Halfassed knitting thoughts

So a while ago I knitted the Lizard Ridge blanket from Knitty which, as you can see, has stripes that go wider and then narrower, making a wavy sort of effect. This is done with short rows. To make a "bump", you basically do this:

- get to the place where you want the right edge of the bump to be.
- wrap and turn (hereafter: "w&t")
- k8, w&t
- p7, w&t
- k6, w&t
- p5, w&t
- k4, w&t
- continue knitting til you get to the right edge of where you want the next bump to be.

So basically you are making a little thing that's the shape of a leaf on its side, by knitting back and forth on decreasingly small rows.

So it occurred to me, what would happen if you just did that randomly in the middle of some other knitting?

For instance, imagine you're knitting a jumper in a heavyish weight yarn, say 8 ply/DK, and every so often as you knit, you insert one of those sideways-leaf shapes knitted in laceweight of the same colour. You'd end up with a jump that had cool kind of slashed effects with translucent panels.

I've thought of a whole bunch of other things you could do with it, by making the insert in different colours, textures, etc. You could put them on the end of a scarf, or around the edge of a shawl, for instance.

Obviously you could vary the shape of the leafy thing depending on how many stitches you started with, and how many rows you did it for. The ones in Lizard Ridge start with 8 and knit down to 4 over the course of 5 rows.

Another way of thinking of them is like Elizabeth Zimmerman's "thumb trick". The thumb trick is this: when knitting a mitten, and you get to the place where you want the thumb to be, put down your main yarn and knit a few stitches in a contrasting yarn. Then go back and pick up your main yarn and knit over the contrasting stitches, and continue knitting the body of the mitten til it's done. Then, when you're finished with that, unpick the contrasting stitches and pick them up with DPNs, then knit the thumb. The inserts I'm talking about are basically the same: you drop the main yarn, knit an insert with another yarn, then go back and knit across the top of the insert with the main yarn.

Anyway. That is just a thought I had. I should probably try actually knitting something like that and see if it looks as cool as it does in my mind.