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.
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.
I don’t know if you noticed on Saturday, but I’ve hit on a combination of selvedge stitches that I like for blocking my swatches. I might even like it for lace shawls and such. At any rate, it’s easy to knit, and it’s easy to block with blocking wires. And I like the way it looks.
You might have noticed that I knit a lot of swatches. I’ve been getting fussier about how carefully I block them, and have been getting more consistent about using a short blocking wire (or skinny metal knitting needle) along each edge. Recently I’ve been pondering my swatch selvedges, and thinking about how to make it easier to thread the blocking wire through them. I remembered coming across a selvedge that uses yarnovers at the very edge, and decided to try that, at least for swatches.
It does make for easier blocking; I’m not yet convinced I like the look of it, though that doesn’t matter so much for swatches. I might try the yarnovers on every other or every third row instead.
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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
These are fairly basic instructions. They aren’t meant to explain how to combine multiple stitch patterns in a single shawl or the fine details of designing something fitted like a sweater, but they should get you started.
Things might change, but I expect this to be a three part series:
