Knot Knecessarily Known Knitting

Well, today is the last day The Whole Nine Yarns will be open. It has been a privilege to be part of the community that Debi and the rest of the crew built over the years in Woodstock. Together we have supported each other through the happy and the sad, through projects that went well and projects that went to the great frog pond. We have celebrated the joys. And we have knit on through all adversity, as Elizabeth Zimmermann advised. For more than a decade the shop has been my home away from home. In the last couple years I have been absent from knit nights, as the traffic to Woodstock and the time required became prohibitive. I've spent more weekends traveling for work or pleasure, so fewer opportunities to teach in the shop. But even when I was away for a month, going back to the shop was returning home, returning to someplace safe and warm and welcoming, someplace where there would always be hugs and comfort. I feel the loss a little bit right now. I am sure I will feel i...

The last part of the pattern is the bind-off. The interesting thing about a pattern that doubles is that each new increase round and plain round uses about as much yarn as the whole pattern up to that point. Let's say you start at the very center with one pair. Cast-on: 1 pair. Set-up round:1 pair. At this point, you have worked 2 pairs total. 1st round: increase to 2 pairs. The increase round contained as many stitches as the previous 2 rounds. 2nd round: plain round of 2 pairs. At this point, you have worked 4 more pairs, so 6 pairs total in the project. 3rd round: increase to 4 pairs. The third round uses as much yarn as rounds 1 & 2. 4th round: plain round of 4 pairs. At this point, you have worked 8 more pairs. Add to the previous 6 pairs, and you have worked 14 pairs total. 5th round: increase to 8 pairs. The fifth round uses as much yarn as rounds 3 & 4. 6th round: plain round of 8 pairs. At this point, you have worked 16 more pairs. Add to t...

The pattern for Exponent alternates plain rounds of 1×1 ribbing with rounds of Y-increases. The Y-increase is a knitting heresy. Normally, you can't knit into the same stitch twice. If you try it, you will discover that all you do is add a wrap, making the stitch taller but not making more stitches. Versa lace is ribbing based. Instead of having a single stitch, you have a pair of stitches. This means you can work knit 1, purl 1, then back up and work knit 1, purl 1 in the same stitches again. As you can see in the detail photograph, the effect looks like two stitches coming out of one. And they are bilaterally symmetrical, meaning there is no left-leaning or right-leaning version of this. I have not yet put in the time exploring, but I suspect there may be some crochet maneuvers that can be mimicked in knitting using this technique.

Well, 2018 really got away from me. This pattern, Exponent, was written for Christmas in July 2017 . In fact, I wrote about it in two different posts in July 2017 . I had a couple sample mini-skeins from festival goodie bags. It is fun to get yarn, but what are you going to do with only 10 yards? I worked Exponent as a hair accessory by starting with an encasement cast-on. But you could also start with a reversible pinhole cast-on and make a shower poof or a flower or a cat toy. It might be interesting to work this with a novelty yarn such as jelly yarn or wire. Or you could work it in Pantone's color of the year (living coral) and make a knitted coral. Here is the basic version of the pattern: encasement cast-on around the hair elastic work a round of 1×1 ribbing work a round of Y-increases in every stitch pair repeat the plain round and the increase round until about half the yarn remains bind off Part of why it took so long to post the pattern was that I wanted to ...