Octagonal Borders Taking Some Time To Resolve!

I felt that the Octagonal borders needed to be less subdivided than the long borders, which in turn meant finding a large stitch pattern. After some to-ing and fro-ing, I decided that I like this one – Milanese Pinwheel (again from Jo Ippolito Christensen).

I’m not so keen on the fact that it doesn’t really tesselate neatly – there’s a peculiar shape left in the middle if you interlock the stitched in the obvious way, and it just didn’t look pleasing. So it was obvious to me that I had best space them out to create islands in an inner sea, as it were. Not like this, however – this was to be a set of five closely interlocked, leaving any partial pinwheels unstitched, to be replaced with some other stitch. But I think it’s already looking congested.

So, trying again.

This time, four, spaced out to form a square. I’m really not convinced by this, either. The slanting sides of the octagons push the pinwheels too close together, so again we have a slightly congested look. Furthermore, as I observed with the borders for William Marshall, the square form can look very static, and in this case, that’s not playing nicely with the swirling movement in the pinwheels.

I think this does, however.

Upending the square onto the diagonal makes it possible to push the pinwheels further away from one another, and while it may only be a couple of threads, I think it looks less congested. That leaves room for me to put another, smaller, pattern “behind” the pinwheels, as it were.

You may notice that while I was wrestling in thought with those pinwheels, I kept on at the path.. So, now I have to do the pinwheels in the other octagon, and decide what to run into the background…