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Friday, September 24, 2010

Knitting Wrapped Stitches

In a lot of my patterns I require a whole bunch of wrap-and-turns (where you move your yarn to the front, slip a stitch, move the yarn to the back, slip the stitch back to the left needle, and turn your work). When you've done this and come back to the wrapped stitch, you'll find that it looks like this:
If you knit it how it is, you're going to see the yarn that's wrapping the stitch as a little bar. If you're OK with this, let it go, but I prefer to make my work look a little more seamless. In order to make the wrap invisible, you should knit the stitch with its wrap. First, you should insert your right needle underneath the yarn that is wrapping the stitch.
See? It's easy! Now just place the tip of that needle into the stitch you want to knit:
But you can't quite knit them like that all the time (sometimes, if your stitches are loose enough, you can bring the working yarn through both loops as so, but I find it's a little hit-or-miss), so what I do is I slip the wrapped stitch off the left needle knitwise, then place them both on, together, as so:
Then knit both stitch and wrap together. It will be a tiny bit visible on the wrong side of the work, but after blocking, even the wrong side will look flawless! I hope this little tutorial helps you guys out!

Friday, September 17, 2010

Winkin'

I'm thinking of making this the first in a 3-hat series (later: Blinkin' and Nod). This one, as well as being the first chronologically, is slightly flirty, with its bow, pinks, and sparkles, so it shall carry the name Winkin'! (Because winking is what you do when you flirt! I think...maybe I don't know how to flirt.) Anyway, I just need to make the other two hats (one will be a man's hat, the other, a child's) and I'll put it out for testing!

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

First-Project Pride

Everyone who knits remembers what it was like to start knitting. You found yourself knitting into lower stitches, dropping stitches, finding that the yarn wasn't wear it was supposed to be, making accidental yarn-overs, and having no idea why your piece turned out like this:
This is the first project of one of the girls I babysit. She is a wonderful girl, full of love, who wanted desperately to wear her creation to school. As it was, her scarf didn't really scream "Finished Object!" so I decided to intervene. Fortunately for me, she is very open to my crazy suggestions, and this one was--"Buttons!" (Wait, isn't that my crazy suggestion for everything? I'm not sure.)
We draped the fabric, cowl-style, around her neck and found the accidental yarn-overs, which we used as button-holes. We sewed the buttons on, and it turned into quite the fashion piece--she's quite the fashion model, yes? A wonderful thing about her is she can't fake a smile. She will only smile like this when she's positively glowing from within, and she has a lot to be proud about!!!