Steve designed this before Christmas and started to knit it, using our favourite Stylecraft DK yarn. Then life took over and he knew he wouldn’t be able to finish it for a long time. We pulled it undone and I did it again. It was finished in mid-March. It was even mounted and photographed. We then decided it wasn’t good enough.

We usually avoid using black for illusions because it is just too stark. We prefer the darkest shades of brown, grey or blue. Occasionally only black will really do.

Under normal circumstances I would have kept the original and started again but that was going to be tricky as I have not been going out even before the ‘shielding’ process came into effect. I could have used mail order but that might have taken a long time and I had already decided that now would be a good time to start using up the yarn mountain.

I thought I could probably find enough black, of a different make, but it turned out that I already had enough black Stylecraft. The lighter colour was more of a problem because there was nothing else suitable to give the right effect.

I could have done it in using 4 ply black with either white, or parchment but neither of these was quite right. The only solution was to pull undone the finished piece and use the silver colour I used before.

I have worked part of the design as a small sample. It seems to work. This will become a separate pattern.

March 24
Cast on 161 stitches and knitted a few ridges

April 1
It is very rare that I start a new project without finishing the old one but I did leave this for a few days to make Don’t Panic. When I picked it up again I knitted six more ridges before I realised that I had not done the edges correctly. If the mistake had been elsewhere I would have dropped the stitches down and picked them up again. Edge stitches are always more troublesome so I decided to pull it back instead.

I finally finished in mid-april.

I used two balls of each colour and some extra black to finish the edging. The hanging is mounted on a board.

Because the image is so dark some of the photos look almost like black squares. Look at the larger images and you should be able to see it better. The last photo is an animation.