Other places to visit

Order Form

Woolly Thoughts Home

The World of Illusion Knitting

©Woolly Thoughts 2019          Contact Us          

PICKING UP THREADS

This was written in
2007
so is now very dated

There was another afghan using the same design as the first but in just four colours – red, black, silver grey and dark grey – with no regard for the different orders of dragons. We made scarves and rug and bags and anything else we could think off, with various combinations of dragons. I have always wanted to add dragons to someone’s chain link garden fence, using strips of carrier bags, but I haven’t found a suitable place – yet. The afghans went into a booklet entitled Scaled Up, the smaller items became Scaled Down. Mainly for our interest, and to remember what we had discovered, we wrote another booklet, Dragonometry, which was purely about the mathematics involved. Much to our surprise we sell as many copies of that booklet as the others, even to knitting and craft groups.

We really were addicted to dragons but you may be wondering why this was such a significant time for Ben. Firstly, the booklet of instructions for these afghans was a little different from the others. It said ‘Designed by Steve Plummer & Ben Ashforth. Created by Pat Ashforth’.  It was the first time Ben had his name on a booklet. More importantly, he went for an interview as a Research Scientist, at a highly-scientific establishment. He had to give a presentation on a subject of his own choice. To my horror he chose to talk about crochet dragon curves – and got the job. The unconventional nature of the presentation, and the fact that he had learned two computer languages to compile the web site, was exactly the kind of eccentricity they were looking for.

We still weren’t done with dragons. The sequences of folds in the strips of paper were equally fascinating and we felt compelled to represent those too. First came a series of three scarves with stripes showing where the folds would be in the paper. Inwards folds were one colour, outwards folds another. Each scarf represented a different number of folds. All have the magical property that when you fold them in half again and again, the colours alternate as the stripes pile up on top of each other. We weren’t satisfied with three strips so the wall-hanging Chromatic Scale showed the folds of seven different strips, beginning with the strip with just one fold.

The dragons, and several earlier ideas, were reincarnated as scarves and shawls and became the basis for a book of knitted and crochet scarves, known as Mufflermatics. My favourite in this book was something that revealed another aspect of its nature when it was used in this new way. Have It All Ways had started its life as an afghan showing the 24 different arrangements of four colours. When it became a cushion in Cushy Numbers it turned into a fun item as there was a different outcome from turning the cushion over in a different direction. When it was turned side-to-side there were clearly 24 arrangements. When it was turned top-to-bottom the twelve squares on the back were the same as those on the front. When it became a scarf there were only twelve squares as the other twelve could be found by turning it over. Folding the scarf in half put identical squares on top of each other, showing that there were only six arrangements. These were things we hadn’t thought of until they happened. No matter how carefully you look and think, surprises still turn up.

Click here to see more about Dragon Curves
Click here to see more about Chromatic Scale
Click here to see more about Mufflermatics

22b. THE LURE OF THE DRAGON