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CHAPTER 1
ROWS ARE RED, ROWS ARE BLUE
COLOR KNITTING USING ONE COLOR AT A TIME
If knitting with one ball of yarn is still a bit of a struggle for you, then knitting with more than one color may seem intimidating. But in this chapter you'll learn the many ways that you can add color to your knitting and still work each row with only one ball of yarn. Adding stripes is one of the most basic methods of making knit fabric in more than one color, and slip-stitching, which creates the look of knitting with two colors but is worked with only one color of yarn per row, is a fun technique that yields impressive results. Tubular knitting takes slip-stitching to a whole 'nother level: It lets you create two-sided fabric with one color on one side and another color on the other side, while still working with only one color at a time. And double knitting is tubular knitting on steroids, allowing you to make color patterns on both sides of the fabric at the same time.
Even if the idea of working with two yarns at once doesn't faze you, this chapter still holds plenty of useful information. There are tips and tricks for making your striped knitting look better, and you may find the possibilities of the slip-stitching technique to be something of a revelation. Plus, having tubular and double knitting in your repertoire of techniques will truly broaden your knitting horizons.
STRIPES? CRIPES!
Stripes are the easiest way to add color to your knitting. In fact, you might think that stripes are so basic and straightforward that knitting them requires about as much thought as breathing. But there's more to stripes than you might think.
Stripes are the color equivalent in knitting of a drumbeat in music. They create a rhythm that can be as regular and booming as a John Philip Sousa piece, as surprising and unpredictable as an improvisational jazz jam session, or as energizing and sexy as a hip-hop hit. You create these rhythms with different colors, which are like the different types of drums in a drum kit, including the cymbals. And if you add just a little bit of trickery to your striping work, you've got a slip-stitch pattern, which looks about as much like stripes as a piano sounds like a bongo. Of course you know how to knit stripes back and forth, but if you want to become a master knitter, you need to know your stripes backward and forward.
The first thing you need to know is how to add a new color of yarn. My favorite way is less than straightforward, but it's worth learning. To do it, I borrow a trick from intarsia knitting (coming up later) to link my new yarn in with the old right from the start. Here's how:
To start new yarn knitwise:
1 With the old yarn in back, insert your needle into the first stitch knitwise.
2 Drape your new color yarn across this needle from back to front, leaving about a 6" tail hanging in back and to the left, and the ball end in front and to the right.
3 Twist the new yarn with the old yarn like so: Take the ball end of the new yarn and bring it in front of, then under, and up behind the old yarn. You are twisting it around the old yarn.
4 Hold the old yarn down with any old finger you can find, and wrap the new yarn around the needle as you would to make a knit stitch.
5 Carry the stitch on the left-hand needle and the new yarns tail over the new stitch, and off the needle. (This maneuver is somewhat more challenging to execute if you are a Continental knitter than it is if you are an English knitter, but it can be done.)
Now you have a stitch that is wrapped around the old yarn, as well as its own tail, and it's pretty damn secure. You can go on knitting down the row, but hang on to the tail in your left hand for just a few stitches to make sure it doesn't go anywhere.
To start new yarn purlwise:
1 With your old yarn in front, insert your needle into the first stitch purlwise.
2 Drape your new color yarn across this needle from front to back, leaving about a 6" tail hanging in front and to the left, and the ball end in back and to the right.
3 Twist the new yarn with the old yarn like so: Take the ball end of the new yarn and bring it in front of, then under, and up behind the old yarn. You are twisting it around the old yarn.
4 Hold the old yarn down with any old finger you can find, and wrap the new yarn around the needle as you would to make a purl stitch.
5 Carry the stitch on the left-hand needle and the new yarns tail over the new stitch, and off the needle. (Again, this maneuver is somewhat more challenging to execute if you are a Continental knitter than it is if you are an English knitter, but it can be done. Sorry, haters.)
Go on purling down the line — just hang on to that tail for a few stitches to make sure it doesn't slip away.
If you cut your yarn every time you finish knitting a stripe and then start a new length of yarn for each new stripe, you will end up with a whole helluva lot of yarn ends to weave into your work when you are done, and as every knitter knows, that is one sucky job. To save you from this nightmare scenario, stripes are often knit in even numbers of rows (two rows of color A, four rows of color B, two rows of color A), which allows you to "carry" the yarn you aren't using up the side of your work until you are ready to use it again, instead of cutting it. Carrying your yarn will let you avoid leaving a big, ugly loop o' yarn along the side of your work when you need to start a new row with a color you haven't used for a while. All you do is wind the yarn you're knitting with once around the yarn you leave hanging at the end of your rows, thereby "carrying" it along with you up the side of the work (so that the yarn is never farther than two rows below where it needs to be when you want to use it again). This is usually called "twisting" the yarn together. You simply twist the yarn you're knitting with around the old yarn — catching it in a sort of yarn hammock — before you start knitting a row.
As I said, this technique works nicely if your stripes consist of even numbers of rows, because you'll always be starting and ending your colors on the same side of your work. But what happens if you are working an uneven number of rows? You'll be ready to stop knitting with red and start knitting with green and — uh-oh! — the green yarn won't be at the beginning of your work, where you need it to be, but at the end. Sure, you can use the old cut 'n start again method, but you have a better option. Just work back and forth on circular needles instead of straight needles; then, when you need to use a yarn that's on the far side of your work, just slide your stitches to the other end of your needles, where the yarn will be waiting for you, and start knitting from that side. Using this method, you can even knit single-row stripes without creating a giant hair-ball of hanging ends at the sides of your work. Just carry the yarn up the side as before, but work back and forth on circular needles and slide your work this way and that as you need to.
Presto Chango!
MAKING CLEAN COLOR CHANGES IN RIBBING
If you are knitting in stockinette stitch and change colors, the color change will be beautifully clean when seen from the knit side of your work. But on the purl side, things will look kind of ugly, with a jumble of new-color stitches visibly poking down into the old color, and old-color stitches poking up into the new-color stripe. Since the purl side will usually face where the sun don't shine, that's not much of a problem. But what do you do when you are knitting stripes in ribbing, and half of your stitches on the right side of the work are purls? Well, if your stripes are made of more than one or two rows, you can use my very favorite trick to keep the color change as clean as a kitten's paws: Just knit the entire first row of the new color, instead of alternating knits and purls as you normally would for ribbing. After that, go back to your regular ribbing pattern. How can this work, you ask? Won't it completely mess up your ribbing? Well, it will make your ribbing just a bit less stretchy. But that's a small price to pay for a color change so clean you could eat off of it.
GIVE YOUR KNITTING THE SLIP
KNITTING COLORFUL PATTERNS USING SLIP STITCH
You know that slipping a stitch simply means transferring a stitch from one needle to another without doing anything to it. But what you might not know is that by not doing anything to some stitches in some rows, and then doing something to them in later rows, but with a different color, you can create some amazing effects. I don't see slipstitch knitting used very often in patterns, and I think it's a shame. It's a way to make it look as if you used a much harder technique, but it's done using only one color in a row at a time. I'd really love to meet the person who invented slip-stitch knitting and shake her hand, because this method is so incredibly simple yet can yield such gorgeous results, it's truly nothing short of magic.
Color by Numbers
DESIGNING STRIPES ACCORDING TO THE FIBONACCI SEQUENCE
There's a method of planning stripes in knit fabric that's been popular among knitters — and especially knitting math geeks — for quite a few years now. It's called the Fibonacci progression, and although it may sound like a delicious pasta dish, it's actually quite a nice way to get a stripe rhythm going in your work. To do it, you start your first stripe with a single row of color. The next stripe will be the number of rows in the previous two stripes added together. Your last stripe was only one row, and there was no stripe before that, so 1 and 0 makes 1. The next stripe will be, again, the number of rows in the previous two stripes added together. In this case, a 1 and a 1, that makes 2. And so on, so that each stripe is the number of rows in the previous two stripes added together. (Or, 1 and 2 makes 3.) You won't want to do this for too long, however, or you'll end up with some mighty wide stripes, so at a certain point, you can either start working this sequence all over again, or start working it in reverse, so that your stripes get narrower and narrower again, all the way back to 1. But whichever way you do it, following the Fibonacci series can lead to some nice-looking stripes, just like the 13th-century mathematician Leonardo of Pisa intended it to when he introduced this numerical sequence, which mimics patterns found in nature. Talk about old school!
The basic idea is simple: You work a number of stitches in a row and slip some others. Then in a later row, you slip the stitches you worked previously, and work the stitches you slipped, but using a different color. To "slip" a stitch means to just pass it from one needle to the other without doing anything to it — like passing the Olympic torch. One thing to pay attention to in slip-stitch knitting is making sure you slip your stitch purlwise, so it doesn't change its orientation from one needle to the next. The "leg" on the right side of your stitch will be in front of the needle when the stitch is on the left-hand needle, and that leg will still be on the right and in front of the needle after the stitch is transferred. (This is what is meant by "stitch orientation"— it has nothing to do with whether your stitch prefers Adam or Eve.)
Another thing that really matters in slip-stitch patterns is where you hold the yarn while you are slipping the stitch. Slip-stitch patterns will usually say "sl 1 wyif" or "sl 1 wyib," which refers to where you hold your yarn when you slip — in front (as you would if you were going to make a purl stitch) when it says "wyif" (with yarn in front), and in back (as you would if you were going to make a knit stitch) when it says "wyib" (with yarn in back). In general, you will be holding your yarn on the wrong side of the work while slipping stitches.
This also means that after you've slipped your stitches and go back to knitting or purling again, you'll be leaving short lengths of yarn behind (or in front of) those stitches, also called "floats." (I really love calling them floats. It's such an airy, pretty way of referring to those ugly hanging strands!) Floats need to be loose enough not to pull your knitting together accordionlike, and just tight enough to float straight across behind your stitches instead of creating gross, dangling loops. (For more on this, see "Float Like a Butterfly," page 25.)
A very simple slip-stitch pattern that illustrates the method better than anything I can tell you is the 2-stitch check pattern, shown above, right. It looks like it was created by alternating stitches in two different colors across a row, but the truth is, each row was knit using only one color — the checked pattern is completely the result of slipping certain stitches.
If you've never tried slip-stitching before, whip out some needles and two colors of yarn and take it for a test drive.
Begin with a multiple of 4 stitches.
ROW 1: Knit with color A.
ROW 2: Purl with A.
ROW 3: With B, k3, *sl 2 wyib, k2, rep from *, end k1.
ROW 4: With B, p3, *sl 2 wyif, p2; rep from *, end p1.
ROWS 5 AND 6: Repeat rows 1 and 2 with A.
ROW 7: With B, k1, *sl 2 wyib, k2; rep from *, end sl 2 wyib, k1.
ROW 8: With B, p1, *sl 2 wyif, p2; rep from *, end sl 2 wyif, p1.
Once you've done this for a bit, you'll be scratching your head in bewilderment. How the hell does it work? Why do the color A stitches look like they are part of row B? The answer, my friends, is that knit stitches are stretchy and will adjust themselves as needed. The color A stitches are a bit stretched out, if you look at them carefully, but the stitches in the color B rows are more than happy to squash themselves down a bit, and that makes everything look a bit more even-steven. This bit of squashing does mean, however, that it will take more rows to knit, say, an inch of fabric using a slip-stitch pattern than it would using plain old stockinette stitch. And, even if you make the most perfect floats in town, your fabric will still be a bit less stretchy and more narrow than it would be if you weren't carrying yarn along behind your work. So deal with it.
As impressive as the 2-stitch check pattern is, it's just the tip of the slip-stitching iceberg. This little trickster can be used to create all sorts of complicated-looking color and texture patterns.
Circular Logic
SLIP-STITCHING IN THE ROUND
Slip-stitch patterns are almost always written in rows, not rounds, and they are so mysterious, you might be afraid to try using them on a project, like socks, that is knit in the round. But fear not! With a few adjustments to the stitch pattern, most slip-stitch patterns can work in the round as well as they do in back-and-forth knitting. The trick is to convert the wrong-side rows in the pattern to right-side rows. So, if the pattern says to knit on a wrong-side row, you purl; if the pattern says to hold your yarn in front, you hold it in back, and vice versa. Alternatively, you can simply knit from the chart, reading each row from right to left and skipping any edge stitches in the original chart so that your pattern will go round and round seamlessly. Also, leave out edge stitches in your count when you are casting on.
SLIP'N SLIDE
USING SLIP-STITCHING TO MAKE TWO-COLOR TUBULAR KNITTING
Earlier in this chapter, I talked about the fact that when you make color changes while knitting stripes in stockinette, one side of your fabric will look nice, and the other — not so much. And I'm sure that at some point in your life you've sought the beginning knitter's holy grail: a stockinette-stitch scarf that won't roll. While the latter is quite impossible, there is a stitch that creates fabric that lies completely flat, looks like stockinette on both sides, and will let you make stripes with beautifully clean color changes. What is this miracle stitch you ask? It's tubular knitting, done using slip-stitching, and it's just lovely. It creates fabric that's basically a sort of tube, with a layer of stockinette fabric on both sides (so it's twice as thick as regular stockinette-stitch fabric), and it's just perfect for scarf knitting. Best of all, when done with two balls of yarn (in two different colors), you'll get a piece of fabric that is one color on one side, another color on the other. And you'll do it all using only one color per row.
To do it, cast on an even number of stitches that is twice the number you'd need if you were knitting the piece in plain stockinette stitch (so, if a 4" piece in stockinette stitch would require 16 stitches, cast on 32 stitches for a 4"-wide piece of tubular knitting).
ROW 1: *K1, sl 1 purlwise wyif; rep from * to end of row. Rep this row.
To add a stripe in a second color, you should begin on an odd-numbered row.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Stitch 'n Bitch Superstar Knitting"
by .
Copyright © 2010 Debbie Stoller.
Excerpted by permission of Workman Publishing.
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