Pattern notes:
I designed this pattern and knit this stole to fundraise for the Canadian Cancer Society. I wanted to create something that evokes strength, beauty and the power of each of our lives.

The candleflames at the ends of the stole serve as symbols of individual lives, and the woven lace motif in the body of the stole speaks to how all of our lives are braided together. There’s a ripple-like lace at the edges, which speaks to me of how all of our lives can have ripple effects well beyond our immediate experience.

The body of the stole reminds me of smoke from the candle flames, and also contains hearts in it -- an unintentional creation, but completely appropriate to the True Love colourway.

If you like it, I'd ask you to donate to the Canadian Cancer Society or, once our husbands' fundraiser is over in a few weeks, to your local cancer charity.

Paul Leaves pooling stole

I'd like to introduce you to my latest pattern, the Fall Leaves Pooling Stole. This one is for Teri, one of the nicest and most generous swappers on Ravelry.


It's knit in the Paul colourway from Wollmeise, inspired by Paul Gaugin's paintings. It's also a gorgeous fall colourway, and it goes really well with a leaves pattern.

(This is not the actual skein that I used, because I forgot to take a photo of that before casting it on.)


Fall Leaves Pooling Stole

(Note: If you're new to the pooling technique, please read the first pattern in this series to get a good idea of how to figure out where your yarn will pool.)

Using an "e" or backwards loop cast-on, cast on 83 stitches onto a US7 needle. Please see my previous posts about figuring out your own "magic number" for your tension on the needles you've chosen. For this pattern, it's pretty easy to subtract pairs of edge stitches if you need to use fewer stitches to get the pooling to happen.

Knit garter stitch for 6 rows.

Start working with the chart below. The stitches in yellow are your garter edging. My edging had 7 stitches in it, not the three charted. Your edging will be different depending on your stitch tension, so please add or subtract stitches as you need to. If you need more than 8 stitches for your garter edging, feel free to do fewer edge stitches (as long as it's more than 2) and add a repeat of the green part of the chart.

(Click on the chart to get it in a larger, more printable size.)


End with a Row 9.

Knit garter stitch for 6 rows.

Bind off very loosely using a sewn bindoff, to maintain the pooling.

Block and pin out the stole.

Wear and get lots of comments, especially from other knitters.

Pooling Streams Stole pattern

I finished this pooling stole last night, and I love love love it! There's an amazing match of the colour of the yarn and the pattern repeat, which is making me think that I really need to swatch out my future yarns and then match the pattern to the yarn colours as they pool.

I've gotten so many wonderful comments about this stole on Ravelry already that I'm rushing the pattern into "print"!


Pooling Streams Stole Pattern
Yarn: Wollmeise 100% superwash, in the Tants colourway.
Pattern: Japanese Feather, from Barbara Walker's Second Treasury.


Using an "e" or backwards loop cast-on, cast on 86 stitches onto a US7 needle. Please see my previous posts about figuring out your own "magic number" for your tension on the needles you've chosen. For this pattern, it's pretty easy to subtract pairs of edge stitches if you need to use fewer stitches to get the pooling to happen.

Knit garter stitch for 6 rows.

Begin chart as pictured below. Row number 1 is the back side.

A tip: Most knitters have a very different tension between their purl rows and their knit rows – my purl rows use up a lot more yarn than my knit rows, so I found myself purling tighter to maintain the pooling. To get around this, I put a US 7 needle on one end of my interchangeable needles, for my knit/lace rows, and a US 6 needle on the other end, for my purl rows.

Please note that I haven't charted the odd-numbered rows, to save space. All odd-numbered rows are the same as Row 1.

The pattern repeat is all of the stitches between the ones highlighted in yellow, except for the final pattern repeat, where you omit the stitch that's highlighted in blue. Don't forget that the edge stitches are garter stitch, so when you knit the back, the first and final five stitches are always knit, not purl.

End with a Row 4 or a Row 18.

Knit garter stitch for 6 rows.

Bind off very loosely using a sewn bindoff, to maintain the pooling.

And here's a close-up of the stole!


As I was knitting up the stole, I debated a few pattern modifications, as I've charted below. One of the really nice things about this stole pattern is the zig-zagging movement of the yarn, and the purl stitch at the edge of the pattern repeat serves to strongly accentuate that shape. You could double that purl stitch and remove edging stitches, as I've charted below.

Also, if you don't like the strong horizontal bar which separates the zig and the zag sections of the stole, you could omit rows 4-5 and 18-19, I've marked "optional" in the chart below.

Pooling for the Ravelympics

(Note: If you're new to the pooling technique, please read the first pattern in this series to get a good idea of how to figure out where your yarn will pool.)

Leaves and Vines Pooling Stole
Yarn: Wollmeise Lace, approximately 1/2 skein or 870 yards
Needles: US 4 for the purl rows and US 5 for the knit rows
Size: 6 feet long when it’s lightly blocked – will probably stretch to 6.5 feet after some wearing. Is also a couple of inches wider than its fingering-weight cousin – approx 19” wide, lightly blocked.


Pattern
Using an "e" or backwards loop cast-on, cast on 100 stitches onto a US5 needle. Please see my previous posts about figuring out your own "magic number" for your tension on the needles you've chosen. For this pattern, it's pretty easy to subtract pairs of edge stitches if you need to use fewer stitches to get the pooling to happen. (Some people also cast on a couple of extra stitches for the garter rows, and then do a k2together to lose them when they get into the pattern rows. It all depends on your individual stitch tension.)

Knit garter stitch for 6-12 rows. (I knew that I would have 9 stitches on either end of my lace pattern, 18 total, so I did 12 rows of garter stitch to make it a thicker edging all around.)

Start working with the chart below. Here it is as a PDF as well, so that you can print it at a much higher resolution.


(Click on the chart to get it in a larger, more printable size.)

End with a row 20.

Knit garter stitch for 6-12 rows, to match the beginning garter stitch rows.

Bind off very loosely using a sewn bindoff, to maintain the pooling.




March 19, 2012: Edited to add errata, courtesy of Mary Lou (MLO on Ravelry)

That reminds me, I have a couple of minor corrections that I wanted to tell you about that I noticed in the pattern:

• Your instructions say to cast on 100 stitches, but you need an odd number to have the same number of stitches on each border since the pattern stitches total 81.
• On line 14 of the chart, it’s marked as 5 stitches in box 36, but it actually should say 4.
• The instructions for the ^ say “slip one, knit the next two stitches” which I read as “knit the next two stitches together”

More Fun in the Pool

I've been having still more fun with pooling stoles. This one is made with the Wollmeise colourway called Am Kalten Polar (North Pole). It's for Phyllis, who's going in for surgery next week. I wanted to send her something that would make her feel loved when she wore it.


And here's the pattern for it, as promised. I'm calling it the Pooling Summer Mesh Stole, and it's based on a stitch pattern from Traditional Knitted Lace Shawls. I just added a purl row to the original pattern to emphasize the chevron pattern.



With a US 7 needle, cast on 85 stitches with the "e" or backwards loop cast-on. This cast-on is hard to manipulate for the first knitted row, but is best for maintaining the colour repeat.

Setup rows:
Garter stitch for 4 rows. If you knit like me, make sure you knit these rows very loosely because your tension will change when you hit the pattern rows.

Pattern rows: Multiple of 9 stitches plus 4 border stitches – the repeat is between the asterisks below.

Rows 1, 3, 5, 7, 9: K2 *K2tog, YO, K2tog, YO, K, YO, SSK, YO, SSK* K2
Rows 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12: K2 * Purl * K2
Row 11: K2 *Purl* K2

End with a row 11, and then do garter stitch for 3 rows to parallel your setup rows.

Use the Elizabeth Zimmermann sewn bind-off (loosely!) to keep the colour pooling lined up. If you pull the stitches out too tightly, your colours will start to fall behind the pooling of your stole.

Also, if you downloaded the other pooling pattern that I put up last week, please note that I found some errors in the chart and the written pattern, and have just fixed those in the post. Apparently, I'm a much better knitter than I am a pattern writer.

Fairy Leaves Pooling Stole pattern

I have another pooling stole pattern to share with you!

To start, here's a glimpse of my process. When I'm trying to decide on how to pool a handpainted yarn, first I unwind it, and then I try to decide what order I'd like to knit up the pattern into.

This is a skein of Handgefaerbt.com's extra fine merino, in the Fairy Garden colourway. (She seems to have changed the yarn put-up since I bought this skein from her. It used to come in 575 yard, 150 gram skeins, but now they're 384 yards and 100 grams.) This pattern uses up almost the entire 575 yards of yarn, so if you want to use the same yarn, you'll have to catch it on a Ravelry destash or just buy two skeins and make a slightly longer stole.

I've doodled on the photo so you can see where I started casting on. I had two choices, both starting in the middle of the darker blue part of the skein. I could have a stole that went Blue-lime-pink-blue-pink-lime-blue, or I could go the other way, and have it be Blue-pink-lime-blue-lime-pink-blue.

I went for the former option, because I wanted the greeny-yellow colour to be closer to the edge, and not in the middle of the stole.



Fairy Leaves Pooling Stole Pattern



The pattern chart (click to make it bigger) is the Falling Leaves stitch pattern from Traditional Knitted Shawls. I've added two stitches of garter border to each edge. I thought that a leaf pattern would be a perfect complement to a colourway called "Fairy Garden."

Beginning in the appropriate place in your yarn, cast on 80 stitches using the "e" or backwards loop cast-on with a US 7 needle. Depending on your gauge, you may want to go up or down a needle size or two.

Knit 6 rows loosely in garter stitch.

A tip: Most knitters have a very different tension between their purl rows and their knit rows – my purl rows use up a lot more yarn than my knit rows, so I found myself purling tighter to maintain the pooling. To get around this, I put a US 7 needle on one end of my interchangeable needles, for my knit/lace rows, and a US 6 needle on the other end, for my purl rows. In the future, I might actually cast on and do the first few garter stitch rows with a US 8 needle, and move to a US 7/6 combination once I get to the lace pattern. Do make sure to swatch a few rows so that you know what your own gauge is, so that you're not surprised when you figure out your needle size.

Begin chart. There are two stitches for the garter stitch edging, and then two setup stitches, the 10-stitch pattern repeat, four stitches to end the pattern, and two final stitches for the garter stitch edging.

Finish with either a row 7 or a row 15.

Knit 6 rows of garter stitch. Cast off very loosely, using the sewn bindoff, to maintain the pooling throughout the bindoff row.

And here's a photo of the completed stole. The final length was a little over 6 feet, and the final width was about 18 inches. (If you use two skeins of the new put-up of this yarn, that will probably be around 8 feet, or whenever you decide to stop your knitting.)

Pooling Rivulets Stole pattern

Dear Dotty, yes, it's been an awfully long time since I last blogged. But I swear I've been knitting, and here's another free pattern to prove it!

I last left you with this sneak peek photo — Wollmeise 100% yarn in the Okzident colourway.


Well, it's now turned into this pretty little stole.


(Note: If you're new to the pooling technique, please read the first pattern in this series to get a good idea of how to figure out where your yarn will pool.)

Using an "e" or backwards loop cast-on, cast on 84 stitches onto a US7 needle. Please see my previous posts about figuring out your own "magic number" for your tension on the needles you've chosen. For this pattern, it's pretty easy to subtract pairs of edge stitches if you need to use fewer stitches to get the pooling to happen. (Some people also cast on a couple of extra stitches for the garter rows, and then do a k2together to lose them when they get into the pattern rows. It all depends on your individual stitch tension.)

Knit garter stitch for 6 rows.

Start working with the chart below. The stitches in yellow are your garter edging. My edging had 5 stitches in it, but your edging will be different depending on your stitch tension, so please add or subtract stitches as you need to.

(Click on the chart to get it in a larger, more printable size.)


End with a Row 11 or a Row 23.

Knit garter stitch for 6 rows.

Bind off very loosely using a sewn bindoff, to maintain the pooling.

Block and pin out the stole. Wear it and get lots of comments and questions about where you got it, and "wow, did you make that yourself?"

I find this one to be totally hypnotizing to look at. The colours pooled perfectly with the waves.


And of course, here's a shot of the whole thing. Thank goodness for the Ott Lite you bought for me, Dotty. It was such a horrible, rainy day today that without it, I wouldn't have gotten any photos at all!