The Knitting Fiend

I’ve made a little progress, but not enough to take a new photo. But, I want to show a detail of the single rib separating each wide motif.

If you squint, you can just barely notice single on either side of the celtic flourish motif and between the the cables and the honeycomb near the edge of the shoulder. My main purpose was to create a break between the major design elements.

Now that I’ve joined the front and back, I’m really glad I added these, and for a surprising reason!

Here’s a close up of a single rib of stockinette stitches on a purl background. (Yes, it looks upside down. I’m knitting top down, so I took the photo that way.)

Notice that every other stitch is twisted. I had decided I’d like the rib to contain twisted stitches because that tends to tighten the single stitch, makes it stand out and looks sort of “cable-y”.

So, how did I do this? Recall I began knitting my sweater back and forth and later joined to knit circular. When back and forth, I knit the single rib stitch through the back loop; this twisted the stitch. I could have also twisted the stitches when working the wrong side facing rows, but I found it pesky, so I decided “Nah”, and just purled normally when the wrong side was facing me. So, every other row is twisted. (If you don’t know how to do knit through a back look, and want to know way too much about stockinette, you can see the difference between knitting through the front and back loops in my article on Western Crossed Knitting.)

Well, when I joined the work, I now needed to twist every other stitch by knitting through the back loop on even numbered rows, and knitting through the front loop (the normal way) on odd rows. That sounds fiddly and hard to keep track of, right? Wrong!

I am so, so glad I did this. I turns out to be very, very easy to detect whether or not the stitch knit on the previous row is twisted. So, there’s no “remembering” involved. Instead, it turns out the twisting helps me remember whether I’m on even or odd rows. And that’s a very convenient thing because all my major cable patterns have cable crossings only on even numbered rows. Except for 1 specific row, the odd rows are mindless “knit stitches as they present themselves”. So, they are easy.

Except.

My eyes aren’t all that great. And I sometimes have trouble seeing if I twisted a cable 1 row or 2 rows below. So, I would normally periodically squint to check. Luckily I don’t have too. I always know if I’m on an even or odd row by examining the twisted vertical column.

I’m glad I did that!