An experiment using circular cast-on as for a lace shawl, but increasing in the stitch rather than Yarn Over.
Using 2 strands of the 4 ply together to allow for greater colour shading. Will keep this one just stocking stitch with shading bands of colour radiating from the centre, but if it works design possibilities are exciting for introducing textured stitches.
This is how I started off this one, but after a bit of trial and error and frogging some rows this is what I ended up doing.
Cast on 8 stitches
K one round
Next round - (K1 m1 m1 K1) x4
Markers placed for the 4 corners
Then a couple of rounds, K front & back, K to next stitch before marker and knit into the back and front of that.
After that settled into the pattern that worked well and gave a good double stitch line from the centre to the corners, with a nice little symmetrical detail either side of the ‘line’
Starting at marker - Knit into front and back of stitch, knit to 2 stitches before next marker, Knit into front and back of first stitch and knit the stitch before the marker.
This gets repeated 4 times each round.
I made sure the 2 stitches at each marker that formed the diagonal line were knitted slightly loosely.
Then it was just a matter of knitting round until I reached the correct diameter of 40 cm/16 inches.
I used the Estonian lace cast off in case I needed to do any stretching into shape.
I decided to wet block since the diagonal stitch lines seemed tight, but the Gotland fabric relaxed and bloomed quite a lot and I could have gotten away with knitting a couple fewer rounds.
This is the first time I’ve knitted anything other than a sample in Gotland, so it was interesting to see how the wool behaved.
Very pleased with the feel and handle of the knitted fabric - for a garment I would wet block to get that gorgeous blooming effect but I’d probably knit a wee bit smaller than I want the finished garment to be to allow for the fabric relaxing.
Very pleased with the result. It was a quick knit, taking just a couple of days, although that was partly because the 2 strands of 4 ply ended up more like USA worsted weight than UK DK.
That technique of knitting a square from the centre is one I will definitely try again - it opens up all sorts of exciting design possibilities that would be tedious to achieve if knitting from one side to the other.
BACK
I decided to knit the back in one strand of the 4 ply - with the way the yarn behaved I realised I wouldn’t have to knit it very tightly. So I experimented and got a nice fabric on 3.5mm needles with 88 stitches cast on to give the 40cm wide. I mainly used the light yarn and did 13 rows light, then a stripe of 1 row dark, 1 row light, 1 row dark. This gave a nice stripe pattern (I use Kaffe Fassetts method of weaving in the ends as you knit) and it blocked out well to the 40cm square with just light steam blocking.
SEWING TOGETHER
I quickly realised that I had a beautiful edge to the front with the cast off going all the way round, and given the different thickness of the front and back the obvious way to join these together was to ease the back into a slightly smaller square and stitch it on so there was an edging of the front showing all the way round when viewed from the back. This has worked better than I’d anticipated and I’m now very pleased indeed with this Gotland cushion.
I’m going to have a little experiment with the centre cast on to see if starting with 12 stitches, or starting with 8 again but increasing in the first row - what I’ve done this time has worked, but I wonder if I can get it looking even better.