Knot Knecessarily Known Knitting

The title of this post is a mouthful! One of the themes running through my knitting life this year has been double knitting. For those of you who are regular readers, this is no surprise. I enjoy the challenge of double knitting. I also enjoy the finished result. Knitting can often have obvious right and wrong sides; and I love that double knitting can be a way to make something that is beautiful from every direction. Earlier this year I finally succeeded in purchasing a copy of the expanded 1994 Schoolhouse Press edition of Notes on Double Knitting by Beverly Royce . Most knitters think of double knitting as mirror-image positive-negative patterns in a thick fabric, such as the example below. Beverly instead explored tubular double knitting. What is that? Tubular double knitting is using double knitting techniques to create tubes or pockets. "Regular" double knitting uses two yarns on each row. In fact, it is a great way to reproduce patterns that can be reduced to...

This last video shows you how to work a three-needle bind-off.  In this example, the bind-off closes the double-knitting.  You can also use this bind-off to join two pieces of knitting.  And I've even shot it both with knitting needles and with a crochet hook. For those of you used to knitting straight through both stitches, you'll notice that I knit the stitch on the front needle and purl the stitch on the back needle.  This causes the stitches to lie flat to form a nice, well-behaved chain detail.  It also causes the wrong-side of the chain stitch to hide inside the knitting, rather than on the public side.  It's a subtle difference, but one I hope you'll appreciate.