Adventures in Ostrich Plumes

I’ve been fooling around with the ostrich plumes stitch pattern after trying something else that didn’t work out the way I hoped. In my swatch, I started just alternating increases and decreases; I needed something with more distinct horizontal lines, more distinct patterning. Off to the stitch dictionaries I went. I have the first 3 Walker treasures and came across ostrich plume in the third one. The original pattern looks like this.

I wanted to try to make it look wavier by alternating the number of yarnovers and decreases in each row, going from 2 to 6 of each and then back down to 2. I also charted it using Adobe Illustrator, but I didn’t chart it correctly resulting in botched attempt number 1. It didn’t work out that well on my first try because I was impatient and skipped all the plain knitting rows between what I think of as the action rows, where you increase and decrease. The result was actually 3 dimensional; the tension in the knit fabric pushed out the decrease section which was impossible to block out completely as you can see from botched attempt number 2.

I bound off and started fresh with a completely new swatch in a different yarn. This time it would be no problem, this time it would work. And it did, kind of. There was still too much tension in the fabric for my liking – the decreases pulling heavily and pouffing up (the technical term, I assure you) enough to bother me even after blocking. See the central decrease section? Still pouffy even after blocking. So instead of swapping alternating sections of yarnovers and decreases every other section the way the original stitch pattern does, I decided to keep them the same, so the increases would all be together in the same column, ditto for the decreases. That helped enormously with the tension and the resulting fabric actually laid flat without blocking, but the end result isn’t quite what I’m looking for, so it’s back to the drawing board and another stitch pattern for me.

I’m going to try a variation on lazy ribbing next. I think that’ll be closer to what I’m looking for, with a little tweak or two.