The Knitting Fiend

Are you knitting in the round? Do you miss side seams? If you do, you probably want to add phoney seams.

I’ll describe how to make them, but first, I’ll discuss why anyone would bother. When you knit circular, phoney seams create slight ridge that makes it easier to fold your sweater flat when blocking or storing your sweater. To show this, I snapped a photo with the sweater body folded along a ridge. That’s the phoney seam. The column of stitches is just a bit thicker and wider; when you lay your sweater and smooth it flat, the edge tends to fold crisply along that column.

If this reason causes you to yawn, don’t bother to make them. I have bulky knit in the round sweaters with phoney seams and some without.

Here’s how to make them:

1. Drop the top stitch from the column you want to turn into a phoney seam off the needle. Let it unravel as far down as you want the phoney seam. This can be all the way down to the first row of stitches, or to the top of the ribbing. I had to use a double pointed needle to pull at my stitches and force them to unravel. (I also stop knitting and latch up the phoney seam about every 2″, instead of waiting until the whole lower body is knit. But, that’s just me.)
2. Insert a crochet hook into a stitch, catch horizontal bars from two dropped stitches in the crochet hook. See the figure above and to the left; I’m using this cotton doubled stranded. The stitch is the lower set of two stitches which I had pulled down firmly when I latched the previous time. Well above that, you see the two horizontal bars, which in this case, consist of 4 strands of yarn.
3. Pull the strands from the horizontal bars through the stitch. See the figure below and to the right.
4. Push crochet hook up and repeat, but this time catch the horizontal bars from one dropped stitch. Keep repeating, but alternate latching up one and two stitches.

This procedure makes a ridge. The ridge is thicker than a normal stitch because you latch up horizontal bars every other time. If you latch up 2 every time, you’ll notice it tends to get too thick, and also shortens. Alternating 1 and 2 seems to make the best phoney seam.

Beginners: I bet some of you are thinking, “Gosh. If I drop a stitch and it unravels, I can modify this techniques to fix the problem. I would just latch up one horizontal bar at time.”

Yep! Precisely.