A General Method for Crocheted Knotwork
Designer and Artist: Elyse Yeager
Materials and Methods: Crocheted acrylic yarn
Year of Creation: 2021
Decorative knots are often designed with crossing points lying on a rectangular grid. A folkloric knot-building algorithm starts with crossings on a grid, as in a plain basketweave, and then uses a "deflecting" rule to vary the path of a strand. To make a curve in a strand, a grid point is "blocked," and the strand is deflected away from it. All crossings still occur on points of the rectangular grid, but now some points of the grid have deflections instead of crossings. With the aim of being able to translate such knots into crochet, the designer described a finite set of components that can be combined to form any possible knot resulting from the knot-building algorithm.
Established and straightforward techniques exist to crochet a small number of geometric shapes, including straight lines, right angles, and semicircular arcs. Each knot component was approximated with combinations of these shapes. The two pieces displayed here were drafted by the designer with the folkloric algorithm, then interpreted as combinations of crochetable shapes, and crocheted accordingly, to test the viability of the general method.
The author believes that similar ideas should suffice to describe knotwork with other regular patterns of crossing points.
Reference: A General Method for Crocheted Knotwork
Bonus pix!
