Last year, I made a colorwork chart for World Wide Knit in Public Day; this year I made a lace design. These are part of my series of stitch patterns I’m making for what I call “geek holidays” (which obviously includes knitting, to my mind).
I’m pleased to say that I have a pattern in Knitty!
Longwing is a double garter stitch crescent shawl with two chevrons inserted in the middle. The result sometimes reminds me of part of a star shape, but more often makes me think of a butterfly’s wings. There’s something fun about wearing butterfly wings without it being obvious.
The word of the month is Paradise, suggested by Nyriis on Patreon. This version is encoded in base 8.
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.
This month, the random number generator chose paradise, suggested by Nyriis. I’m really pleased with how this turned out, despite (or perhaps because of) the unexpected owls.
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.
This is the third and final part of my very basic series about how to use a stitch pattern. Here are the first two:
Stitches in stitch dictionaries are usually written to be worked flat, but they can usually be converted to be worked in the round. This post discusses how. Occasionally, you’ll find a stitch pattern written to be worked in the round; the instructions here will work for those, too.
Several years ago, I was playing around with combining knitting and crochet, and I hit upon a way of doing so that made me really happy. I was going to write more about it “later”, but then my wrist stopped allowing me to do crochet, and “later” never came. (No, really, I tried a bunch of things. Please don’t offer me advice.)
Anyway, I recently came across some old swatch photos I took with a cell phone, and thought I’d write about it in hopes that it would spark someone’s interest. I’d love it if someone else were to play around with this!
I wrote recently about a start for a top-down triangular shawl I’d come up with, but there’s another that I’ve used in several shawl designs (most of them not yet published): modified disappearing loop. You can see it in use in Sycamore Creek.
Disappearing loop is generally used as the center of a shawl or something else to be worked in the round from the center outward. However, there’s no reason it can’t be used in cases where you need to cast on a small number of stitches for a shawl to be worked flat.
Here’s how.
Here’s links to a bunch of techniques and tutorials I’ve collected since the last time I posted one of these link lists. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I did! I’ve included some crochet links even though I can’t use them myself, just because I thought they were interesting.
Knitting
Crochet
This is part 2 of a series about how to use stitch patterns.
It is extremely basic, and is meant to help get you started. It will not help with sweater design, or with combining multiple stitch patterns in a single object, or other more complicated things.
The first step is to figure out how many repeats of the stitch pattern you want in your object. Yes, this will take arithmetic. Or you can guess and rip out multiple times. That works too, but I personally find it more frustrating. It’s also harder on the yarn.
Ideally, you’ll knit a gauge swatch in the stitch pattern (at least 7 inches/ 18cm square) and wash it so you can measure how many stitches and rows there are over 4 inches / 10cm. This is especially important for something that needs to fit a particular way. Sometimes you can instead start by making a good guess, knitting on your scarf for a while, and then washing it while it’s still in progress to see if the gauge is right. Using the object itself as a gauge swatch is a fairly common practice for small objects. (I use it for mitts all the time.)
For a scarf, you might be able to get away with a rough estimate, based on the gauge listed on your yarn label. For anything really large, or for anything that requires a good fit, I would really recommend the gauge swatch, because any errors in guessing will be multiplied by a lot to make your item too large or too small.
So, here’s how to calculate your number of stitches to cast on based on your gauge swatch.
