Knot Knecessarily Known Knitting

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 ...

Well, here we are in October. For us southeastern crafters, we should be coming up on Southeastern Animal Fiber Fair. But we all know what happened to Asheville on 27 September 2024. I had expected to spend this week planning and packing and driving up to the mountains for a lovely weekend with friends. This year SAFF and Rhinebeck were again scheduled for the same weekend. I understand that beginning next year, SAFF is on the fourth weekend for a decade. That means 10 years of Rhinebeck weekend followed by SAFF weekend. The world is slowly moving back into alignment. Dragon side In anticipation of SAFF, I worked diligently and monogamously on Dragons' Lore . This is the two-faced double-knit scarf designed by Rik Schell of Purl's Yarn Emporium . I purchased the scarf kit in January when I was nearby at Kanuga. I'd had nearly annual conversations with Rik at SAFF. I knew he had developed an alternative way of working two-faced double-knits...

The satisfaction of making things is much connected to the beauty of the thing made. When you yourself craft something beautiful and of high-quality, the personal satisfaction is what encourages/compels you to do more. Climbing the skill ladder, however, sometimes means you make things that are ugly. Behold! obverse reverse What is this? This is the obverse and reverse of my swatch from Harry Wells' "Colorwork the Easy Way: Mosaic Knitting" class at The Knitting Guild Association Next Level Knitting Conference a couple weekends ago. I either attended in real time or watched the replay of eight of those conference classes. While I had done mosaic knitting a long time ago, I thought a refresher from an excellent teacher might be good. The pattern at the bottom of the swatch is the pattern worked in class. Of course, I then decided I wanted to work it reversibly. My first attempt was not entirely successful. But above it, you can see t...

Last weekend I took Alasdair Post-Quinn's online "Double-knitting Off the Grid" workshop . While I don't double-knit often, I find it useful in certain circumstances. Alasdair's inventive exploration of the technique is always worthy of my time. Learning something new was a familiar pleasure, one I haven't indulged in much in 2020. The swatch took a couple hours to knit. Basically, the class was a deep dive into double-knit increases and decreases. The decreases are pretty much the same ones I use in versa lace. In double-knitting those decreases involve two colors not one, but are otherwise the same. Alasdair has an interesting way of working the swap between stitches #2 and #3 in a single decrease. And he has an unusual way of working the lifted increase. Also, I would have misread his charts if I hadn't taken the class.  The off the grid method allows you to create motifs that are more curved and refined, rather than pixela...