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rarely used stitches to spice up your knitting Charles Voth
Okay, so you ' ve used garter stitch a lot and graduated to stockinette, or reverse stockinette, and maybe you ' ve tried combinations of knit and purl to create texture, or even cables, but 10 to 1 you haven ' t tried using wrapped stitches or the knot stitch in your knitting. To spice up your knitting with new textures, try these 2 stitches that follow.
Let ' s start with the knot stitch. I know what you ' re thinking:“ Why would you want to add knots to your knitting?” Well the knot stitch is actually not a knot( say that out loud 10 times quickly), but it does raise the surface of your knit fabric by adding a bump. Now, if you put enough of these bumps in the right places, and with a little planning, you get a very unique look to your fabric. For those of you who don’ t want bobbles or even rosettes( like the ones we looked at a few days ago), the
As you can see in the swatch above, the knotted stitch makes the ribbing almost look like a cable, but there’ s no cabling involved, so some may be inclined to call it a mock cable. Food for thought.
At any rate, to make the knot stitch you have a four step process: Knit the 2 stitches you want“ knotted”; wrap the yarn from back to front of work by bringing it over the right needle and return it to the back between the needles; pass the first of the 2 knit stitches over the second and the wrapped yarn; wrap the yarn again in the same manner; pass the second knit stitch over both wraps— which become 2 stitches. There’ s the knot.
knot stitch is a simple alternative to making your knitting have some interest.
To make the knot stitch, you can use any two stitches on the left needle. In the swatch I made, I chose to knit a [ k2, p1 ] ribbing, and the columns made by the k2 were the perfect location for the knot stitches to be added. I thought of 3 different positions for the knotted stitch( see pencil sketches above).
But I chose to swatch the first one so that there would be lots of knot stitches and we would be able to see the way the ribbing would really take on a new life of its own with the added texture. There’ s nothing wrong with arranging the knotted stitches more sparsely or even in a mock argyle motif.
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The second technique I’ d like to show you to add texture to your knit fabric is the wrapped stitch. I put these 2 techniques together because to a degree, in both cases, you ' re choking stitches with yarn. Okay, that’ s not a nice image, although we all know that sometimes our knitting issues make us feel like throttling our yarn.
Photos by Charles Voth