Free Style Knitting–The Pahoehoe Wrap

Making It Up As You Go Along

Whew! It’s been awhile! I’ve been staying home and trying not to contribute to the pandemic, while still trying to maintain my sanity. Knitting, of course, has played a large role in my quest to remain sane. Christmas presents are finished and I’ve even had some time to work on some things for myself. I still have several projects on needles and patterns in various stages of draft–from rough notes to taking and editing the photos. Plus, I’m still having new ideas that just need to be knitted, or at the very least, scribbled onto paper so that I can remember them when I have more time (HA!).

I did work on something completely new over my holiday break. I call it free style knitting, because it only began with a crude plan and I modified (heavily!) as I worked through the project. I made many spontaneous decisions as I was knitting, and I took careful notes, but I’m afraid that I would need to made a second one to actually write the pattern. It’s definitely an eye-catching and fun piece to wear, even if it never gets written into a pattern. I wear it over a tunic with leggings (pandemic wardrobe!), so it’s super comfortable, non-restricting, and warm in a wool/yak fiber mix.

My inspiration for this wrap was based on my memories and photos of the lava formations from trips to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. The name of the wrap is Pahoehoe. Pahoehoe lava is a characterized by overlapping ridges and ripples. I took a helicopter tour of the volcano area when I first visited the Big Island. The bright red lava was only clearly visible in the crater, then once it flowed away, it appeared silver, with just a hint of the bright red peaking through. I don’t have very good photographs of the pahoehoe lava that I saw, but there are some excellent fair use professional photographs available through the United States Geological Survey (USGS.gov).

This wrap has lots of short rows, forming its shapes and angles, and giving it an asymmetry, with few straight edges. The alternating rows of stockinette and reverse stockinette stitches give an undulating texture to the overlapping shapes. My original intent was to have this be a rectangle, but then I lost interest in keeping track of the many short rows–an opposing short row is required to keep things square–so I just embraced the shape of the flow, and made it all asymmetrical. After all, there aren’t many straight lines in nature.

The red (hot lava) is concentrated at the neck and then visible peaking out between the reverse stockinette ridges. The wrap changes color from red to silver-gray to charcoal gray at is gets farther from the neck, imitating the color changes as the lava cools into basalt rock.

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Notice the shades of silvers, grays, and black in the photos above. I didn’t quite match the color of the molten lava with the red yarn, but I was limited in my color choices in yarn. I think it is not an easy task to mimic that glowing orange-red-hot color! And, let’s face it, the cooler red tone of the yarn that I used is a bit more wearable–at least for me.

It’s definitely a funky little one-of-a-kind wrap, but I like how it turned out. It’s a good set of colors for me, and gives me lots of fond memories of my travels to the Big Island of Hawaii.

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