Okay, this is going to keep bugging me...

[firstfrost]

Did I knit you a grey shawl, which shumashi borrowed to wear in "Charlie and Algernon" six years ago? (Or, if it wasn't you, do you know who it was?)

(Crowdsourcing my memory in my old age, sigh...)

Comments

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

Hmm, like this one:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/15906682@N05/1806463700/
except I keep trying to make that be your red shawl instead. Now I don't remember what that one looks like...

[shumashi.livejournal.com]

No, I don't think so.

I'm pretty sure the red one is this, by the way.
http://stuff.mit.edu/~boojum/KnitIndex/html/pix/gathering%20011.jpg

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

Ah, okay. That one is also a pi shawl (though pi isn't really in the numbers). It has to do with how the increases are done, which is "double the number of stitches in one row, then knit until double the number of rows that you knit last time" (because the circumference=2piR, except that 2pi might as well be k), iterated. So in both that one and the one I showed you, you can see that the increases are all in the visible rings, which go from sparse stitches to dense stitches. The technique was invented by Elizabeth Zimmerman, the grand dame of knitting, and she called them "pi shawls" when she described it.