Knot Knecessarily Known Knitting

I usually like to incorporate some sort of selvedge treatment on any edge that isn't hidden in a seam allowance. Some knitting stitches will curl or they are loose or they just don't play well at the edges. For the Albedo Shawl, I used a 2-stitch i-cord that was knit as you work rather than applied at the end. But because I was using lace patterns, I did encounter some concerns about row gauge. Most knitters worry very little about row gauge. After all, most of the time we are concerned with how wide our work will be. How tall or short it becomes is pretty easy to control in most projects by just knitting more or fewer rows. But if you are combining different stitches across the same row, then row gauge can be an issue. If you have a stitch pattern that is short in the same row with a stitch pattern that is tall, then your fabric will not want to lie flat and will be prone to puckering. This can be a fascinating textural design element, but it can also just be a frumpy mess! ...

My design process is such that I sometimes come up with what I want visually before I figure out whether or not it can be knit. In the Albedo Shawl, I decided I wanted a horizontal line that would divide the border pattern at each end from the swath of plaited basket stitch in the center. What I came up with is casting off-on. The principle is that binding off will create a horizontal line of chain stitch. Of course, if you bind off, then you don't have any live stitches on the needle. So one way to accomplish my goal would be to bind off and then knit up new stitches to replace the ones I just eliminated. But why eliminate them if you know you want them right back? So I decided to cast them back on as I bound them off. In this way, I avoided the hassle of knitting up stitches. As you'll see in the videos, the technique is a little fiddly. You need to slip stitches back and forth between left needle and right needle in order to have them in the correct location for binding ...

The plaited basket stitch involves crossing stitches -- i.e. cabling 1 over 1 -- on both the right side and wrong side rows. You are not going to want to use a cable needle for this. But you will find that working this on the needles is not as hard as you might expect. It does require some flexibility in the wrists. On the plus side, once you learn how to work this, you should be able to easily pick up on how to work a Norwegian purl. And while the videos show you how to work it for this particular stitch pattern, you should be able to adapt this information to other situations that call for crossing a single stitch over another. 1st video: How to work plaited basket stitch from the right side. 2nd video: How to work plaited basket stitch from the wrong side.

A new pattern! And a bonus chance to win yarn! Glee! Back in June I posted about some swatches I had knitted for the summer TNNA show. One of the swatches was done in Crystal Palace Moonshine, a lovely yarn with color, shimmer, and just a little halo. In late August, I got an e-mail asking if I would be willing to make a project using this yarn. I had hoped to get it cast on during Dragon*Con, but that just didn't happen. I even tried to work on it some during the convention, but the muses refused to help me. (I'm sure they were just too busy inspiring all the serious Cosplayers.) But I did get the project worked out and cast on in September. And in about a month, I knit up this lovely shawl. The name? Albedo is the reflectivity of a surface. Astronomers use the albedo of a planet, moon, or asteroid to make guesses about its composition. A shiny, icy surface is much more reflective than an ashen or rocky surface. Since the Moonshine yarn is glimmers and shines, it seemed li...