Human Factors

Teaching is often about human factors. How do you make something unintelligible instead understandable? Knitting patterns have this same challenge. How do you tell someone else what you did in enough detail to be replicated, but not so much detail as to overwhelm?

One of the techniques I teach occasionally is two-pattern double-knitting. This technique allows you to have two different patterns on each side of your fabric, instead of a reversed negative. The most common use of this technique is to put lettering into a project.

The challenge is the charts. A regular double-knitting chart looks like this:

And produces this:

The chart that makes the letters read correctly looks like this:

And produces this:

Right away, you can see the chart for this technique makes your eyes cross. You must follow the chart carefully, mindfully, to produce the desired result.

I recently stumbled upon a better method for these charts.

A friend had been working on this scarf with the script from The One Ring. She was doing the regular double-knitting version, which makes one side that reads and one side that doesn't read. But she doesn't like double-knitting. I said I'd gladly work on the project. The first thing I did was download Guðrún Herdís Arnarsdóttir's legible charts. And that's how I discovered a much better method, where the chart now looks like this:

In legible double-knitting, you are still producing stockinette on both sides of the fabric. The stitches are still knit-purl pairs on the needles. That part has not changed. What has changed is what kinds of stitch pairs you have. In normal double-knitting, there are only two kinds of stitch pairs:

1. knit light, purl dark
2. knit dark, purl light

Legible or two-pattern double-knitting adds two more types of pairs: 

3. knit light, purl light
4. knit dark, purl dark

That means there are four types of pairs, not two. So instead of two colors of blocks in the chart — usually white and black — there are four colors. In this case, I've used yellow for type 3 (knit and purl both with light color) and red for type 4 (knit and purl both with dark color).

Guðrún swaps the red and black from what I'm using. For my brain, having color mean "do something different" makes better sense. Here's what the key looks like:

The overall chart resembles two images superimposed on one another, as if both were set to 50% transparency.

With my week-long class on reversible knitting coming up in June at John C. Campbell Folk School, I now have some editing to do for my handout!