In our last not really existing summer I decided to knit a warm skirt and dived into my stash. I removed some skeins of Rowan Tapestry, a yarn I didn’t use up to then because I had heard about pilling and felting.
Nevertheless it was time to use it up now and it seemed perfect for a skirt we call “Kaminrock” in German. I didn’t find a matching word in English but you may describe it as a skirt you are wearing sitting comfortably by the fireside.
I hate seaming where it is not neccessary and therefore started with an open cast-on with contrasting yarn.
Of course you want to know how long the finished project would be in the end. From experience I knew that biaswise cropped knitting tends to gravitation and would lengthen. I included this reflections into my calculations.
I made a swatch, washed and dried it and calculated the slanting hypothenuse by using Pythagoras’ theorem. Then I casted on 200 stitches.
The short-row segments in color 173 and 174 were seperated by a rib in grey so that layers were formed. At the beginning of every second row I knitted 2 sts tog., at the end of every second row I knitted 2 sts in one st.
When the skirt had the circumference of my hip I finished with three-needle-bind-off.
Of course it’s not so trivial to end a knitting with wavy borders and so I reckoned when to start ending. Yes, it sounds funny, but you have to anticipate the end knitting in this technique and to implement actions. Therefore it’s really difficult to write a pattern.
The waistband got some apertures for an elastic strap.
After washing the skirt lengthened about 12 cm as expected.
This is not a pattern but a technique. If you want to learn it, search for “Strickrausch”, where you can book live- or online-lessons or go to Heidrun’s Ravelry Swing-Knitting-Site where you can buy tutorials or workshops.
The different color fields are knit with a special algorithm. That means: the short rows are shortened in various intervals. Those intervals are combined in a numerical order. This order is determined by yourself before starting to knit and will never change until you finish the work.
For knitting a project like this you should have advanced skills in shortrow-knitting as in the named technique.