What I’m really doing at the moment is procrastinating on building the backdrop of our model. This is really important if we want to show something even slightly impressive in Dublin, but also intimidating. I sort of have a plan, but can’t bring myself to start quite yet. For added complexity, the backdrop will need to be shipped from Germany to Dublin, so it will need to be packed flat like IKEA furniture if I don’t want to break the bank on shipping costs.

I’m procrastinating by watching youtube videos and doing some mindless knitting in order to have some more stuff to cover the platform(s) with. Which is why I have something to show to you today.

Wanting something a bit more organic than straight lines, I picked the classic feather and fan pattern for my next piece. I found this tutorial and off I went. A friend donated a whole big bag of her leftover bits and pieces of yarn to the project:

This is normally the kind of stuff that gets more and more and is never used up, but this project is actually perfect to make a dent into something like this! I grabbed the first grey ball and started knitting, changing colours whenever I ran out of yarn:

That green line towards the right is actually two different leftover greens, each being just long enough to knit a single row. On the black/white/grey-speckled area you can see some ends sticking out. This was a leftover which had a few different tones just knotted together – also something quite hard to use up, but no problem here. A bit of messiness is just what’s needed. Here’s the finished piece as part of the edge-covering of the platform:

Looking great, and for being just a couple of days of youtube-watching, covering quite a bit of real estate. I’m sure there’s other simple patterns as well that would be useful for this kind of effect.

 

I continue to realize that while trees and bushes and lianas are loads of fun to make, what we’ll probably need the most of will be various types of ground cover. These can be simple and mindless, but also a good way to try out different techniques. Today’s swatch uses something that can be found on the internet under the term “Swing Knitting”. I haven’t been able to find a good tutorial, though. Using a variegated grey/black sock yarn, I made this:

Basically, what you’re doing is working short rows in your piece, meaning you turn around in the middle of a row somewhere. Here’s a good tutorial how to do that: German Short Row video tutorial. To keep your piece roughly rectangular and not bunching up in places where you don’t want that, you will need to knit the now “missing” stitches of your row at some point, but that point doesn’t need to be right now, in fact, in can be several rows later. The rows in the picture look like they’re not all parallel, and that isn’t an illusion, they aren’t. Direction of knitting is from the bottom up. If you look at the area above the yellow and orange pins in the middle, you see two knit triangles with a diagonal purled line in between. The right triangle was worked first, making ever shorter rows. Then I purled a few rows to create the diagonal line. Then I worked the second knit triangle, and as a bonus, I worked the longest row first, so this triangle appears to be knit diagonally. It is important to put a marker where you’re turning your short rows, so you know to which place you need to knit when creating the complementary short row from the other side later. When you do that, you can remove that marker.

Here’s the piece installed on the edge of the platform:

I think it gives a nice organic effect. Next time, I might mix things up even more by using different yarns for the different areas – for example grey and green to show that some of that rock is covered by moss or grass.

 

While looking for something completely different, I came across a decidedly squishy plastic bag. I was delighted by what I found inside:

A whole pile of swatches for long-ago projects that had long fulfilled their original purpose. A wonderful heathered brown and a light green would be perfect for covering more of my platform!

I want the whole platform to be covered in something or other before adding the bushes and trees, so I started by deconstructing the current setup so I could rebuild it from the ground up. I could do that easily because I’m using pins to attach things to the platform, which works well through the fabric into the cardboard and allows me to move stuff around easily. Here’s what I ended up with:

Looks like quite a lot, doesn’t it? When I started covering the platform, I found out that even with my newfound treasure it’s far from enough to even cover a single platform:

I mostly used the swatches for the backside of the platform, hoping for more interesting things for the front. Putting everything flat I have till now back on, the platform still isn’t completely full:

In fact, there’s still lots of work ahead. It’s also becoming clear that knitting and crochet will have to be the main crafts employed – the embroidery pieces add interest, but they’re way too time-consuming to be effective for the bigger areas.

While there’s still more ground to cover, those swatches helped me to make quite a bit of progress. Do you have swatches from old projects lying around in the right colours? If yes, please bring them to Dublin so we can cover some ground with them and concentrate on making the interesting parts!

On the other hand, if you want to make ground coverings from scratch, please consider making your pieces not quadratic or rectangular. I think the current setup does need more bits and pieces with flowing outlines, so the result doesn’t look too artificial. While those platforms definitely have been at least partly formed by Raksuran influence, they do have a natural feel in my mind – think small-time agriculture as opposed to factory farming.

In addition to the Binary trees, the folks from the Botanica Mathematica project also posted a Fibonacci tree recipe. This gives us a different type of tree to play with, and one that arguably looks more natural as well.

Here’s my attempt, before stuffing and adding leaves, including the yarns used:

Again, I used a solid brown held together with a variegated sock yarn. To give the bark a bit of structure, I used a very simple pattern: one knit, one purl all the way round, and then exactly opposite the next round. Again, I used the recipe as a rough guideline rather than following the exact numbers of rounds indicated. I started with 21 stitches and worked my way up. In order to avoid an ugly seam somewhere, all my branches have an uneven number of stitches, so the pattern comes out right automatically when doing one knit, one purl in the round.

Here’s a peek at the finished tree:

If you like my pom-pom leaves, I’ll write about how to make lots of pom-poms in one go next time. It’s way more fun than making one at a time!