Cecelia Campochiaro, Curious Knitter

When you first learned to knit, you might have wondered why certain stitches made fabric that curled, or why right-leaning and left-leaning decreases didn’t quite match, or why charts didn’t really show what the knitted fabric would look like. Knitting patterns might have seemed completely unworkable. If we stick with the craft, most knitters eventually take these oddities in stride and work around them. We learning to fudge what we can’t fix, and we figure that’s the way knitting goes. We read our stitches, let the habits of our skilled hands take over, and integrate knitting into our lives the way we ride a bicycle, make a cup of tea, or steer a car. Not Cecelia Campochiaro. With a scientific mind (trained by a PhD in physical chemistry), she approached those small curiosities as chances to investigate knitting more closely. By making small variations—holding several yarns together and creating gradual striping patterns, repeating a sequence of stitches with a slight offset, or mirr...