I noticed quite a few hits in the past couple of days from people looking for my Visio knitting symbol stencils (templates). They're the tools I use to do all of the charts here on String. However those files appear to have gone astray. I'm having problems going back and editing the original posts to edit the links there, so I am offering up this set of links instead.

I've got two sets, both for older versions of Visio. For Visio 5 here's a Zip file containing the basic shape set, increases and decreases, and cables. And here's the same thing for Visio 2000. I know for a fact that my stencils work with Visio 5, Visio 2000 and the last version of Visio in MS Office 2003. I haven't had an opportunity to test the latest Visa version of Visio with my templates yet.

Here's a link to the original post describing my method, but in short - I've built a series of "alphabet blocks" each bearing a standard knit symbol. I build my patterns up block by block. I can group or rotate blocks as needed. Once my blocks are in order, I add chart notations, including my grids and row numbering, and a key. I can also use the same system for colorwork charting by assigning my desired colors either to the whole block, or to a small square unit in a block's center, as needed.

I offer up these stencils to anyone who wants to use them. For the record, I've heard that these blocks can be imported and used in other less expensive graphics programs including Edraw. I know that Edraw can open Visio files, but I don't know if it uses a stencil or template library that can import Visio stencils. I suspect that to adapt my symbols you'd take this Visio file containing most of my symbols, then use Edraw to open it and copy the symbols out.

If you do use my files to create your own charts, I'd greatly appreciate a link back or a line of acknowledgment in your final work. I hope that someone else finds these useful as I do.

Technorati : knitting

First, in answer to a question about how to draw up a loop, I do a normal pick-up one into one chain selvage (or bind off, or cast on) stitch, then I grab it and pull more yarn through, distending the newly made stitch until I've pulled a foot or more of yarn through. Once I've got the giant loop, I use it to knit the next two rows. When I've finished the two rows I grab the strand leading back to the ball and give it a firm tug to pull any left-over yarn back out of the loop, and to snick the newly knit piece up closely to the existing work. Here you see the loop being pulled through prior to knitting with it:

After much trial and error, I've hit on the best way to cast on for the strips in my modular knit Log Cabin Baby Blanket. (Wish I'd looked at yesterday's comments before all that fiddling and seen Karen's suggestion). Crocheting onto a knitting needle, like I do when I start off the waste chain for a provisional cast on, works nicely. It produces an even chain type edge, analogous to the strip's bind off and chain selvage edges. I've described crocheting on before, but here's another swag at it.

In the snap below I've stuck my crochet hook into the final stitch remaining after I've cast off the stitches on the last strip. I'm holding the working yarn BEHIND the target knitting needle, and I'm reaching OVER the needle with the crochet hook

I'm grabbing the working strand with the crochet hook and am about to pull the just-grabbed strand through the existing stitch (in effect, I'm making a crochet slip stitch).

Ignoring the errant strand of Smaller Daughter's hair in the shot above, what we wind up with is a stitch on the knitting needle. I've moved the working strand to the back of the knitting needle again, and am poised to make another.

Crocheting on works especially nicely for provisional cast-ons. Instead of crocheting a long chain THEN fiddling with the bumps on the back of the chain, trying to pick them up, this method produces the chain edge and mounts the stitches in one step. It's one of the core techniques I teach in my occasional "Crocheting for Knitters" workshop.

As you can see, my blanket is growing. According to the logic diagram, I'm in the middle of unit #7:

Finally, here's the working method. It's not a pattern because I am not giving yardage estimates, gauge or dimension. These log cabin blocks can be made to any size and assembled like a standard patchwork quilt, or the working logic can be used to make a larger object as a single square. For the record, I'm using Austermann Batika Color, a bulky weight yarn with a native gauge of 4 stitches per inch in stockinette, on 6mm needles. I'm getting roughly 4 stitches per inch and four garter ridges per inch in garter stitch on US #9s (5.25mm). My initial square was about 3x3 inches (roughly 7.6cm), and all my subsequent strips are about 3 inches wide.

The best way to join ends of Batkia when starting a new ball is to thread the new strand into a standard tapestry needle and stitch it through the center of the chainette for about 2 inches, like feeding an one eel to another. Once the doubled length has been knit, any flapping ends can be trimmed back without fear of raveling.

Working Method for Modular Log Cabin Square

First square:

Cast on 12 using crocheting on.
Row 1: Slip the first stitch purlwise, knit 10, k1b.
Repeat Row 1 until you form a square of garter stitch. In all probability there will be 12 chain selvage edge loops running up both sides of the square. Cast off 11. One stitch should remain. Do not break yarn.

Strips:

Using the last remaining loop, crochet on 12 stitches.
Row 1: Slip the first stitch purlwise, knit 10, k1b. Draw a loop through the first available chain selvage stitch on the previous square or strip (it will be the edge to the left of the new strip's attachment point). Enlarge this loop until it's big enough to knit with. Turn the work over.
Row 2: Pulling the loop tight and making sure you're knitting with the anchored side rather than the side that runs free back to your ball of yarn, knit 11, k1b. Turn the work over.
Row 3: Slip the first stitch purlwise, knit 10, k1b.
Repeat Rows 2 and 3 until your new strip runs the whole width of your piece. The first time you do this, it will be a square of 12 stitches x 12 garter ridges. The second strip will be a rectangle of 12 stitches x 24 garter ridges and will run across the top of the first two squares.
Next row: Cast off 11. One stitch should remain. Do not break yarn.

Repeat the strip directions, always adding strips counterclockwise around the perimeter of the piece, with each strip running the full length of the available side.

Technorati : knitting

I was wrong and I freely admit it. Remember the post in which I described a method for estimating the depth of stripes that would be produced by a skein of space dyed or multicolor patch yarn? I applied that method to my skein of Noro Kureyon Sock, and it flat out missed the mark.

Based on skein size and color strand counting, I estimated that each solid color stripe would last 4-6 rows or so before shading into the next. I still stand by that for the yarn on the outside of the skein, but I didn't factor into my estimation how seemingly random Noro yarns can be. Here's the skein:

I see lots of turquoise and magenta, with side trips to royal blue and deep green. The color segments of the yarn on the outside of the skein appear to last for the lengths I indicated.

But here's the resulting slouch sock (a sock with a deliberately wide ankle part), knit from the center of the ball out. It's brother is just a tiny turquoise cast-on speck right now:

Huh? where did that huge lump of royal blue above the heel come from? And the green/orange mix directly above that? And why is the pink/purple section so unexpectedly wide? Counting the strands on the inner layer visible on the un-dissected skein, pink/purple should be equal in width to green. What gives?

I might have been less surprised had there been more than one skein of this color number available on the day I bought the yarn. Looking at several, each starting at a different spot in the color progression might have revealed larger (or different) color segments than I anticipated. In any case, the color repeat has gone through about one and a half cycles in this sock, hitting the toe's hue blend about halfway between orange stripe and densest part of the magenta, although factoring in the wider circumference of the ankle part than the foot, the second appearance of the pink/purple is longer than that combo's debut.

So there's my caveat. I still say my estimation method works. Mostly. Except for Noro, where all bets are off.

Pattern footnote:

How to do a slouch sock? Easy. US #00s. Standard figure-8 cast on toe, worked on a set of five DPNs. Increase to 17 stitches per needle until just before the heel (68 st total). Increase one stitch per needle to 18 (72 st total), work a standard short row heel across two needles (36 stitches), instead of decreasing away the two sneaky stitches used to minimize any top-of-heel-decrease gaps, keep them, and increase one stitch each on the two non-heel needles for a total of 19 stitches per needle (76 st total). Work leg part equal in length to foot (folded along the heel's natural equator), then work about 20 rows of K2, P2 ribbing and end off.

Why do a slouch sock? Between the wild colors, thick/thin spin, and overtwist, any lacy or texture pattern would be lost in this stuff. Also this yarn isn't a good candidate for stranding or striping with another (although two different but closely related skeins in a simple stranding pattern might be interesting). I've had some breakage, and I'm not inclined to use this stuff for a nice, snug sock that takes a lot of stretching to put on. The roomy top will diminish that strain.

Technorati : knitting

I got a private note yesterday from a knitter who seeing the fuzzy entrelac blanket posted yesterday, wanted to know how I knew the spotty yarn would work well for it. I reply.

Frankly, I wasn't sure what I was going to do with my spotted yarn. But multicolors come in several flavors. While there are no hard and fast rules in knitting, there are some general principles I use to help figure out what to do with multicolors, especially because I'm one of the yarn-first folk. I rarely have a specific project in mind when I purchase yarn, and usually have to find or invent something to do with my new treasures. Also, as long time readers here have seen - I don't always hit on the best use right away. Sometimes it takes me a couple of starts before things work out. I don't mind ripping back. To me it's part of the process of exploration and discovery. Now these thoughts are things that work for me. Your taste is probably different from mine, and there's nothing wrong with that, so please don't think these are put forward as rules for everyone.

For me, first comes yarn choice. Multicolors come in all sorts of types and color combos. I have to like the color set and mix proportions as a whole. I like to look at my target yarn from a distance - 10 feet at least, to see if the skeins "read" well as an aggregate. Lots of times one or more of the colors pops out strangely from a more harmonious background. I tend to avoid those mixes. I do however like multicolors that are composed of different colors but similar intensities.

Once a color combo has caught my eye, I look at the length of the repeat. On skeined yarn, this is relatively easy, especially if the yarn shop allows customers to untwist a skein. Never do this unless you have asked permission and you know you can return the yarn to the original twist, neat enough to be indistinguishable from the on-shelf stock. Then do so once you've made your evaluation. Or ask the yarn shop staff if they can untwist/retwist for you.

On DK and worsted gauge, I figure about 1.5 stitches per linear inch of yarn. On sport and fingering, figure 2.5-3.5 stitches per inch of yarn. A run of a single color as wide as my palm on a DK is probably a bit over 5 stitches when knit up - just under an inch worth of knitting in DK gauge. Shorter areas of color end up looking like little spots. Longer ones produce broken stripes. Really long segments produce larger stripes (depending on the circumference of the piece being knit and the gauge).

What to do if the yarn comes in a ball rather than a skein? You've got to guess and estimate. Look at the put-up. Estimate about how long one circumference wrap of the ball is. For example, if you look at the Noro Kureyon Sock below you can see that the wrap goes diagonally around the ball, and that there are about four or five wraps before the color changes.

The ball is approximately 7 inches long (the spread from my index tip to small finger tip with my hand splayed - it's good to know some standard biometrics of your own hand for guesstimation), so a rough estimate is that one wrap around the ball would be about 15-16 inches. The individual color patches on this yarn are probably on the order of 65-75 inches long, probably something like 24-30 linear inches of knitting at an approximate sock gauge. (My socks are about 11.5 inches in circumference on the ankle, so for socks one color segment would probably make a stripe a bit over two or three rows deep).

A yarn with lots of rapid color changes will read very differently from a yarn that's mostly background color with scattered spots. The rapid color change yarn will, from a distance, almost seem to do an impressionist's blend, and appear as a hue median to all the colors being represented. That means that a yarn with a zillion little spots of color, each individually quite clear will end up looking like a muted blend of all of them from a distance. Tweeds and multi-strand ragg style yarns (two or more plies of different, sometimes variegated color twisted together) are good examples of this effect. My Impossible Socks uses a ragg-twist multicolor tweed in combo with solid blue. The overall effect of the tweedy yarn is much darker and muddier than its constituent bits, even without the navy stripes.

Colors that blend one to the next can also present problems. Sometimes the nondescript areas between vivid colors predominate if evaluated as a general proportion of total skein length. A lovely multicolor on the shelf may actually knit up rather muddy, with only small flashes of the marquee hues. Conversely, colors that shift abruptly from one to the next can produce a rather motley and jarring effect, with each jostling against its neighbors. In longer repeats, I tend to favor yarns that have few or no blended transitions. I also prefer that any transition areas make up less than 10% of the total color cycle.

Because of the "tweens" challenge with shading multicolors and the perceived meld problem in general, I tend to stay away from yarns with wildly disparate color combos, and stick mostly to multicolors with either a well established and pleasing uniting background color; to yarns that present either multiple variants of the same color (like a continuum from light blue to navy); or to yarns that offer up two or at the most three closely allied colors (like red to yellow, with side trips to orange). The Paisley shawl illustrates this visual mind meld. It's a raspberry to blueberry blend. The detail shows the color spots clearly, but the big picture blends both into a medium purply garnet.

In terms of color repeat length, I try to match projects to the repeat length. I've found in general that unless I can engineer repeats to deliberately and predictably flash, I am not wildly fond of large areas of multicolor yarns knit flat. They're just not very interesting to me worked that way. I much prefer trying to introduce movement or to break up the large-field effect. Entrelac works nicely. The color repeats in the strip below (from my Chest of Knitting Horrors ™ graveyard of unfinished projects) uses Entrelac to make the most of a short color repeat. Each square is only about an inch across.

If the repeat is long, you can engineer something fun like my Snake scarf, displaying the long repeat's gradations to maximum advantage, or working center-out medallions that radiate from one color to another (the brown throw is all knit from the same color number Blauband sock yarn).

If the color bits are extremely short, the diagonal movement introduced by the Entrelac patches combined with the narrow "bounce area" of the patch width evens out the distribution of the spots, and makes them look like ice cream sprinkles (jimmies to my fellow Bostonians).

Sometimes I've broken the rules and used directional-distortion texture patterns with self stripers to break up the march of concentric rings of color by zigging the texture this way and that. My SeeSaw socks, published in KnitNet ages ago are a good example. These are in fact my original SeeSaws, still in service after all these years:

If I can engineer it, I really like making yarns flash - knitting them in the round so that patches of the same color align on top of each other to create an almost painterly effect. The wildly jarring colors of my Rainbow Mills Matisse sweater would not have worked well together if the piece hadn't been designed to flash. Look at the cuffs and waist ribbing to see how muddy and non-descript the blend is without color stacking. You can also see the difference in the flash pattern produced by the difference in body and sleeve circumference.

An alternative approach is to limit the width of the strip so that colors bounce back and forth across a narrower strip of ground. That can make the individual stripes deeper, and add interest by adding the "collision lines" where the repeats abut. The piece below was interesting because it was made from four skeins of hand-dyed from the same batch. They were close, but different enough to each present its own periodicity of repeat when knit into strips of equal width.

Sometimes I'm faced with multicolors that just can't be tamed by stitch direction, calculating garment widths to make them flash, or working them in narrow strips. My favorite solution for those yarns is to find another yarn that coordinates - either by picking up a color from the repeat itself, or by adding another color in contrast. Then I work my solid along with the variegated in stripes or other patterning, in a proportion that tames the wild mix, in effect forcing an new uniting background color into the repeat. In the sock top below, the solid is the magenta. The variegated was turquoise, yellow and hunter green. An unlikely and loud combo, but one that worked.

So to sum up, there's a use for almost every multicolor yarn. Things that make using multicolors easier include harmonious, balanced color sets (even if they're bright), and a minimum of muddy areas. Introducing movement by stitch direction or by narrowing the strip being knit can be more interesting than the same yarn knit totally flat in stockinette. It IS possible to use texture patterns with multicolors, and even the most savage multicolor can usually be tamed by introducing a background or contrasting solid.

Hope someone finds this useful, so that a skein that's been languishing in stash somewhere finally meets inspiration.

Technorati : knitting

For some reason the automatic spell checker kicked in and (without my approval) obfuscated my meaning a bit. I repost, with corrections. Apologies for the confusion.

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I did do a small amount of gift knitting this holiday season - mostly large-gauge hiking or slipper socks, knit from DK or worsted weight yarn, respectively. I give all my socks with a must-fit guarantee. If they're not optimal, I usually make another pair or fix the sub-standard offering.

I had to honor that warranty this year for one pair in particular. The recipient was thrilled, but my foot size estimate was off. I based my estimate on a pair of shoes which turned out to belong to someone other than the target. Since the only defect was foot length, and the yarn is nice and big (and I have a small amount of additional yarn but not enough to do a whole new pair), I decided to lengthen rather than make another pair. Plus a tutorial on doing so might be of use to my one reader out there in blogland. :)

The re-toeing process works in fundamentally the same way, regardless of whether the original sock was knit toe-up or cuff-down. I use this opportunity to present a quick how-to for those looking to add length or replace worn areas on the toe or ball of the foot.

Here's my original pair, knit from the Jaeger Matchmaker DK leftovers from my dropped leaf sweater:

The measurement from the tip of the toe to the back of the heel is about 9 inches. The recipient has requested about an additional half inch of length.

Step one is to unravel the toe area. It's always easier to unravel any area that contains increases, decreases or cable crossings from the top. Knitting can be unraveled from the bottom, but anything other than plain stockinette or garter stitch can be problematic. Because these socks were knit toe-up, I need to start unraveling above the increases that form the toe. If these were cuff-down socks, I'd begin unraveling at my grafted or bound-off seam. In both cases, the process is the same. Identify the stitches that in the toe form the decrease line (in flat feature toes), then boldly snip and get on with it. Here I've put a safety pin between the side stitches a few rows up into the sock foot from my snipping point, and am about to cut. Note that the only one stitch needs to be snipped to start the process:

Having cut, I'm now placing the newly freed stitches of the sock foot on my needles as they are liberated. If I wanted to re-employ the knit part that I'm excising here, I would use two sets of needles, picking up the stitches on both sides of the unraveled row. (I might do this if I were lengthening a sleeve or sweater body above the ribbing, if I intended on grafting the ribbing back on rather than totally re-knitting it). In this case, I'll just rip out the toe and stash the remaining mini-balls in my Box of Future Stripes(tm) - there being few yarn scraps in this world that I find too short to save. The less frugal than I would probably give them the fling.

Why not use the raveled yarn to re-knit the toes? Because I already know that the bit ripped back is too short. Socks benefit from there being as few joins as possible, especially in the sensitive toe and heel areas. If I were to use the ripped back yarn I'm guaranteed to run out, and will need to add on more. That means that instead of three ends to darn in on each reworked toe (the original sock body end, plus the two ends of the re-knit area), I'd have five (original, re-knit section, extra yarn added to eke out raveled bits). More ends = less comfort for the wearer.

While I'm picking up, I don't pay any attention to how many stitches end up on each needle. Because I've marked the exact center of the side, I can assort the stitches appropriately among the needles once they've been rescued. Here you see the result. All stitches reclaimed and on the needles:

Once the stitches are on the needles, it's a simple matter to knit extra length and work a standard toe, ending with Kitchener grafting. As you can see in the after picture below taken after the toe was re-knit, there is no line of demarcation between the body of the foot (knit toe-up) and the new toe (knit in the other direction). My cuff-down grafted toes do turn out to be a bit pointier than my no-sew figure-8 cast-on toes. In any case, here's After Sock and Before Sock. Measured against each other, I've added a bit over a half an inch to the sock's heel to toe length. All I have to do now is fix the other one.

Ripping back and picking up after a garment is finished is a handy technique to have in one's bag of knitting tricks, and one that many people overlook. I've used it to replace worn sock feet, re-knit mitten ends and glove fingers that sprouted holes, lengthen the cuffs and body of sweaters for rapidly growing children, and replace worn elbows or ripped cuffs. So finished doesn't always mean permanently done. Think of it more as "in a resting state that's presently useful" than as absolute finality.

Hope you found this useful!

Technorati : knitting

Apparently my last post caused some confusion. A couple of people wrote to say that they didn't understand why the original graph wasn't knit-able. I'll try to explain again.

One principle of lacy and other texture knitting is the equivalence of decreases and increases. In patterns with parallel edges, for every new stitch introduced into a row via a YO, Make 1 or cast on, there is an equivalent stitch removed by a complementing decrease. That decrease can come in many forms - a K2tog, a SSK, a cast-off, or as part of a multiple stitch decrease (Sl-K2tog-PSSO, K3tog, SSSSK, etc.) Yes, there are some exceptions - patterns that deviate by having a decreased stitch count on one or more rows, but if they have parallel edges, they must restore the stitch count on subsequent rows. I've graphed both types here before.

Walker's Porcupine Stitch uses increases and decreases balanced throughout to maintain parallel edges

By contrast, her Starlight Lace Stitch is a parallel edge insertion that has a modified stitch count on rows 16 and 14, that is restored in both places on the next right-side pattern row. The presence of those evil gray "no stitch" boxes is a dead give-away that stitch count monkeying has happened.

To create a panel with one or more decorative edges - edges that zig in and out to make nifty curves, scallops, or sawtooth or triangle points - the stitch count has to be deliberately altered so that the width of the piece grows and then shrinks in a predictable manner. Most of these decorative panels are edgings - strips with one nice firm straight edge that is usually knit or sewn onto the thing being trimmed, and one fantastical dagged edge - the decorative points or ruffles that hang free. There are two-edged edgings that in the past were used as trim or decorative strips all by themselves - lingerie straps, camouflage for shelf edges, free strips appliqued onto towels and house linen, but they're far less common and are rarely seen in modern pattern collections.

The stitches introduced (or decreased) to form the points can occur anywhere in a row. Placement as well as the number helps determine the overall shape and depth of the point. If the new stitches accumulate or disappear from the left of the location of increase/decrease, the points tend to be a bit sharper. If they accumulate between the stable edge and the location of the increase/decrease the points formed are more like waves or scallops. We saw that in the pattern I charted in the last post, where the point-forming increases/decreases were relatively close to the stable right edge of the piece, stitches were accumulated between the stable right edge and the location of increase decrease, and that spot was followed by a relatively large section that had a stable stitch count. Here are simple graphs of a few basic edging shapes, stripped of all lace detail. Note that in each and every one, if a row has more (or fewer) stitches than the one that preceded it, there is a clearly discernible cause on that preceding row - an increase or a decrease that's clearly to blame.

It's the absence of any stitch-to-blame in the historical chart that made it un-knitable:

Yes, the graph looks good. The points march in and out in clearly defined order - but the causes for that patterning are absent. Every YO on this graph is countered by a decrease. There are none left over to form the basic triangle point shape.

Now as to why the chart was published this way - the pattern book I was working from is a direct facsimile of a work produced in Germany in 1921, in a language I can't read. I did double check the instructions, both against the English key thoughtfully provided by the book's modern editors; and against the original diagrams presented at the front of the book. Those show standard symbols and a little engraving of what the resulting work should look like. I also successfully reproduced another pattern on the page that uses the same symbols, so I'm pretty sure that in spite of not being able to read the accompanying text I didn't miss anything substantive.

My guess is that because charting was new, and the symbols used in the original book are not standard (charting symbols aren't standard even today), among the pattern designers, the artist that laid out the pattern, the typesetter, and the proofer, errors slipped in. Proofing knitting patterns isn't an easy thing, as any modern professional pattern writer/editor can tell you. In my experience, the most accurate patterns appear to have been produced between 1950 and arbitrarily - 1985. Stuff before in general isn't as stitch for stitch perfect or isn't in modern notation; and stuff after seems to have suffered from a lack of skilled manpower and/or editorial time. Not to say everything published after 1985 is junk, but we've all seen books rushed to market that required dozens of pages of errata. Books published during the designated "sweet spot of knitting" era tended to require far fewer corrections than do many contemporary works. Kudos to those professional authors/editors/publishers who have taken on the extra time and expense in pursuit of perfection. Eyebrows are raised at those who cut corners. Slack is cut for pre-modern works, especially those that pioneered new forms of instruction.

So the moral of the story in knitting as in far more weighty world matters, is "trust, but verify."

Afterword: People new to charting might find the Charting 101-107 series here on String useful. You can find those posts under my Reference Shelf tag.

Technorati : knitting

More on corners. Using the same principles as the knit-from-center-out framing area on my cashmere shawl, I've done a mitered corner on my baby blanket. I do envision a problem now that I've finished a credible Corner #1, but I'll deal with it when I get there.

The first step was to make sure that I had a multiple of my halved row count available as live stitches along each edge of the project (small alerts should be going off in your head right now, but back to this later). That's because using my chosen attachment method, two rows of edging are attached to each live stitch.

Edging right side row: S1, work pattern to end
Edging wrong side row: Work pattern to penultimate stitch, SSK last stitch together with a live stitch of the body.

I can modify this scheme by doing an occasional SSSK on that wrong side row, in which one edging stitch is knit together with two live stitches from the body. This can be periodic and eat a specific number of stitches over a given number of repeats (eating one on every Edging Row 1, or every third row of the edging, for example); or it can be ad-hoc - performed when the thing looks like it's getting too ruffly. Being a precise person, I prefer the former, but I'm not above sneaking one in using the latter should it be necessary. You've probably already figured out that working an edging onto a top or bottom of live knit stitches (or stitches rescued after unzipping a provisional cast on) will require a different rate of attachment than would knitting them onto stitches picked up off a side edge formed when the body was knit, via a standard slip stitch edge.

The second step was to identify a clear diagonal on the existing pattern, and use that as an alignment point on which to build my mitered corner. In this case, the edge of the eyelet diamonds makes a good divider.

So having stated the obvious, I violate it all. To create the live stitches all the way around my perimeter, I picked up, putting all the new stitches on a large circ. I started at the end of a knit-side row of stockinette, placed a marker and picked up a stitch in every slip stitch selvage on my left side edge. Then - not having done a provisional cast-on because I was on vacation and was lazy - I placed a marker and picked up the same number of stitches as I had stockinette stitches across the bottom of my half-hitch cast-on row. Then it was a march back to the origin point, placing a marker then picking up stitches along the remaining selvage.

It so happened that my picked up stitch count on each side is pretty close to a multiple of my edging row count-halved. So I started knitting my edging a couple of stitches in from my corner, commencing with good old Edging Row #1. (Hearing that ding-ding alert again? You should be.)

All is well and good (sort of). I've now marched around three of my four corners, and am in the home stretch, working my last straight side. Then it's on to the final corner and graft.

Now. Why all those alerts?

Because my corner as graphed works best when I commence it on the tallest row of my point - not on Row #1, which is the shortest row. I didn't figure that out until I was well along. Not wanting to rip it all back a THIRD time, I'm going to see if I can somehow cheat on Corner #4.

Here's a graph for my modified edging and corner, with attachment instructions (done to the best of my ability).

Technorati : knitting

Where have I been? Well, first there was another spate of chaos deadlines at work. Then it was the beginning of Birthday Week here in the String household (they're 7 years and four days apart, with mine shortly thereafter). And to no one's surprise, I came down with a nasty flu. I'm not yet over that, but it was severe enough for me to stay home from work - something I've done only once or twice in the last decade.

For her birthday Smaller Daughter specified a volcano cake with a dragon on it. She'd seen something like this in a kiddie cookbook - a bundt with a lava-like frosting poured on, surmounted by some clever marzipan decorations. So we made it a group project. I provided the almond bundt with chocolate fudge filling and frosting; Older Daughter molded the marzipan dragon with dried apricot wings; and Smaller Daughter made the strange red prey creatures fleeing from the dragon:

We were hard pressed to find enough room for the obligatory birthday candles. The cake and decorations however were delicious.

I did manage to make some progress on the lace scarf over the last week. I've finished the center section, and am working on the edging. It looks like I'll have to nip into my third skein of Prescott, so I'm thinking of pausing on the edging to go back and add some length to the center section before lapping all the way around that last end. I'm not doing anything fancy here - no mitered corners. I'm just working an extra repeat of the pattern into the cornermost stitch, and hoping that all blocks out evenly later.

I played with quite a few edging patterns for this piece, finally settling on the "Doris Edging" from Miller's Heirloom Lace. It has framed diamonds that exactly complement the center strip. Along the way I noodled up another simple triangle-based edging. This is an out-take, and didn't end up on the scarf. I won't violate copyright by sharing Miller's edging (which I used more or less verbatim), but I will share this one:

Knitting an edging onto a piece isn't difficult. It helps if your base item was worked with a slip stitch selvage edge, but that's not mandatory. I've knit edgings onto all sorts of things, including finished fulled/felted items, fabric, and leather (some caveats on this, below). The slip stitch selvage just makes it easier. Your chosen trim will have one edge intended to hang free. Most often that will be dagged, serrated, scalloped or otherwise fancified. It will also have one (more or less) straight edge. This straight edge is intended to be sewn or knit onto something else. I like to work in the orientation shown in the knit sample and pattern, above - with my straight edge on the right, and the fancy edge on the left. My right-side rows commence from my main piece outward, and my wrong-side rows return from the fancy edge back to the main piece.

Sometimes I use a provisional cast-on and start my lace rows immediately after it. Other times I use a half hitch cast on, then work one row back in knits before starting my lace patterns. There's no real rhyme or reason here. It's just what I felt like doing at the time. In this case, I cast on using half-hitch, and worked a row of knits back, working my first join on that "back from cast-on" non-repeated row. The join itself is quite simple. When I get to the last stitch of my wrong side row, I pick up one stitch in the edge of my established body piece. Then, for the first stitch of my right-side lace row, I either knit or purl that newly created stitch along with the next stitch after it on my needle.

If I knit those two together I end up with a neat column of stitches that makes a visual line between the lace edge and the main body. While this can be desirable in some cases, it does present a different appearance on the front and reverse of the work. Because the lace center of this piece is garter, and the edging is also presented in garter, I used a P2tog to make the join. The front and back of the work look less different from each other if I purl the join instead of knit it. Once the join is made, I work out the remainder of my right-side lacy row, and the return row. So long as I remember to pick up one stitch at the end of every wrong-side/return row, then work that stitch together with the next one as I begin the right side row, my edging will be firmly united with my main body.

Sometimes you don't want to do a row-for-row join. Occasionally the stretch of the lace edging or the ratio of the edging rows to body rows isn't 1:1. This might happen if you are working the edging on smaller needles; or if you are working the edging across a row of live stitches (or across the top or bottom cast-on or bound-off edge) rather than along the "long side" of the work, parallel to the main body's knitting. In that case you may need to either work additional non-attached lace rows every so often, or pick up at the end of the wrong-side/return rows by knitting two body stitches together, again every so often. The former adds more length to the lace, the latter subtracts width from the body. Which method is used depends on the stretch of the body.

The biggest caveat in attaching knitting by knitting on rather than by seaming is that if you do so, the lace is no longer "portable." Let's say in a fit of Suzy Homemaker frenzy, you edged out a set of exquisite hand towels. It's now some years later, and your children have stained those towels beyond recognition, but the edging still looked good. If you had knit the edging separately and seamed it on it would be very easy to remove and re-apply to new towels. But even if you had run a band of slip stitch crochet down the edge of the towel to provide an easy edge for attachment first, if you had knit that edging onto the towel, removing the fancy lace from the towel will be ...problematic.

As far as knitting onto fabric, fulled material or leather - it CAN be done. If the edge can be pierced by a needle tip (or was conveniently punched beforehand), you can knit right onto the edge of anything. BUT the warning about not being able to take the lace off again or adjust it later is strongly in effect. If you want to attach a lace edging to any of these substrates, it's worth it to work one row of slip stitch or single crochet along the item first, then knit (or seam) your knitted edging onto that crocheted foundation row. The foundation row of crochet gives you a stable, evenly placed line of stitches for the joins, and stabilizes the base item's edge somewhat. It also (in the case of leather) makes working into previously punched holes easier (a crochet hook is much easier to thread through and grab a strand than is a knitting needle's tip). Plus, if you think the item being trimmed might shrink, consider seaming rather than knitting on so you can make adjustments later.

So. If you plan on using a lace edging again on another item, or you think your base item might shrink - take the time to seam (collars, cuffs, bed or bath linens). If the edging will remain on that piece, living and dying with the item that bears it - consider knitting on instead (knit counterpanes, scarves). To illustrate this post I wish I still had the denim jacket I trimmed out in knitted lace, or the baseball jacket that used strips of recycled fur interposed with white Aran style heavy cables...

In any case, back to sniffling and a nice lie-down.

Technorati : knitting

Apparently my post on knitting patterns from books published prior to 1920 or so has struck a chord. I've gotten a couple of requests on how to go about translating these older knitting patterns to modern notation. I did a six part section on how to graph up patterns from written notation before (Charting 101, 102, 103, 104, 105 and 106 ), so this sort of follows as optional post-lesson workshop.

This time I'll start with a web-available pattern. K. Harris at Vintage Connection has posted a transcription of a knitted insertion pattern that first appeared in The Delineator magazine, in June 1896. I'll be producing a modern notation graph for that lace panel. Before we begin, it's worth noting some common features of turn-of-the-century knitting. Not every technique known today was widely used, and terms varied a bit - even more widely than they do now. I'll try to cover some of the most common notations.

Knit and purl - k, p

Not much difference. Basic knits and purls were pretty much as we know them. There were however a couple of associated usages that are less common today. Knit plain usually meant work in knit stitch only. One complication - it follows then that for things knit in the round knit plain came to mean "work in stockinette." Occasionally by extension knit plain was used to indicate stockinette done in the flat rather than in the round, even though intervening rows of purl by necessity exist. I've also seen it used very infrequently to mean "continue working in established pattern," but that's rare. More often the term work even was used in that context.

Another alternate usage - purls were sometimes referred to by the term seam, as in the instruction "knit two, seam two" to produce k2 p2 rib. This is probably a hold-over from early sock making, in which a column of purls on the back of the leg was used in imitation of a seam line.

Narrow - n, k. 2t, t,

The modern equivalent of narrow is K2tog - the standard right leaning decrease. Sometimes this is written up as K2, with the "tog" part of K2tog being left out entirely. Older patterns did not use SSK. Occasionally they call out a SSK equivalent of "slip one, knit one, pass slip stitch over" (see below) but most often they don't bother with a left leaning decrease, and use K2tog, even when the cognate would be visually more balanced or appealing. Close inspection of accompanying illustrations reveals that the knitters did employ K2tog for almost all decreases. Less frequently this decrease is referred to as together (t) or knit 2 together (k. 2t.).

One unusual notation on narrow - a couple of patterns I've seen use n followed by the note "by slipping the needle through the back of the stitches." This does sound a bit like a proto-SSK. But unless otherwise modified or explained, it's pretty safe to assume that any n means k2tog.

Slip - s

Another movement that's pretty standard. Unless otherwise modified, slip in historical context means slip purlwise - transferring the stitch from the left to the right hand needle without changing its orientation.

Slip and bind off - sb, sbo, sl&b,

Another historical way of referring to the left leaning decrease or SSK equivalent, this refers to the s1-k1-psso unit.

Over - o, th, w, tho, th. o,

Yarn overs or eyelet producing increases - still a source of multiple terms today - have even more names if you go back through time. I've seen YO referred to as over (o), throw (th), throw over needle (tho or thn) eyelet (e), widen (w), make (m), put over (po), yarn on needle aka yarn over needle (yon), wool round needle (wo, wrn, won).

Special note on double YOs. Most of the time modern patterns use a multiple-unit YO if a really big eyelet is needed. But in historical patterns when YOs were used to make columns of fagot-stitch lace, it was common for the YO that formed them to be specified as a double yarn over, probably because of the yarn manipulation used to create them needed to allow for a subsequent p2tog. If a pattern with fagoting calls for a double yarn over but the stitch count on the subsequent row doesn't account for the additional new stitch (or doesn't mention dropping it), it's a good indication that a modern redaction will call for only one YO and not two.

Make - m

This can be problematic. It's on the previous list as a euphemism for YO, but it is also used in historical patterns for invisible increases - where an additional stitch is added without creating the eyelet hole formed by a YO. Modern "make" is usually interpreted as a raised bar increase, although other forms of adding a stitch like knitting into a stitch on the row below are also sometimes used. A bit of close examination of any illustrations or even experimentation may be called for here. The term made stitch is also sometimes used to indicate the new stitch formed by a YO in a previous row - especially when more than one YO created multiple adjacent loops on the needle.

Purl two together - p. 2 t., p2to, pto

Purl two together was a very common instruction, especially when columns of fagoting style lacy knitting were used.

Crossed knit - c, t, b, tw

Crossed knits are modern twisted knit stitches, produced by knitting into the back of a stitch (ktbl). I haven't seen a historical pattern that includes a purl through the back of the loop (ptbl), but that doesn't mean that one doesn't exist.

Now with all this set out, I can graph up the diamond insertion from the Delineator. It starts out with a cast-on of 23 stitches. It includes double YOs, but all double YOs are followed by p2tog units, producing the columns of fagoting in either side of the center design. I'll show the progression from as-described rows through modern notation.

First, as written, preserving the double YOs; without flipping the wrong-side rows in accordance with the modern charting convention of showing the work as it appears on the front (public) side; and without centering the rows or norming the chart to have parallel edges we get this: (click on images below for larger versions):

We quickly see that stitch counts vary from row to row, although the pattern is more or less internally proofed because wrong side rows do contain the same number of stitches as the right side rows that preceded them. We also see that the double YO followed by P2tog problem is here. Were those YOs to each be "real" each following wrong side row would need to be two stitches longer, and the lacy effect would not be achieved.

Other features of this pattern are pretty straightforward. YOs are YOs, whether they appear on the front or reverse side rows. The K3tog unit only shows up on front (even) side rows. P2tog when seen from the back is a plain old k2tog, so that's also easy to flip.

So. Norming the presentation so that wrong-side rows are shown using the correct right-side row equivalent symbol, and isolating the side columns of fagot stitch, and consolidating the YOs we get:

I've gone through all of this not only for the fun of sharing, but also because I am using this particular pattern to knit up a new quick lace scarf. I'll edge the thing out with something complementary, but for now, here's how it looks:

Knit somewhat overscale in Swift River Prescott on US #8s, one panel of this lacy pattern is perfect for a scarf - curl-free and totally reversible!

Technorati : knitting

Self stripers, multi-ply color twist yarns, and hand-dyed yarns are lots of fun. There's a ton of color there to enjoy. But sometimes a vast and unbroken expanse of color play can be boring or can produce some oddly pooled or cluttered results that look nowhere as nice as the yarn did in the skein. That's why I like to fool around with multicolor yarns, trying to find a way that they play best, or are shown to better advantage. Sometimes it's not easy (regular readers here know of at least two of my multicolor yarn experiments have landed in the limbo of my Chest of Knitting Horrors^tm over the past couple years. But sometimes it is easy.

I finished up a pair of socks as a "chaser" after the vest was done. I used a stash-aged 50g ball of Stahl Wolle Socka Color, in a multistrand twist of maroon, pine, blue, and marigold - #9140, plus another well-aged 50g ball of Patons Kroy Socks in hunter green - #409. While the colors aren't exact matches, they are close enough to complement each other. Both of these were found in last-ball sales, but several years and many miles apart. Since I need around 80-90g of most fingering weight sock yarns to make a pair, between the two bargain basement balls I had enough to finish and still have leftovers - provided I used more or less equal amounts of each.

My solution was to work heels, toes, and ribbing, plus about a little under a third of the sock's body in my solid green, plus the remainder in the multicolor. I used very simple seven-row striping repeat, working five rows of multi, and then two rows of solid green (2/7 = about 28% of my sock's body). I like how the multi is visually broken by the bands of solid green. The end result has at once more contrast and more subtlety than working the whole sock from multi alone, even if I still did contrasting color toes, heels and ribbing.

Of course the other advantage of working simple stripes on socks is to idiot-proof achieving two socks of identical size. It's very easy to count five row units and two row units. When I had completed ten muticolored stripes, it was time to start the heel, which is much easier than having to count every row or trust in doing a measured or eyeballed estimation of foot length.

So. If you find yourself with odd lots of sock yarn, don't despair. 100g of fingering weight sock yarn knitting is ample for most socks up to around men's US shoe size 10.5 or so (slightly smaller if yarn-eating textures are used). You can either work color block style, using up one leftover and then another, or you can stripe. But how wide to make the stripes?

Heels, toes, and ribbing in my standard short-rowed heel sock consume about 25g (a conservative estimate). I have large and wide feet for a fem, so if you are knitting for yourself chances are that you use roughly what I do or less. Weigh it out and set it aside. Then weigh the rest of your leftovers. If you have (for example) 40g of blue, 20g of yellow and 20g of green, you've got a ratio of 2:1:1. If you worked a stripe repeat conforming to that ratio (let's say two rows of blue, two rows of yellow, two rows of blue, two rows of green), you should have enough of each color to complete the pair.

Obviously, I had enough and did complete my pair. And I did have leftovers. As expected, I had a bit more of the multi left than I did the green, because my heels, toes, and narrow green stripes added up to about 60% of total yarn consumption.

Technorati : knitting

Rebecca notes that the patterns in the on-line repros of antique knitting and crochet books that I reported on yesterday call for needles specified by outmoded sizing systems, and asks for help in translating those sizes to modern ones.

I reply that there several sources for info on knitting from these older patterns floating around the Web. Here are a couple.

• The most complete size comparison chart I know about that shows older vs. modern needle sizes is at Lois Baker's Fiber Gypsy website.
  
• I've also got one here at String that speaks to the equivalents between historical and modern needle sizes. I add some common vintage yarns typically used with those needle sizes along with suggestions for equivalent modern yarns (I'll be updating this soon based on the new info from yesterday's books).
  
• The list of ancient yarns with approximate yardages maintained at Vintage Knits is also very useful if you're trying to work from an older pattern specifying an unknown yarn (often without yarn specs.)
  
• The yarn database here at wiseNeedle can be helpful, too. We've got a smattering of reviews for actual vintage yarns have entered by knitters who stumbled across older products in stashes or yard sales (reviews of discontinued yarns are always welcome here!). Other people have posted reviews noting that they have used various modern products as substitutes for now discontinued yarns. You can find the former by looking up the old yarn name like you would any modern one. You can also use the search comments field on our advanced search page to look for mention of an older yarn in any review.
  
  If you've got a yarn review to add, the most efficient way to do it is to first look up the name and see if it's in the collection. If it is - click on the link on the yarn's page to add your comments. Or if the yarn is new to our collection, here's a page where you can add both basic data and your comments at the same time.
  
• The knitting terms glossary also maintained here at wiseNeedle contains historical British and American usages as well as modern ones. You can limit the result to two or more languages by holding down your <CTRL> key and highlighting the desired ones from the drop-down list.
  

Technorati : knitting

Out web-walking again, I've stumbled across a treasure trove of books on spinning, weaving, and other textile arts. It includes historical and recent works on lacemaking, embroidery, tatting, knitting, crochet and some other less practiced crafts, as well as ethnographic material, periodicals, and academic papers. I'm sure I'm the last to find out about it, but I share the reference all the same.

This textile-related archive is maintained by the University of Arizona. Its collections are available on-line, with the individual works so distributed either aged out of copyright, or presented with the authors' permission. There are thousands of items - mostly geared to industry and manufacture, but with a healthy smattering of works detailing hand production. Scans are available as PDFs, with the larger books broken out into smaller segments of under 15MB. Not all are in English.

Among the works I found that are of greatest interest to me in specific are:

Whiting, Olive. Khaki Knitting Book, Allies Special Aid, 1917, 58 pages. PDF

This compendium of knitting patterns presents sweaters, wristlets, socks, scarves, mittens, hats, caps, and baby clothes intended in part for troops overseas during WWI, and for the comfort of refugee families displaced by the war. Patterns for knitting and crochet are both included. The socks shown mostly knit top-down, some have a gradually decreased instead of grafted toe. Some of the socks are worked on two needles and seamed. One pair in particular (marked as a pattern from the American Red Cross, p. 13) seems to include a written description of a grafted toe, but it does not name the technique. Directions are a bit more detailed than is usual for pre 1940 knitting booklets. Fewer than a quarter of the patterns are illustrated with finished item photos. Aside from a list of abbreviations in the front, there are no how-to or technique illustrations.

Nicoll, Maud Churchill. Knitting and Sewing. How to Make Seventy Useful Articles for Men in the Army and Navy, George H. Doran Company, New York, 1918, 209 pages. PDF

This book is a bit more detailed than the previous one. It also contains a rundown of standard troop knitting patterns - hats, mufflers, balaclavas (called helmets), mittens, socks and the like. Every project is illustrated either with a photo or a line drawing of the finished product. Instructions are written out in a fuller format than in the Khaki Knitting Book. It also has some valuable bits of instruction including a list of yarn substitutions, plus two full size color plates showing the wools used, identified by name; a small stitch dictionary section,

Of special note are some unusual mittens (including a mitten with truncated thumbs and index fingers - p.68), half-mittens - p. 77, "doddies" or mittens with an open thumb, p. 80, and double heavy mittens intended for seamen or mine sweepers hauling cables - p. 94). The grafting method of closing up sock toes is clearly described AND illustrated, but it is called "Swiss darning" (p.131). I've heard that term used for duplicate stitch embroidery on knitting, especially when the decorative stitches are sewn in rows mimicking actual knitting, rather than being stitched vertically, but I have never before seen it applied to actual grafting. The entire section on socks and stockings is particularly clear and useful. There are even a couple of crocheted and knit mens' ties in the sewing section.

Finally, the sewing section (about a quarter of the book) might be useful to people doing historical costuming or regimental re-creators who are looking to augment their kit. The one drawback is that most of the sewing patterns are predicated on Butterick printed patterns, and the schematics are not provided in the book. Among the offerings are money belts, a chamois leather body protector and waistcoat, various types of shirts and undergarments, pajamas made from heavy blanket fabric, and a book bag (like a messenger's bag).

Egenolf, Christian. Modelbuch aller art Nehewercks un Strickens, George Gilbers, 1880, 75 pages. Note: Reprint of 1527 book. PDF

Ostaus, Giovanni. La Vera Perfezione del Disegno [True Perfection in Design], 1561, 92 pages. Note: 1909 facsimile. PDF

These are two modelbooks of the 1500s. There are several others in the collection, but they are mostly books of needle lace designs. Ostaus also offers up mostly patterns for the various forms of needle lace, plus some patterns that can be adapted to free-hand (as opposed to counted) embroidery, plus a large section of allegorical plates to inspire stitched medallions, slips, and cabinets. One thing I've always liked are some of his negative/positive patterns. These are designs that if laid out on a strip of thin leather or paper and cut can be separated longitudinally into two identical pieces. There are several of these scattered around the middle of the book.

Starting around page 73 or so there is a section of graphed patterns, a number of which landed in my New Carolingian Modelbook collection.

The Egenolf book also is mostly line drawing suitable for freehand embroidery. Some are pretty cluttered, but some are very graceful. The oak border on p. 32 has always been one of my favorites. There's one plate with a counted pattern, on p. 72.

---. Priscilla Cotton Knitting Book, Priscilla Publishing Co., 51 pages. PDF1, PDF2, PDF3, PDF4, PDF5, PDF6.

This books is obviously a seminal source behind many of today's reference books on knitting technique and patterns. Notation is sparse and "antique" with n (narrow) being used for k2tog, and o for yarn over, and other oddities. There's a fair bit of circular doily knitting, but it is of the knit radially and seamed variety seen also in Abbey's Knitting Lace. In fact many of the doilies appearing in Abbey appear to have been adapted directly from this work. You'll also recognize many Walker treasury edging patterns in these pages.

In addition to the stitch texture and lacy knitting sections, there's a bit on "cameo knitting" which appears to be another name for stranding (in PDF2). The section on filet knitting (in PDF3) is relatively extensive, and clearly shows both the strengths and weaknesses of this rarely described style.

---. Priscilla Irish Crochet Book No. 2, Priscilla Publishing Co., 52 pages. PDF1, PDF2, PDF3, PDF4, PDF5, PDF6, PDF7, PDF8.

This has got to be the single most complete and eye-popping source I've ever seen on Irish crochet. Not only does this contain an amazing amount of eye candy, it also gives directions on how to create it, offering up pattern descriptions for the individual motifs, the joining brides and grounds, and the working method of fastening the motifs to a temporary backing while the grounds are being worked.

---. Egyptisch Vlechtwerk [Sprang], Holkema & Warendorf, 36 pages.PDF1, PDF2

As an example of the depth of the collection, here's a work on Sprang, one of the lesser known fiber manipulation crafts sometimes mistaken for early knitting. It is in Dutch and appears to be from before WWI, but it is illustrated with photos of finished pieces and works in progress.

These are just a small sample of the hundreds of works available at the University's website. Again, most are on the industrial aspects of the textile arts, from fiber acquisition (including sericulture and sheep raising) through spinning, and weaving, but a goodly number are of direct interest to hand-crafters. Topic lists exist for knitting, crochet, embroidery, cross stitch, lace, tatting, and a multitude of other subjects. Support this valuable resource by visiting and using it. I know I'll be combing through here for years...

Technorati : crochet, embroidery, knitting, lace

Techknitting is posting an interesting series on stranding, and as part of it, mentioned the use of Strickfingerhuts (knitting yarn guides/knitting thimbles), linking back to my original post on the subject.

For those who are unfamiliar with them, they are those gizmos that sit on the end of the left hand index finger, that are used by Continental style knitters (pickers) to hold and separate two or more yarns while doing stranded colorwork.

Adding some more detail on the subject, I'd like to address a problem TK points out as being common among those who hold two yarns in one hand while stranding - differential feed.

If a row has more or less equal numbers of stitches of both colors, both yarn strands are consumed at the same rate. But if a row has lots of Color A, but very little Color B, A will be eaten at a much greater rate, eventually causing the knitter to readjust his or her grasp of the yarn to even things out.

Those of us who do use Strickfingerhuts find that the differential feed rate problem is greatly minimized compared to trying to hold both yarns in the left hand unassisted. Yes, eventually the difference in yarn consumption catches up with us and we have to yank the strands even, but no where near as often.

We do however find that over time we prefer to put the dominant color (the color most represented on a row) in either the left or right eyelet to minimize the feed problem. There's no hard and fast rule to this, it's a matter of personal preference.

In stockinette in the round, I prefer to have the dominant color in the right eyelet, and the less represented color in the left. This helps when I lock in my floats:

Although I usually work stranding in the round, occasionally I have to do it in the flat. If I'm knitting stockinette in the flat using a Strickfingerhut, and I'm on the purl side, I prefer to have the dominant color in the left hand eyelet.

For the record, I notice no difference in the appearance of the finished product if I mix eyelets - sometimes putting the dominant color in one, and sometimes in the other. I do however note that some other Strickfingerhut users do, and advocate always keeping the background color in the same eyelet regardless of its relative dominance on any one row. Again, experimentation is your friend.

Technorati : knitting

I've played around some with methods of producing and applying the edge finish to the khaki vest. First I tried the separately knit/sewn on band method, using a couple of different approaches to the seaming (fold band longitudinally, sew the band up, then apply it; sew on both sides in one pass; sew on the display side, then do a separate seam to affix the facing side). Of all of them, the last method worked best, but it was the most effort intensive of them all.

So I looked further. Plain I-Cord (knit on or applied) was too narrow to stabilize the edge, and two courses of it would have been too bulky. I didn't like the way that picking up along the edge then knitting out looked - especially along the curve of the armhole.

Even more experiments ensued. Finally I landed on knitting-on a strip parallel to the edge, then going back and seaming down the free side on the inside of the piece. Doing that I could produce an edge of any desired width, go around curves and even plan on mitering the vest point corner. Here's a swatch with a mitered corner. Note that I haven't sewn down the facing on the inside yet, but natural stockinette curl is keeping it nice and neat. (For some, the inside seaming might be optional, but I plan on doing it on my finished piece).

To miter the corner of this 8-stitch strip, I used short rows. Here's how I did it:

Applied 8-stitch Strip Facing with Mitered Corner

Start with the public side of the work facing you, holding it with the bulk of the piece on the left, so that you're working up the right side of the thing (upside down from the picture above). Using straight needles, cast on 9 stitches, then pick up one stitch in the edge of the piece being finished. While the strip is 9 stitches wide, one is consumed during joining, so the part that protrudes is really only 8 stitches wide.

Row 1 (wrong side): P8, k1.
Row 2: S1, k6, ssk, pick up one stitch in edge of swatch
Row 3: S1, p7, k1

Repeat Rows 2 and 3 until you reach the corner, having just completed an odd number (wrong side row)

Row 4: S1, k6, wrap and turn.
Row 5: Slip the wrapped stitch, p6, wrap and turn
Row 6: Ignoring any previously wrapped stitches, S1, k5, wrap and turn
Row 7: Ignoring any previously wrapped stitches, Slip the wrapped stitch, p4, wrap and turn
Row 8: Ignoring any previously wrapped stitches, S1, k3, wrap and turn
Row 9: Ignoring any previously wrapped stitches, S1, p2, wrap and turn
Row 10: Ignoring any previously wrapped stitches, S1, k2, knit the next stitch along with the loop around its base, turn
Row 11: Ignoring any previously wrapped stitches, S the stitch you just knit, p2, purl the next stitch along with the loop around its base, turn
Row 12: Ignoring any previously wrapped stitches, S1, k3, knit the next stitch along with the loop around its base, turn
Row 13: Ignoring any previously wrapped stitches, Slip the stitch you just knit, p4, purl the next stitch along with the loop around its base, turn
Row 14: Ignoring any previously wrapped stitches, S1, k5, knit the next stitch along with the loop around its base, turn
Row 15: Ignoring any previously wrapped stitches, Slip the stitch you just knit, p6, purl the next stitch along with the loop around its base, turn

The corner is complete, return to repeating Rows 2 and 3. Optional finish - seam down the inside edge of this facing.

I've stated applying this same edging to the armholes of my vest (having previously seamed the shoulders).

I plan to do the bottom edge next, incorporating the mitered corner on the vest points. But I haven't played with the buttonhole band treatments yet. Sadly, I have misplaced my copy of InkKNitters. It's here. Somewhere... Weekend plans include tossing my knitting library to find it.

Oh. Unless a monsoon is upon us, weekend plans also include attending the annual Gore Place Sheepshearing Festival in Waltham, Massachusetts. Not a big festival as fiber fairs go, but very local and lots of fun. Look for me with both Elder and Smaller Daughter in tow.

Technorati : knitting

After yesterday's post on my Galaga Hat, I've gotten a couple of questions about the method for working back and forth seamlessly to make a tube. In specific, some people wanted to see illustrated how I make the wrap and turn join. I try to oblige them (click on pix to see them larger):

I've shown just the knit-side round. The purl side round works in exactly the same way. Work to the marker, making sure to work the last stitch before the marker along with the loop around its base, shift the marker over, wrap the stitch after the marker, flip the piece over, return the marker to the right-hand needle, and continue with the rest of the round.

Why go through all this trouble?

I don't have enough yarn to strand around the entire piece. Nor do my motifs span the entire circumference of my hat. I am in effect working spot Intarsia motifs (actually I'm stranding between them, but limiting that stranding to the spot motifs). Rather than cut the yarn at the end of each motif, or stretch it back to the beginning of the spot design on each row, I am working the equivalent of flat knitting - going back and forth, alternating rows of knit and rows of purl. When I purl or knit back to my spot motif, my contrasting color ends are on the correct side of the motif for the next round. But I hate sewing up, and want to make a hat without seams. Rather than knit this totally flat (a valid option), I'm using wrap and turn to make the join at the end of each round.

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I had started this post back when I was up to the shoulders of my ribbed leaf pullover, but life intervened and it languished. Also, the diagrams ended up taking more time than I thought they would. For the record, I write these entries mostly in the half-hour I steal in the morning after breakfast, while my kids are getting dressed for school. Some of the longer and more illustrated ones can take a couple of days to pull together. Yet another reason why my blogging rate has fallen back since leaving the world of consulting for full-time employment.

For the record, I'm now just a couple of rows away from completing the sleeves of the ribbed leaf pullover. I'll use the piece to do some assembly and finishing posts later this week and next.

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Some deadlines have passed, others remain. I did have an hour or so of knitting time last night, which I used to excellent effect, both for some much needed relaxation, and to advance my leaf pullover. I am now finishing up the front, at the point where the centermost stitches are set aside and the shoulders are completed.

Now this stage of production is one that has inspired a huge number of wiseNeedle advice board questions. The directions to join in a second ball of yarn and knit both shoulders at the same time tend to confuse people who are new to knitting. Here's the basic concept. My postulated directions say something like

Work across 25 in pattern, place center 20 on holder, attach second ball of yarn and work remaining stitches; continue in pattern and commencing on the next wrong-side row, working both sides at the same time, decreasing 3 stitches at each neck edge 2 times, then 1 stitch at neck edge three times. Continue until piece measures 20 inches from bottom and bind off.

Here you see a basic sweater front (or back), knit in green yarn bearing a big R in the center so we can keep track of the right (read public) side. You see all 70 stitches on one needle, ready to commence a right side row.

At this point, I've followed the direction to "Work across 25 in pattern, place center 20 on holder". Note that the stitches on my right hand needle have been completed.

Now I'm beginning the part that confuses many beginners, "attach second ball of yarn and work remaining stitches." It's not difficult. We're going to do the left and right shoulders simultaneously, mirroring all shaping so that they are symmetrical. The stitches on the holder form the bottom of the neck opening. Sometimes the pattern specifies that they be bound off, other times it asks that they be placed on a holder so that they can be used "live" to form the collar. In either case, they are now parked and won't be touched again until the pattern revisits collar production and finishing.

Take another ball of the same yarn and starting with the stitches on the far side of the stitch holder, finish out the row. Leave enough tail at the neck edge for easy finishing later. This next diagram shows the work after I've completed the "work remaining stitches" bit. I've finished my right side row.

The diagram below shows the work flipped over to work back across the wrong side (the non-public side). I've got my two balls of yarn set up, one for each shoulder area, and I've indicated the spots where the decreases should happen.

We're up to continue in pattern, working both sides at the same time, decreasing 3 stitches at each neck edge 2 times." The pattern is now directing the shaping of the neckline. When a pattern calls for decreasing more than one stitch at an edge I usually bind off at the beginning of a row. Yes, that makes a stepwise decrease, but as you'll see I minimize the jaggedness a bit. The only exception to this is if I'm working in a giant superbulky (3 stitches to the inch or fewer). In a yarn that big, the steps can be quite noticeable. But back to 99.99% of all knitting.

To accomplish my first set of bind offs I have to remember to work my rows in pairs beginning on a wrong-side row- two rows each with stitches bound off at the beginning yields symmetrical decreases at the right and left edge of the work. In the diagram above, I am poised to begin my initial shoulder decrease. I have worked back across the first bunch of shoulder stitches, ending at the neck edge. No bind-offs yet. But as I begin the second set of shoulder stitches I bind off the first three, then continue across the row. Then I flip the work over to begin my right-side row, work across the shoulder side I just decreased, and perform a similar decrease on the other shoulder

At the end of my second decrease row (in this case, a public side row) I finally have symmetrical decreases on either side of my neck edge, formed by binding off stitches at the commencement of two successive rows. My bind offs are a bit jagged and step like, but that can be diminished somewhat by slipping rather than working the first stitch bound off prior to ending it off.

I am ready to go on to the next direction in my instructions. It says to decrease "1 stitch at neck edge three times". It doesn't say to do this by binding off. I could do it that way, and many patterns say so. But I don't like the jaggies formed by binding off. If I've got only one stitch to get rid of, I'll use plain old K2tog and SSK decreases. Depending on the pattern, I might work them in the edgemost stitches, or in the next-to-edgemost stitches, allowing them to form some sort of decorative detail. Also unlike the bind-off style decrease, there's no logical reason to separate these between two successive rows. I generally work them on the same row. Most of the time that's a right-side (public side) row, but in my current project - a piece with heavy texture patterning - it's easier to do them on the plain purl worked wrong side, using P2tog and P2tog through the back of the loop so as to produce the same effect on the public side as K2tog and SSK. In any case, I place them on either side of the neck edge, creating the curve that is the foundation for whatever collar treatment is specified by the pattern in hand.

An aside: It's interesting to note that older patterns more commonly suggested completion of one shoulder and then the other rather than knitting them in parallel. Most often those pattens gave directions for the first shoulder, and then said something like "repeat for second shoulder, reversing shaping as necessary." (A direction that caused me to blink in wide-eyed terror while knitting my very first sweater.) There's no reason why patterns written in that style can't be worked in the "at the same time" method. I prefer the two-together method because it's how I idiot-proof my own knitting to ensure that my shoulders end up being exact cognates of each other. But not everyone likes working this way.

Reasons to stick with the older method might include the unavailability of a second ball (if for example you are working off one immense cone of yarn and don't want to break it to create a second ball); or the need to concentrate on one set of shaping directions at a time. So long as the you take care to make sure that row counts are the same and that placement of the decreases is a parallel as possible, working one shoulder at a time is a perfectly legitimate way to go. There's no shame in working the one at a time method, it's just a matter of mental wiring and personal comfort.

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A couple bits from my mailbox today, plus a long-lost toy.

Yards, grams, and ounces

A reader wrote to ask how to convert ounces and grams to yards, because she'd found a pattern and wanted to buy enough yarn to knit it. I answered with this:

You can't convert ounces and grams to yards. Yards measures length. Ounces and grams measure weight. One ounce equals 28.35 grams (give or take). One gram equals roughly 0.35 ounces. There are dozens of conversion calculators on the web that can help you flip between the two if you don't have a calculator or pencil and paper to hand.

Let's say you had 1.75 ounces (roughly 50 grams) of a 100% wool. You could have about 250 yards of fine fingering weight yarn, or around 135 yards of sport weight wool, or around 120 yards of DK weight wool, or around 100 yards of worsted, or about 80 yards of bulky. And that's without factoring in stuff like how lofty or dense the yarn is, whether or not it's made up of multiple strands tightly twisted, or one giant fluffy strand. One five stitch per inch worsted for example might be about 110 yards for 50 grams, but another might be only 90, all depending on the denseness of the strand.

This is further complicated by fiber blends. 1.75 ounces of acrylic at 5 stitches per inch (the textbook definition of worsted) might have significantly higher yardage than 1.75 ounces of 5 stitch per inch wool because the acrylic fiber is in and of itself less massy.

All this being said, there are very loose guidelines of roughly how much yardage a pound of yarn might contain. But remember - use these numbers as a rough guideline only, and only for the fiber type and gauge specified. If you're planning a yarn purchase and are going on only this type of info - buy at least 25% more than you think you need. I can guarantee that three times out of four, you'll end up using more yarn than you originally planned. Here's one set of rough yards per pound figures. Remember - it's for hand-spun 100% wool only.

Why post patterns for free?

Another person wrote to ask why I post patterns for free. She specifically asked if I was doing it to undercut the people who charged, and wondered why I didn't write for magazines or other publishers. I wrote back:

I'm flattered that you think my patterns are good enough for professional publication. I think they're borderline. I don't do lots of multiple sizes, they tend to be pretty sketchy. Some are more like method descriptions than hard and fast patterns with set yarn quantities.

I post patterns because I find the process of working out the problems they present to be fascinating. My patterns are posted more as a by-product of that exploration rather than the cumulative product. I want to share the fun of both inquiry and production.

I have dabbled in writing patterns for a yarn maker and an on-line magazine. I'm a proposal writer by trade. I spend my professional life running the gauntlet of multiple concurrent hard-stop deadlines. Knitting is an area where my only deadline is "whenever." I found out that harnessing the creative process to a fixed delivery framework squeezed all the fun (and much of the creativity) out of it. I can't work under a mandate that inspiration will occur between Thursday next and the 30th of the month, will involve one particular technique and one particular yarn in a color not of my choosing; or that the finished object and full proofed pattern in five sizes will be delivered without delay within 15 days of yarn receipt. Even the web-based magazines brook no delay. So I retreat to my own deadline-free tenth-of-never world, doing whatever the heck I want, when I want to do it.

Why not self-publish and sell the result? Because the burden of handling the business end of the thing (payments, refunds, shipments or downloads, record keeping for taxes) is not commensurate with the pocket change income the effort would bring. I'm re-thinking this in reference to my embroidery book, but to do it for lots of little knitting patterns would be a big pain. Also because patterns people pay for are held to a higher standard than are give-aways. To be competitive, I'd have to knit the trial in a color that photographs well (opposed to the color I want to use), figure out that range of sizes, and use a much higher standard of test knitting than I currently do. While I don't put out junk as a rule, errors are there. I get to them when I can. But I don't want to knit everything twice or more - once to create it and at least once more to test the directions, possibly trying out every size offered.

Long Lost Toy

Well, not lost. It's been sitting in a corner for a while. I made it for Larger Daughter when she was four. Now that Smaller Daughter is out of the hobby horse years, poor Hero isn't seeing much action. But he's one of my favorite projects, out of all the things I have ever made.

I had no pattern, some black and green Melton wool scraps left over from some SCA outfits, stuffing, a stick, two brass rings, plus a bit of trim, glue-on jewels, a couple of and bells left over from making holiday ornaments. I improvised and here's the result.

A stick horse menacing enough for a Nazgul's child. Needless to say Hero will be spending his retirement here, and not getting passed down to anyone else.

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When they only sort-of match. Kind of.

Here are my 1.4 mittens. As you can see, they're very quick. Even faster to do than socks. Now I can see how girls of long ago had the goal of knitting an absurdly large number of mittens to stow away in their hope chests against the needs of their future family. At my almost half a mitten a night rate (in about 1.5 hours of knitting time), I could do a pair a week and still have time left over for other knitting.

Too much fun, especially since I have no hope chest deadline. I think I'll have to do another pair for me. Another chance to graph, and to do so on a larger field (at least 35x69 boxes to the mitten tip, instead of 28x61, perhaps a few more). Now, what to put on mine... Sprites from old computer games? Cute, but hardly original at this point. Words? I would have to find some pithy piece I could endure reading day after day. Some other graphed pattern from my book? Perhaps the bunny I shared here before? Something from my out-take notes - the patterns that weren't documented well enough to make it into the book, or proved out to be from after 1600? Perhaps. Some doodle with no prior precedent? Also not unlikely. One caveat though, I may be delayed in my start on my sequel mittens. I've gotten a begging/pleading/groveling request for another Klein Bottle hat.

Two quick cheats - Got a mitten or other strong left/right directional chart on your computer and want a quick and foolproof way to swap that left/right thumb placement without sitting down and taking the two tedious minutes to transcribe it on the hard copy? Most printer drivers in both the Windows and Macintosh worlds have a "print mirror image" setting buried way down on their Advanced Features page, accessible off the printer set-up or print controls dialog page. Use that to print a new copy of your graph. Instant left/right swap.

Or if your printer driver doesn't have that setting, get a sheet of clear viewgraph transparency plastic that's meant to go through your printer (the stuff that's used on overhead projectors). Print on that. Put the result in a page protector with a sheet of white paper behind it. When time comes to do that second mitten, flip it over. Overhead transparencies are becoming rare in this day of cheap full screen projectors, but many teachers still use them and they're still in the office supply stores.

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June over at Twosheep recently wrote about a tubular cast on. That sent me off looking up various ones. June recommends the one from Montse Stanley's Readers' Digest Knitters' Handbook, although she notes that doing it in stockinette is not as stretchy as doing a ribbed tubular cast-on. She gives links to a couple of nicely photographed instructions at My Fashionable Life, and Little Purl of the Orient. I don't have that particular Stanley book on my shelf, but I use an entirely different tubular cast on than the one described at those sites and in the book.

I learned an at once more fiddly and simpler method for a ribbed tubular cast-on during the second sweater I ever knit - Penny Straker's Eye of the Partridge unisex raglan. Straker's pattern format included a side bar with helpful advice or bonus illustrations of techniques and tricks. This one included instructions for the cast-on I did Partridge as a gift for one of my sisters. I knit it in Germantown worsted (very much like Cascade 220), in an dusty antique rose and a deeper, almost blood rose for the darker complementing color. It's long gone now otherwise I'd put a photo here instead of the sample photo from the pattern, shamelessly lifted from a web-based retailer (the pattern itself is still available, and also comes in a kids' version).

Straker's method calls for using a provisional cast-on, and casting on half of the stitches called for in the pattern. If for example, the pattern asks for 100 stitches, I cast on 50. Then I knit in plain stockinette for four to ten rows (usually 6). At the completion of the last row, I unzip my provisional cast-on, and place all the newly freed stitches along the bottom edge onto a second needle. I often use a needle one size smaller than I used for the stockinette piece to make this easier.

I now have a long, skinny snake of knitting, suspended like a hammock between two active needles. I hold the needles so that the strip is folded in half, with the purl side on the inside. Then I take a third needle and alternately knit one stitch off the needle closer to me:

and purl one stitch from the needle that's further away:

(Pictures courtesy of Younger Daughter, already at 8 as good a photographer as her mother will ever be)

When I'm done, I have a nice, neat, stretchy tubular edge in K1, P1 rib that can be made wide enough to accommodate a drawstring. I use this routinely for almost all of my hem edges - even for circular knitting. I've made the small divot at the join into a design feature on some pieces where I've started my cast-on at the neckline. On others, I've used the dangling tail to snick it up and make the starting point invisible.

In this case, I broke into twisted rib the row immediately following the cast-on row. How's the leaf sweater coming? The front of it is starring in the cast-on photos, above. Here's the back - blurry and hard to see, but proof that I'm done with it. Also proof that yes - a texture pattern that's mostly stockinette will also curl.

For the record, here's a bit of detail in which you can barely make out the texture pattern and the armhole decrease area (click on this for a close-up):

And because I'm still sniffing around for a small project to run in parallel with my leaf sweater, plus I'm having fun with my ancient Unger Britania- I'll take another lead from June. It's mittens next. The shape of a traditional Norwegian mitten looks pretty simple, yet with ample scope for fun. Hello Yarn offers a PDF of a blank mitten graph. I think I'll take that idea and run with it - redrafting the template for a smaller gauge, and using some of the historical graphed charts from my book on embroidery. If nothing else, I'll enjoy the doodle time.

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A couple items from my inbox.

Question on Justin's Counterpane

Cindy wrote to say she was having problems conceptualizing how the pieces to make my Justin's Counterpane pieced blanket fit together. This particular blanket is a large scale intro to white cotton/lacy knitting. Only twelve main units are needed to complete it - six keyhole shaped motifs, and six whole octagons. Ten triangles are used to eke out the sides and make them straight. An optional edging finishes the thing. They're put together like this:

I did not use additional triangles at the corners to make a true rectangle because it's easier to go around a more gentle angle without mitering than it is to go around a 90-degree turn. And I didn't want to go through the bother of mitering my corners.

Because of the relatively few units used and the simplicity of the classic pinwheel motif, I think that people wanting to make a first item in this style might find the pattern useful. Being a blanket, it doesn't have to fit anybody so gauge is a guideline, not a mandate. It can be worked in any cotton or cotton blend yarn you like. The yarn I chose was a very inexpensive DK weight, but by using the appropriate size needles, a piece of usable dimensions could be made in anything from sport to worsted. Much heavier than that though and you'll get into weight issues, cotton being quite a bit massive than its equivalent thickness in acrylic or wool. (You could even work this in standard wool or acrylic, but I think the design will be crisper in cotton.)

In any case, some basic guidelines for knitting and seaming together pieced counterpanes include binding the motifs off especially loosely; blocking the units before assembly, by wetting them down and pinning them out while stretching them to their maximum extent; and using whip stitch or when possible, mattress stitch done in half of the edge most stitch to sew them together. Back stitch or mattress stitch done further into the motifs will make the seams too dense and rigid, and may introduce cupping.

Bargain Hunters' Blocking Boards

Rachel and I had an eMail chat recently. I think it was over on one of the knitting-related boards at Live Journal. She was looking for advice on blocking. In specific, she was looking for low-cost alternatives for blocking. We went through the standards - pinning out on carpet covered with towels or on a padded table or bed, but she wanted a rigid surface that was easy to stow in addition to being inexpensive.

I recommended getting a half-sheet of drywall from the hardware store, taped around the edges to reduce crumble, and topped with a flat sheet through which the pinning happens. I also suggested scouring yard sales or opportunity shops for the squishy/spongy foam pattern/alphabet block floor tiles or play mats favored by the parents of toddlers. They're indestructible and often outlast the toddler years, landing at second-hand venues. Top those with a sheet and pin away, happy that you've found a modular, easy to store solution that as a creative recycle, nibbles away at the waste stream.

Rachel decided to go with the play mat idea. She sent me a note of thanks, and included this shot of her shawl blocking:

(Photo is hers, used with permission). She also notes that she got her mat at WalMart, and it was less than $20. Love the shawl, Rachel, and as ever - I'm delighted to have been useful.

A quickie today.

There have been a few times when I've wanted to work I-cord (or a knit edging) onto the perimeter of something, completely encircling it, and ending up by grafting the final live stitches onto the original cast-on row with the hope of creating as near seamless a join as possible. Here's an example:

To date when I've needed to do this, I've either knit several rows extra of the I-cord "free" prior to beginning to apply it to the edging, or I've used a provisional cast-on with waste yarn for wider knit trims. Working several rows of extra I-cord gives me a snip zone I can cut and then ravel back to produce the cast-on edge live loops I need for grafting. I suppose for narrow trims, I could do a similar thing - knitting several rows of plain garter or stockinette prior to beginning simultaneous application to the thing being trimmed and commencement of my trim pattern. A judicious snip and ravel back will reveal those live loops just as nicely as working sacrificial to-be-cut I-cord does.

But I had a "doh!" moment last night. Why not just cast those few first stitches directly onto a large safety pin or small stitch holder? Unclasp, transfer stitches onto a live needle, and go! To do this, I'd use the simplest of provisional cast-ons, starting out by holding my strand behind my stitch holder and picking one stitch up knitwise, then I'd shunt the yarn to the front of the holder and with my needle tip in back of it, pick up one stitch purlwise, and so on.

Here are seven stitches picked up on a stitch holder:

It looks kind of like the figure-8 cast-on I favor for toe-up socks:

EXCEPT that by picking up the stitches instead of winding the yarn around the needles I've managed to mount every other stitch with the leading leg in back. Not a problem. I'd work one corrective row of purls back before beginning my edging, and on that row, I'd purl into that back leading leg to eliminate any inadvertently twisted stitches. Or I could reverse the direction of the stitch holder and wind the yarn on exactly the same way as I do for my fig-8 cast-on, eliminating the problem entirely.

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I got a note yesterday from someone who commiserated at the slow going doing a piece so full of left twist and right twist 1x1 cables, and who wanted to know if there were other ways to do them.

There are several ways to go about it. Some are documented in B. Walker's stitch treasuries, others elsewhere. The first and most obvious is to do a plain old 1x1 cable, slipping the stitch that needs to go in back onto a cable needle or spare DPN, working the one that needs to land on top, then returning the slipped stitch to the active needle and working it, too. Nice and neat, but time consuming.

Some people have a knack for working these small cable crossings without using a cable needle or other aid to hold any stitches. This works best in a nice, cooperative and slightly sticky wool, but with practice can be employed in most other materials, too. Famous Wendy is especially good at it, and has a nice tutorial on no-needle cables on her website. Although it is employed there for a 3x3 cable, the same principle holds for a simple 1x1 twist. Grumperina also has an illustrated no-cable-needle tutorial. Her method is slightly different and works well, too.

But being a klutz and prone to dropping stitches, I prefer some of the other less adventurous methods. My irrational preference here is sort of like people who prefer to keep their fingers on the keyboard while using a word processing program, disdaining use of the mouse in favor of key command sequences.

Here are a couple of other ways to make 1x1 twists. B. Walker advocates the second method described below for each (the ones I attempted to illustrate). As with most cases in which there are several ways to accomplish the same thing, experimentation is always a good idea. Different methods will give different gauges and depending on the materials used, may have an effect on fabric drape and loft. If you've got a pattern that's heavily dependent on LT and RT, take a moment to play with the various ways to accomplish them when you are swatching. You may find that one of the many ways to produce them works best for your project in hand.

Left Twist (LT) Methods - Rightmost stitch ends up on top

• Identify your two-stitch unit. Skip the first stitch and knit into the back of the second, then knit the skipped stitch through the back of the loop and slide the entire unit off your needle.
• Identify your two-stitch unit. Skip the first stitch and knit into the back of the second, then knit BOTH stitches together through the back of the loop and slide the entire unit off your needle

Knitting into the back of the second stitch

Knitting both together

Completed twist unit

Right Twist Methods - Leftmost stitch ends up on top

• Identify your two-stitch unit. Skip the first stitch and knit into the front of the second, then knit the skipped stitch and slide the entire unit off your needle.
• Identify your two-stitch unit. Knit both stitches together, but do not remove them from the left needle. Knit the first stitch again, and slide the entire unit off your needle.

Knitting both stitches together

Knitting the first stitch again

Both completed twists (placed a couple of rows apart, they make up the C shape in the center of the mini-swatch)

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A person posting on one of the historical knitting lists asked a question yesterday about this 18th century Spanish knitted cap. I've poked around the Victoria and Albert Museum's on line photo collection, but I hadn't taken the time to zoom in and look closely at this particular item.

At first glance the cap appears to be covered with knit-purl texture patterning, but if you zoom in (and especially if you have the ability to get an even closer look at the image) you'll see that the texture isn't formed by knits and purls. Instead, the design is made up of some sort of stranding that floats over a stockinette background. The question was about how this might have been done. Unfortunately, we can't see the back of the work. So I got to thinking...

The most obvious way would be for someone to work up a plain stockinette cap, then hand-stitch the floats over counted stitches, to produce a diapered or pattern darned effect. This would certainly work, but lacks elegance. If I were making a hat like this, I'd much rather do the decoration at the same time as the base knitting, rather than going back later.

This leaves two methods - some sort of in-row wrapping, or slipping stitches with the yarn in front of the work.

Let's look at slipping first. If you knit a row, then holding yarn in front, slip several stitches, and then resume knitting, you make a fabric that has a base row of normal height, then a distended area where stitches were slipped. If you continue to do this on subsequent rows without rows of intervening plain knit, you pull those stretched stitches up even further, creating a vertical column with a grossly distorted base structure. It doesn't look like the knitter of this cap made the floats by slipping with yarn in front because if you zoom in and examine the long vertical bars of the ornamentation, a float seems to happens on every row, and there is no evidence of vertical distortion.

This leaves the wrap method. Wrapping stitches for ornamental effect isn't widely practiced any more although it still survives almost as a curiosity in some cotton knitting. You can see an example of wrapped stitches in the cover pattern on the Lewis Knitting Counterpanes book published by Taunton Press. In this case the wrapping is pulled very tightly to magnify the gathered effect of the pattern. The wraps are peeking out beneath the bellies of the scallops:

I've also seen texture designs in European pattern collections that use wrapped stitches. There are a couple of the tight-wraps-as-gathers type at the end of Omas Strickgeheimnisse, a German-language knitting texture pattern dictionary. I thought there was at least one in the Bauerliches Stricken series (another 3-volume German stitch dictionary), but thumbing through, I can't find it now. Some of the on-line Russian language stitch collections also show wrapped stitches I found these by searching for УЗОРЫ which may mean pattern or stitch in Russian. It also seems to transliterate to the letters "uzori or uzor" in Western alphabets, which are also good starting points for searches. (No I don't speak or read Russian, I've stumbled across this bit of trivia while web-walking.) I don't have time this morning to fish up the citations for these dimly remembered Russian texture patterns. I'll have to leave that for tomorrow.

However, none of the contemporary sources for these wrapped stitches employ them in the way I envision that the Red Cap Knitter did.

I don't think it would be difficult to do this, just a bit fiddly. I like fiddly. Remember that this is a thought experiment. I haven't tried the method out yet. Perhaps over the weekend I'll have time to do so. Here goes.

Let's say you want to lay a ladder across four stitches. You knit the four as usual. Then you take your yarn and move it to the back of the work. You transfer four stitches from your right hand needle back to the left hand needle, then you move the yarn strand to the front of the work, laying it in the "ditch" between the first stitch to be wrapped and the ones that came before it. Then you slip those four stitches back to the right hand needle. You draw the yarn strand across the front of the work over the four, then return it to the back. You have now "lassoed" your four stitches. Give the thing a slight tug to maintain tension, and knit the next stitch as usual.

Now all you need is a suitable graph, and you're set. (Credit: This particular graph has been researched by SCA pal Carol.)

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Yesterday I described two of the more usual methods for attaching edgings to project bodies - plain old mattress stitch seaming, and knitting onto a live stitch or finished edge. Today I continue with a third method. I'm not quite sure what it's called, so I'll call it the drawn loop method for now.

I learned this while doing the Forest Path Shawl (Interweave Knits, Summer 2003). If you plan on finding a copy of IK and working the Path, be aware that it appears to be sold out from the back issue collection on the IK website, and that there's a correction posted in the magazine's errata pages.

Drawn loop is intended for working a knitted trim onto a finished edge, and seems to be the least bulky of the three methods when used for that purpose. Like plain knitting on, the attachment is worked row by row as the knitting proceeds. Many patterns that use plain knitting on include directions to pick up an endless number of stitches prior to working the attached edging so that the trim is applied to live stitches rather than the original finished edge. The drawn loop method avoids that annoying exercise in endless counting although it does work best when done on a slip-stitch selvage. Unlike knitting on, there's no column of double stitch thickness decreases formed where the edging meets the main body. As such, it's particularly airy. It is however a bit fiddly to do, and works more easily with a smooth finish yarn than with a hairy mohairy type lace yarn.

To use drawn loop, you cast on much as for knitting on. If you use half-hitch, knitting on or a cable cast on to add your edging's worth of stitches, you do so to your right hand needle, but instead of making a slip-knot for the first, you establish that first stitch by picking up a stitch in the edge-most loop of your main body, then work back a wrong side row to return the yarn strand to the rightmost side of your edging (and point of attachment). If you had the foresight to have incorporated a slip stitch edge in your main piece this will be easy. Otherwise you'll have to eyeball where to pick up. Difficult (which is why many patterns want you to pick up stitches along finished sides) but with practice this is do-able.

If you use a provisional cast-on like a crocheted chain, you'll put those new stitches onto the left hand needle, then work a wrong side row using your good yarn to return the rightmost side of the edging (and point of attachment).

Once you're back at that rightmost edge, you use your needle tip to draw another stitch up through the next selvage loop of the main body. Here's where it gets tricky. Enlarge that "stitch" until it's a loop of about 18 inches or so diameter (how big to make it will become clear after you've done a couple of iterations). That loop will have two "ends" - one firmly attached to the knitting, the other sliding free trailing back to your yarn ball. Grab the fixed end and give it a gentle tug to make sure there's no extra slack, then using the loop, work across the right side row of your edging. Flip the work over as usual, and work the wrong side row back, again using the giant loop. When you get back to the point of attachment, give another slight tug to the strand coming from the yarn ball to pull out any excess left over from your giant loop. Then repeat the process, drawing up another giant "stitch" in the next selvage loop and using it to knit a pair of edging rows. All of this sliding of the yarn back and forth as the large loops are made is the reason why this method works better with smooth rather than hairy finish yarns.

Again, like any attachment method that involves butting two pieces of perpendicular knitting, some adjustment of the ratio between rows worked to selvage stitches may be necessary. If the newly done edging is beginning to get too ruffly and fluttery, you may need to rip back a row or two and skip a selvage stitch. If the edging is drawing up and the body is beginning to gather, you may need to work an additional pair of edging rows without attachment.

Like I said, it's fiddly but effective, creating the lightest possible line of attachment between an edging and a live-stitch-lacking main piece, and avoiding pain-in-the-neck sessions picking up a zillion stitches around a piece's perimeter. I used drawn loop to good advantage on my Spring Lighting Lacy Scarf pattern, and plan on using it again on future designs.

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Now. Back to the present.

Sallyknitter sends an eMail asking how one goes about attaching an edging to a row of live stitches. I'll try my best to answer.

First, there are several ways of doing it. The simplest but most fussy is to knit the edging entirely separate, as a long strip - then sew it on using mattress stitch. Effective, but boring. Plus even using mattress stitch you can end up with a relatively bulky seam on the reverse compared to the rest of a gossamer-fine lace piece. I used this method on the two counterpane patterns in the wiseNeedle pattern collection, and on the tragic pink blanket now awaiting repair.

Having had my fill of producing an endless roll of edging, then an eternity sewing it on neatly, I now prefer knit-on edgings. They have the advantage of keeping one's stitches securely on the needles until they are both edged and bound off in the same pass. Knitting them on is relatively easy. Let's use an edging pattern I've described here before:

To work this onto the edge of a row of live stitches, I wouldn't even need to break my yarn off after completing the last round of my main piece. Using a half hitch I'd cast 8 stitches onto my right-hand needle, adjacent to the last stitch worked in the main body. If I started with half hitch, I'd purl 8 back, working row 12 of the pattern, with the exception that the blue box would be a plain purl instead of the "artifact" stitch left over after binding off 6. If I were to use a provisional cast-on employing waste yarn, I'd cast on 8 onto a DPN or the left-hand needle, then work across starting with row #1, but working the first stitch as a plain knit.

I'd then work the rows of my chart as directed. You'll note that on the final stitch of the even numbered (wrong side) rows, I purl the last edging stitch along with a live stitch from the existing edge. In the case of this particular pattern, given the row and stitch gauge difference, I found I had to "eat" additional live stitches as I attached, in order to prevent ruffling (which on some pieces can be a design feature rather than a bug). So on rows 6 and 12, I purl one stitch from my charted edging along with two live stitches from the piece's body.

Now. What do you do if there aren't live stitches? You pick them up. To knit the edging above onto a FINISHED edge, instead of purling the last even row stitch together with one stitch from the live body, I'd finish the even rows by picking a stitch up along the body of my finished piece. My odd numbered rows would then begin with a K2tog, knitting that new stitch together with the first stitch of my edging pattern.

Using these method, any edging from dead simple I-cord to elaborate lace can be attached to a live stitch edge or a finished piece. You can even use an edging to both finish and seam together TWO edges. I did that on these pillows.

I recently learned another slightly more involved method of knitting an edging onto a finished piece. It's the one I use in the Spring Lightning lacy scarf (pattern elsewhere on wiseNeedle). More on that tomorrow.

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This was the entry that I was hunting for when I discovered my missing month. It describes crocheting onto a needle to start a provisional cast-on instead of just making a crocheted chain and picking up stitches along the back ridge of bumps. This was originally posted on 22 June 2004.

WORKING REPORT - CRAZY RAGLAN

Enough boring everyone with rehab junk. You came here to read about knitting, and not to visit This Old House.

I've ripped out the entire mindless knitting raglan and started again. This time I'm doing it in the flat, and working both pieces side by side. Because I hate seaming ribbing I've decided to add it later in the round, after I've sewn the sweater body, so I've started out with a provisional cast-on. I favor the crochet chain method of provisional cast-on, but I detest fiddling with the crocheted chain, picking up the bumps along the chain's back. Instead I crochet my chain directly onto my knitting needle. Here's how:

First I pick a nice smooth cotton string-type yarn, and a crochet needle a size or two larger than I'd use with it for a crochet project. In this case, I raided the Baby Georgia I was using for the filet knitting project, and grabbed a Bates F size crochet hook (more on hook sizing another day).

To start, I chain up about five stitches, just to have a stable spot to begin and an end to hold as I do so. Then I take my knitting needle and hold it like this:

Holding the yarn in the back of the knitting needle, I reach up across the front of the knitting needle to grab the strand and form my crochet stitch. This lays a loop around the knitting needle itself, with the leading leg of the loop correctly oriented. After the stitch is formed, I use my left forefinger to flick the yarn around to the back of the knitting needle again:

Once the yarn is in the back of the needle, I'm ready to crochet on my next stitch.

I usually crochet on several more stitches than I need, just to be sure I have enough, and end off with five or six plain chains as insurance. Once the stitches are on the needle, I can switch to my knitting yarn and begin my first row of knitting. If I have more stitches cast on the needle than I need, I just slip off the excess. They become normal crochet chain stitches and sit quietly until the end of the project. No worries.

When it's time to awaken the provisional stitches and begin knitting in the other direction, I find the last chain stitch I did (tie a knot in the dangling end if you think you might not remember which is which), carefully unpick that last stitch, then pull the strand to zip out the crochet stitch by stitch. As each knit loop is freed, I slip it onto a waiting needle.

Here's my newly re-started raglan. Note that I'm knitting the back and the front at the same time. That way I am guaranteed that they match row for row and decrease placement for decrease placement.

I've done something here with the crocheted provisional cast-on that helps me keep life straight when working two pieces side by side. I've crocheted all of the stitches I need for both back and front in one long strand. First, following the procedure above, I made enough stitches for the back. Then I crocheted about ten free stitches without making loops on the needle. After that I made the stitches for the front, ending with a few extra chains. Using a different ball of yarn for each piece, I knit across first the front and then the back. The little bar of crochet anchors my two pieces together in the center and helps me remember which direction I'm going so that I don't get to the half-way mark, then head back across the same piece instead of working the other one. (As the work gets longer I'll safety pin the two pieces together closer to the top for the same reason.)

How did I manage to take the photos above? Not by growing extra arms, that's for sure. So far all of the "hands working" shots on this blog have been taken by Alex, my 8th grade daughter. She may not knit, but she handles a mean digital camera.

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[Repost of material originally appearing on 8 August 2006]

More questions and comments today via eMail.

Do you always use the half-hitch cast-on on two needles for medallions?

No. For octagonal or square medallions predicated on a starting stitch count of 4, or for triangular or hex medallions that start out with 3 stitches, I tend to use an I-cord beginning, working one round of I-cord, then introducing more needles as the work grows. But my I-cord also starts out with half-hitches rather than another, firmer cast-on. I often use the cast-on tail to thread through the half hitch "spine," drawing up the center purse-string style to make it nice and solid, but not lumpy. The only exception to this is if the center of the medallion is a large hole rather than a solid bit. If the edge of the cast on will be on display because it frames a central hole and structural integrity is key to a neat hole, then I use something more solid - either long-tail or one of the knit-on cast-on family.

I see several sources for learning how to knit lace in the flat, how about a source for the basics on inventing your own in-the-round medallions?

It's true that analyzing and inventing medallions aren't as widely addressed as flat lace. Some of the shawl books and specialized Shetland Knitting do go into a quite bit of detail on using lace patterns for center-out, radial increase pieces, but they mostly stick to squares. The most recent edition of Interweave Knits (Fall '06) has an informative article on what to do if your lacy pattern is interrupted by changing stitch counts - again very useful, but only part of the story. The Lewis Knitting Counterpanes book put out by Taunton gives lots of patterns for medallions, but is rather less useful as a source of hints for designing your own.

In spite of all these great sources, my at-the-elbow source for medallion knitting tips remains the venerable Mary Thomas Book of Knitting Patterns. It's the companion volume to her Knitting Book. Thomas is one of my personal heroes, both for these books and for her embroidery series. Judith in Oxon in the UK tells me that Mary Thomas grew up in her town, but is now forgotten there. What a shame.



Knitting Pattterns was first published in 1943, and has been in print ever since - most recently in an inexpensive Dover re-issue (pictured above). There's an extensive on-the-web preview of some content at Google Books if you're unfamiliar with it (the 1938 Knitting Book preview is also available, current inexpensive Dover edition shown above). For two slim volumes I am constantly amazed at how much info they contain.

The Thomas books bridge the Victorian and post-Victorian era ladies' pattern magazines, compendiums and encyclopedias of needlework (Weldon's, de Dillmont) and modern knitting guides (Vogue, Principles of Knitting). Thomas tried to seek out what was offered in conteporary scholarly info on textile history, and to explain some of the more esoteric aspects of craft execution in a non-ambiguous way - targeting an audience interested in process and technique rather than in devised patterns. For example, she was one of the first to use a system of standard block symbols to represent knitting texture and colorwork patterns in graphed format.

Of course nothing is perfect. Her knitting history reflects the state of research at the time she was writing, and is not as devoid of folk myth as is R. Rutt's, but it's not bad either. The biggest criticism people have of the Thomas books is of the small illustrations sprinkled throughout. The drawings are by "Miss H. Lyon-Wood, Miss Dorothy Dunmore and Miss Margaret Agutter" and reflect a rather colonial world view (especially of non-Europeans) that today would be considered culturally and racially insensitive. Of all the books, the Knitting Patterns (her last) has the least of these little cartoons, and her earlier works on embroidery, the most. As an aside, it's also worth noting that Agutter wrote books on cross stitch, crochet and patchwork quilting, and as a respected knitting expert, worked with James Norbury on Odham's Encyclopaedia of Knitting. I've heard rumors that the other two seem to have provided small illustrations and marginalia for several other contemporary books, plus some childrens' book illustrations, but haven't been able to confirm them.

Overlooking these flaws, things that recommend Knitting Patterns include sections on all sorts of lesser seen esoterica, including Filet Knitting (knitting in imitation of fliet crochet); picot point knitting (an amazingly fiddly bit of freeform scrumwork to make petal and flower-shaped bits of detached knitting for edgings or raised decoration); and basic steps in medallion knitting geometries. On the whole, given the ubiquity and extreme inexpensiveness of the Thomas books (both can be found used for under $2.00 each), they are useful additions to anyone's knitting library.

Other sources that delve into the mysteries of knitting medallions in the round include B. Walker's recently compiled Fourth Treasury of Knitting Patterns, in which a non-traditional approach to medallion knititng is addressed as an offshoot of directional knitting; and unlikely as it sounds - in the standard center-out method, inJudy Brittain's Bantam Step by Step Book of Needlecraft. I've written about the Bantam book before.

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[Repost of material originally appearing on 14 June 2006]

If you are translating between knitting in the round and knitting flat you may run into a direction to perform something on the right side of the work that you now need to do on a wrong side row (or vice versa).

The absolute best source for this info are the symbol key charts at the start of B. Walker's Charted Knitting Designs, and A Fourth Treasury of Knitting Patterns (and possibly several of her other smaller books, though not Walker I or II). It's the most complete, listing a huge number of stitch manipulations and giving directions - sometimes more than one set of directions - for ways in which that same manipulation can be achieved on both right side and wrong side rows. Other books of charted patterns including L. Stanfield's New Knitting Stitch Library give right side and wrong side equivalents, but I find the Walker set the most complete and the easiest to use as a ready reference.

The info below is abstracted from a small portion of her charts, but without her specific how-to write-ups. Items with asterisks are ones for which Walker gives multiple variants that should be subject to experiment before the optimal one is chosen. Her write-ups are excellent and should fuel countess hours of yarn-y tinkering.

Right Side Row	Wrong Side Row
K - Knit	P - Purl
P - Purl	K - Knit
(K1-b, K1) - Center double increase into one stitch	(P1b, p1) - Center double increase into one stitch
K2tog - Knit 2 together	P2 tog - Purl 2 together
SSK - Slip, slip knit	P2 tog b - Purl 2 together through the back of the stitch
P2 tog - Purl 2 together	K 2 tog - Knit 2 together
(S1, K2tog, PSSO) - Left slanting double decrease	(S1 WYIF, P2tog-b, PSSO) - Right slanting double decrease*
K3tog - Knit 3 together, a right slanting double decrease	P3 tog - Purl 3 together, a left slanting double decrease*
K3 tog b - Knit 3 together back, a left slanting double decrease*	P3 tog b - Purl 3 together, a right slanting double decrease*
(S2, K1, P2SSO) - Slip 2, knit one, pass 2 slipped stitches over, a center double decrease	(S2, P1, P2SSO) - Slip 2, knit one, pass 2 slipped stitches over (Specific method of slipping desribed*)

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[Repost of materail originally appearing on 12 June 2006]

We've looked at taking a pattern that's been written for circular knitting and parsing it out for knitting in the flat. That's pretty easy, as most items knit in the round are not drafted with much complex shaping. Texture designs and colorwork do impose limitations, as does some shaping. In most cases it's a matter of identifying seamlines, then doing the math to apportion the existing stitches into pieces defined by those seams.

Going the other way is harder, mostly because of the range of complexity of shape that can be accommodated by knitting in the flat. In general, the simpler the shape, the easier a piece is to translate. Drop shoulder sweaters with backs and fronts that are nearly identical are a cinch. Stuff with waist shaping, darts, princess style seaming, or other tailoring presents special challenges. But in spite of shaping most things can be knit either whole or in part using circular technique.

Starting with something simple, the Spring '06 edition of Knitty contains Jamesey, a pattern by Mary Neal Meador. It's a nicely patterned simple men's pullover, worked flat in knit/purl combos. There's minimal shaping, and the texture pattern with no row count abberations or increases and decreases is easy to translate for in the round knitting. There's one tiny bit in her Sideways Stitch description that bears paying special attention.

To work Jamesey in the round, I'd add the total stitches front and back. I would NOT modify the pattern to substitue a full pattern repeat for theextra non-pattern-repeat stitches at the leftmost and rightmost sides of the front and back unless I were very ambitious. Doing so is a refinement to be sure, but one that's totally optional. Unless the piece was intended to be very fitted or the gauge was large, I wouldn't eliminate any stitches on the sides that in a sewn piece would be eaten up by seam allowance. BUT if I felt that four extra stitches of width at my gauge WOULD make a noticeable difference in fit, I'd take the time to refigure the stitch counts without them (remember that this would have to be done all the way around the piece, on the body and sleeves both).

In general, first I'd begin reading the pattern and noodling out how to deal with it's tougher parts. This sounds like a dumb thing to say, but I know lots of people who knit with the "headfirst off the pier" approach. They grab needles and yarn and start in without taking the time to work through the piece mentally and to make sure they understand it. While this step can be less intensive if you're knitting something verbatim as written, if you're translating between flat and circular knitting not taking the time to really understand the original can be fatal to your project. I'd also point out that if you are knitter who rarely reads ahead, you are far more trusting than I. I've found lots of patterns that were poorly written or confusing. At the very least, knowing ahead of time that rocks are in the stream makes the the rapids less of a surprise.

In this case I'd begin by casting on the stitches for the front, placing a marker, casting on the stitches for the back and working the pattern as written up to the tricky Sideways Stitch rows. I'd work the front to the marker, then the back to the second marker. Every row will be a right-side row, so the texture pattern - conveniently graphed out - would be very simple to follow. The piece would grow as a single tube until the Sideways Stitch rows.

Those rows are written up for back and forth knitting, and need a bit of examination to translate them. Round 1 is pretty easy - it amounts to working the pattern as described, but laying the stitches so that their front legs are in the back of the needle. This twists them. (If you're unfamiliar with stitch mounting, you can pop over here.) The second row requires the knitter to work backwards the way he or she has come. In the case of knitting in the round, it would be simplest to turn the tube inside out and accomplish the directions as written, knitting counterclockwise around the piece until the starting marker was reached. BUT just before I'd do so, I'd wrap what would have been the next stitch if I were to have continued around normally. Wrapping this stitch, then when it is encountered later, working it along with its wrap will help prevent a little hole from forming. Once I'd done the second round of the sideways stitch, I'd flip my tube back out so that the public side was on the outside of the thing, then continue with the third row of the Sideways Stitch pattern.

Having accomplished the tricky bit, I'd return to plain old knitting in the round until I had gotten to the point where the sleeve would eventually be set. That point isn't marked on the schematics, but it's pretty simple to figure out in a drop shoulder piece. I'd take the measurement across the top of th the pattern's flat-knit sleeve and divide it in half. Then I'd subtract that from the height of the body. When I'd reached the point where the bottom of the sleeve was to be sewn on, I'd have a choice. The easiest way to finish off would be to split the piece front and back, and finish each piece knit flat on the circ, using a separate ball of yarn for each one. However this is a return to knitting in the flat. For some people it might smack of defeat. Others have very different gauges when they knit in the flat - enough to make a visible horizon across the sweater.

The alternative is to steek. Remember the markers indicating the "seam lines" dividing the front and back stitches? I'd work up to one, cast on three or four stitches, then continue around to the other and repeat the procedure. This will add a couple of stitches left and right to the sleeve area. The body will be just a bit wider at this point, with the extra width being clear to spot. I'd work the extra in plain stockinette. I'd continue to finish out the body, perhaps following the simple neckline shaping directions verbatim (with the introduction of that second ball again); or perhaps knitting straight across that area in anticipation of forming the shape by machine stitching and cutting later. (We'll get back to steeking in a bit).

Sleeves are easy in this piece. There's simple shaping - increases at the left and right of the pieces at regular intervals, making them into simple elongated trapezoids. Again I'd cast on and join in the round - probably starting out on DPNs. I'd introduce a stitch marker to indicate the beginning of the round, and assort my stitches so that it wasn't apt to fall off the end of a DPN. Then I'd work in the round, introducing my increases as paired increases on either side of the marker.

Once I had the sleeves and body done, if I had chosen to steek, I'd stabilize the extra stitches I introduced to the body tube. Some people do this with a line of slip stitch crochet or hand-embroidered chain stitch. I prefer to whip out my ancient Elna and run a couple lines of machine stretch stitch on either side of my intended cut line. I'd then cut carefully between the machine stitched lines to make my opening. If I were doing the stitch and cut method of making the neckline, I'd draft out the curve I wanted onto a paper template, pin it to my piece and machine stitch along its edge.

Although this sounds hard, mostly it's figuring out how wide and how deep the neck area should be, then taking a piece of paper and folding it in half - marking the width and depth on it and cutting a symmetrical curve by hand to match. Paper is cheap so if it takes several tries it's o.k. The alternative of course is to whip out the French curve or drafting program and produce a proper drafted piece. Either part of the paper can be used, although I do find using the smaller inner curve piece to be easier to pin out flat onto my knitting.




At this point finishing whether you've worked flat for the upper body or in the round for the whole thing is pretty much the same - sewing the shoulder seams and setting in the sleeves.

Now. What about pieces with complex shaping - waist nips or princess line seams?

Those features work more or less like the sleeves. I introduce a marker at the point where the seam line should be, then work the increases or decreases as directed, on either side of the marker in accordance with pattern directions. Areas where you are told to cast off can be harder. For example in the princess style schematic, at the head of the front body side panel in there's a "blind end" where the body side panels terminate short of the sleeve. I suspect I'd have to noodle on that one quite a while, and the solution would require short row shaping. Not easy. But for the determined willing to experiment and rip back - not totally impossible, either.

I can't cover every eventuality of shaping and its implications for translation from flat to round knitting, but I hope I've given you an idea of the general process.

Yesterday's Post

I wasn't claiming that the Knitters pattern was ripped off from mine. First of all, it's not my pattern. All I did was slap a couple of ornamental stitches onto a well known published piece. I own nothing here. Plus traffic on this site is so low that it's highly unlikely that anyone who saw something on String two years ago consciously repeated it. My post was instead more of a "neeener neener neener" piece, accompanied by gloating rather than accusational finger pointing.

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Before I was overtaken by creeping Deadline Disease, I promised three things - some general principles on translating flat knit patterns to kntting in the round; a list of increase and decrease stitch equivalents for right and wrong side rows; and why someone would want to knit either way. That's a bit much for one day.  Even for long-winded me.  Let's start with the most subjective - why one would choose one style over the other.

To start off with I'l make some bold statements that kntting historians are welcome to debate.  Knitting garments in the round was far more prevalent during most of knitting's history.  Think of socks, hats, and traditional sweaters - most of them were worked that way.  Seamed knitting (knitting in the flat) appears to have taken off around the time that knitting made the transition from traditonal garment to fashion wear - roughly about the same time when written patterns became more prevalent.  I believe it did so in order to conform better to fashionable clothing's styles, tailoring and fit, and to allow greater reproduceability of results among an audience already familiar with sewn garment methods.

Why knit in the round?

• Simple, quick garment construction
• Simple pattern writing for boxy shapes
• Minimizes purling on stockinette pieces
• Eliminates (or minimizes) seaming
• Takes advantage of knitting's inherent elasticity for fit
• Easier production of stranded colorwork
• Easier production of texture and lace patterns that require increase/decrease manipulations on every row
• Ideology (there's a strong lobby of knitting purists that advocate it as the most natural or historically-connected way to knit)
• Fewer pieces to lose or match in gauge
• Flashing (color stacking of space dyed yarns) works better
• Easier to ravel back and add length or replace worn sections.
• If using one circ, fewer needles to use than knitting in the flat

Why knit in the flat?

• More complex and tailored garment shapes can be achieved
• Pattern writing for complex shaping is simpler for designers trained in garment construction theory
• Easier to adjust tif you need to produce complex garments in multiple sizes
• Seams can add structure and strength to a piece
• Smaller individual units can be more convenient to produce
• Intarsia colorwork is easier to do
  
• Eliminates cast on row join challenge, especially on fine gauge garments that employ large stitch counts
• Eliminates the at-join color jog problem (to be specific it substitutes a match stripes at seam problem)
• Can be easier to measure garments in progress to determine compliance with required dimensions
• In flight modification for fit can be simpler because problems can be spotted after one piece is made, and the entire garment does not need to be ripped back to make adjustments
• Easier to add width while the garment is in progress
• No scary DPNs or circs needed.  Fewer needles to loose compared to DPNs, no DPN juncture ladder problems
• Straight needles are less expensive than circs, and multiple lengths needn't be purchased.  No need to have multiple diameters of the same size needle on hand to accommodate tubes of various diameters (required unless many DPNs, a two-circ or the oversized circ method is used)
• Easier to block pieces before final finishing stage.

I've probably left the reason why you chose one method or the other off these lists.  Feel free to add it in a comment.

Each method has its own strengths and shortcomings.  Each has styles for which it is particularly suited.  And each can be manipulated to do most of what the other style is better suited to do.  You can make faux seams on something knitted in the round. You can do stranded colorwork on something knitted in the flat.  You can add shaping to an in the round piece through planned and judicious use of increases and decreases to mimic the fabric manipulations of darts or tailored seaming. 

n many cases there's logic in the choice of one method over another.  Dale's Norwegian stranded pieces are perfectly suited for knitting in the round.  They employ strategies like steeking to place shaped collars or introduce other construction features.  I'm sure people have done it, but I wouldn't want to translate one of them for knitting in the flat - there's nothing to be gained by doing so.  Complex tailoring like this from a discontinued Berroco pattern would be a headache to render in circular knitting.  BUT logic doesn't always prevail.  I have seen commercial patterns for stranded sweaters that ARE knitted in the flat.  I'd take a hard look at them to see if I could produce them in the round.   Likewise, I've seen all sorts of contortions and cutting done to circular knit patterns in the name of making them less boxy. Again I'd have to take a closer look to see if using an alternate approach was better.

While you're far more likely to see in-the-round direction today than you were 25 years ago when I started knitting, you'll still find that many fashion oriented magazines and yarn manufacturers booklets offer up more patterns for knitting in the flat than they do the other method.  I'm thinking pubs like Vogue Knitting, Adriafil's Dritto& Rovescio and most of the modern European books, plus the old Phildar, Aarlan, and Pingouin books. 

As in so many things, ideology does play a part.  You can find books written in the 1940s through 1960s that sniff at knitting in the round, calling it "peasant work" or noting it in passing as the dreary ancestor of  more modern applications.  And you can find books written by knitting revivalists that excoriate the torture of imposing tailored seamed construction on a medium that has so many virtues in its most simple form.  I'm dogma-agnostic.  I use whichever method is best for me to produce the project at hand.  Which brings me to the real reason why I think patterns are written one way or the other:

• It's what the pattern's author/designer is most comfortable with

Overall though, the motivation to change something from flat to circular knitting is far more common than yesterday's case.  Anything with a rectangular construction and minimal shaping  is a natural - especially sweaters with drop shoulders.  The exceptions might be sweaters in yarns that are prone to biasing or stretching, or ones in particularly flimsy yarns or knit in very open textures.  In those cases the structural integrity imposed by firm seams might be crucial to garment drape and longevity.  I'll look at this in more detail in the next overly long post.

HolidayInnEloise saw yesterday's post and sent in a question via eMail.  She's not a fan of knitting in the round and wants to know if the Cabin Fever pattern I am using can be worked flat back and forth on two needles.  She's a bit confused by how to change a top down in the round sweater into a more standard format.  I'll try to answer.

First, while there are exceptions, most things that are knit in the round can be parsed to knit in the flat either in part or in their entirety.  Many but not all things that are knit flat can be knit in the round.  Like with everything in knitting, knowing the logic behind the design can help you make the transition.

To go from round to flat, there are two big things to take into consideration - the garment shape and the knitting texture or colorwork pattern used.  In order to transform a seamless thing into a knit-flat thing, seams must be introduced.  Sometimes figuring out where to put them can be a challenge.  The sweater I'm working on now is of very simple construction, but even it presents a challenge.

Following the original pattern, I started by making a tube for the collar.  After that there was a row of increases to add a bit more scope for the next step - symmetrical increases on either side of four diagonal lines from collar to armpit (the raglan lines).  The piece proceeded more or less like a poncho or capelet until the depth of the raglan increase lines accommodates a loose shoulder toarmpit fit (along the way one is directed to stop making increases otherwise the piece would grow too wide, but that's a minor quibble).  After the capelet type shoulder yoke was done, the sleeve stitches were slipped off onto holders, and with the addition of a few extra stitches under each arm, the remaining stitches for front and back were worked as a big tube.  After the body tube was completed, the sleeve stitches were retrieved from their holders and worked out to the cuff, with some decreases at the bottom center to remove bulk.

Thinking through the logic top down we've got a challenge right off the bat.  To me, the turtleneck collar is a lost cause.  No one wants seams on the inside of an already bulky turtleneck.  That feature will probably need to be knitted in the round on DPNs.  After that we've got the capelet yoke area, formed by the faux raglan style increases.  The most obvious choice to flat-ify this part is to turn the unibody capelet back into four pieces - a front, a back and two sleeves - to be seamed together along the raglan lines as real raglans are. 

To do this, I'd probably take the stitch count from the after-collar increase row just before the faux-raglan feature starts, and deconstruct it back into those four pieces.  For example, I'd take the recommended stitch count for the front and add two selvedge stitches.  These will be eated up as seam allowance when the garment is sewn together.  Then I'd follow the instructions for the front area, working my increases as directed, but doing them TWO stitches in from the edge (one stitch to make the decorative line, plus the selvedge stitch for sewing up later).  At the post-raglan point where the piece is long enough according to the original pattern, (when the sleeve stitches were slipped onto holders), I'd cast on one quarter of the total stitches that are to be added at the left edge of my piece and half at the right, then continue knitting to the specified total length. (Remember the original just gives one number to be added between what is the front and back.  I need to divide that by four and put one quarter at each edge of my front.  The remaining stitches would be added to the back.)  I'd end up with an object shaped like a house with a Mansard roof.  The other pieces would be made the same way.   The back would be identical to the front.  The sleeves would be similar but predicated on a smaller initial cast-on.  I'd assemble the thing by first sewing the raglan seams, then the seam from lower hem to cuff.  Finally I'd pick up my provisional stitches at the neck and add the collar.

But I'm not bound to do this piece top-down.  I could also knit it in the flat bottom-up.  I could divide the ending body stitch count in half (adding a selvedge stitch at either side to make up for a seam allowance) and working on half the stitches - knit the front and back flat up to the undearm.  At that point, I'd cast off the stitches that were added in the original just after the sleeves were slipped off, removing one quarter at each edge.  Then I'd start the raglan shaping.  But in a bottom-up piece, that shaping will be formed by decreases rather than increases.  To preserve the simple yarn over detail of the original I'd need to do a bit of playing.  First I'd work an inch or two plain (in the original the raglan area ended before the piece was long enough to reach the underarm).  Then I'd work the left edge of my piece K1, SSK, YO, SSK; and the right edge K2tog, YO, K2tog, K1.  The K1s are the selvedge stitches.  The [decrease] YO [decrease} unit adds up to a net loss of one stitch, with one of the decreases making up for the decorative YO. This won't be exactly analagous to the original because the stitches framing the YOs will be heavier, but it will be close enough to preseve the general appearance.  When I had the requisite number of YOs and my stitch count was equal to the post-collar neckline count (plus two for the selvedge stitches), I'd slip everything onto a holder and begin the next piece.  The back would be made the same way. 

The sleeves would start off with the final stitch count for the cuff, and along the way add a stitch at either edge right or left (I'd probably do M1 increases two stitches in from the edge at the ends of a row just to keep things neat when I seamed).  I'd knit the same length below the raglan line that I did on the front and back, then plunge into the same logic to make the decorative raglan line itself.  Once there were the same number of YOs in the raglan line of the sleeve I would guess that the sleeve's upper dimension matched that of the front and back exactly (the open holes are more than decorative, they make the thing easier to count and measure).  I'd slip the remaining stitches onto a holder and seam all the raglan lines.  After that I'd sew the side seams and pick up and knit the collar in the round on DPNs.

Another alternate method would be a hybrid between flat and circular knitting.  I'd work the front and back up to the point where the extra stitches are cast off, and the sleeves until they met the body to cuff measurement.  Then I'd arrange them all on a circular needle, and finish out the couple inches of plain work followed by the raglan capelet yoke part in one big knit in the round piece.  I'd still have seams to sew under the arms and from the armpit to the hem, but that would be it.  (To do this, I'd eliminate the selvedge stitch that I added to the raglan edges in my first all flat knit alternative.

The second factor that might affect the transition from round to flat knitting is texture.  In this particular sweater it's not an issue.  I've got miles of stockinette, a couple of rows of purl welting, and some K2, P2 rib.  That's it.  In the round stockinette is "never stop knitting."  Flat stockinette is alternate rows of knit and purl.  No big translation problem there.  However, if I had a texture pattern and the original was knit in the round I'd need to do the mental shuffle, turning knits to purls and vice versa for the odd numbered wrong-side rows. Having a texture pattern in chart format makes the right-side/wrong-side translation easier.   I might even need to adjust the row on which the pattern starts so that the bulk of my increases and decreases end up on an easy-to-manipulate right side (knit) row.  Yes, they can be done on a wrong side (purl) row, but then the problem of which increase or decrease when done on the purl side mimics standard right side row stitches intrudes.  All exist, but many are puppy awkward to do (more on this tomorrow). 

Colorwork in the original can also present a challenge.  Many people find stranding easier in the round.  You always have a right-side row facing you, and it's very simple to see the design build as you knit.  Stranding can be worked flat too, with every other row a purl row.  It's harder to see the pattern on the purl side, and some folks don't enjoy manipulating multiple strands while making purls.

So there you have it.  The first thing to do is to examine the original in the round pattern and see where seams would go.  The second is to look at the texture or color pattern used to see if it can be comfortably translated.  Once the individual pieces are determined, the cast on numbers can be derived from the original pattern (half for the front, half for the back, plus an optional selvedge stitch).  Then it's just a matter of knitting and seaming.

Tomorrow I'll look at going in the other direction, what the equivalents of standard increases/decreases are if you do them on the wrong side, translating flat knitting into circular knitting and why one might want to work in one style or the other. 

Some people have asked how Elder Daughter (about to be 15) did all the math that led up to her bunny's pirate sweater.  I don't think they were asking how she was able to accomplish the task in the first place, but instead, what methods she used.  All those numbers sound daunting, but it's really not that hard if you take it step by step.  I wanted to to do as many steps as possible, so we started out with as little information beforehand.  Here's what she did, taken in large part from the write-up that was on her poster.

First, as I said - I was evil.  I gave her a lump of yarn without a label.



Now I knew what it was, but Evil OverMoms don't tell.  The first thing she did was determine how many yards of yarn she had.  Here's her write-up (the spacing on the equations is a bit squirrely because they were exported from MS Word's equation editor):

First, I had to find the total weight of the yarn. Using a scale, I found I had to 225 grams of yarn, total.

Then, I turned to a precision instrument to help me. The McMorran balance is designed to determine yardage per pound.  The formula that comes with the balance requires the user to first find out how long a piece of yarn is needed to make the balance register level.  My balancing length for this yarn was 9.75 inches.

 The next step is to use the formula that comes with the balance to determine yards per pound (YPP):

 

 In my case

My yarn has 975 yards per pound, but I needed to find out how many yards were in 225 grams.  The formula to convert grams to pound is:

Plugging in my values I find out:

Now I multiply YPP times my weight in pounds:

And so Elder Daughter defeated the first yarn demon, and determined how much yardage was contained in her tangle - a whopping 482.6 yards.   I'll post more in this series when she brings her poster home and we can scan her drawings.  For the record, McMorran Balances also come in a metric version.  But I have the Imperial unit one, and it was more fun to make sure she did as many conversions back and forth as possible.  

I promised to describe how I avoid those small holes that can form at the top of the diagonal line of joins formed by short row style heels.  Please bear with this household's limited photography skills.  Those are my hands.  Elder Daughter (now 14) is manning the camera. 

To start - here is my sock, worked toe up on five needles.  Each with the same number of stitches on it. This sock is ideal for illustrating this process because I have planned my sock foot depth to hit at the points of color change.  It's easier to refer to stitches by color.  Apologies if you're color-impaired.

I have just completed the knit side row in which I have knit together that last wrapped stitch along with the wraps at its base.  There are no more stitches "in front" of me, waiting to be wrapped.  I'm ready to rejoin the body of the sock.  But before I do so there's one last step that needs to be done with the leftmost heel needle and streteched out stitches in the interstice between the heel needle (green and white stitches) and the body needle (orange stitches).  I've put down my empty needle and am about to do this next step using the needle bearing the green and white heel stitches.


In step two, you can see that I've gone one round down below my active row and am in the process of picking up one stitch, using the tip of my heel needle.



Step 3 shows that picked up stitch (light green), safely parked on my heel needle.  At this point, my just-completed heel needle contains ONE MORE stitch than all of the others.  After Step 3, I pick up my fifth needle and knit across the first then second needle bearing my top-of-foot stitches.



When I get to the other side of the top-of-foot stitches and have my fifth needle poised to start working up the right side of my heel, I pause.  There are two anomalies on this side.  First - we'll need to do the same pick-up of one stitch as we did at the end of the first heel needle.  The second is a bit trickier.  If you look closely, you'll see that because I launched directly into my first full round after re-activating the last wrapped heel stitch on heel needle #1, I never got back to the commencement of the heel to re-awaken the rightmost heel stitch on the other heel needle.  You can see it below, noosed by its blue wrapping stitch.  THIS IS O.K.  NOT TO WORRY.  We'll deal with it as part of this side of heel.



Now (in spite of blurry pix), you can see that using my empty fifth needle, I am picking up one stitch in the row below the first stitch on my heel needle.  It's light green, and is being formed in the orange stitches below the start of the turquoise heel stripe.



Next is the wrapped stitch cheat.  In the shot above you can see there are actually two wraps on this first heel stitch.  One is blue, one is green/white.  The blue stitch happened first, and is lower on the carrying stitch than is the nearly impossible to see green/white one.  It is extremely difficult to work both of these wrapped stitches along with the carrier.  So I cheat.  I lift the lower wrap (blue) and place it on the end of my heel needle.  Then I knit it and the carrier stitch together, ignoring that other green/white wrap.  UNLESS THEY'VE READ THIS CHEAT, NO ONE WILL EVER NOTICE THE OMISSION.   It will have no effect on sock wear, or the presence or absence of that litle hole.



Now because I've picked up a stitch on this needle too, I have two top-of-foot needles that each bear my original number of stitches, plus two heel needles that each bear my original number + 1 stitch.  On this next round I take care of that.  I work across heel needle #1, taking care to do a SSK on the last two stitches.  I'm now back to my original count, and have eliminated the gusset hole on this side of the heel.  I work across the top of the foot stitches as usual.  When I get to the other heel needle, I knit the first two stitches together.  Again I'm back to my original count, and have snicked up any potential hole on this side.  Once I've completed this "remedial decrease" row, I consider my heel complete and go on to do whatever I feel like for the ankle.

Here's the result:

Linda writes in with a sock-related question.

Do you weigh your skeins/balls of sock yarn before you start?

She goes on to point out that she weighs her sock yarn that comes in "makes a pair" size balls (usually marked at 100g).  Because (like me) she knits for big feet, she is also often afraid that she'll run out if she makes sock #1 too large.  Weighing the remaining yarn as she knits sock #1 tells her how close she is to having used up 50% of the total. 

It's a good idea, but I don't do it.  Mostly because the lousy kitchen scale I have at home isn't precise enough for the task at hand.  That and laziness.  Also at this point, trust.  I know that a 100g ball of yarn is plenty for a pair for me, even with my clown-sized feet.  and that if I knit the foot to fit, then knit the ankle part as long as the foot, I'll have enough left over for 2 inches of ribbing.  That doesn't mean I don't get nervous.  I do.  Sometimes I do run short.  So I suppose I really should go out and buy a decent scale...

This brings up Linda's second observation.  To paraphrase:

Sometimes the ball weight is less than the label states.  My ball of Sockotta I just started is labeled 100 gms but weighed in at only 94 gms. Maybe my scale is wrong...

While a calibration or accuracy difference between any two measurement devices is always a possibility, perhaps her scale isn't wrong.  Yarn weight is measured under "standard conditions."  Presumably if Linda was experiencing the same set of conditions (most specifically - humidity), her ball of yarn would weigh the full 100g.  It's also not entirely unknown for distributors to offer products that hit the exact mark only as an over-the-lot average, with some balls being heavy and others light.  Certainly not optimal but not uncommon either.  Inconsistent yardage has been mentioned in the wiseNeedle yarn reviews (sample:  Diana, Dulce, .Manos, Melin, Tibet).   Finally there ARE some yarns that are consistently short of the listed yardage.  That's a big flaw that has also cropped up a few times in the yarn reviews posted on wiseNeedle (sample:  Superwash 12 Ply, Nature Cotton). 

Should one expect every skein to hit the 50g or 100g (or whatever mark)?  Under ideal conditions, yes.  But I doubt it will happen often in our imperfect universe.  My solution to the problem is on larger projects - to buy that extra skein as insurance.  I've dipped into my insurance yarn often enough to make it a standard part of my yarn purchase planning.

Several people wrote to express surprise and/or commiseration that I was struggling with the join-twist problem on my camo-flash tee.  It's an easy problem to have, and one that's not limited to beginners.  I find some things exacerbate the chance of twisting:

• Having too many stitches for the needle's circumference
  

If the stitches are jammed onto the needle they have a tendancy to ruffle the cast on edge, no matter what cast-on is used.  Even more so if the cast-on edge is narrow.  That's why I ended up knitting several rows of stockinette in waste yarn.  That gave my "cast-on row" some bulk and weight, and helped sort out the ruffle

• Using a circular instead of a flock of DPNs.  

Now most people will disagree with me on this one. DPN fear runs deep.  But I at least find it far easier to tame an in the round cast-on row if it has been done on several smaller straight needles than on one circ (or two circs).  A couple of factors here get in my way with the circs.  First, even if they've been carefully de-kinked using the hot water method, they still curve.  Second, they are not uniform in girth around their entire circumference.  Stitches twist more on the skinny cable part than they do on the fatter business ends of circs.  Using DPNs all the stitches are held on areas of uniform thickness.  I usually cast onto my DPNs in sequence, then lay the entire work out flat on the table, in a rough circle, making sure each needle's cast-on edge is turned to the inside of the circle.  On DPNs that edge stays where I want it, held in place by friction on the needle's thickness.  Circs aren't as easy to sort out this way.  The stitches on the skinny part twist every which way, and the springy cable parts themselves rebel at neat alignment.  Keeping two circs in proper orientation is even  harder.

• Lots of stitches in the absolute
  

The bigger the piece, the harder it is to keep the stitches in alignment.  The hardest circular cast on I ever did was on a cardigan I knit for my grandmother.  It was black, with an originalstranded pattern in white in the traditional Fair Isle yoke area.  It was also in fingering weight acrylic (a slippery yarn) as she specified "easy care" for the gift.  At 8 spi I had something like 340 stitches around.  And around.  And around...

So for the most part, I use DPNs to start off circular pieces.  Even adult circumference sweaters.  I do use a couple of tricks though. 

First, unlike this piece, I do not often start out with a provisional cast-on. The need to go back and work the live edge later did introduce an element of complexity, and until I did the waste yarn thing, made an even more ruffly than usual bottom edge.  This in turn made keeping it sorted out more difficult.  For large circumference pieces, I usually use a tubular cast on, similar to the method Kris described in a comment on yesterday's post.   I use straights, and using a provisional cast-on, create half the number of stitches needed.  I knit five or so rows in plain stockinette.  Then I unzip the provisional cast-on and stick a second straight into the newly freed stitches, making sure that the points of both straights end up on the same edge of my now suspended strip of knitting.  Next I fold the strip in half, and using a third needle (often in this case, a circ), alternately knit one stitch off the needle in front and purl one stitch off the needle in back.  This gives me a sturdy and attractive edge, and enough of a bottom ridge that when joined into a round for circular knitting, avoids the twist problem on the first truly circular round.  If people are interested in pix of this, I'll try to take a demo sequence, but at this point I'm sure the tubular cast-on I describe can be found on photo how-to sites elsewhere.

My second trick is casting on using long DPNs.  I adore Euro-style extra long DPNs, and buy them whenever I see them.  My collection is far from complete, and the sizing and set numbers are a bit strange because many of my finds are yard sale orphans or even "antique" British needles that originally came in sets of only three.  Even so, I do have several DPN sets in the 12-18 inch long range.   Theyr'e very convenient for casting on, even if they end up being a smidge off standard sizing.  A half or quarter size down is usually a good thing if casting on wool, to control stretch; conversely the same amount larger can be useful in casting on cotton or linen to introduce a bit more ease in a tight initial row.

Some people swear by using a contrasting color for the cast on row.  As you can see from my problems with this project, having a white row at the bottom of a mostly-green piece didn't help much.  So there you have it.  Reasons (not excuses) why this problem plagues so many people at all levels of expertise.

Yesterday I wrote about establishing the flash value.  Today I write about what might go wrong while you're doing so.

First, there's the gauge problem.  When I do it, the gauge of the row that I pick up off the provisional chain isn't exactly the same as my plain old stockinette gauge.  The waste yarn choice or tension of how I knit that first row can cause all sorts of oddities.  This is especially true for me when I use larger size needles (anything over a US #3).  As I knit the second row I might find my color alignment drifting because there are too many or too few stitches in the pick-up row.  Not many, but enough to throw things off.  For example, row two might hit a designated color change point several stitches before that same spot appeared on the cast-on row.  If that happens I might cheat on the knit row immediately following my cast-on.  If I see the color repeat drifting too much to the right, I might knit two stitches together.  Conversely, if I "over-run" a color match point, I might rip back a couple of inches, then do a make-one to add a stitch, bringing the target sploches into better alignment. 

I do however have to take care if I change the stitch count.  If you look at my parrot-color sweater, you'll see wide swings where the colors lurch from side to side.  That's normal.  Two things make the zig-zags happen.  First, one's tension is not always uniform.  Most of us have near imperceptible changes in gauge as we sit through a knitting session.  We knit more tightly when we sit down, then loosen up a bit as our hands relax.  Finally when we get tired, we tighten up again.  Tighter knitting migrates the colors to the right.  Looser knitting migrates the stripes to the left.  I knit my parrot sweater's body in two sessions.  They're easy to pick out.



Hand painted yarns also have a playful imprecision in color placement.   They are never as regimented in their color placement as machine printed yarns (sock self-stripers).   That's the second factor, and what makes the edges of the stripe so step-like.  Color segments seep into the hank at different rates at different places, yielding different saturations and slightly different lengths of the color segments from strand to strand.  And some blobs may not go all the way through the hank and may seem to disappear after several repeats.



You can see clearly, above.  Look at the 8:00 position on my skein.  There's a spot of brown.  It encroaches on the teal and bleeds into the khaki, but doesn't do it uniformly through the hank.  It's most evident on the top of the skein.  Underneath it looks like the teal touches the khaki directly, with no intermediary fling into brown at all.

This brings me to the second thing that can go wrong.  Not every hand-painted skein is ideal for this type of knitting.  The longer the repeat and wider the individual color splotches, the better suited a yarn is for flashing.  My new yarn is borderline.  I expect some parts will align nicely.  The big teal areas show special promise.  I am expecting the brown and  khaki bits to dance between the teal areas because they are so short and so haphazardly sized.  I am not going to get the clear zig-zag stripe of my parrot sweater.  Instead I'm expecting something with more of a softer forest floor/camoflauge look.

UPDATE:  The third factor that limits flash is generated by how the skein is dyed, in conjunction with the total garment circumference.  Strands that are adjacent in the original hank when it was dyed are more likely to be close or near-close matches than are strands that are further apart.  If you have a garment that's small enough to be traversed around by only two repeats, the color stacking you will see will be much more in alignment than will a garment knit from the same yarn that takes five full repeats to complete one round.  That's wny it's not uncommon to see flash kits for toddler sweaters but less common to see them for adult sizes. If I were into dyeing and wanted to aim for flashing yarn in an adult circumference, I might try winding my yarn into hanks that are significantly wider around than the sizes most commonly used.

Now after several fits and starts of my own project - all the result of the pitfalls outlined abouve  (you have to be willing to rip out several times if you're going to start a flash sweater), I think I've got the stitch count thing down.  I hope to have actual pix of it in the next post.

First a cool thing:  stud earrings in the shape of the end buttons from old Susan Bates US #1 straights (bottom of the page). 

Flash Dance

I'm working with my latest yarn present - the hand-dyed cotton brought home from Arizona by the Resident Male:



My goal is to turn it into a t-shirt that flashes.  By that I want to have the color segments line up one on top of each other so that the finished product looks like it was painted:



Based on new yarn's look and circumference, I'm reasonably certain that I can do this, but two questions remain.

1. Will the final dimensions dictated by having to use full multiples of the skein length for each round of knitting be useful sizes.  In other words, my final sweater size will be dictated by how many stitches it takes to achieve flash.  Will that size fit?
2. How does one go about figuring out how many stitches to cast on to achieve this effect anyway?

The two questions are closely related.  This skein is  similar to a yarn I've used before.  In that yarn (not the one above), it took about 60 stitches to consume an entire repeat (give or take).  At five stitches per inch, that works out to about 12 stitches of linear knitting per repeat.  A flashing garmet knit from that yarn could be roughly 24 inches, 36 inches or 48 inches around.   24 inches would be too small for Younger Daughter, but a 36-inch sweater will Older Daughter.  48 inches will fit me.

 But will my new yarn hit that target.  Not closely enough to be absolutely certain.  This skein is a tad smaller in circumference than the old one.  (To determine the skein diameter of the old one, I took my balled up leftovers and wound some around my swift, lining up the color slices.  When the colors aligned, I knew I had "reconstructed" the original skein's width.)  The old skein was about a full yard in circumference.  This one is about 30-31 inches so I'd expect that the color cycle would be smaller.   For a rough approximation, I divided 36 inches by 60 stitches.  I get about .6 inch of yarn consumed per stitch.  That seems a bit high but not outside of reason.  30 inches "eaten" at the same rate would result in 50 stitches.  I suspect that my flash value will be somewhere in the 50-stitch neighborhood.  Five repeats of 50 stitches and a gauge of 5 stitches per inch would yield a garment circumference around 50 inches.  A bit big, but not outside of wearability.

Now all the math theory in the world can't substitute for actual experimentation.  Having done the base noodle work, it's time to try it out.  I know that whatever I end up knitting, I will want to be as yarn-economical as possible.  It might be necessary to eke out my limited amount of flash yarn with something else for ribbings or edgings, so I'll start with a provisional cast-on. 

I like the crochet chain provisional cast-on, preferably worked right onto the needles to avoid the fiddly bit of picking up stitches in the chain's back bumps.  I cast on far more stitches than I needed because with the crochet chain cast-on, you can slide any excess off the needles (or not pick up in the bumps) with no adverse effect on the project.  So using a plain old bit of cotton string for ease of removal later, I cast on about 270 chain stitches and set it aside.

Another complication.  In a screamingly bright  color combo like the parrot sweater above, it's easy to figure out where a color cycle begins.   That yellow is killer and can't be missed.  My new yarn however contains colors that are much closer in value.  There are three repeating segments per full cycle: teal, khaki, brown.  How will I know when I've gotten back to the beginning point?  Having wound my yarn into a big ball already it is no longer obvious where the cycles end.  An artificial flag is necessary.

Just like I did to determine the skein length of my old yarn, I hauled out the swift again, and re-wound several turns of my new stuff, taking care to adjust the swift until I could align my color patches.  I put a safety pin into the yarn at the end, and another into the yarn five turns (five full cycles) later, making sure that both pins marked matching spots in the cycle.  I now had five repeats marked out.  Starting with the point marked by my pin, I began to knit the loops off my provisional chain and continued until I cit the second safety pin.  Counting up, I had about 260 or so stitches on my circ before joining.  Or so?  Why the imprecision?  Am I ready to knit off happily watching the flash pattern grow?

Not exactly.  Tune in tomorrow to find out why, and what I did next.

Tracey asks if I plan on washing my Webs-acquired Highland Tweed before I work with it, or if I plan on washing the sweater after it has been knit. 

I think in this case, I'll wash my yarn first.  A couple of years ago, I knit something in a yarn that like the Highland Tweed was full of whatever they use to make machine spinning easier   It was a cone of some unidentified 100% wool I got at the old Classic Elite mill end store.  I swatched it up, got gauge, washed the square, re-gauged and knit up Flor's gansey pullover for my older daughter.  (Flor's pages are off-line, but the pattern can be found in the Internet Archive.) Then I washed the thing.  I was never quite pleased with the fit.  The yarn relaxed and fluffed out a bit, but looked "strangled" in the sweater.  Proportions shifted slightly in unexpected ways.  I'm sure if I had taken the time to wash the yarn first, then take a gauge on it rather than doing the lazy route, everything would have worked out better.

That being said - how to wash yarn?  It's easy.

I take my swift (or two chairs back to back in my pre-swift decade) and wind a fair bit off the cone.  Then I'll take some cotton string and loosely tie the newly made hank in two or three places.  I note that many hanks I buy are tied in a two or three "stitch" manner rather than in one big clump.  It looks like the person who did it took a length of tie string and looped it around the accumulated hank.  Then, he or she bunched up about a third of the hank's yarn and plunged one end of the tie string through the thing from top to bottom, and the other end through at the same spot, from bottom to top.  Then they grouped up the next third, and repeated the process.  The whole idea is to keep the yarn in an easy to unwind hank, but not tie it so tightly that the yarns rub up against each other and encourage fulling.



Once my hank is loosely tied, I'll wash it the same way I wash my finished items.  I'll fill my washing machine part way with cool water and add a wash agent.  Right now my favorite is Kookabura Wool Wash, but I've also used Eucalan in the washer.  If I were doing this OUT of the washer in a tub sink or bucket and had no wool wash to hand, I'd try a liquid dishwashing detergent or inexpensive shampoo.  Warning though, adding either dishwashing liquid or shampoo to a washing machine can mean a Lucy Moment as you deal with the resulting overflow of lather.  

With the washer's wash cycle off, but with the wash agent mixed well in the water, I submerge my hanked yarn in the tub and let it soak for a while.  I might swish it a bit very gently in the water to encourage the process but I don't turn the washer on, or otherwise squeeze, rub, or agitate the yarn mass.  Once the yarn has soaked for a bit (usually about a half hour, or until I remember I've put it in), I advance the washer dial to rinse.  I let the machine empty, then refill partway with the SAME temperature water in which I did the wash, but stop it before agitation begins.  I let the yarn sit a bit in the cleaner water (again with perhaps the most gentle of hand swishes), then advance the machine to final spin.  This time I let the water drain out and let the machine go through its final spin, to fling as much water out of the yarn as possible. 

After the wash I take my hanks and loop them around plastic hangers, then hang the hangers somewhere to dry.  Over the shower rod with a towel underneath is fine.  The trick is to find somewhere out of direct sun that's un-humid enough to encourage quick drying.  My basement in this case is right out, as it is too damp down there for quick drying.  On a very humid day I might direct a fan to blow at my drying hanks in order to speed the process.

Am I doing this right now?  Not yet.  I admit I've been sidetracked (the story of my knitting life).  I'm playing with the nifty cotton I described yesterday, messing with gauge measurements and stitch count, trying to establish my flash dimension.  It's a bit harder than before because although the yarn has the right dimension and color placement to flash, the color set doesn't have a wildly obvious marker like a screaming orange stripe.  A visually distinctive bit helps eyeball where the repeats should overlap.   More on this as I work the problem through...

I've gotten some questions via eMail about yesterday's yarn crawl.

How do you know what to buy?  Do you go with a list?

Some people do.  My pal Kathryn did.  She had a prepared list of patterns and requirements, and went looking for yarns specific to those needs.  I don't.  When I go to an "exotic" yarn shop I look for things that aren't available at my local yarn store.  Most of the stuff in the front retail store area at Webs is available in my own neighborhood.  (I am lucky enough to live in one of the most yarn-shop-dense areas in in the US.)  I went looking for back room bargains, off labels, mill ends, and other oddiments that I am leery of purchasing sight-unseen over the 'net.

In terms of what I was looking for, I do admit that experience with yarns is a plus.  I know a bit about different types of yarns and their properties.  Not as much as a spinner - but enough to know what yarns are likely to improve with washing, and which ones will remain prickly for their entire life.  I've got a rough grasp of what both yards per pound figures and the number system of yarn descriptors used for woolen and cotton yarns translate to in standard hand-knitters terms and gauge.  I've played with wraps per inch (though I admit I didn't use that measure this trip).  I've got a calculator and know how to convert pounds to grams, so I can figure out a rough equivalent cost per mythical 50-gram skein.  Plus I have a good idea of what colors appeal to me, look well on me (or my target),  have classic appeal, and would be fun to knit. 

So what I did was wander the back aisles in the walk in warehouse, looking for goodies on special.  The goodies had to be of excellent quality, in an appealing color that will transcend trends, of versatile type or construction (not a novelty yarn that will look dated in a fortnight), and represent a significant cost savings.  If any "spoke to me" (inspired a particular creative idea upon first sight) all the better.  But I was not buying for immediate consumption and went with no particular  projects in mind.

Have you ever bought "the wrong yarn"?

Yes and no.  I've got all sorts of things that have sat in my stash for extended periods of time, but I've never bought anything I wished I could return.  For example, right now I've got two bags of well-aged Classic Elite Artisan in a deep green somewhere between khaki and hunter.   At the time I bought it (circa '99) I had an idea that I'd use it for a cabled sweater.  But since then I've reconsidered.  It's a bulky weight (3.5spi) and has alpaca in it.  A cabled thing in it would end up being both weighty and ultra-warm.  Too warm to wear as an indoor/outdoor sweater.  Plus I've found I prefer knitting in smaller gauges.  So it sits, awaiting inspiration, but I wouldn't say it was a bad purchase or it was "the wrong yarn."  Eventually I'll figure out what to do with it, or I'll swap it for something else. 

How much did Webs pay you to post yesterday's ad?

Nobody pays me nothin'.  I go where I want, and I write what I want on String - bad or good.  Please send my greetings to the other conspiracy theorists whose company you must enjoy.

So what are those number system/yards per pound bits you mentioned?

(This wasn't actually asked, but I'm sure it will be if I don't address it here).  There are several very cogent explanations of the number system and how it's calculated elsewhere on the Web, but here's a quick cheat sheet of equivalents for wool.  Remember that although this chart makes it look like there are absolute definitions of size, these are approximate average numbers.  There is considerable overlap with the values shown above and below each category, dependent on all sorts of things including fiber blends, texture, or how tightly the stuff is twisted (how dense the yarn is).

Weight (ply weight descriptor equivalent)	Most Common Gauge	Approx. Average Yards/Pound (Wool)	Approx. Average Wraps/ Inch	Some Count Numbers* For This Weight (100% Wool)
Fingering (4-ply)	7 spi	1,920 wool	16	4/30, 2/15, 4/24
Sport (6-ply)	6 spi	1,500 wool	14	6/24, 2/16, 3/9, 3/11
DK (8-ply)	5.5 spi	1,400 wool	12-13	3/8,
Worsted (10 ply)	5 spi	1,280 wool	11-12	2/10, 10/24, 4/8
Aran (12 ply)	4.5 spi	850 wool	10-11	12/24, 2/4,
Bulky (14 ply)	3-4 spi	680 wool	9-10
Super Bulky (16 ply+)	3 spi or fewer	500 or fewer	8 or fewer	2/2

*In wool the first number refers to the number of plies (physical construction, not "ply weight equivalence"), in cotton, the second number refers to the number of physical plies

Please feel free to send me corrections and additions.  I'll be adding to this chart as time goes on, and possibly supplementing it with one for cotton when I get a chance.

The work crisis has not yet abated (in fact, it's just settling in for the long haul).  Even if I'm not writing about it, I AM knitting.  Plain, boring, unadventurous, run of the mill, miles of stockinette, unchallenging (but comforting) knitting.

In my case, that usually means socks, and reverting back to the sock style I can do in my sleep - toe up with a figure-8 cast on, and short-rowed heel.   I've been averaging completion of a pair every six days or so.  I only knit for an hour or so each evening, so each sock is taking me three evenings to complete.



At the left what we've got is a pair of fingering weight socks composed from various leftovers.  The vile mustard is a 100% wool yarn I've had forever.  The label still lists the distributor with a pre-zip code address format.  The tweedy green/blue is a partial ball of something (I know not what) I got in trade swapping leftovers with a friend, and the red is some Dale Baby Ull, left over from a sweater knit for the smaller daughter.  This is the pair I was referring to when I wrote that in January my color taste departs, and I feel compelled to mismatch in the most garish ways possible.  Perhaps it's a seasonal longing for light and color that happens just after the holidays, when the world returns to winter-drab.  In any case, the moire-like patterning of the red tweedy parts isn't a camera artifact, it actually exists.  For some reason the tweedy red bits worked themselves into swirls on the foot of one sock and the ankle of the other.  I think they moved in and out of synchronicity this way because in this multi-ply yarn (a true 4-ply four ply), each ply was carrying the same set of colors.  While the plies never aligned so that a blob of red hit across all four at the same time, it does appear that if two aligned **just right** I got my swirls.  An unexpected effect to be sure, and one I would have preferred either lasted for the entire duration of both socks, or didn't appear at all.  Still, the things are garish enough to begin with, so the red striping is just another element of eye offense.

In the center is half a pair of light worsted weight socks.  The other is still on the needles.  In this case I had a skein of Little Lola, a variegated yarn.  I've used it twice before to make Kombu scarves, but the colors for those were tamer.  This particular skein presented a problem.  The colors in it are less of a set, and more of a street fight, with fuschia, teal, olive, mustard and navy all scuffling for attention.  I had set the skein aside when I used its two brothers because I didn't know how exactly to use it.   When I was rummaging through my stash to fuel my holiday knitting I came across two skeins of a yarn I got in a discontinued inventory sale back in 1994 or so, at the late lamented Yarn Shop in College Park Maryland.  It's Classic Elite Paisley Light, a mix of wool and rayon, and matches the all superwash wool Little Lola exactly in gauge and structure.  In my case the Paisley Light also matched the fuschia in the Little Lola spot on.  By working the toes, heels, and ribbing in Paisley, plus alternating stripes of three rows of Paisley and six of Little Lola, I've managed to tone down the discord of the variegated skein a bit.  It's still a riot, but more of a quiet one.  (Review of Paisley Light coming soon to wiseNeedle).

Finally the pair on the right is standard issue Regia Mini Ringel.  Nothing special here whatsoever.  Due to my bad photography you can't even see the nifty way the stripes miter on the short-rowed heel.

One last bit of blather, the old fashioned way of doing stripes (actually using two skeins of yarn, alternating between them on some sort of fixed count) is a wonderful way to make socks match in length.  It's relatively easy to count four or six rows of color A, then some number of color B.  Then when time comes to make sure that the second sock is the same length as the first, all that need be done is count the stripes.  Much more accurate than eyeballing or measuring, and far less tedious than counting rows.  A final hint, sometimes counting even a small number of rows in stockinette can be difficult if you're using a dark color yarn, or one that's highly variegated.  Instead of counting on the front side, I take a needle tip and insert it into a column of purl bumps on the reverse side of my stockinette.  It's easy to count off my rows by counting the purl bumps.

One distinct advantage of cataloging my knitting life here - at year's end, I can look back over my posts and see how productive (or unproductive) I've been.  It doesn't look like I actually accomplished much this year in the way of actual knitting.  I certainly achieved conservation of un-finished projects, starting as many new ones as old projects that were brought to closure, although I did work on several major efforts.  In any case, here's a catalog of what I learned and did in 2005:

Projects finished

• Crazy Raglan.  Knit for the smaller daughter and started in 2004, this was an exercise in the use of DK weight self-striping yarn for something other than socks, scarves and hats.  I had several false starts on this one, ripping back when I didn't like the patterning that resulted.  I finally hit upon working the piece in several sections, joined Intarsia style.  This allowed the yarn to play better over narrower strips of width.  The project was a modified success, with most of the failure laid to the length of time it took me to get it done.  In the intervening months, target daughter grew, so the final product was a bit smaller on her than I intended.  Oh well.  I get to knit her another sweater now.
  

• Fingerless whatevers - (also see patterns, below).   A happy confluence of expedience and need, my hot color combo fingerless mitts made last winter bearable in my drafty house.  I can't say I learned much from this project besides the fact that not everyone sees the charm in garish, magpie color contrasts.  But it was fun to do, and resulted in a pattern for general consumption plus a rare item made for me.

• Paisley Shawl - I started with some lovely hand-dyed multicolor lace weight yarn and Sharon Miller's Birds Eye shawl pattern, but found out that the color variations in the yarn were too fierce and overwhelmed the delicate texture of that design  So I began experimenting and looking around for alternatives.  I found that the simpler the pattern and larger the plain stockinette (or garter) area, the better texture patterns coexist with color riot.  I ended up working a mostly-garter pattern from Spring '05 Interweave Knits.  It's an easy project, suitable for folk who are just embarking on lacy knitting.  My Paisley turned out quite nicely, and became a much-appreciated gift.

• Alcazar - The Hazel Carter pattern.  Fun to knit, but again a lesson learned.  This type of complex lace knitting needs special care if it's attempted in something other than wool.  Wool's stretch makes it optimal for the distortions required to span corners and block flat.  My Alcazar turned out beautifully, but the unstretchy nature of the faux-silk rayon made it difficult to work with, and limited the effectiveness of the corners, making them a bit more cupped than they would have been had I used wool.   Became a very much appreciated gift.

• Small grapevine in long armed cross stitch and double running.  Been sitting around forever.  I finally finished this one off and gave it as a gift (notice the theme, here?)  The next day's post goes into additional detail.

• Holiday knitting, including five scarves, seven pairs of socks, three hats, a pair of flip-top mittens, and a pair of fingerless mitts.  Nothing much exciting here (except for Kureopatora's Snake, see below).  All gifts...
  

Still in the bag

• Cursed Socks.  I can't say why this is still ongoing, but this pair of socks has sat on the sidelines for the past two years.  I could probably finish off the second sock in an evening or two.  I hang my head in disgrace.
• Dragon Skin Rogue Cardigan - Starting with the excellent Rogue pattern, I introduced some materials substitution, gauge, sizing and texture modifications.  All was going well until a mishap led to the front being pulled off the needles and a tangled mess.  Elder daughter looks at me with cow eyes every time she passes the knitting bag containing it.  My lesson learned here - take better care of projects in process, and don't let things languish just because I'm frustrated by the prospect of ripping back a mile, and figuring out where I left off.  More chagrin.
• North Truro Counterpane.  This one is going to take a very long time, even if I pursue it with dogged determination.  Still, I really like the way it's coming out.  I'm about 20% done (by eyeballed estimate), and will continue plugging along - probably as a perennial summer project.  The cotton motifs are perfect for knitting when it's too hot to knit anything else.  I'm not embarrassed about this one.
  
• One total disaster, actually abandoned - the Mystery Project - a felted bag commission undertaken for Classic Elite.  Try as I might, I could not get the entire thing to full evenly.  My bag ended up a misshapen lump, and the tight deadline I was working under didn't allow a second try.  Horror in a handbag - that's the only description I can think of that's near accurate.  Packed up in a box with the left-overs and mailed back in shame, so I can' t truly say it's still in the bag.

Reference articles

In spite of a dearth of personal knitting, I did write quite a few articles for String that I hope have been useful.  So that's something at least.

• Gauge 101
• Vintage yarn substitution suggestions - more are welcome.  If you've got additions for this chart, send them along.
• Lillehammer mythology - The famous sweater, with some musings on possible meanings on its various motifs
• Doing the central double increase - with illustrations
  
• One oversized circ and two-circ methods for knitting in the round
• Two items on two circs, knit side by side - also check out the notes from the following couple of days for more clarifications
  
• Make one left and make one right - two complementary invisible increases
• Some useful web tools
• Musings on Dutch Heels and inverted Dutch heels
• Cast on Round-Up I  and Cast on Round-Up II
• Knitting Needle Roundup, parts I, II, III, IV, V,  VI, and VII - describing many of the most commonly available straight and circular needles, their characteristics, actual diameters and lengths
• Shoe sizes, worldwide
• Winding a center pull ball by hand
• Charting 101, 102, 103, 104, 105 and 106  - a series detailing how to go about taking a prose pattern and turning it into a chart

Patterns

And some patterns. 

• Morgan's Paw Warmers - Pattern for super simple wristies/half-mittens knit in the flat from bulky yarn
  
• Susan's Impressionist Blues Lemonade - method description on making a stole with pockets
• Fingerless Whatevers - Fingering weight yarn half-mittens with a twisted stitch cuff and gusset thumb
• Ann Kreckel's Baby Booties - the pattern is provided as a link (it's Ann's not mine) but I do offer up a photo essay on how the thing is constructed
• Kureopatora's Snake - an entrelac style scarf done in ribbing in a wild yarn
• Kombu in German - a translation of my Kombu pattern from wiseNeedle, graciously provided by a German-speaking knitter

Books reviewed

And I posted reviews of a bunch of knitting books not often written about.  Mostly these are out of print books I got through my local library.  Insert shameless plug for local libraries.  Go.  Look.  Take books out.  If these older knitting books just sit on the shelves, the staff will be tempted to clear them out to make room for other stuff, and chances are the new books won't be about knitting.

• Reversible Two-Color Knitting
• Stitch by Stitch Volume I
• Bantam Step by Step Book of Needlecraft
• Mit Nadel und Faden
• Patchwork Knitting (the other one)
• Design Knitting
• Knitting Stitches and Patterns
• Knit to Fit
• For the Love of Knitting

Plus there have been all sorts of other posts here this year, blathering on about knitting, techniques, horrific mistakes I've made in my own projects, nifty things I've stumbled across, and the like.  Less however since my re-entry into full-time employment, as lengthy notes like this now take a couple of days to complete.  I'll soldier on into the New Year both blogging and knitting. I've already got two more pairs of socks I can rack up against my upcoming 2006 grand total.

I have to lead off with a disclaimer - I haven't tried this yet.  It's from TechTrax - a very useful third party support source for Microsoft applications.  Between them and WOPR, I have never failed to find a needed answer to a question about MS Word, Excel, Visio, Project and other MS-official torture devices I use in the course of writing proposals.  Most of the time in fact my answers are sitting ready to be found in the various discussion forums and articles on those sites.  (Instant expert help is always appreciated).

I know there are lots of people who use Excel or Word to set up knitting charts.  Some of them wish knitting fonts were more widely available or (more importantly) more intuitive, or more like symbol sets with which they're familiar.  Others have looked into building their own knitting symbol fonts.  That's a big task, and there are all sorts of tools to help.  It turns out that there is a hidden, free tool avaialble to MS Windows users - resident in operating system itself.  This tutorial takes you through using this character map editor to build custom symbols. 

The same site also recently published an article on creating custom graph paper in MS Word.

Other useful tools:

• Factor generator - useful for quickly figuring out possible repeats
• From the same site as the Factor Generator, a quick metric/imperial unit conversion utility
• And a grams/ounces coverter, too.

And so we see that knitting tools aren't always found in knitting-specific places.  If you've come across something useful in an unlikely location please feel free to add a comment here.  I can assure you that someone, somewhere will be very, very grateful.

?Thanks to everyone who left recommendations on inverting heel flap heels for toe-up socks. There probably are lots of "official" ways to do it. Leah mentioned one in Gibson-Roberts Ethnic Socks and Stockings. Kathryn says there's one in Church's Sensational Socks. Brigid sends us to the KnitSocks Blog. Emily says just to do a plain old flap heel, as written for cuff-downs, and Rob points out a totally different approach adapted from Rehfeldt's Toe Up Techniques for HandKnit Socks.

You know sometimes there's a reason to bow to the giants who have gone before. And sometimes for no reason other than personal perversity and the joy of fiddling with something on one's own, there's a reason to keep on plugging away despite all the world's advice to the contrary. I've been feeling contrary.

I worked my heel as described in yesterday's post. Here's the result:



I tried it on. It fit, but the sock ended up being too long. Plus I wasn't entirely satisfied with the location of the gusset. it was centered too low on the foot, with too much above. Fabric sort of lumped up on top of the ankle. So in this aspect at least taking a recommendation from Emily, I ripped my sock back to about a half-inch below the heel and reknit the thing on 50% of the total stitches. I ended up picking up 15 stitches on either side of my heel flap.



I like this better. I had thought that not having a heel cup (the turning the heel bit) that I'd end up with little wings at the corners of the heel flap. The sock unworn kind of looks that way, but when worn, everything fills out and no little corners protrude. Perhaps that's because my feet are so wide. This particular pair is a gift, so I'll have to knit another pair using this heel and give them a thorough wear testing. I am keeping this heel. (The color on this second photo is closer to Real Life.)

In any case, I'm now up to the ankle part and am about to place the knit/purl motif I've drafted up. It's a very simple geometric design based on some rectangles. Thinking on the way knit/purl patterning looks, I'll work the foreground in knits, and the background in purls. I'll either place it in a stripe of purl that goes completely around, or box the motif in a purl field. More on this tomorrow...

Here's the last item in the chart series. Thank you for all the kind words. I'm delighted that people are finding this useful.

I have gotten some questions about why I am not using the standard Japanese symbol set. That set is quite broad compared to most of the sets in Western books. My answer is that it's relatively unknown in the US and Europe. Perhaps I'll add a symbol glossary that equates its symbols to notations used by other more commonly available sources. That's a big project though, and might be better suited for wiseNeedle than for this blog.

Barbara Walker's Starlight Lace, Second Treasury of Knitting Patterns, p.288

I will use this last Walker pattern to show some more complications to charting life. This time, the pattern's stitch count varies in a couple of rows, plus there is a large number of edge stitches. My method is to graph out everything verbatim row to row, then (if needed) introduce no-stitch boxes for clarity. Again, all quotations from Walker are in bold. Here goes...

Multiple of 6 st plus 5
Row 1 (wrong side): and all other wrong-side rows - Purl.
Row 2: K2 *yo, ssk, k1, yo, ssk, k1-b; rep from *; end yo, ssk, k1.

The repeat is only 6 stitches, but I think I'll chart out three repeats plus edge stitches. That should give me enough room to see the play of the edge stitches, and the staggered effect of the offset design itself. Row 1 is plain old purl, but it's a wrong side row, so it graphs out as shown below, with the "1" on the left hand edge rather than the right hand edge. Remember, I'm just graphing verbatim at this point. I'm making no effort to read ahead. I just want to get the stitches down on my chart.


We've got 23 stitches [(6x3) + 5]. Note that the k1-b (knit one stitch through the back of the loop to twist it) has its own symbol. All wrong side rows in this pattern are plain - worked as purls if the thing is knit flat, and as knits if it's worked in the round.

Digression: Most modern texture patterns alternate rows with something happening on them (cable crossings, decreases, increases, etc.) with plain rows, and many pattern authors don't bother graphing the alternate rows if they're all plain. This can cause a bit of confusion. I got tripped up recently by Hazel Carter's Spider Queen shawl. It's a masterful bit of charting, but the first chart is stripped of those plain wrong-side rows. The later charts include them. I wasn't paying attention, and didn't notice that the numbering on that first chart labeled every row, but counted by twos. I ended up having to rip back a bit when I noticed that my piece didn't looklike the project photo. So be warned. Look at the numbering. If it begins with "1" on the left, and you're knitting flat you start off with a wrong-side row. If the "1" is on the right and you're knitting flat, you start off with a right-side row. If every other number is missing, you've got a pattern with the plain rows left out. Look elsewhere in the write-up to find out if those plain rows are to be knit or purled.

I'll skip writing up the plain rows, but I will include them in my growing graph:

Row 4: K3, *k2tog, yo, k1-b, yo, ssk, k1-b, rep from *; end k2


Again, no problems here. Everything graphs out nicely and stitch count is constant. There are equal numbers of stitches increased (the yos) and stitches decreased (the ssks and k2togs).

Sometimes if I'm having problems with a repeat, even if it's charted, I'll grab a piece of graph paper and draw out my stitches. Sometimes I catch an error in my knitting using my pencil that went totally unnoticed on my needles.

Row 6: k2, k2tog * yo, sl2-k1-p2sso, yo, sl1-k2tog-psso; rep from * end yo, sl2-k1-p2sso, yo ssk, k2.

This is where that "off to hell in a handbasket" feeling begins to creep in. We've got double decreases, both with the rightmost leg on top (sl1-k2tog-psso), and with the centermost stitch on top (sl2-k1-p2sso). We've also got a number of yarn overs, and just for fun - a couple of plain old decreases, and an unknown number of times to do the ** repeat between the k2, k2tog opening unit, and the end yo, sl2-k1-p2sso, yo, ssk, k2 closing unit.

To figure this out, we need to remember that we've got 23 base stitches on the previous row. That's 23 stitches to play with. All of the plain knits plus the stitches in the decreases on Row 6 must add up to 23. Let's look at the math:

• One ** repeat on this row adds up to six stitches (the two double decreases).
• The pre-** opening row unit is four stitches (k2 plus one k2tog)
• The after-** closing row unit is seven stitches (one double decrease plus one ssk and k2)

If you add up our fixed numbers (the pre- and post-** stitches) you get 11 stitches. The previous row contained 23, and we subtract those 11 from the total. We get 12, which (serendipity) is a multiple of our ** unit. We graph out the pre-* stitches (shown in blue) plus two repeats of the ** unit, followed by the post-** unit (also shown in blue.


We're out of that handbasket, even though our graph is showing a very short row. Not to worry. Going through and counting stitches confirms that we've got the correct number here. We'll worry about neatening everything up and inserting those no-stitch boxes after we get all the rows charted. So let's move on.

Row 8: K3, *k1-b, yo, k1, yo, k1-b, k1; rep from*, end k2.
This row is also problematic. How many times to repeat the stuff between the **s? Again , stitch count comes to our rescue. Evil Row 6 brought the stitch count down to 17. Row 7 (worked plain) preserved that count. Now on Row 8, there are increases, and "as-is" stitches but no decreases. There should be 17 stitches on this row EXCLUSIVE of the YOs. Again we do the math. We start with 17 stitches, then account for the three before the *, and the 2 after - that's 12 stitches left. NOT counting YOs, each between the ** repeat contains 4 stitches. We need to graph out three iterations of the stuff between the **s. Happily once we graph in these instructions (including the 6 YOs) that restores us to the original stitch count of 23.



Remember, we're not worrying about lining stitches up right now, our only concern is getting the correct number of them on the chart. We'll think about how to represent those low-count rows 6 and 7 later.

Row 10: K2, *yo, ssk, k1-b, yo, ssk,k1; rep from * end yo, ssk, k1
We're back to a stable stitch count, with the same number of increases and decreases per row. Graphing it up is easy. I notice something here though:



See those two blue units? They're identical. It looks like this pattern is formed by an exact duplicate of rows 1-6, offset by three stitches (one half of the repeat). While you can see it (sort of) in the prose directions, the duplication leaps out in the charted ones. I find this sort of half-drop duplication and charting makes the pattern really easy to memorize. More on this later, after we've charted some more rows.

Row 12: *K2tog, yo, k1-b, yo, ssk, k1-b; rep from *, end k2 tog, yo, k1-b, yo, ssk.
Again this looks veeerrrryyyy familiar! I've highlighted the repeat (in fact I just cut and pasted those boxes).



Row 14: K1, *yo, sl2-k1-p2sso, yo, sl1-k2tog-psso; rep from *, end yo, sl2-k1-p2sso, yo, k1.
Remember Evil Row 6, with all those double decreases? It's back! Offset three stitches, but otherwise the same. We start with 23 stitches on the previous row, then subtract the 1 before the **, and the 4 after the **, leaving 18 stitches - so we do the 6-stitch bit between the **s three times.



Row 16: K1, k1-b, *k1, yo, k1-b, k1, k1-b, yo; rep from * end k1, k1-b, k1.
Just like row 8, offset again by three stitches. Again we've got 17 stitches on the previous row to account for. Not counting the YOs, we've got 2 stitches before and 3 stitches after the ** accounted for, leaving 12 - so we do the 4-stitch ** unit three times. One you add in the YOs, we're back up to to the 23 stitches of our original count.



Now to add the finishing touches. It looks like each of the decrease units on Rows 6 and 14 visually caps off the clusters of decreases on the rows below. So I'll spread them out across the row, adding in my no-stitch boxes as best I can to maximize the read of the pattern compared to the photo of the worked swatch.

I'll also add in my stitch key, header and footer info at this point. Remember that there are NO increases or decreases on alternate rows. Therefore I don't need to include that second column of "if it's a right-side/wrong-side row" instructions that I had to include in yesterday's write-up.

One final note, there is one small bit of strangeness here. Because of the way that the repeat works out, and the way that edge stitches are handled, the last decrease on Row 6 is handled differently if it is the final stitch of an "inside repeat" or if it is the final stitch of the last repeat on the row. Since this isn't easy to graph, I've added a special note about it, and made it blue on the chart.



The memorization thing?? This pattern looks complicated at first glance. Especially if you just look at the prose directions. However it's not that tough. There are only four substantive rows - 2, 4, 6, and 8. The entire pattern repeat is only six stitches wide. Everything else is a repeat, either straight on the same row, or (in the case of rows 10-16) offset by three stitches (one half the width of the repeat). ? I can't remember the prose directions verbatim, but I can and do memorize the pattern in its visual representation. Not everyone can memorize a nonverbal visual representation (and it's no shame not to have that bit of wiring) but many people can, and have surprised themselves by being able to do so after becoming comfortable with charts.

This concludes my mini-series on graphing - how to read them, how to build them, and how to solve common problems translating prose directions to charts. Please feel free to post additional questions about graphing and reinterpreting prose instructions as charts, but please know I will not be offering a graphing service here. My goal is to show others how to do it for themselves, not do it for them.

One last tech note - the visual presentation of the charts changes mid-way through this note because I experienced a massive computer failure. I ended up finishing this post on a different machine using a different version of MS Visio. The later version has a slightly different GIF translator than the earlier version I normally use. So it's not your monitor - it's me. Apologies for the visual confusion.

So far the nominations for stitches to use as object lessons have been rather sparse. I've gotten suggestions to do:

• Porcupine Stitch from B. Walker's Second Treasury of Knitting Patterns, p. 282
• Drooping Elm Leaves from B. Walker's A Treasury of Knitting Patterns, p. 217

I've also gotten notes from people who said that given the hints posted over the past week they've been able to graph up

• Mermaid Mesh from Walker's Second Treasury, p. 267
• Madeira Cascade from Walker's A Treasury, p. 222

As the big boss at work would say, "Good on 'ya!"

These two patterns are not quite straightforward. Cascade has five stitches above and beyond the repeat that need to be apportioned into edge stitches. It does however have a very strong central spine - a double decrease that lines up on all right-side rows. Mesh is a bit harder in that it has both lots of edge stitches, plus a massive number of decreases and increases that use natural slant of the decreases to visually wander left and right. Certainly not a pattern for the faint-hearted to graph!

For the object lesson I'll do Porcupine and Walker's Starlight Lace (Second Treasury, p 288). Drooping Elm is interesting, but doesn't pose some of the conundrums that these two do. I'll start today with Porcupine. Starlight will appear later in the week.

Porcupine Stitch from B. Walker's Second Treasury of Knitting Patterns, p. 282

Porcupine has some interesting features. It's a 9 row repeat, in which only three rows are substantive. BUT those three rows are each repeated at least twice, and the same instructions are repeated on both the right and wrong side rows of the piece. There are also four stitches requested over the 12 stitch repeat count that will have to be accounted for in edge stitches, but they seem to always stay outside the ** repeat marks, so keeping track of them shouldn't be a problem.

Walker notes that this texture design is of Victorian origin. It does have a major feature that was much more common in early instructions than in later ones. Porcupine includes patterning on both right side and wrong side rows. You don't see this often as most modern? patterns confine increases, decreases or other shaping elements to right-side rows only. Flipping the instructions for decreases is far more confusing than just translating knits to purls and vice versa.

My write-up will intersperse the as Walker gives them with how that row ends up being graphed. The Walker quotations will be in bold.

Multiple of 12 stitches plus 4
Row 1: K2, *Yo, K2tog; rep from * to last 2 sts, end k2
Looking at the pattern, I suspect it will be a good idea to graph out two repeats of the pattern, that's 24+4 = 28 stitches across my chart. We start with a right-side row:


Row 2 and 4: K2, purl to last 2 st, end k2
Very easy. Remember this is a wrong side row, and that mental inversion thing should be invoked to "flip" knits to purls and vice versa.

Row 3: Knit
Because Row 4 is the same as Row 2, I'll graph up both 3 and 4 here.


Row 5 and 8: K2, *sl1-k2tog-psso, k4, yo, k1, yo, k4, re from *, end k2
Now it begins to get interesting. Still, stitch counts are maintained. How can I tell this? By looking at the part between the **s. It includes a double decrease that finishes with the rightmost stitch on top, plus two yos to compensate for the two stitches eaten by the double decrease. Warning though. It's not all that hard to visualize row 5, it's a right-side (odd numbered) row, but I can sense some hyperventilation among those who have noticed that this same sequence is repeated on a wrong-side (even numbered) row. We'll deal with that bit of chaos when we get there.

Row 6, 7 and 9: K2* p3tog, p4, yo, p1, yo, p4, rep from * end k2
We have now hit the twilight zone row - the one that will cause many people to give up graphing. But it's not impossible. Remember that mental flip thing? Flex your brain because we're now going to do some gymnastics.

On Row 6, we've been told to do a p3tog on a wrong side row. Now, a p3tog on a wrong side row, if viewed from the right side of the work is a dead ringer for a k3tog. How do I know this? The Sainted Bar