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Susan Goldstine

@sgoldstine.bsky.social

#ShowMeYourKnits

My current #WIP is a #mathart exhibition piece that I’m still keeping mostly under wraps, but here’s a sneak peek. The knitting is nearly complete; the blocking and mounting will take a few days on their own.

🧶 #knitsky #mathknit #mathknitting #symmetries

A closeup of a blue knitted lace artwork with embedded glass beads. The section shown is divided into four rectangles of lace by strips of garter stitch, and each rectangle has its own repeating lace design. The beads form white lines, yellow lines, and red dots in various configurations. If you’re curious about the underlying math and don’t want to wait until I post the finished artwork, look up my Fundamental Frieze Scroll artworks, which were the precursors to this piece.

November 9, 2025 at 5:22 PM

Susan Goldstine

@sgoldstine.bsky.social

#ShowMeYourKnits

Luckily, I bought a heap of self-striping sock kits from Lollipop Yarns before they vanished. Since there’s always half a pair’s yarn left over, I decided to helix knit the remnants of two kits for stripe-on-stripe chaos #socks.

🧶 #knitsky 🧦

www.ravelry.com/patterns/lib...

Three pairs of socks lie flat on a wooden deck. The pairs on the left and right are stacked so mostly the top sock is showing, and the left and right socks of each pair match. The left and right socks of the middle pair do NOT match, and they are laid out side by side. The lefthand pair is striped in an eight-color sequence of greens and blues, with solid teal at the toe and heel. The right-hand pair is striped in a six-color sequence of various blues, with dark royal blue toes and heels. In the middle pair, the striped yarns from both outer pairs of socks are helix knitted together so that they flow seamlessly around the sock like the stripes on a candy cane. One sock has a teal toe and a blue heel, while the other has a blue toe and a teal heel.

My bonus pair of socks on my feet, which are side by side on the deck floor. My toes are pointing towards the top of the photo, teal on the left, blue on the right. I really enjoy the way these socks go together without matching. The stripes in both sock kits alternate light and dark, and I tried to keep them out of phase so that I would have light on light, light on dark, and darks on dark. The different numbers of colors in the two kits (eight blue-green, six blue) also naturally shuffled things up. The result is that in place of the crisp, four-to-five row stripes each ball of yarn makes on its own, these socks have broader stripes of mixed shades with blurrier edges.

My feet in the blue-green-blue chaos socks, but crossed to better show the inside edge and heel of the left sock. I do a fair bit of show-off knitting, but my goal with these socks was to take a break from complicated patterns and enjoy the exquisite colors. Vanilla Extract, the pattern I used for all three pairs of socks, is now my go-to nothing-fancy sock pattern. I experimented with several different types of ribbing for the cuffs; this pair has 1x1 twisted rib, which I particularly like for the muddled striping.

October 5, 2025 at 7:58 PM

Susan Goldstine

@sgoldstine.bsky.social

#ShowMeYourKnits

Shawlography has brought me #joy on several fronts. Beyond the pattern being a surprise, I was surprised when my entire knitting Zoom crew jumped into the MKAL with me. And this year, it was a joy to take it apart and put it back together the way I wished I’d made it.

🧶 #knitsky

My Shawlography, after its recent brioche-flipping surgery, draped across a grey stone slab and the brickwork under it. This was Stephen West’s Mystery Knit Along in 2021. I’m not really a mystery knit along fan—I sometimes knit them after the fact, since I prefer to know what I’m knitting—but I got swept up in this one and it was a blast! The yarn kits from Stephen and Penelope dropped right around my 50th birthday, so I splurged and ordered the Flamingo Cherry Mominoki yarn kit. My pattern modifications were holding a glittery mohair from my stash with the pattern yarn color in a few places (love!), and switching foreground and background colors in the brioche stripe (regret). Here, I’ve reknit the stripe so the colors are as planned, and the black in the foreground echoes the black in the multicolor fan at the center of the shawl’s crescent.

My Shawlography lying on a bed, midway through the process of grafting it back together. The color way consists of black, dark purple, dark cherry, flamingo pink, and purplish ecru. In the center of the semicircle, the shawl starts with a tiny cherry semicircle, surrounded by a fan of textured stripes in prominent black with the other colors peeking out from behind. The shawl design has a two-color brioche strip many sections later that echoes that central fan, with black in the raised foreground and cherry behind it. I flipped them, thinking the brighter color would look better on top, and my fervent desire to go back to the original design is what moved me to pick the shawl apart in the first place. I thought I was going to knit a new startup row, attach the brioche strip the other way, and then make a second incision to flip the border, but I decided it was easier to knit a new brioche section from scratch so I only grafted once.

My Shawlography as I originally knit it, wrapped around my stoic blonde cockapoo. Good girl, Kiko. I’ll take it off soon, I promise. With the flipped brioche colors, the cherry yarn in the brioche together with the cherry in an earlier section of red and purple were just too much of the cherry color for me. It felt like the shawl was out of balance.

The mohair I added is a sparkly lavender grey. I held it with the black for the i-cord spiral that looks like an old telephone cord, with the cherry in the line of bobbles, and with every sixth garter stripe in the border, so it cycles through all five yarn colors.

October 3, 2025 at 11:48 PM

Susan Goldstine

@sgoldstine.bsky.social

#ShowMeYourKnits

My favorite #scarf knitted for myself. With two yarns, the free pattern turns linen stitch into bumpy vertical stripes on one side and flat horizontal stripes on the other. I ditched the trendy urban neutrals for neon Noro on black.

🧶 #knitsky

www.purlsoho.com/create/2017/...

My rectangular Reversible Stripes scarf, pattern by Purl Soho, laid in a zigzag on a wooden deck. The arrangement shows three segments of the right side and two of the wrong side. I’m calling them right and wrong for clarity, but as the name implies, both sides are meant to be showing. The scarf is knit from a solid black yarn and a bright jewel-toned slow-color-change Noro yarn that cycles through teal, mustard yellow, pink, lavender, cornflower blue, and grass green. At this scale, both sides of the scarf look like a dense field of bright color dabs carpeting a black background, with a more bumpy texture on the right side.

A slightly up-the-nose selfie of a younger me wrapped in the Reversible Stripes scarf she’s just finished. I’m wearing a melon colored top, whose front is mostly covered by the spread-out ends of the scarf running down my chest and off the bottom of the photograph. Both ends are showing the right side, with vertical columns of jewel-toned purl bumps jutting out from the black yarn. In fact, the black yarn has a similar texture, but being black and slightly thinner, it visually recedes into a backdrop for the brilliant Noro colors. Around my neck and at the inner edges falling from my shoulders, the scarf folds over to show the wrong side. The stripes here are smoother and run horizontally, each stripe a sequence of alternating knitted Vs and yarn slipped to the front.

September 14, 2025 at 11:38 PM

Susan Goldstine

@sgoldstine.bsky.social

#ShowMeYourKnits 🧵2/2

… and so I finally began the first of two surgeries to flip the brioche strip so it echoes the center of the shawl! I’ve been meaning to do this for four years, and it’s finally time. I have the yarn remnants standing by.

This is my current #WIP. Wish me luck!

🧶 #knitsky

My recently finished Shawlography, Stephen West’s Mystery Knit Along from fall of 2021, being blocked on my guest bed. I’m not really a mystery knit along fan—I sometimes knit them after the fact, since I prefer to know what I’m knitting—but I got swept up in this one and it was a blast! Shawlography is a highly textural five-color shawl, and I ordered one of the S&P kits made for the event: the Flamingo Cherry color way of Mominoki yarn. My pattern modifications were holding a glittery mohair from my stash with the pattern yarn color in a few places (love!), and switching foreground and background colors in the brioche stripe (regret).

My Shawlography after the initial incision. The color way consists of black, dark purple, dark cherry, flamingo pink, and purplish ecru. In the center of the semicircle, the shawl starts with a tiny cherry semicircle, surrounded by a fan of textured stripes in prominent black with the other colors peeking out from behind. As written, the shawl design has a two-color brioche strip many sections later that echoes that central fan, with black in the raised foreground and cherry behind it. I flipped them, and it has annoyed me ever since. Here, one row of cherry yarn has been picked out, and the stitches on either side are on two long circular needles. The needle sizes are smaller than the size 4 I used for the shawl to make it easier to catch all the stitches.

A closeup of the divided shawl, this time with the outer part flipped over the way I will sew it back on. I like it so much better this way! I will have to do a second cut, flip, and graft at the top so that the sections above the brioche are turned the right way again.

The mohair I added is a sparkly lavender grey. I held it with the black for the i-cord spiral that looks like an old telephone cord, with the cherry in the line of bobbles, and with every sixth garter stripe in the border, so it cycles through all five yarn colors.

September 8, 2025 at 1:09 AM

Susan Goldstine

@sgoldstine.bsky.social

Opening Convocation.

“Tell me you were running late this morning without telling me you were running late this morning.”

🤦‍♀️

The lap of my academic robe, dark pink with black velvet trim. Below it on the grass are my feet with red glossy polish on my toenails. My left foot is in a beige suede sandal, while my right foot is in a metallic black sandal.

August 29, 2025 at 9:57 PM

Susan Goldstine

@sgoldstine.bsky.social

It’s been a while since I posted any progress shots of my Vitamin D Cardigan, so here are both sleeves and some of the short rows. We have hit the technically wearable phase!

🧶 #knitsky

www.ravelry.com/patterns/lib...

thebluebrick.ca

My Vitamin D cardigan just after I finished knitting the sleeves. At the top of the image is the sweater’s yoke with its grids of eyelet increases, the fronts and back on stoppered circular needle cables. This section of the cardigan is crescent shaped and blisteringly bright green. The sleeves, which jut down and outward, show the yarn’s gradient fade through pinks into maroon and purple.

The Vitamin D cardigan in progress. The sleeves are knit flat and then seamed, and this photo shows the sleeves after I’ve sewn them into tubes. The upper part of the cardigan is now folded so the left front overlaps the right front, and the sleeves hang down.

The Vitamin D cardigan after the first set of short rows. Since the pattern stops these short rows before reaching the front edges of the cardigan, the cable of the knitting needles encircles the body, with both needle ends emerging a few inches from the edge of the left front. The color of the body has reached the greenish orange, melon-y tones, with a smooth color fade on the back and a sharper color jump towards the front corners of the short-row wedge. The rest of the cake of body yarn sits in the lower right, showing the rest of the color fade into magentas and purples.

August 29, 2025 at 4:24 AM

Susan Goldstine

@sgoldstine.bsky.social

#ShowMeYourKnits

To add a touch of color to my Iced cardigan (@stolenstitches.bsky.social), I mixed in some Noro for garter #stripes in the shawl collar. Three rows in between switching yarn makes the front and back of the collar both the “right” side.

🧶 #knitsky

www.ravelry.com/projects/sgo...

Me fifteen years ago wearing my recently knitted Iced cardigan. I am standing on a lawn in front of hedges and a fence, with a river and a bridge in the background. The cardigan is a double-breasted blue-grey in stockinette with garter cuffs and hem and a thick multicolored striped garter shawl collar that overlaps in the front. There are two large triangular wooden buttons holding the cardigan closed on the left side. A leash handle is in my right hand; the less-cropped version of this photo found through the pattern link shows my fluffy dog sniffing the grass in the lower right.

The Iced cardigan lying flat on a black metal deck table with the right sleeve hanging over the edge of the table. The cardigan is buttoned closed, and the shawl collar is slightly folded over around the neck. The striped collar has pastel colors streaked through the blue-grey main color: bits of yellow, green, red, purple, and white. The oversized buttons are pie wedges cut out of a large round branch with the bark still attached, made and sold by The Hickory Tree on Etsy.

A closeup of the left side and back neck of the open cardigan lying on the deck floor. The two wooden buttons are on the right side of the photo, as is the back of one of the two large snaps that hold the right edge (on the left of the photo) closed when the cardigan is fastened. The striped collar is folded to reveal the front of the garter band on the side and the back of the garter band at the top. Since I knit three rows of each color, the pattern is a garter ridge in the heathered blue-grey background yarn, a ridge in which the background yarn and the pastel Noro interlock, and a ridge with just the Noro, repeated up to the outer edge of the shawl collar. This left me with quite a few ends to weave in, since each yarn jumped sides at each color switch.

August 17, 2025 at 7:49 PM

Susan Goldstine

@sgoldstine.bsky.social

#ShowMeYourKnits

My most satisfying knit from #scraps: a möbius Chevron Cowl made with various pink and brown fingering yarn #leftovers held together. The half-twist makes the diagonal “ribs” slant in opposite directions where they meet at the center.

🧶 #knitsky

www.ravelry.com/patterns/lib...

My scrappy Chevron Cowl, made from five lace to sport weight yarns held together in different combinations. The cowl is a seamless möbius band, so it has one surface and one edge. The center of the band is a highly mottled pink, while the border is made from variegated pink and solid brown yarns held together with a pale pink mohair lace. The cowl is folded much as I would put it over my head, with the back horizontal and the front in a downward pointing V. As with möbius cowls in general, it lays in position flatter than a long cylindrical cowl.

The in-progress cowl, shortly after I started the border. Since the cable needle runs through the entire edge of the möbius strip, the fabric is wrapped into a compact cowl. For fun, when I started the border, I made the diagonal texture slant in the other direction. So in the finished cowl, if you follow a stockinette or reverse stockinette stripe, it makes a W shape instead of a V.

The beginning of the cowl together with the five balls of yarn that make it up. The pattern uses the famous Cat Bordhi möbius cast on to start knitting along the midline and knit outward along the single edge of the möbius band. In the wooden yarn bowl at the top are a highly variegated pink ball of yarn and the tail end of a dark pink solid. Below the bowl, a small ball of a slightly lighter pink solid rests on two full balls of yarn that went into the border, a coffee brown wool blend and a pale pink mohair blend lace.

The proximate cause of the cowl. Crazy for Ewe, my local yarn shop, was doing a community project where they asked people to knit garter-stitch hearts in pinks and reds. Here are the seven hearts I made from various pink leftovers. The one at the top used the variegated pink held with one of the solid pinks. I loved the combination and I had a lot of the variegated pink left, so I started planning the cowl.

August 9, 2025 at 5:26 PM

Susan Goldstine

@sgoldstine.bsky.social

#ShowMeYourKnits

I have so many #shawls that I fell into decision paralysis this week. But here’s an old Sagratino shawl I should really pull out more in the fall. The pattern calls for wool fingering yarn, but I fell for this thicker Noro cotton blend.

🧶 #knitsky

www.ravelry.com/patterns/lib...

My modular Sagratino shawl, a shallow V of hexagon motifs in three slow-change color ways. I don’t remember which Noro yarn this was, but it’s one with more subtle color variations than the typical Noro. The hexagons are knitted from the outside to the center, and they each have six eyelet curves spiraling into the center. The sides of the shawl’s V are three hexagons wide.

The six balls of Noro yarn that went into the shawl. Unfortunately, I didn’t think to turn one or more tags to show the name of the yarn, but you can read that it is a blend of 50% cotton, 35% silk, and 15% wool. There are two balls of each color way. From left to right, they are shades of blue, pinks and purples with a tiny bit of blue and green, and shades of mossy green.

August 8, 2025 at 4:43 AM

Susan Goldstine

@sgoldstine.bsky.social

#ShowMeYourKnits #knitterschoice

… and THERE’s the gradient! On to the second sleeve…

The shop.thebluebrick.ca sweater kit is in Blossom. I’m less certain of how the gradient yarn will work in the body, where it meets Vitamin D’s short rows, but I’m looking forward to finding out.

🧶 #knitsky

My Vitamin D cardigan in progress. The sweater is knit from the top down in one piece. One sleeve, knit flat and still to be sewn shut, juts out to the left. The top of the other sleeve, the back, and both fronts are on circular cables, with stoppers screwed to the ends on the back and fronts and the size 2.5 needle tips ready to start the second sleeve. The top of the cardigan is all bright green, but the left sleeve fades through pink into maroon.

July 29, 2025 at 10:46 PM

Susan Goldstine

@sgoldstine.bsky.social

#ShowMeYourKnits #knitterschoice

Early in my current WIP, I reproduced a rare knitting error I last made 15 years ago: passing the edge of the knitting through a hole in the knitting. Nothing for it but to rip back and reknit. A nice reminder that spectacular missteps are part of the journey. 🧶🙃🎉

A close up of the Vitamin D cardigan I’m currently knitting after I found a truly implausible error. My fingertips are at the top, holding down the cast-on edge to show the problem. In the middle of what should be a line of regularly spaced yarn-over holes, one hole seems to be missing. On closer inspection, I realized that at some point when I was returning some stitches that had come off the needle, I must have accidentally let the top edge run through the “missing” eyelet. I debated just leaving it since I was well past this point, but instead took a deep breath and ripped back a few dozen rows to fix it. Definitely the right call.

What the top of the Vitamin D cardigan is SUPPOSED to look like. There are radial grids of yarn-over increases on the fronts and the back of the cardigan, with plain stockinette wedges for the tops of the raglan sleeves. The error I had to pick out was at the top of back, where the now unobstructed top edge is curling the way unsupported stockinette does. This image is just over halfway through the increase section at the top. As of this posting, I’ve finished this section and am knitting the first sleeve, where the color gradient kicks in.

Early in the knitting of the Summit shawl I made in 2010. The light blue shawl consists of wavy strips of stockinette with dropped-stitch ladders and big open holes between them. In the first row of holes, I managed through a lapse of attention to twist the fabric so that the bottom edge actually ran through one of the holes, but didn’t notice until I had finished the entire second row of holes. (Wine and conversation were involved.) While ripping back to the offending twist was annoying, it did give me a good laugh.

The middle of the unblocked Summit shawl. I spread out the rectangular shawl loosely and let the middle stay bunched up to show the drape and the depth produced by the curl of the unblocked strips of stockinette that undulate between the lines of drop-stitch framed holes. I will link this pattern (as well as the cardigan pattern) in a reply post. I knit this in the raw silk yarn from the pattern, in the same pale blue color.

July 27, 2025 at 2:01 PM

Susan Goldstine

@sgoldstine.bsky.social

More post-Bridges posting: my Math + Fashion show outfit. The skirt and top feature two renditions of one triangle tiling in the hyperbolic plane. I coded the Poincaré disk tiling in Processing and @spoonflower-social.bsky.social printed it on fabric.

#bridgesmathart #mathart #mathfashion

Me wearing the look I submitted to the 2025 Math + Fashion show at Bridges Eindhoven. From top to bottom: a purple, blue, and teal polygonal quilted top I machine-sewed and hand embroidered, an aqua camisole, a two-thirds-circle skirt printed with a hyperbolic tiling outlined in purple that fades from teal to purple, aqua tights, white and silver platform shoes by United Nude. I’m also wearing a bead crochet bracelet in white, green, blue, and purple. My arms are spread wide to show off the bell sleeves of the top. Behind me is part of a mural by Carrie Patterson, Ash Scherer, and community art students from St. Mary’s College of Maryland.

Spoonflower printed the fabric for the top and the skirt. The polygons for the top are printed on cotton jersey fabric, while the skirt panels and the fabric for the waist and pockets are on a cotton/linen blend.

Another submission photo for my look in the Bridges Eindhoven Math + Fashion show this July. I’m standing in front of a different section of the mural with my arms spread diagonally and a huge, open-mouthed grin. I think that Ariel Webster, the photographer, caught me in the middle of laughing at something.

The top is stitched out of two-layer polygons that are like pillows without stuffing: purple dodecagons (12-sides), teal octagons (8-sided), and medium blue squares. There are also some cut-off slices of polygons to make the hemline and cuff-lines a little less unruly. I hand stitched these together to make a cropped top with flared sleeves, then hand embroidered the dual tiling in white running stitch. A decorative embroidered star appears in the center of each polygon, marking a vertex of the dual tiling. The tiles outlined in white are approximations of 30 45 90 hyperbolic triangles, the same triangles that appear in the Poincaré disk tiling in the skirt.

July 25, 2025 at 5:54 PM

Susan Goldstine

@sgoldstine.bsky.social

I’m back home, slowly getting over my post-Bridges-Eindhoven jet lag. On my way to the conference, I spent a day in Amsterdam and visited the yarn mecca that is Stephen & Penelope. No comment on the damage to my wallet.
🙃🥰😉

🧶 #westknitsarethebestknits

www.stephenandpenelope.com

Yarn heaven. A photo from the back corner of the shop. In the lower left is part of a table festooned with colorful Stephen West shawls, leather project bags and balls of yarn. In the middle right, a low cabinet with eight half-full yarn cubbies; the shop’s swift and ball winder are on the right edge. Along the back of the photo are half a dozen or so carefully arranged hanging yarn displays that fill up all the available wall space. These represent, if memory serves, less than half of the yarn arrayed against the walls of Stephen & Penelope. In front of the wall displays is a couch covered in a huge Stephen West knitted blanket. Several more cabinets, shawls, and pride flags complete the scene.

Another view of the back part of the shop. I was standing past the far side of the mustardy green sofa, facing a back wall display of Life in the Long Grass yarn. Five more sections of hanging yarn are visible along the side wall to the right, mostly in-house yarns. The large section at the right edge of the photo is all Bicycle yarn, some skeins of which might have fallen into my yarn basket. The modular blanket on the couch has diagonal stripes in greys, greens, browns, and melon-y orange. Behind the sofa is a low yarn cabinet. In front of the sofa is a small round table draped in a circular teal Slipstravaganza blanket. The table top is overflowing with baskets of yarn, and two neon-bright knitted onesies hang over the front edge.

July 23, 2025 at 12:34 PM

Susan Goldstine

@sgoldstine.bsky.social

#ShowMeYourKnits

No photos of me in my As If Tee Lite by @knitandcroshay.bsky.social. Too bad, as it’s the perfect #summerknit. I don’t do cap sleeves, so I redesigned the sheer top part with set-in half sleeves and a back seam.
Color: Disco Inferno 🪩🔥

🧶 #knitsky

www.ravelry.com/patterns/lib...

The front of my hot pink As If Lite Tee by Shay Johnson. This rewrite of the As If Tee was a collaboration with Magpie Fibers, and I used their yarns Swanky Sock and Plume. The latter is a cashmere silk blend that looks and feels like a mohair silk lace yarn except softer. The lower body of the sweater and the peaked bust line are knit with both yarns held together, as are the collar and cuffs. The section above the bust is knit in Plume alone, making it delightfully sheer and airy. This color was part of Magpie’s summer 2023 collection, where all the colors had amazing 70s dance music names.

The back of my As If Lite Tee. I don’t like wearing sleeveless or short sleeve tops, so I needed something other than the original cap sleeve design. This was a bit tricky, because the top—at least the section where the two breast peaks are—has to be knit flat, and I don’t particularly like drop shoulders, so picking up sleeves from the cap ends wouldn’t work. I decided to put a centered seam in the middle of the back and to make the tops of set-in sleeves with decreases around the shoulders. Then I knit down from the armholes (which I provisionally cast on) until I had the length I wanted and finished with the cuffs.

July 21, 2025 at 3:51 PM

Susan Goldstine

@sgoldstine.bsky.social

#ShowMeYourKnits

I’ve already posted so many of my #blue knits. But there’s #mathart in the air, so here’s The Symmetries Diagram Themselves from 2018. This is the second time I knitted a wall hanging with the symmetries marked by beads.

🧶 #knitsky

gallery.bridgesmathart.org/exhibitions/...

The Symmetries Diagram Themselves, 2018. A light blue knitted lace banner mounted on a wooden dowel, hanging against a beige background. The fabric is divided into seven sections, each with a different lace design, separated by garter stitch borders. Six of the designs are vertical strips arranged in a 2 by 3 rectangle on the body of the banner, and the seventh constitutes the lower border. Lines of white beads mark axes of reflection symmetry; lines of yellow beads mark axes of glide reflection symmetry; bronze beads mark centers of 180° rotational symmetry, and red beads are registration marks for the translation symmetries. The seven designs represent all seven frieze groups, i.e., all the possible symmetry structures for a pattern that repeats in one direction.

July 15, 2025 at 3:22 PM

Susan Goldstine

@sgoldstine.bsky.social

#bridgesmathart is almost here! Crystallographic Napkin Ring Series is the artwork Ellie Baker and I made for Bridges Eindhoven. It showcases our new software tools for making fabric designs that coordinate with bead crochet.

#wallpapergroups #mathart

gallery.bridgesmathart.org/exhibitions/...

Crystallographic Napkin Ring Series by Ellie Baker and me. Fifteen cloth dinner napkins are folded and rolled into cones, then arranged like the petals of a flower. Each cone is bound by a bead crochet napkin ring with the same design that is on the napkin fabric. To make the rings easier to see, the napkins are folded to place a strip of the unprinted back side of each napkin under the ring. Each of the 15 napkin/ring pairs corresponds to a different wallpaper group (one of 17 possible symmetry structures of designs that repeat in two independent directions in a plane). The other two wallpaper groups are provably unattainable in bead crochet. Charles Wampler proposed the clever method for adding two more groups to our earlier 13-group bead crochet theorem. Spoonflower printed and sewed the napkins from graphics files we generated.

July 7, 2025 at 3:48 PM

Susan Goldstine

@sgoldstine.bsky.social

#ShowMeYourKnits

My July #WIP: the top of a Vitamin D cardigan. But surprise!—I’m actually using a gradient sweater kit from shop.thebluebrick.ca, so the color will shift near the body/sleeve split. Stay tuned! I’m loving the pattern so far.

🧶 #knitsky

www.ravelry.com/patterns/lib...

The beginning of a Vitamin D cardigan, which is knit from the top down in one piece. This pattern by Heidi Kirrmaier is very popular (over 5000 projects on Ravelry), and the result is something like a crescent shawl with raglan sleeves in it. The knitting so far is on a long circular needle (two cables with a connector), and the fabric is clearly divided into five expanding sections: front, sleeve, back, sleeve, front. The sleeves are plain stockinette with make-one increases at the edges, while the back and both fronts have a simple grid of yarn-over eyelets for increases. The fabric and the attached ball of yarn are bright green; however, for each sleeve and for the body, I’ll switch to the fabulous coordinating gradient skeins from The Blue Brick’s sweater kit. It felt more fun to leave the other colors as a surprise for later, so no photos of the unknit gradient… yet.

July 5, 2025 at 6:21 PM

Susan Goldstine

@sgoldstine.bsky.social

#CrochetAway

Maybe this theme will finally shame me into sewing the lining and attaching the strap to the Spica #Bag I crocheted three years ago, but probably not this week. The designer is the queen of embossed crochet. Highly recommend.

🧶 #crochetsky

www.ravelry.com/patterns/lib...

The complete but unlined crocheted body of a pale green Spica Embossed Bag, designed by Natalia Kononova, a.k.a. Outstanding Crochet. Embossed crochet uses a combination of front post and back post stitches to create a sort of bas relief texture that people (including the owner of my local yarn shop!) often believe is knitted at first glance. The rectangular bag has alternating branches of broad smooth leaves and branches of small flower buds running up the sides and slit handles at the top. There’s also a long strap, not pictured here, that I will attach once I’ve properly reinforced the handles and lined the body. I’m 95% sure I used Rowan Creative Linen, a linen/cotton blend.

June 30, 2025 at 6:30 PM

Susan Goldstine

@sgoldstine.bsky.social

#ShowMeYourKnits

Some year, I will finish tweaking/writing the pattern for this #garterstitch mosaic cardigan featuring the seven frieze groups and have it test knit. 😬😳

Photos by Justin Foreman, modeled by Jasmine Long.

🧶 #knitsky #mathknitting

gallery.bridgesmathart.org/exhibitions/...

Jasmine Long (at the time a student at the college where I teach) wearing a boxy garter stitch cardigan with bright mosaic color work on the lower body and sleeves. The pattern is called Seven Peaks. The main color is a light/medium blue, and the color work sections consist of seven strips of two-color decorative patterns in pairs of the main color, orange, yellow, and magenta. The colored bands on the body run from mid-chest to hem, and the coordinating thinner bands on the sleeves start a couple of inches below the elbows and extend to the cuffs. The textured button band has eight pearly white buttons, one in each two-color band and one just above them.

Another image of Jasmine Long in the Seven Peaks Cardigan. Here, she is buttoning the top button (or more likely miming that) to better show the designs on the sleeves. From the top to the bottom of the sweater, the colored bands on the body and the sleeves are blue and orange, orange and yellow, yellow and magenta, magenta and orange, orange and yellow, yellow and magenta, and magenta and blue. In each set of bands, each of the seven designs represents a different one of the seven possible frieze groups, which are the different types of symmetry that patterns that repeat in a single direction (horizontally here) can present.

Jasmine Long in a side view in the Seven Peaks Cardigan, smiling, with her left hand in her hair and her right arm hanging down. Both Jasmine and the photographer, Justin Forman, were very gracious with their time and their willingness to experiment with different poses and camera angles. This version of the cardigan was designed for a math fashion show, and so I kept it simple, but the version I made for myself has pockets! Working those in without disrupting the color patterns was a fun challenge. Assuming I ever manage to publish a pattern, I’ll definitely include the pocket option.

June 30, 2025 at 3:51 AM

Susan Goldstine

@sgoldstine.bsky.social

#CrochetAway

The return of #blanket is well timed, as I just *almost* finished my Fable Blanket end-of-bed throw. The scale and my calculations say I don’t have quite enough yarn for the final border round, so this is parked until I can search my Noro stash for compatible scraps.

🧶 #crochetsky

My Fable Blanket, design by Of Mars, minus the final border round and the blocking. I’m using a total of four balls each of two different but similar color ways of Noro Ito, one with more of the blues and purples, the other with more of the oranges and pinks. Both skeins also have blacks and greys and muted browns. The blanket is lying on a clover-flecked lawn, next to the remnants of the last two skeins. Unfortunately, these remnants are just a bit short of what I need for that final round and I am separated from my stash, but my eventual plan is to raid my Kureyon leftovers for something vaguely compatible and use it for the short sides.

The Fable blanket and the uncrocheted Noro Ito from a different view. Here, the long thin blanket runs diagonally from the lower left to the upper right. I’m making this as a throw for the end of a wide bed, so its unblocked dimensions are roughly seven feet by three feet. The stitch pattern of the blanket has lots of highly textured stitches that, together with the moderately long runs of color in the yarn, produce a riotously colorful fabric. Most prominent in the image are the rows of large bobble stitches and the rows with a triple-crochet zigzag on top of double crochet.

June 21, 2025 at 7:10 PM

Susan Goldstine

@sgoldstine.bsky.social

#ShowMeYourKnits
I’d dreaded the inevitable #yellow week because I don’t really knit yellow. I forgot this Cabled Sunburst Washcloth, part of my campaign to turn two miniskein sets of Euroflax into myriad washcloths. ☀️🫧💦

🧶 #knitsky

www.ravelry.com/patterns/lib...

www.ravelry.com/patterns/lib...

Two Cabled Sunburst Washcloths and three pairs of Bodhi Leaf Washcloths laid on a weathered wooden deck. At the top, a yellow sunburst is half covering a darker sunburst that is somewhere between maroon and beige. Each sunburst is round, with wavy cables radiating outward from a central disk and a bumpy picot edge. At the bottom, the six Bodhi leaves are fanned out. Two are dark pink, two are bright pink, and two are ecru. At the top of each leaf is an i-cord loop for hanging the washcloth.

A closer view of the two sunburst washcloths by themselves. This pattern was written for a cotton yarn, but I got two kits of linen yarn meant for the Bodhi Leaf Washcloth from MDK’s summer 2018 pattern collection. So I decided to knit some of the warmer colors into the Cabled Sunburst Washcloth, which I’d bookmarked in Ravelry ages ago.

The two mini-skein sets of Louet Euroflax I got from Modern Daily Knitting. There are two sets of five colors each. On the left is beige, saturated dark pink, yellow, pale orange, and ecru. On the right, various pinks (including the maroon-y beige-y yarn from the second sunburst) and a dark purple.

June 21, 2025 at 3:27 PM

Susan Goldstine

@sgoldstine.bsky.social

🧵concludes

There’s a third cowl, but I don’t have proper photos yet. I have one more blank and further ideas for improvement, so there will someday be a forth, which I might exhibit.

Here’s the rainbow dyeing process. That this thread falls in June is a cowl-y coincidence. Happy Pride Month! 🏳️‍🌈

A knitted blank that I just dyed with a rainbow gradient on my dining table. This is the yarn for the third cowl, for which I decided to mix up twelve colors instead of six to make the transitions smoother. The yarn was presoaked in vinegar water, and I set the dye by wrapping the fabric in plastic wrap and steaming it. I wanted to dye outside, which is safer chemically and stain-wise, but there was too much wind.

The knitted blank with the dye set, arranged in a ring to show that the beginning and ending reds match. The colors fade through the rainbow counterclockwise, with red at the bottom of the photo. The fabric is on a black deck table, the one that I would have preferred to dye the yarn on.

The two unraveled halves of the blank. As they had just been unraveled after being knitted and steamed, the yarn is absurdly crinkly. Each half is in a broad loop, tied on either side with a bit of white cotton. The top loop, the one with the blues and purples, is so crinkled that the open center of the loop is hidden, like when baking a poorly proportioned bagel swells the hole shut.

The same two loops after the yarn was soaked in water and hung with weights overnight. The extreme crinkles have relaxed into a gentle waviness, and both loops now open into big, untwisted hanks. The top loop here has the red, orange, yellow, green part of the gradient, and the bottom loop has the green, blue, purple, red part of the gradient.

June 12, 2025 at 5:15 PM

Susan Goldstine

@sgoldstine.bsky.social

🧵continues

Second cowl again. I call this Double Rainbow Cover, a topology pun. Imagine you could separate the front and back colors of yarn without the fabric falling apart. Then you’d have a two-sided surface with the colors in rainbow order. In math, this is a double cover of the Möbius band.

My second Möbius cowl laid out in a sort of rounded loop. In the center, green on red with the red bobbles and purple/blue on orange/yellow with the yellow bobbles are most prominent. One important design subtlety comes from the fact the the right and wrong sides of brioche with increases and decreases do not look the same, so you have to compensate for that when you half-twist and graft. Consequently, as I knit from right to left, the right (direction) side of the vine is always right (good-looking) side, and the left side of the vine is the wrong side. The leaves look better on the right, so to balance things, I added the bobbles on the left. I also just love how the color contrast makes the bobble clusters pop.

Another rounded loop view of the cowl, with more different bobble colors showing. Another way to understand how the Möbius structure fits together is to imagine cutting (YIKES!) the cowl along the stem of the vine. If the stem were felted together so that everything didn’t unravel, you would have a single loop, half as thick and twice as long, with a full twist. This loop would have two edges, the i-cord edge (singular!) of the cowl and the cut edge. It would also have two surfaces: the front would be the right-side (in both senses) knitting with the solidly outlined leaves, and the back would be the wrong-side knitting with the bobbles.

June 12, 2025 at 4:41 PM

Susan Goldstine

@sgoldstine.bsky.social

🧵continues

Still photos of my second cowl. The trick: dye a sock blank into a ROYGBPR rainbow. Cut in half to make a ROYG skein and a GBPR skein. Brioche them together, make a half-twist, and graft. Ta-da! Wasn’t easy, but I HAD to do it.

More details in the alt text. Next: more math, dyeing.

My second Double Rainbow Cover cowl (more on the name in the next post). The Möbius cowl is flattened into a near-rectangle, so that the bottom layer lies flat and the half twist is all in the top layer. The design on the fabric is a vine with two-color brioche leaves and double knit stem, an idea I took from Nancy Marchant’s lovely Winter Birch scarf. On the left side of the vine, there are three-bobble berry clusters in the background color. Most of the top layer is red on green melding into purple on yellow, and on the other side of the half-twist is yellow on purple. In the gaps around the twist, you can see purple/blue on yellow/orange.

My second Double Rainbow Cover cowl, a Möbius cowl with only one surface and one edge. Here, it’s configured like the triangular three-arrow recycling symbol, but sideways. To the right is an uninterrupted strip of red/orange on purple/blue. The two segments on the other sides of the triangle are purple on yellow and yellow/green on red. My color transitions were smoother and more even than in the first cowl, but yellow to green was still patchier than I’d like. I did lose some vibrancy compared to the first cowl, so this one is has a more mellow color scheme.

June 12, 2025 at 4:14 PM

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