Bellringing! Knitting! Music according to the physical constraints of the instrument! Mathematical craft patterns!
English church bells are rung by teams of people, one person per bell in a room underneath the bell chamber itself. The bells are very big and heavy - the smallest one I've personally rung was a bit under 100kg, I haven't kept track of the largest but I expect it was somewhere north of 500kg, bells exist which are several tonnes. As the bell swings on its wheel you have some ability to speed it up or slow it down (or pause altogether) but not by a huge amount - so when a group of bells 12345678 rings in sequence, the group of ringers can only change the sequence a little bit at a time by swapping some neighbouring pairs of bells, eg 21436587.
This means you can't ring tunes, really, but you can ring complex braided patterns with hundreds of rows and no repeats. And you can interpret that as a cable knitting chart. So in autumn 2023 I spent seven weeks knitting the method Bristol Surprise Major in sock yarn on 2.5mm needles, for a final length of approximately 3 metres or 1792 rows plus border.
The bell picked out in red is bell 1, the treble. It performs the same pattern each time, 32 "changes" long. The other seven bells make the same set of cable crossings each time but they start and finish in different places, thus each one moves through the work of each other bell. Bell 8 (the tenor) is picked out in blue yarn - for the first "lead" it starts in 8th place (brown line on the digital chart) and finishes in 6th place, for the second lead it starts in 6th (turquoise) and finishes in 4th, etc.. After seven leads it is back to 8th place so that is a "plain course" of 224 changes.
"Bob" and "single" are instructions for ways to alter the plain course so that it can take thousands of changes (still nothing repeated!) to come back round to the 12345678 sequence again. I didn't knit any of those because even I don't want a scarf that long. I had to block it in the local church because we didn't have any space long enough at home where the dogs&cat wouldn't get to it!
















