[...] accidentally forgot to twist the legs of the first spider. Rather than take it out (the work of a whole minute and a half!), I played with the "bottom" legs of the spider, and managed to make them look like the top. A bit hard to keep the lower body of the spider taut, but I rather liked the effect. Enough so that I deliberately made the third (and last) spider the same way. And out of a mistake, made a pattern.
Anyone else done something similar?
Not with untwisted spider-legs, no. But in some other situations I too have "made lemonade, if life handed me a lemon" <g> A bit depends on how far into the work you make the mistake and how far past the mistake you actually notice it. Sometimes it's possible to make a mistake look like deliberate, by making it into a centerpiece, or -- as in your case -- into "bookends" of a pattern.
I once made a longer (about a yard, with 40 repeats) piece and, on the 4th repeat made a mistake; I took in and let out the pairs from a motif in a different way than I had done the first 3 times. I saw it almost immediately but, like you, I sort-of liked the effect... So, every 4th repeat, I made the same mistake, on purpose :) I bet, one day, someone will look at that piece and pronounce it machine-made; afterall, a mistake repeated at regular intervals is one of the classic ways of telling machine- from hand-made <g>
Are there patterns that call for untwisted legs?
None that I remember seeing, though I have seen -- in some cheap Chinese work -- spiders with a *single* leg twist instead of the usual multiples (I think the "rule" is as many twists as there are legs coming in per side). And there are spiders where plaits (rather than single pairs) form the spider, in which case they're likely to go into the spider without twists (a plait being formed with TC, and therefore ending untwisted). You then have to remember to omit the first twist, when restarting the plait.
----- Tamara P Duvall Lexington, Virginia, USA Formerly of Warsaw, Poland http://lorien.emufarm.org/~tpd/
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