• Music: Last of the Summer Wine: 1985 Vintage

Seeing things ...

Have been spending very little time on the computer during the past week; instead most of my leisure time has been spent with a pile of alpaca yarn, making my first foray into illusion knitting (sometimes called shadow knitting) ... something I've been fascinated by and wanting to try for a long while. It's a technique that creates fabric patterns that are only visible from certain angles. As I'm far from being the world's fastest knitter and the yarn is just about as thin as that used for socks (and being worked on 3 millimetre needles), it's taken me a while to get to the point where the elusive design starts to show, but now I can finally see it in action ... YAY!!!:

	Viewed straight on, it's just a pattern of multi-coloured stripes.
	View at an angle and the stripes are replaced by a coloured triangle on a black background.

What this will eventually grow into is Vivian Høxbro's Rainbow Jacket (click on any of the photos to see different views of the jacket and hints of the illusion ... my little triangle point begins partway up the sleeve and will continue to widen to touch the bottom hem at centre front and back)

For another example of illusion knitting at work, take a look at this example. Those who don't knit, but do sew, can most easily visualize how it works if they think of pintucks on narrow-striped fabric. If only selected sections of each stripe are pintucked, a series of ridges of the different colours will rise above the main fabric ... still looking stripy from above, but blocking each other and forming new geometric shapes when viewed at an angle.

More photos as the design gets more obvious. :-)