I’ve found a very nice alternative to the knit bobble
that makes knitting bobbles a pleasure instead of
a headache. Purists would say that these happy
little bumps aren't bobbles at all, because, well,
they’re not worked with your knitting needles. They
are worked ingeniously with a crochet hook. So,
technically speaking, they aren't bobbles at all and if
you look at the accompanying picture of my swatch
(see bobble swatch photo), they look a little less
bulky, and slightly more subtle. So I'm naming them
“rosettes” instead.
Yarn over hook
If you look at these rosettes, you don't even have to
squint or really stretch your imagination at all to see
that they do resemble little roses. I've placed these
inside diamonds made with twisted stitches to give
them a little nest of their own, but they look equally
lovely on a background of reverse stockinette.
To work the rosette in the indicated stitch, you
place that stitch on your crochet hook (it should
be the same diameter as your knitting needles or
one size smaller). With the hook, you make a yarn
over the hook counter-clockwise, in other words
bringing the yarn from the back of the work up and
over the hook and return it to the back of the work
(see yarn over hook photo) and draw that yarn over
through the stitch on the hook. In crochet, that’s
called a chain. You work 2 more of these chains (see
2 chains photo).
Then you do the following set of moves twice: yarn
over, insert hook in first stitch—the one at the base
of the chains—yarn over and draw up a loop (see 5
strands photo).
Two chains
5 strands on hook
Third, you do one more yarn over and draw
through all the loops on the hook, chain one more
and place the stitch back on the right needle (see
right needle photo). Now you can proceed across
the row. Writing it out, reading it, and trying it may
seem like a long chore, but these will soon be very
quick to make with a little practice, and easier than
knitting bobbles like usual.
If the bobble seems to want to poke its way to the
back of the fabric, you can simply push it through
to the right side, pull on it a bit, fluff it up and it’ll
stay. Blocking always helps too. For this swatch I
used Bernat’s worsted weight Canadiana in Aran
and I just dunked the swatch in a bowl of justboiled water for a two-minute soak, and then I
gently absorbed the extra moisture with a towel
and pinned it out to dry.
Returned to right needle
Crocheting rosettes is a quick and simple
solution when you want to have a slightly less
pronounced version of the traditional knit
bobble. I hope seeing a bobble coming up in
the next row of your knitting will motivate you to
press on and work it quickly with this technique.
KNITmuch | issue 2
7