April came and went rather quickly, didn't it? I was really happy to round off this month with a pattern of mine being published in the STEAM issue of Knotions online magazine. STEAM stands for Science Technology Engineering Art and Maths - it was a great theme to get ideas flowing!

You can see my contribution here - the Aranacci Shawl. Aran + Fibonacci = Aranacci (that's how my thinking process went!) I've been fascinated by the Fibonacci sequence for some time, and it was a pleasure to work it into a design. Perhaps the introduction to the shawl explains this best:

"The Aranacci Shawl is an easy-to-knit, reversible, (slightly asymmetric) triangular shawl; with a hugs-and-kisses cable running along one edge, and plenty of relaxing garter stitch in the main body of the shawl. Increases are worked using simple yarnovers, which create both an inner border of eyelets, and a decorative feature of eyelet rows which take place in a Fibonacci sequence. The eyelets have one garter ridge between them at first, then two, then three, then five, and so on following the Fibonacci sequence. The Fibonacci sequence (named after an Italian mathematician who first described it in the West in 1202) is a series of numbers in which each number is the sum of the two that precede it. So 1 is followed by 2 (1 + 1), then 3 (1 + 2), 5 (2 + 3), 8 (3 + 5), and so on. This sequence is found to occur mysteriously often not only in mathematics, but also in biology (e.g. flower petal arrangement, tree branches, snail shell curvature). In our case, the shawl finishes with a section of 34 garter stitch ridges, but if you have plenty of yarn, you could continue knitting theoretically forever (well, maybe with another section of 55 garter stitch ridges!)The reversible Aran cable actually only has three different rows in the whole cable, yet looks much more impressive than that would suggest! The shawl overall strikes a balance between relaxing garter stitch and an interesting (but not too taxing) cable." I used 7 skeins of Nua Worsted to knit the shawl; it's a lovely yarn which is perfect for anything to be worn next to the skin.

Knitting Tutorials

Also new to me this month was having a go at creating knitting tutorials. I've had some people contact me in the past wondering if I had any of these relating to the Simple Cable Beanie in particular (which is understandable since it is their first introduction to cable knitting for some people). I've worked a few tutorials showing these cables - mostly these are on my Instagram page for now, but the idea is to have them easily available for people, particularly to newsletter subscribers. I'll try to link the first one here, which shows how to work the Cable In instruction (without using a cable needle!) I added how to work the Cable Cross without a cable needle, and I have another one still to come. Actually I filmed a longer one for the 'Cable In' which was a little too long for Instagram Reels (which I've learned can only be a minute long), so if you want to see the longer version, where I work the cable twice, it's on my TikTok page. I am the newest newbie you can imagine on TikTok, but everyday's a school day, right? I try and mix it up too, and not have everything the same on all the social media channels, so please feel free to follow me on TikTok if you are on there - and I might make it into double digits (gasp!) for my followers! I'm @AranAccessories on there, but I'm not able to post a link to it here (sorry!) 

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