So let’s go for a gentler word…these two techniques
involve swaddling our stitches with yarn…hmmm,
maybe you have a better term for this.
see if your stress is showing or whether you’ve just come
from your yoga class and the wrapped stitches are too
loosey-goosey.
To wrap stitches you want to establish which ones ahead
of time. With this lace and texture combination, I chose
to wrap the 3 center stitches of the diamond motif.
When you're at the spot where you want to wrap the
stitches, you place them on a cable needle.
The next thing to be aware of is whether or not you're
going to knit or purl the first stitch after the wrapped
ones. In this case I'm going to purl it, so I need to wrap
the yarn around the stitches on the cable needle in a
counter-clockwise manner so that after the third wrap
the yarn ends up forward, to the front of the work. If I
were to knit the first stitch after the wrap, I would wrap
the stitches on the cable needle in a clockwise manner
and the yarn would end up at the back of the work.
If you look at the stitch diagram stitch key, you'll notice
that the symbol for wrapped stitches look ingeniously
like a single wrap. You may want to see what it would
look like with one strand, but in general 2 or 3 times
around produces the nicest results. Most charts will
indicate the number of wraps the designer intended, as
you can see here.
Chart for Wrapped Stitch Lace texture pattern.
Once you’ve wrapped the stitches, you can pass them
from the cable needle to the right needle and continue
knitting.
You may wonder how tight to wrap the stitches. That
depends entirely on your taste, but mostly on your stress
levels at the time and whether or not you have too
much family over for the holidays. To maintain an even
wrap consistency from spot to spot where you wrap your
stitches, you need to wrap and then set your work down
and compare to other wrapped stitches so that you can
Wrapped stitches and knot stitches really do add a
beautiful look to the surface of your knitting. Ombre
or variegated yarns look really good when the wraps
are a different color than the wrapped stitches. I’d
like to encourage you to try these stitches on the
cuffs of sweaters or mittens, or in a cowl or a scarf.
I hope these rarely used textured stitches won’t be
rarely used any more.
And as my son, who is studying film
production, would say
“That’s a wrap!”
KNITmuch | issue 2
13