knitting

Help: a free lace knitting stitch pattern

| Naomi Parkhurst

This is a continuation of my Help post from before, this time with a lace stitch based on the word help. If you like it and use it, please consider donating money to a group working to assist after natural disasters. As I discussed in my previous post, local donations are usually best, but if you don't have much time, I think it's hard to go wrong with Doctors without Borders.

I'm not familiar with the right groups for the flooding in South Asia or Africa, or the earthquake in Mexico. This is all highly discouraging, but remember to look for the helpers!

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Help Texas flood victims

Help: a free chart for any craft that uses them
| Naomi Parkhurst

The colorwork chart I’ve included in this post is based on the word help, using my encoding methods. Whether or not you plan to use it, please consider donating money to organizations helping with disaster relief after Hurricane Harvey.

There’s a lot of organizations that need help. Here are the principles I like to use for natural disasters and some suggestions for organizations:

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1/1 Cable Crosses

| Naomi Parkhurst

I use 1/1 cable crosses fairly frequently in my lace design. Sometimes they help me continue a decrease line where there isn't a corresponding increase. Other times they make a nice closure at the top or bottom of a motif. In any case, here's a brief guide about how I work them without a cable needle. I'm pretty sure the 1/1 right cross method is pretty standard (I think I learned it from Barbara Walker's books); I don't know about the 1/1 left cross.

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Phoenix: a free lace knitting stitch pattern

| Naomi Parkhurst

This month, the random number generator chose phoenix, suggested by Sara on Patreon.

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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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 22

| Naomi Parkhurst

First, a useful link elsewhere:

Second, three links to some older posts of mine I think you might find useful: