(no subject)

[which_chick]

I have taught myself to do two-handed two-color knitting. That's what I did this evening instead of cooking dinner. Now, not_your_real may recall that I claimed I would not ever do this. I said that one string and one stick in each hand was really not a feasible concept no matter what other people on the internet said in their damn blogs. I said that it was fussy and entirely too difficult and besides, pursuing two-handed knitting would mean I'd need to learn to knit continental, which I would not ever, ever do because holding the string in one's left hand and picking stitches instead of throwing them was impossible, sick, and wrong. Er. I may have been a bit hasty with that judgment.



Two-handed two-color knitting is only shitty for the first two hundred or so stitches. After that, it gets better pretty rapidly as the previously unyarned hand figures out what to do with the second string and you get a grip on making the stitches for either picking or throwing, whichever you didn't do before.



The purple stitches were made the (for me) usual way, with the yarn thrown around the needle from the right hand. The green stitches were made the (for me) new way, with the yarn held in the left hand and picked by the right needle. (The yarn is leftover from the bag I finished here a couple of days ago, which is why I'm using those two colors to practice my two-handed, two-color knitting.)

Comments

[sara-merry99.livejournal.com]

As someone who's never learned to knit at all (the time I tried I was way too left-handed for the teacher to be able to teach me, she basically kicked me out of class), I'm deeply impressed. One of my friends changed from throwing to picking stitches recently just because she found it to be better ergonomics, but I don't think she's ever tried two handed two color knitting. It seems like it'd require more thought, which would make it harder to do on auto-pilot, but I suppose that's a minor concern.

So when yhou're doing stitches with the purple yarn what happens to the green yarn, is it basically embedded in the fabric or does it lie across the back?

I bet something like that swatch would look pretty felted, BTW. Almost marbled maybe.

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

Picking is better ergonomics. I'm still making crappy-ass baby stitches here, and I can already tell that my unskilled and lame attempts on that front have the potential to be faster and slicker and all-around nicer than throwing.

The yarn that is not being used to knit with at the current time lies across the back of the fabric. It's called a float, and if you do a big enough stretch (about an inch or so) of one color, you will need to catch the float -- to tack it down so that it's not loose. That's more advanced than I currently am, so I don't know quite how that works yet. There will probably be more on this subject tonight, so check back.

[not-your-real.livejournal.com]

Pretty!

I almost bought sock yarn for no reason today. I restrained myself and just bought the laceweight yarn I wanted for the stitch sampler complex I want to start (I'm envisioning three samplers of the exact same stitches, one in crochet cotton on number 1 needles, one in tiny tatting cotton on number 0000 needles to show what it would have looked like back when people made small lace, and one in laceweight wool on number 2 or 3 needles to see what the stitch would look like Shetland-style). This sampler idea comes of having a wonderful book of about 100 lace stitches out of the library and knowing that I can't have one of my very own since it's OOP - I will also chart the (currently only written-out) patterns, and between the charts and the samplers I'll have all the info I need for future reference.

Whether I can do approx. 100 different blocks of stitches three times over within the allotted number of renewal periods is a good question. Maybe I'll work up the charts first and then start with the knitting-up.

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

Sock yarn is alluring and very sexy. If you resisted the wiles of sock yarn, you're stronger of will than I am.

On the stitch sampler thing, I'd go for doing the paperwork part first. I can definitely see the point of one real-life sample of each pattern, but I'm not sure why you'd need three samples of each one. However, it's your eyesight and free time.