Wish: a free lace knitting stitch pattern

Wish: a free lace knitting stitch pattern, by Naomi Parkhurst
| Naomi Parkhurst

I’ve started being able to post another knitting stitch pattern each month, thanks to my Patreon supporters. For this mid-month post, I used a random number generator to pick a word out of what I call my word hoard: the list of words that supporters past and present have suggested for me to encode as knitting stitches. This month’s word for the middle of the month is Wish, suggested by Nim.

Each month, my Patreon backers have the chance to suggest words for me to encode as knitting stitches. A random number generator helps me choose the word of the month, and then I get to work, first turning the letters into numbers, then charting the numbers onto grids in various ways. Finally, when I make the chart into lace, I turn the marked squares into yarnovers and work out where to place the corresponding decreases. (I usually make lace; occasionally I make cables instead.) I also make a chart for any craft that uses a square grid for designing; this goes in a separate post.

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Wish: a mosaic knitting stitch pattern

Wish: a mosaic knitting stitch pattern
| Naomi Parkhurst

Yesterday’s needlework chart for Wish turns out to work quite well as the basis for a mosaic knitting chart. I ran out of time to knit a swatch, but the nice thing about mosaic knitting is that the charts are similar to the final appearance of the knitting.

The thing about mosaic knitting is that it just looks difficult. It’s really easy to do! Basically, you’re knitting two row stripes, and slipping stitches from the row below to make the contrasting pattern. If you can knit stripes, you can knit mosaic patterns.

Here’s an article from Twist Collective about how it works.

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Wish: a free needlework chart for any craft

Wish: a needlework chart for any craft, by Naomi Parkhurst
| Naomi Parkhurst

The random number generator picked Wish for my second encoded word post of this month. It was suggested by Nim, one of my Patreon supporters.

I usually develop a complicated knitting stitch pattern for each word, but I also like to provide a basic chart for any craft that’s worked on a grid: beads, cross stitch, whatever. I also try to provide an image of the pattern repeated all over not as a chart. It doesn’t necessarily look like a finished object for any particular craft, but I just want to give a sense of it.

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Beads and pairs of stitches

| Naomi Parkhurst

I was having a conversation with a knitter in my Ravelry group about the difficulty of figuring out where to place beads symmetrically when all the stitches come in pairs. That is, there’s a lot of pairs of knit stitches, or a lot of double yarnovers. That conversation led to some experimentation on my part based on her ideas, my thoughts about them, and on my knitting reference books.

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Unicorn: a free needlework pattern for any craft

Unicorn: a free needlework chart for any craft, by Naomi Parkhurst
| Naomi Parkhurst

This month, the random number generator chose unicorn, suggested by Katherine & Ange on Patreon.

I usually develop a complicated knitting stitch pattern for each word, but I also like to provide a basic chart for any craft that’s worked on a grid: beads, cross stitch, whatever. I also try to provide an image of the pattern repeated all over not as a chart. I use a bunch of filters and things to try to make it look interesting while retaining the encoded layout. It doesn’t necessarily look like a finished object for any particular craft, but I just want to give a sense of it.

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Unicorn: a free lace knitting stitch pattern

Unicorn: a free lace knitting pattern by Naomi Parkhurst
| Naomi Parkhurst

This month, the random number generator chose the word Unicorn, suggested by Katherine and Ange on Patreon. I went through a unicorn obsession in my early teens, so it gave me pleasure to see this word come up. I like the lace, too.

Each month, my Patreon backers have the chance to suggest words for me to encode as knitting stitches. A random number generator helps me choose the word of the month, and then I get to work, first turning the letters into numbers, then charting the numbers onto grids in various ways. Finally, when I make the chart into lace, I turn the marked squares into yarnovers and work out where to place the corresponding decreases. (I usually make lace; occasionally I make cables instead.) I also make a chart for any craft that uses a square grid for designing; this goes in a separate post.

Four more dollars a month will fund me enough to make two such patterns each month. Won’t you subscribe? Woohoo! We got there! Two words a month, coming up! (You’re welcome to subscribe anyway, of course. 😉)

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Étude no. 22: Tunnel Eyelet

Three Tunnel eyelet variations
| Naomi Parkhurst

Periodically I like to try out techniques I haven’t used before and experiment with them. When I write about this, I call the posts my études, because they’re somewhat like the exercises musicians do for practicing.

I was browsing through my copy of Barbara Walker’s Second Treasury when my eye lit upon the Tunnel Eyelet stitch. I hadn’t really noticed it before, and when I read the instructions I was a little confused about how it worked. With many knitting instructions, I understand them better if I try them, so I did just that.

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Book review: Decorative Knitting

Swatch from Decorative Knitting
| Naomi Parkhurst

A friend suggested that there’s no reason why my book reviews should be limited to new books, and this made sense to me. So when I acquired a nifty book at a local craft supply reuse shop called the Scrap Exchange, I immediately realized that it was a good candidate.

Decorative Knitting, by Kate Haxell and Luise Roberts, is a book about ways of embellishing and decorating knitting. Many of these are fairly standard techniques, but some of them are quite unusual. When I was flipping through the book, the moment I knew I needed to buy it and look at it more carefully was when I noticed the swatches of inlay.

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