Presenting The Black Widow Spider King

You've all been so patient, waiting for me to finish this monster. When I finally discarded the convoluted, inaccurate grafting instructions I found on the Web and substituted a simple "follow the leader" process, the final step took ten minutes. I won't clutter this post with my moronic instructions, but I'll do a really short post in a day or two to show you what I did.

For those who tuned in late, the project started off as Hazel Carter's Spider Queen. Well, the first thing I fiddled with was the color, changing the boring white to dramatic black. Then I had some difficulty with the chart for the central square, so I fooled with that too, ending up with something sort of similar. I motored right along to the the inner border, which I didn't care for, so I discarded it and designed one featuring bouncing baby spiders. At this point, I kind of decided that the original pattern pamphlet was probably not guiding me anywhere, so I mutated a Japanese pattern named Mondnacht into the outer border. And of course, I had, by this point, no recollection of the original edging at all, so I dinked about in Excel and created something pleasing that also fit nicely into discrete repeats.

I have no idea what the copyright issues might be and the pattern notes are such a mess I don't think I could begin to convey the directions. If anyone is truly desperate for this pattern and is able to improvise a bit, I'll be happy to send along all the notes and charts. Everything is in electronic format in Photoshop, CorelDraw, Microsoft Word, and Adobe Acrobat.

The shawl used about 3000 yards of Yarn Place's Gentle and was knit on #2 needles.

It's quite large (about 6.75 feet x 5.5 feet, and 9 feet on the diagonal), so it was difficult to photograph the entire thing. When I have the energy to unpin it, I'll take one of those artsy, swirly pictures that show lacy shawls at their finest. For now, let's take a flatland tour.

I couldn't stand far enough away to get the entire thing in the picture frame.



But you get the idea.

Here is a closer shot of the central square:


And a bit of the edging:



Attempts to take meaningful detail photos were a bit of a problem.



But I finally got Harry to move over long enough to take this pix:


Of course, everyone decided to party right on top of the darned thing. Daphne, who is now living in Japan, sent a bottle of sake.



As you can see, the sake was rather potent...


A good time was had by all, although it took me twenty minutes to untangle the octopi from the now-empty sake bottle.

The entire set of photos can be found on Flickr, and I will soon upload a few to Ravelry, as well.

Please enjoy the views!

A Corner of Black Widow Spider King

By forcing myself to knit two repeats a day, I have finally turned the first corner of the BWSK. It took me three tries to get a corner I was happy with. By showing these incredible photographs, you all can be happy along with me!



If there is anything more boring than knitting edging, I don't want to know about it. 2.75 sides to go. Urgh.

On the Edge

After a week of unpacking and consuming truly appalling quantities of tentacle-free food, Harry and I finally sat down to work out the edging for the Spider King shawl. We spent almost two full days swatching before hitting upon a pleasing solution.

The shawl itself is complicated, so we wanted a simple edging. But all the simple edgings we tried were visually boring. More importantly, they were insubstantial and didn't frame the shawl very well. It occurred to me that part of the problem was that all the edgings we sampled were real lace knitting, that is, patterned on both sides. After perusing a few lace books, we decided that such edgings looked floopy--they were elegant flat on the floor, but when vertical, the edgings seemed droopy instead of crisp, and detracted from the overall appearance.

We reshelved all the lace books and fired up Excel instead. Within an hour of fiddling, we had a simple, but visually dynamic edging that worked well as a frame for the complex center. And the return row was plain knitting, so it would be easy to knit backwards during the attachment process (I hate turning knitting and avoid it whenever possible). Finally, the 16-stitch repeat fits perfectly into the 32-stitch repeat on the border.



Harry remarked that I had incorporated the Soba Noodle motif that he had originally planned for the edging, and was pleased by the smattering of Pachinko balls that I managed to scatter inside the points.

The next step was to actually start the edging. Where? I didn't want to begin at the corner, because I wasn't exactly sure how many doubles (attach two border stitches to one edge stitch) I would need to go around the point. After two hours of research on and off the Web, I realized that not a single person ever revealed exactly where they started their edging attachment. Weird, considering that long, convoluted paragraphs were spent on esoteric arithmetic calculations that made my brain fizz gently.

I decided to begin after the corner stitches, going clockwise around the shawl. This gives me plenty of practice before I get to the corner.

Here's a diagram:


I am planning 8 doubles on each side of a corner using Fleegle's Easy-To-Remember Rule of Corner Turning, which states that the number of doubles needed to go around a corner equals half the number of rows in the repeat. This rule works fairly well for most edgings. I don't like triples--way too bulky and they put a bit of a strain on the poor corner stitch--so I avoid them.

Anyway, you can finally see a bit of the shawl emerging;


Harry is ecstatic--me too!

Spider King Shawl Body--Complete!

Isn't she lovely?

Onwards to the miles and miles of edging!

Nuts to Knots

As I creep my way up the chart for the Black Widow Spider King, I have been encountering Too Many Knots in my balls of Gentle. The other day I was finding a knot about every other row. As I was almost at the end of the ball, I decided to start the second ball I brought with me. Now I am encountering knots every row.

I can understand one or two knots per ball, but this is becoming ridiculous. Not much I can do about it but grit my teeth, because first, I don't have any more black Gentle here. Second, Yarn Place's web site has been a mess for months. You can't order anything, even if you could find what you want amidst the weird slide show thing that now passes for a "store." And third, even if I could order more and have it shipped to Japan, it won't be the same dye lot.

If I continue to encounter more knots, I am afraid that I will be unrecommending this stuff for anything more than swatches.

Black Widow Spider King: Outer Border Progress

I am at row 20 of 121, creeping along at 1 or 2 rows a day. One day I managed 3 rows--a record. By the end of next week, I should be past the tough section, which features more P3tog-left slants than is really legal. I wish I could pin it out, but all I can do is stretch it a bit for a glamour shot:

Black Widow Spider King Inner Border--Complete!

Sorry the pin-out is so sloppy--it's a strain to show anything without risking the stitches sliding off the needle. It's a looooooooong way around each row, especially as I am being exceptionally careful not to make a mistake. Each row takes about an hour, and that's when I am feeling particularly coordinated.

I was flabbergasted that my stitch count came out perfectly--I didn't have to fudge a single stitch to begin the extremely complex outer border.

Alas, BWSK isn't going to Japan with me. I don't want to risk losing it in my checked luggage or having it confiscated from my carry-on by a surly TSA person. And the lighting in my room over there is, um, subtle--a bit too subtle to work with fine black yarn. On the positive side, I look thirty years younger, assuming I can find a mirror in all that subtleness.

Instead, I will begin the Unst shawl and knit up to the beginning of the pattern. That way, if something happens on the ride over I won't be heartbroken. Well, overly heartbroken.

As usual, I have already made some adjustments to the Unst shawl pattern. I preferred the original center shown in Heirloom Knitting, so even though I paid for the standalone pattern, I am just mutating the stole into a shawl, as (sort of) decribed in the book. I know that books don't mumble, but if they did, the paragraph for the conversion would be an excellent candidate for literary mumblehood.

The arithmetic made my head spin, but I finally worked out both the vertical and horizontal repeats for a square center. I figured the author ran into the same problems I did trying to shoehorn the original center into 165 border stitches, so she went with a central pattern that didn't require so much modulo arithmetic.

I'll finish the center while I am there and then begin the border when I get back in July. And, while I am there, you guys will be treated to lots of Japanese yarn and books.

Shawl Border Pickup Lines

This morning I wasted in inordinate amount picking up stitches along the sides of the Black Widow Spider King center. I read the directions about sixty times until I got the hang of the Polka Pickup (no kidding, that's what the directions called it). You are directed to pick up the stitches using a rhythm of 1, 2, 3, HOP. That is, you pick up stitches in three rows and skip the fourth row.

Depending on your dance skills and Dignity Quotient, you could also pick up stitches to Chubby Checker's Twist (1, 2, 3 TWIST), or a stately waltz (1, 2, 3, PAUSE).

I went with Chubby, but puzzled about picking up bumps or valley threads. The original directions seemed to be valley thread, yarnover, valley thread, hop, which produced a remarkably ugly line of uneven yarnovers.

In the end, I found the bump, valley thread, bump, hop/skip/jump/pause/twist rhythm gave the most even result.

I had to do an experiment, of course, to see what would happen if I picked up only bumps or only valley threads, as might be the case if I were picking up exactly one border row for every two rows knitted. This was alas, not the case for the BWSK, where I had to pick up three rows for every four knitted.

The photo below is a lovely Fleegleland lace shawl center consisting of 10 stitches and 20 rows of garter stitch with assorted holes in the center that simulate lace of astounding complexity.



On the right side, we have the bump pickup--10 bumps exactly, for 20 knitted rows. This technique produces an even, unobtrusive edge.

On the left side, we have a valley pickup--again 10 stitches. I picked up one thread in the valley, which is also called a "bar" in some lace instructions. This side came out one stitch short, so I had to fudge it, with rather mediocre results. This method also produces a row of unattractive holes on the two border sides.

I guess I am a bump fan. Hop Hop.

Black Widow Spider King Shawl--Center Completed!

Gaze upon it now, because once I have laboriously picked up all the stitches on a circular needle, you won't get to see a lot of eye candy. It will, alas, resemble Harry's sloppy web for a long time to come.

I worked out the outer border this morning, so I have a reasonable idea of what I will be doing. I think. Maybe. Ah well, that's what fudge is good for, yes? (Click on the picture to see a higher-resolution view.)



Here's a detail pix:


I have turned a corner of the Dragone shawl and will be busy finishing that before I return to the BWSK.

And for those of you who want a Harry sequel, I would be happy to write one if I could think of a story line. Here's where you can contribute to my madness!

Black Widow Spider King Shawl

I have basically discarded the original Spider Queen pattern, so, in the spirit of the original, I figured I needed to make up a story about the new design. Those who dislike fairy tales should probably close your browser window now.

A little background...

For part of every year, we live in a small town in Japan about 60 miles southeast of Tokyo. It's a family-owned company called Kurenai Kai (Crimson School) and their business is Japanese embroidery. We stay in two tiny rooms, equipped with a miniscule bathroom, a microscopic kitchen, and an Extremely Large Spider that we named Harry.

Harry is about ten inches from toe to toe and the first time we saw him, we thought we had been transported into a really bad sci-fi movie.

Harry is very smart. He knew, for example, that if he sat on the delicate rice-paper screens, we couldn't attack him, lest we end up spending hours with said delicate rice paper and glue repairing the damage. (Damage to the shoji screen--Harry is way too quick for us to inflict any damage on him).

After a few years or uneasy coexistance, we achieved a precarious balance: We would leave Harry alone to consume quantities of the ferocious mosquitos that inhabit the area, as long as he didn't prance around while we were awake.

So, in honor of Harry and his gargantuan appetite, I rename the Black Widow Spider Queen to Black Widow Spider King and tell this story of Harry...


Once upon a time, in a land far, far, away, there was a spider named Harry. Harry lived in the dormitory of a Japanese embroidery workshop, where the occupants all created lovely works of art on silk fabric.

The problem was, no matter how hard Harry tried, he just couldn't get the hang of embroidery. (You can see where this story is going now, right?)



All the other Kurenai Kai spiders would spend their days busily stitching away at tiny obi and teeny kimono using spider silk and gold thread snitched from the main workshop. But every time Harry picked up a needle and tried to embroider, the head of the workshop would come by and say "Take it out."

Harry spent most of his time in the workshop taking out what he stitched. Then he would go into the dormitory bathroom and sniffle.

All the other spiders made fun of him.

"Harry's a failure!" "Harry's a loser! "Harry can't stitch his way out of a rice cooker!"

One day, a strange-looking couple moved into the rooms attached to the bathroom. They unpacked all their belongings and left for dinner.

Harry strolled around the room, poking at the odd stuff the strangers had left behind. What, for example, was Peanut Butter and why were there four huge jars of it in the kitchen?


Harry stuck a leg into the open jar. Fifteen minutes later, he was still trying to remove the peanut butter from his leg hairs when he spied a basket full of stringy stuff in the corner of the other room.

He scuttled over to the basket and crawled onto a large ball of thin, silky, thread. "Hey, he said to himself," This is almost as nice as spider silk." He yanked out a length and started playing with it.


The door opened and the strange couple came back into the room. They stared at Harry. Harry stared at them. Everyone screamed.

Harry quickly retreated to the bathroom and hid in the light fixture (a tight squeeze).

After a few minutes, Harry peered around the doorframe. One of the humans was doing something peculiar with a circular thingie and the silky thread. As Harry watched, a lovely fabric began to emerge from the circular thingie.

"That's cool," Harry thought. "I wonder if I could do that?"

Fortunately for Harry, the laptop computer on the table contained a formidable compendium of knitting information. It wasn't too difficult for Harry to hop up and down on the PageDown key once he got the hang of loading files into Adobe Acrobat.


"This doesn't look too complicated," he thought. "I just need one of those circular thingies (a 1" circular needle would do). Plenty of yarn here."

Harry scrabbled around Kurenai Kai and decided he could make a decent circular with a short length of soba noodle coated with rice glue and two embroidery needles filched from the workshop.



It wasn't the greatest needle ever made, but he managed a nice scarf with it.


All the other spiders wanted a scarf too. It gets really cold at Kurenai Kai in the winter. They started looking at Harry with a bit more respect. After all, scarves were warm. Kimono were merely uncomfortable.

Some of the other spiders tried knitting scarves and such, but they just couldn't get the hang of it. It took several hours to calm down Kumoko-san after she accidently knitted her leg fur into her Noni bag.



Pretty soon Harry had made some other needles out of bamboo slivers and nylon thread he found in the office and was busily knitting sweaters, hats, and socks. Too bad he needed 8 socks for each set. This got tiresome. And he never really got the hang of turning a heel for a spider foot.


He started flipping through some of the knitting books lying around the room. "Hey," he said "I really like this shawl. The center area could pass for a handsome web."

And he started knitting the center of the shawl. It looked pretty good. In fact, the other spiders thought he was making a new web (His old one was getting tattered at this point, as he spent so much time knitting, he was neglecting his housekeeping).


When he finished the center, he stepped back (way back) to admire it.


"Not bad for a first attempt." he thought. "Of course, I changed a few things around. The original designer didn't have a clue about arachnid society or goverment. She thinks we have a Spider King who hits on fairies. Geez."

Then he sighed. "I don't care much for those borders. The first border looks like a spider-munching bird."


"And the outside one makes me a bit seasick."



At that moment, one of the other spiders came into the room to remind him that it was his day to babysit all the young Kurenai Kai spiders.

He spent most of the afternoon preventing 2456 bouncing baby spiders from becoming lunch for some really hungry-looking crows.

Exhausted, he retreated to the bathroom light fixture for a short nap. When he awoke, he saw one of the humans doing something on the computer with graph paper.



"That doesn't look too difficult," he thought. "I'll get those baby spiders to pose for the inner border." After an intensive lecture about discipline, honor, and respect for their elders, he lined up about 40 of the kids and started knitting the first shawl border.


Harry also graphed the border and stored it on the laptop. And he made a hard copy with flyspecks on the bathroom ceiling. The strange couple might take the laptop away and he hadn't had a chance to travel to Akihabara and buy one for himself.


As he knitted away on the inner border, he starting thinking about the outer one. Clearly, it was way too much trouble to knit from a pattern of live spiders--they kept hopping around and demanding fly snacks every ten seconds--so he decided to design a border that incorporated artistic web designs.

Some of his friends and neighbors were way talented that in that respect. Harry's web, alas, was strictly functional. And to tell the truth, half the time, his lunch fell on the floor and scuttled away.


He spent several weeks roaming around town with his minicam, snapping pictures of interesting webwork. After uploading the images to the laptop, he fooled around with Photoshop, and in a few hours had a handsome outer border design.


Harry decided to model the edging after the soba noodle that was sacrificed for his first circular needle.


Pretty soon, Harry's shawl was being admired at the Wednesday Show and Tell that the workshop spiders held to review their previous week's work.

The head of the workshop, Yamakumo-san, decided Harry needed more recognition. "Harry," he said, "It's time to include your knitting in our annual exhibit along with the obi, kimono, and handbags."

Harry spent an entire year knitting masterpieces the like of which had never been seen in Japan (or anywhere else, for that matter).

Knitted kimono!



Knitted Noh masks!

Knitted landscapes...



And a three-dimensional treasure ship that was entirely seaworthy. All the spiders at Kurenai Kai took a cruise on the Sumida River one New Year's evening on Harry's takarubune.



Harry's fame grew and grew, and pretty soon, he was winning awards everywhere.


Harry soon established his own workshop, acquired hordes of apprentices, became a National Treasure, and lived happily ever after. And it all started with the Black Widow Spider King shawl, which he hung in a place of honor in his office.

The End.

Black Widow Spider Queen Inner Border

I am hip-deep in designing the shawl borders, with Knit Visualizer, Photoshop, and CorelDraw to help me out.

Here's the math. The inner square is 179x179 stitches. The outer border is centered on 50 stitches, so that 99 stitches is a full mirror repeat. I therefore need 198 stitches to begin the outer border.

If I do a YO every other row at the corners, I'll need about 20 rows of knitting to get to 190 stitches.

I looked at the slapped-together composite, and decided that, because both the center and the outer borders are quite busy, the inner border should be a bit restful.

Here are two choices. The first one is a simple, linear strip, while the second offsets the little motif to add just a bit of movement.




I am leaning towards the second choice, mainly because I dislike static stripes. And it sort of looks like bouncing, baby spiders to me.

Shawl Borders: A Third Method

As I begin the design of the Black Widow border, I am also thinking about the general construction. There are several ways to assemble these shawls, but the two methods under consideration are:

1. Pick up all the stitches around the four sides and knit circularly. This method requires purling every other round to keep the garter stitch background correct.

2. Pick up all the stitches and knit around, turn and knit back. This method requires grafting the fourth corner upon completion of the border.

As I wandered around the Web this morning, I found this very interesting post describing another method of working a Shetland border. The author of these posts works the fourth corner with a clever trick, so the entire border can be knit around, but there is, in fact, no grafting required.

There are two links: here and here. The first has the description, the second, the pictures.

Tell me what you think. I may swatch this in heavier yarn and see how it works.

Black Widow Spider Queen as Stuffed Cabbage

Years ago, I decided to make stuffed cabbage for dinner. As I assembled the ingredients, I noticed that I didn't have any cabbage, nothing much for stuffing, and not a drop of tomato sauce in the house. I ended up using spinach, cornmeal, sausage, and salsa. The end result was actually quite tasty, but didn't exactly conform to the standard stuffed cabbage we all know and love (or not, as the case may be).

So, as I cruise through the final repeat of the Black Widow center, I am starting to critically examine the original border. I don't like it. The first row of thingies, which are supposed to be crowns, actually look like cartoon aliens to me. The wiggly border is just awkward and way too thick for the little flowers on the outside. And that Franken-seam! Why?


I also notice the chart presentation is called "boustrophedon," which is apparently Ancient Egyptian for "causing your head to explode because I am too cheap to buy enough papyrus to write out the entire pattern."

Setting aside the boustrophedoned aliens, I turn to other ingredients in my pattern cupboard. And lo! There is some sausage here.

This is the border of Mondnacht. Curiously and fortuitously, it's written with knit and purl rows--perfect for working in the round on a garter-stitch center. A little Photoshopping...


And we have a tasty dish of stuffed cabbage!

Now all I have to do is work out the math. And fiddle the corners. But you get the idea. I may cave, if it turns out to be impossible, but I really like this assembly better than the original.

Shawl Updates

As you can see from the wrinkly picture below, two repeats of the Black Widow Spider Queen shawl are now complete, and I am well into the third of four repeats. Nothing of any note to report--no dropped stitches, no tinking, no frogging, and no cat-claw snags (thank you, Laptop).


I am fiddling around with the border patterns, because I will be knitting them in-the-round to avoid the Franken-seam that grotesquely deforms the original. When I have the process all worked out, I will post the instructions, in case anyone wants to follow in my tottering footsteps.

And here's a pix of my Dragone border. I am a quarter around at this point, and am very pleased with the dragon-scaly look.


For those who wish to further totter along with me, here is the chart of the border pattern. The even-numbered rows are purled, so don't forget row 16, ok?


This weekend, we are taking a break and driving up to Asheville, North Carolina. Talk about target-rich environments! When I Googled for Yarn Stores in Asheville, I got 220 hits! After I stopped hyperventilating, I grazed through the results and found that most of them were typical goofy seach returns. But there were 15 genuine yarn stores in the area, so I will be busy pinching and poking, hoping in vain to find yarn for Mountain Ash.

Poor Mountain Ash. So far, I have considered and rejected about seven different yarns, including one that was supposed to be hand-dyed to a submitted sample. The dyer overdid the green (it's a bit too minty-fresh for me), so I had her overdye that to dark blue. Now I have 2500 yards of lovely silk merino lace for something, but not, alas, Mountain Ash.