knitting techniques
Mary Scott Huff has just published a book with Abrams called Mitten Handbook, which is fascinating, useful and comprehensive.
For years, knitting instructor Mary Scott Huff has been teaching knitters how to make mittens. This book is a compendium of her wisdom about mittens, including an anatomy of each element of knitting them and how to customize your project by combining these elements in a way that pleases you.
Yes, that means there a lot more to this canada goose factory outlet book than the 22 beautiful mitten patterns at the end. Before you get there, you learn all about the anatomy of mittens and how to design them, edges, cuffs, thumbs and tops of mittens, techniques such as wearing ease, gauge and swatches and choosing yarns.
I just want to make some mittens for our winter charity knitting project, you say.
That good. That my goal, too. But this book can inspire you, not only to choose the best yarn in your stash for the project, but also how to make something the people you are knitting for will be delighted and proud to wear. I know a lot of you have speed in mind when you make charity projects. You want something you don have to think much about so that you can make them fast while watching TV, and you do turn out things that are utilitarian and warm. But I like to find patterns that challenge me, perhaps teach me a new technique or give me an opportunity to practice a technique I haven used for a goose outlet canada buy canada goose jacket cheap while. And this book is going to give me inspiration to satisfy that goal.
For canada goose canada goose coats outlet reviews example, this canada goose outlet jackets book shows you how to make mittens that are knitted flat, with canada goose outlet online a seam up one side. Or you can make them in the round, either on a short circular needle or on double pointed needles or even with the magic loop. Or, you can make them flat, side to side. If you are knitting canada goose outlet new york city in the canada goose outlet black friday round, you can start at the top and work down or start at the cuff and work up. Huff describes and photographs all these techniques, to give you an idea of which one would be interesting to try for your next project.
I have never seen this technique before. Looks challenging, doesn it?
I was fascinated by the section about knitting thumbs. She has eight different styles, reflecting knitting traditions from many parts of the world. For canada goose outlet uk sale me, the most unusual thumb technique is the circular, but you may find another one is the most unusual. I discovered that the technique I used the most is the vertical slot.
Cuffs add so much style to a mitten. I love the chapter in which she teaches cuff styles and how to make them. There are cuffs that turn your mittens into gauntlets, lace cuffs (that I don recommend for winter projects), cuffs that have buttons (I guess to make the cuffs tighter and warmer) and cuffs that incorporate cables or drawstrings.
I don have room here to describe all the styles and wonderful techniques explained in this book. You will just have to see for yourself. But you see some of them reflected in the mitten patterns at the end.
These Desert Cactus mittens would be a great charity knitting project for a child.
One of the simplest is a child mitten called Flower. It a simple stockinette design, knitted in the round, with some garter stitch rounds in the cuff that define a very short section with two stitch twists or cables. I notice that in one mitten, she has one round of purls at the top of the cuff, whereas on the other mitten, she has two. According to the directions, though, this is a mistake.
If you are doing your charity knitting from stash, this book has a Stash Busting Stripes mitten that will help you create something beautiful with scraps of yarn that on there own are not good for much more than mending old projects. This pattern is written for men and women, knitted again in the round from the bottom up.
If you like texture but find that cables are a challenge, you might enjoy making the Guernsey mittens, which use knitted and purled stitches to form diamonds and checkerboard boxes. This pattern uses the Channel Canada Goose online Island cast on that I tried to make from other books, though my attempts to follow Canada Goose Outlet their instructions were unsuccessful. Maybe if I make these mittens, I finally master that cast on. Or I can use another cast on if I still having problems.
These Guernsey mittens would canada goose outlet online uk work for either canadian goose jacket a man or a woman, a great canada goose factory sale idea for charity knitting. I hope this book turns into a classic that people refer to for many years to come. It published by Abram books and should be available in bookstores and yarn shops.
This is a close up of the tubular cast on for the k1, p1 ribbing on my Diminishing Rib Cardigan, a sweater I made last year. Can you see how the stitches seem to roll right over the edge? This looks much more smooth and professional than many other cast ons.
Back in the 1980s, when I was married and living in Massachusetts, my husband, a friend and I went up to Maine (probably Portland, but I not sure) so our friend and I could take an all day class on the tubular cast on and bind off. This was an invaluable class that transformed my finishing techniques, but these are techniques that I think can only be taught visually. I can accurately describe it. And in fact, if I haven done the bind off for a while, especially on k2, p2 ribbing, I find that I have to get out an example of it (usually an old sweater where I done it) and study it so that I can remember how to do it.
The woman who taught this technique had lived for a time in Japan, and canada goose outlet parka she had learned the technique canada goose coats on sale there, cheap canada goose so she naturally called it by its Japanese name, a term that I long since forgotten. She even photocopied some Japanese diagrams of how to do it and passed them out to us. I immediately recognized that this was the same technique that a French American friend of mine had asked me the year before to use on a sweater that I made her, because she seen it in France. I can therefore say with certainty that at the time I learned this technique, it was not exclusively Japanese, but I don know where it originated.
This is a close up of the tubular bind off on the same canada goose uk shop sweater. Notice how the bind off matches the cast on perfectly, with the stitches again looking like they continue right over the edge.
Since I began this blog, I been looking for a good video to link to to show you how to do this, and also, I been looking for a good name for the technique. Names I come across include the canada goose outlet shop Italian cast on, the tubular cast on, the invisitble cast on and cast off, and the kitchener cast off. One of the great things about Ravelry is that with time, some technique names tend to get standardized, but I think the jury is still out on this one. However, I think the tubular cast on and cast off are probably the best names because they describe what is going on, they aren regional, and they match for both the cast on and cast off or, as I prefer to call it, the bind off.
There are two ways to do the tubular cast on. One involves scrap yarn and one doesn I learned the method that doesn use scrap yarn, so naturally, that the one I prefer, and this morning, I found someone on YouTube who has made two videos demonstrating the technique that are quite good. By the way, I think she English. I going to link here to the shorter of the two, but while you on YouTube, her other one will probably appear in that column on the right, so I recommend you watch it, too.
Should you find that too complicated, don give up hope. Eunny Jang from Daily has a good video of the other method, which involves scrap yarn.
Practice this for a few days, and you will be delighted with the more professional edge on all your k1, p1 ribbing. If you are doing k2, p2 ribbing, it easy to convert this cast on to that pattern. Let say the first row after your cast on would be p1, k1, all the way across. Instead, you p1, skip one but leave it on the left needle, p the next stitch, go back and knit the slipped stitch, slip the two stitches you just worked to the right needle, k1, and repeat from the until you are all the way across the row. Then just work in the K2, p2 ribbing as you normally would.
The bind off is pretty easy if you know how to do the kitchener stitch. It done with a tapestry needle, not knitting needles. I will tell you more about it tomorrow.
For weeks now, people have been asking me if I watch Knitting canada goose outlet Daily on television. I told it on in the morning (nobody who asks me knows exactly when, apparently on WLIW, the PBS station in Long Island, which I get as channel 21. Not having seen the show, I was asking myself how good it could be. I love knitting (is it obvious?) but I thought a television show about it would have very little action and could get boring quickly.
Then, out of the blue, I came to work on Tuesday to find a DVD of Knitting Daily TV, Series 500, Episodes 1 to 13, on my desk, courtesy of Interweave Press. Apparently, Whitney Dorband in the https://www.dvu-nds.de Marketing Department thought I ought to see it. Thanks, Whitney! You made a good call. I haven seen the whole thing, but I watched the bonus material yesterday at the end of the DVD and thoroughly enjoyed it.
One of the many techniques I have yet to try but would like to soon is Entrelac, and there an excellent tutorial on this disk of Eunny Jang doing Entrelac. I can actually imagine backwards now, meaning knitting from right needle to left instead of the usually left needle to right. And Jang instructions about skipping stitches and where to increase were all very helpful. I think I may tackle an Entrelac scarf soon, perhaps for one of the kiddies at the treatment center for our contest. I think it would be a great way to practice a new skill.
Other bonus tutorials on this disk are Double Knitting and Domino Knitting. Apparently, the tutorials cover material that they didn have time to cover in the TV shows.