I’m always excited on release day (and relieved that the writing, editing and testing process is over!) but even so, today is special. At long last, it’s release day for Sure on This Shining Night!
If you’ve been following along with my monthly newsletters this year, you’ll have seen me struggling with this design since last winter. When the incredible Julie Asselin approached me about collaborating, I thought a fingering weight version of my bestselling Nuit d’etoiles design would be just the ticket—a great showcase for Julie’s stunning Leizu Fingering Simple base and beautiful tonal colorways, and an easy pattern to calculate for me. I had the charts already, right?
Wrong.
It turns out that finding the formula for Nuit d’etoiles on the first pass must have been a miracle, because trying to shrink it sent the math completely haywire. I needed the stitch count at the end of each wedge to be an odd number, but kept turning up evens. I tried every iteration of cast-on number and short row rate I could think of. There was LOTS of frogging.
Now, it should be known that I am not the math whiz in my family. All of them, literally all of them, are in STEM or have worked in a STEM field at some point. I can math well enough to grade a sweater but that’s about it. When my mom saw me knitting and ripping out and knitting and ripping out, she said, “Ask your brother to do the math for you!” (My brother is a computer programmer and spits out equations the way a gumball machine spits out gum.) But I didn’t, because a) I was young and foolish, and b) I didn’t think I could explain the knitting concepts to a non-knitter well enough for him to actually crunch the numbers.
This went on for how many months? 6? 7? Thereabouts.
After frogging my hundredth version or so, I broke down, or rather melted into a puddle of overwhelm, and took it to my brother. I drew diagrams. I made a table of stitch counts. I scribbled. He looked at everything I brought and said,
“The easiest way to do this will be to write an algorithm.”
A what?! That’s the easy way?
2 hours later he yelled “Ruth, I got it!!”
He gave me three sheets of paper.
“Now, use this formula to find the initial value (the cast-on number—you say tomato, I say tomahto), then plug that value into this formula, then take the result and add it to this other formula.”
And what do you know? It worked.
It’s a shawl. A discernible, legitimate shawl. The stitch counts all work out, and you won’t have to use an algorithm to make it. The whole pattern boils down to a couple pages of text and 3 teensy charts. As Porky Pig would say, “That’s all, folks!”
By the way, the same brother (I have more than one) took these photos because my self-portrait game is still iffy, and it turns out high winds wreak havoc on autofocus. Man of many talents, I tell you.
The pattern is available on Ravelry and Payhip, and it’s 15% off with the code STARS until midnight EST on November 12. And guess what? Nuit d’etoiles will also be 15% off with the same code, also Ravelry and Payhip.
I hope you enjoy knitting this more than I did, and that doesn’t mean I didn’t have fun. It’s been a wild ride—and I’m so happy to finally have a finished, polished pattern out for you!
👏👏👏