Bird: a free lace knitting stitch pattern

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

The word I drew from my word hoard for this stitch pattern is Bird, suggested by Catnach on Patreon. I’ve been a casual birdwatcher for a lot of my life. Recently, there have been goldfinches eating flower seeds in our garden, and that makes me happy.

Each month, my Patreon backers have the chance to suggest words for me to encode as knitting stitches. I make two of these into knitting stitches each month: the first is drawn from the collection of new words; the second is drawn from the collection of unused words. A random number generator helps me choose these, 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.

The stitch patterns are not meant in any way to look like the original words; the words are the seeds of my creativity.

Follow link for charts and instructions

Blog slowdown

| Naomi Parkhurst

I find myself with a lot of writing and design projects I want to finish quickly, so I’m going to take the next month or so easy as far as blog posts, aside from my Patreon stitch patterns.

One of the design projects is a fundraiser shawl, and I think I’ll try to share my progress with that on a weekly basis, as there’s no reason to keep it secret. Here’s how things are going so far!

Yarn is BC Garn Bio Shetland.

Mosaic stitch pattern is Help, encoded.

The fundraiser might change in the future, but for the foreseeable future, money will be split between RAICES and a local immigrant justice group (I need to do the research on that one).

Pride a free needlework chart for any craft

Pride: a free needlework chart, by Naomi Parkhurst
| Naomi Parkhurst

The random number generator picked Pride for my first encoded word post of this month, suggested by Pia and Natasha, two 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 in use.

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Pride: a free lace knitting stitch pattern

Pride: a free lace knitting stitch pattern by Naomi Parkhurst. See blog post for non-rainbow photo.
| Naomi Parkhurst

The first word I’m encoding for this month is Pride, suggested over the last three years by Pia and Natasha on Patreon. It’s a day late for Pride month, but it was suggested during Pride month, so here we are!

(See the main post for a non-rainbow photo of the swatch; I couldn’t resist the overlay.)

Each month, my Patreon backers have the chance to suggest words for me to encode as knitting stitches. I make two of these into knitting stitches each month: the first is drawn from the collection of new words; the second is drawn from the collection of unused words. A random number generator helps me choose this, 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.

The charts are not meant in any way to look like the original words; the words are the seeds of my creativity.

Follow link for charts and instructions

on 3-to-2 cable/decrease hybrids, part 1

| Naomi Parkhurst

Several years ago, I came up with a decrease because I wanted to decrease a single stitch without having the decrease lean to one side or the other. I thought of it as a centered single decrease, and went looking to see what other people called it because I figured it must exist. And indeed, it was the bunny ears decrease. It can also be described as a 3-to-2 decrease because you start with three stitches and end with two.

I also worked out a way to combine a 1/1 cable cross with a decrease in the same pattern. I’ve since come to realize that it could also be called a 3-to-2 decrease; just a different kind.

I’ve recently had reason to use it again in something else I’m designing, and I thought I’d share the method here. There are multiple permutations and so I’m going to spread them over a couple weeks.

If you know of a name for this class of techniques, please comment or let me know on Ravelry or social media.

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Dreamer: a free lace knitting stitch pattern

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

The word I drew from my word hoard for this stitch pattern is Dreamer, suggested by Bookwyrm and Catnach on Patreon. It’s a beautiful word, and I think a beautiful stitch pattern.

Each month, my Patreon backers have the chance to suggest words for me to encode as knitting stitches. I make two of these into knitting stitches each month: the first is drawn from the collection of new words; the second is drawn from the collection of unused words. A random number generator helps me choose these, 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.

The stitch patterns are not meant in any way to look like the original words; the words are the seeds of my creativity.

Follow link for charts and instructions

Dog version 2: a free mosaic knitting stitch pattern

Dog version 2: a free mosaic knitting stitch pattern, by Naomi Parkhurst
| Naomi Parkhurst

It hasn’t occurred to me before to play around with mosaic knitting layouts the way I do with lace knitting. I think this is because I assumed that it would be too annoying to make sure it would work structurally. But that nice plain stripe at the top of Dog from last week made me realize that it would be easy for this one.

The nice thing about mosaic knitting is that the charts are similar to the final appearance of the knitting, so I’m not going to provide a swatch this time. Mosaic knitting looks difficult, but it’s really easy to do! Basically, knit two-row stripes, and slip stitches from the row below to make the contrasting pattern. If you can knit stripes, you can knit mosaic patterns.

Here’s a detailed blog post I wrote about how it works.

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