Knot Knecessarily Known Knitting

I used the December downtime to look around our neglected house. We are still reorganizing from Cuddly Hubby moving home January 2022. The 10 long boxes of comic books are in one corner of my studio. The weaving equipment previously in that corner is stored securely in a closet under the basement staircase. Some clutter remains. How could I organize my work space? Among the clutter was the pile of orange yarn . This was acquired in an Atlanta Knitting Guild auction on 11 July 2019, back in the Before Times. It is 48 skeins of super bulky 50% alpaca 50% wool from Blue Sky Fibers. I bid $40, thinking no one would let me get this for less than $1 a skein, right? Wrong. It is over 10 pounds of yarn — almost 5 kilos. The price was almost criminal. Orange is not a typical color for me. Of the almost 500 entries in my Ravelry stash, only a dozen are "orange." And at least a few of those are gifts or door prizes or a pale peach color rather than a true orange. ...

Since I now have some time on my hands, I'm getting back to unfinished objects, half-designed projects, notes for new classes, and the like. I have a backlog of things in the "when I have time" category. There were several items in the basket on the living room table. Among them were handouts, yarn, and a strip of Russian lace pattern samples from when I took Galina Khmeleva's "The Fundamentals of Orenburg Knitted Lace" at Georgia FiberFest in September 2017. What I what to concentrate on today is attaching a lace border. I pulled out the acrylic practice yarn and started swatching. Swatch worked in the Orenburg tradition, with simultaneous edging. In the Orenburg tradition, the edging is worked in a long strip from left to right across the bottom. It essentially becomes the cast-on. The central pattern stitches are picked up from the side of the edging. And the Russians have a clever method for turning the corners and working the edging at both s...

I've been doing a lot of travel lately, including Fiber Forum, STITCHES South, Maryland Sheep and Wool, and Middle Tennessee Fiber Festival. Thus, the time gap on the blog. I did want to share my current experiment. This is an alternative method for attaching i-cord. It uses Rick Mondragon's sliding loop intarsia technique combined with Gwen Bortner's method for picking up reversibly on an edge. I've talked about Rick's technique before . To knit up on an edge reversibly, Gwen picks up by knit 1, yarn over rather than all knits. The yarn overs create a second layer of fabric. Gwen's method is especially suited to transitioning to 1x1 ribbing, double knitting, or brioche. I'm also knitting back backwards and I'm working the 6-stitch i-cord using Beverly Royce's method for tubular double-knitting. In this case, I am working left to right alternating knit 1, slip 1 with yarn in front; then working right to left alternating purl 1, slip 1 with yarn in ba...

This is the third -- and probably most important -- tutorial video for the Sir Thomas entrelac scarf. This join is a clever use of the sliding loop modular intarsia technique published by Rick Mondragon in the February 1995 issue of Threads magazine. I knew of the technique, but had not thought of using it in entrelac until I met Jay Petersen in the summer of 2011. Jay has done some amazing explorations of entrelac that is three-dimensional, patterned, or reversible. He is definitely the king of extreme entrelac! This technique is but a sample of the reversibility that can be achieved.