It's An Illusion

Last week we had the monthly meeting of the local Knitting & Crochet Guild branch, with a workshop in Illusion Knitting, aka Shadow Knitting.  It was led by Ann Kingstone, one of our members, who had designed a square for us to knit, with a pattern of a star.  The star is more or less invisible when looked at straight on, lit from in front (or in a flash photograph) but appears when the square is lit from the side and/or looked at from an angle.

No star

Star lit from the top 

Star seen at an angle

I started my square with a provisional cast on, to allow for picking up stitches all round to add a border, as Ann suggested, but I haven't decided yet what to make from it.

To introduce us to illusion knitting, Ann had brought a shawl that she was given by Steve Plummer and Pat Ashcroft  of Woolly Thoughts - it has a portrait of Robbie Coltrane as Hagrid in the Harry Potter films knitted into it.

Hagrid shawl, from http://www.illusionknitting.woollythoughts.com/hagrid.html 

At the workshop, we were wondering where the idea for illusion knitting came from - it seems such an unlikely technique to invent from nothing.  Later, I looked in Vivian Høxbro's book Shadow Knitting.  She says that first came across the idea in a translation of a booklet by a Japanese woman, Mieko Yano - a similar account is given on a blog by Mrs Petersson here, who says that Mieko Yano was teaching illusion knitting and other Japanese knitting ideas in Sweden in the 1980s.   But I don't know if Mieko Yano invented the technique, or whether it was developed earlier in Japan. Intriguing.