The Knitting Fiend

Planning my new shawl, I found myself asking, “Do edgings look ok when knit onto the chain selvedge of a larger piece?”

As it happens, I’ve never actually knit an edging onto a shawl. I could, of course, have asked an email list how this type of edging looks. Likely, a variety of opinions would have been posted including: “Yes, it looks fine.”, “No it doesn’t.”, “It looks fine, but it’s just as easy to knit the edging as you go along.” “Yes, and knitting it after is the one and only way to do it.” “Yada, yada, yada.”

Mind you, I actually enjoy reading the range of opinions and I learn a lot that way. But the fact is, until I actually do it, I never feel confident that I will or won’t like a the results of any knitting technique. That’s why I try so many.

In my enthusiasm to learn how things look, I tend to try a whole bunch all at once; the result is I create some of the most bizarre unphotogenic swatches in knitdom!

I mean look at the swatch shown above left! I wanted to try a picot bind off. So, to the left of the light blue line is a garter stitch swatch with a picot bind off. When I knit that swatch, I slipped the first stitch of every row. (For those wondering, I think slipping the first stitch purl-wise and then bringing the yarn to the back to knit makes the nicest edge. So, that’s how I do it.)

In principle, that swatch as “all done”. Still, there it sat. Just a swatch with two convenient chain selvedge edges challenging me to “do something” to them.

In response to the challeng, I said, “I should experiment and seam this by knitting the edge stitch of the swatch to the edge stitch of some sort of pretty edging” (Mind you, this is a common technique. I’d just never done it.)

Of course, I couldn’t work an edging I’d already tested, so I flipped through my set of Barbara Walker treasuries and picked out a sawtooth type edging. I cast on and knit 1 repeat. See the bit to the right of the blue line but below the first horizontal white line? That’s what I knit.

Next, I got ready to seam this to the swatch. I found myself a double pointed needle and picked up a few stitches from the chain edge. Below left, you can see my chain. Because I had slipped stitches, the edge stitch was very easy to see, (but since this particular wasn’t entirely clear, I’ve highlighted one chain in orange.) When I picked up, I inserted the needle tip through the front leg of the chain from bottom to top. This makes the stitches “sit” the standard way. After picking up stitches, I set that swatch aside.

Now, a normal person who liked to create pretty swatches would have unraveled, cast on and knit the first row of edging to the first row of swatch. But not me! I just picked up the edging, and with the sawtooth part of the edging pointing to the right, I knit followed the edging directions, knitting until 1 stitch remained on my left needle tip. I picked up the garter stitch swatch and transfered that last edging stitch to the needle holding the garter stitch swatch; see below left. Then, I inserted the right needle tip into the first two stitches on the left tip and knit these two together. (See below right to see how to insert the right needle tip to knit two together.)

The two pieces were now fused together at one point.

I turned the work to continue the edging, slipped the first stitch, placed a stitch marker and worked in the edging pattern across the row. I turned to work the next row.

I followed the edging stitch directions for the next row until I reached the marker; I slipped the marker, then worked a k2tog. The k2tog fused the last edging stitch to the garter stitch swatch– now there were two “stitches” in the knit seam.

See how this works? Every two rows, I work a stitch from the edge of the garter stitch together with an edging stitch. I continued knitting this way for two repeats of the edging. (Those are the repeats between the two horizontal white lines in the photo above.)

This looked very nice and I concluded that, in future, I will have two options: I can work the edging as I work the shawl, or I can work the edging afterwards. Knitting the edging after knitting the rest of the shawl has several advantages: 1) I can consider a variety of edgings while I knit the garter stitch portion, 2) I don’t need to carry the edging directions around with me as I knit the main part of the shawl, 3) It’s easier to memorize the edging pattern when you aren’t knitting long garter stitch short rows before and after every edging row, and 4) I could make the edging g a different color!

Of course, there are advantages to knitting the edging as you knit the shawl also. Still, I think it’s always useful to know several ways to achieve the same end result.

Ok, now I could have continued doing what I was doing, right? But I didn’t.

While knitting, I realized that the way I was attaching meant that there would be 2 rows of edging for every 2 rows of shawl edge. Now, that is what I am likely to want 99% of the time, but what if I wanted to have more rows on the edging. (This would be useful if you want a very, very deep edging. In that case, having more rows and blocking will permit the circumference of the shawl to increase with length– as to keep the whole shawl semi-circular.)

Once I got this idea in my head, I worked two rows as previously. Then, on the following “seaming” row, I picked up a loop from the chain selvedge stitch I’d already knit into and knit that together with the edging stitch. Then I turned and knit back to the sawtooth edge.

I alternated these four types of rows, thereby working 4 edging rows for every 1 chain selvedge stitch– which means 4 edging rows for every 2 garter stitch rows. I worked two repeats of the edging this way.

When I blocked this out, that makes the edging longer than the swatch edge, which you can just barely discern if you examine the edging above the top white line above left. You can see how the edging flared out a bit–but since I only worked two repeats this way, the effect is barely evident in the photo.

Still, what this means is that, if I block without pulling on the “seam”, I will be able to design shawls edged with gentle ruffles or if I pull on the seam severely, I will be able add a very deep ruffle to a circular shawl without distorting the semi-circle. Or, at least I think I’ll be able to do both.

I may have made on butt-ugly swatch, but I have discovered quite a bit!

I bet you’re wondering why I don’t show a detailed photo of how I did picked up the extra loop of the chain knit into it to work the second two rows? Well, because I tried it a couple of different ways, some looked icky. The method I finally hit on looked nice, but I didn’t take any photos!

So, someday I’ll show this. Meantime, all I can tell you is that if you experiment, it’s possible to hit on a method for picking up that second chain that results in a pretty seam!

That’s all for now. Tomorrow I’ll tell you how to knit the sawtooth edge, and how you could make it deeper etc if you wished.