Decreases

DSD and other people’s designs

| Naomi Parkhurst

I came up with the DSD double decrease several years ago. It’s a double decrease that is visually an exact mirror of sk2p: work ssk (or any of the other left-leaning single decreases), slip it back to the left needle and pass the next stitch over it, then slip it to the right needle again.
It took me a while to find a name for it. I knew I couldn’t have been the first person to invent it, and I wanted to use the same name as other designers. When I asked on Ravelry, I got a kind answer from Annie Maloney (Ravelry patterns, stitch dictionaries), who also designs lace. She told me that she calls this decrease a double slip decrease because that is what Barbara Abbey called it in her book about lace design. Annie Maloney abbreviates it as DSD, so I do likewise.

I didn’t know if I’d ever come across it again in anyone else’s work, but amazingly, in the last couple of months I’ve come across examples in two books I’ve had for a very long time: my Mon Tricot stitch dictionary and Susanna Lewis’s Knitting Lace, which provides charts for a 19th century stitch sampler and talks about lace design.

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K3tog: a tip for tight knitters

| Naomi Parkhurst

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a tight knitter. This doesn’t trouble me much these days; I’ve loosened up enough that I don’t need to struggle to push each stitch along the needle one at a time the way I did when I was a child. I often get the gauge on the yarn label using the recommended needles. (Yes, really, though it’s not as useful as you’d think.) The biggest benefit to being a tight knitter is that I don’t need to knit socks using the thinnest needles.

But there’s times that it used to get a little aggravating, and I’ve realized that the reason those times don’t happen any more is that I’ve worked out various unconscious tricks for dealing with them. One of the things that used to vex me was knitting (or purling) three stitches together: such a struggle to get the needle through all three stitches at once!

Here’s how I loosen them up:

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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Étude no 24: Bunny Ears Honeycomb

| Naomi Parkhurst

After last week’s post, I couldn’t resist trying out the kyok/bunny ears method for dealing with a double yarn over in an established stitch pattern. I was considering how the double YO, followed by pyop, followed by by bunny ears makes a three row sequence, and that reminded me of German Honeycomb (see my hexagonal mesh post). So here is a variation on German Honeycomb.

Periodically I like to play with techniques in swatches to see what I can do with them. When I write about this, I call the posts my études, because they’re somewhat like the exercises musicians do for practicing.

Follow this link for a chart and instructions

Étude no 23: noodling around a little with bunny ears back

| Naomi Parkhurst

Periodically I like to play with techniques in swatches to see what I can do with them. When I write about this, I call the posts my études, because they’re somewhat like the exercises musicians do for practicing.

This time I was looking at a potential chart for one of my Patreon words, and wondering if I could make something work. I had an idea about a combination to try and I decided to make a swatchlet to see.

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Gather together: permutations of a knitting stitch

Gather together: permutations of a knitting stitch.
| Naomi Parkhurst

There’s a knitting stitch combination that I’ve seen called a gather, and I’ve mostly seen it in Estonian stitch patterns, though I’m guessing they get used elsewhere too. Essentially, they are a combination of a double decrease (or more) and a double increase (or more) happening at the same time.

It sounds more complicated than it is. Take the 3/3 gather. When making a k3tog decrease, the basic principle is to insert the needle through all three stitches as if they were one stitch, and then knit one stitch in that clump of stitches. The gather expands upon that: knit those three stitches together without removing them from the needle, then yarnover, then knit the three stitches together again. This is the same as working a KYOK at the same time as a k3tog. Start with three stitches, end with three stitches, but they’re gathered together.

But thinking of it as a decrease/increase started making my brain fizz.

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Tinking a centered double decrease

| Naomi Parkhurst

If you haven’t heard the term, tinking is the process of undoing knitting, stitch by stitch (tink is knit spelled backwards). While I like the effect of various double decreases, I have to admit that they can be kind of a pain to tink, because of the way that the stitches are out of order. I recently noticed a trick for tinking my CDDs, and so I thought I’d share it just in case it’s useful.

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Linkety-link, part 20

| Naomi Parkhurst

It’s been a while since I did a link round-up!

Knitted Borders and Corners – some different ways of approaching corners when working a knitted-on border.

Learning, Practicing, Perfecting – Sara Lamb writes here about the learning process in respect to weaving and leatherwork, but the process itself is universal to handcraft. Well worth reading.

Non-roll Stocking Stitch Edge? – well, not exactly. This post tells how to use twined knitting to make what looks like a stockinette hem that won’t curl.

Bunny ears decreases– I’ve talked a little about the 3-to-2 decrease I like to use, that some people call Bunny Ears Back. It produces a symmetrical single decrease that doesn’t appear to lean to either side. They are now accounted for in Stitch Maps, which makes me happy. The linked blog post also shows a couple of stitch patterns making use of them – I really like Little Hearts a lot and am planning on making use of it. A more complex stitch pattern of mine that uses them is Beloved – and I can see that I’ll need to go edit the stitch map!

Taming long floats via the STUART method for color-knitting – an intriguing trick from TECHknitter (so many of her tricks are intriguing) for dealing with long floats. This looks like it might be the key for knitting more of my code grids as colorwork even with long floats. Hm!