Knot Knecessarily Known Knitting

Well, 2018 really got away from me. This pattern, Exponent, was written for Christmas in July 2017 . In fact, I wrote about it in two different posts in July 2017 . I had a couple sample mini-skeins from festival goodie bags. It is fun to get yarn, but what are you going to do with only 10 yards? I worked Exponent as a hair accessory by starting with an encasement cast-on. But you could also start with a reversible pinhole cast-on and make a shower poof or a flower or a cat toy. It might be interesting to work this with a novelty yarn such as jelly yarn or wire. Or you could work it in Pantone's color of the year (living coral) and make a knitted coral. Here is the basic version of the pattern: encasement cast-on around the hair elastic work a round of 1×1 ribbing work a round of Y-increases in every stitch pair repeat the plain round and the increase round until about half the yarn remains bind off Part of why it took so long to post the pattern was that I wanted to ...

When making garments that fit the human form, we sometimes talk about "ease." Ease is a measure of how much extra fabric is in a garment. For example, if a bust measurement is 36 inches, then a sweater that is exactly 36 inches around has no ease. If the sweater is 38 inches, it has 2 inches of positive ease at the bust. If the sweater is 35 inches, is has one inch of negative ease. A big, boxy, oversized sweater might have 6 or 8 inches of positive ease. This is important when you are making garments that both fit and flatter. And ease behaves differently if the fabric is woven than if it is knitted. Woven fabrics generally don't stretch if they have been cut with the grain. (Cutting on the bias is a whole different story.) Knit fabrics are different. They stretch. They move. They might even grow. This also means knit fabrics can match our shape. If the shape you have underneath is not one you want to display to the world, then this is maybe a bug rather than a featu...