Monday, February 05, 2018

No more rugby until the weekend, so I have reverted to the shawl. I’m engaged with row 95 of the borders. The final lace row is 99, and the borders end altogether with row 107 – so this week might see them done, and the centre commenced.

What I thought about Arne & Carlos on dominant yarn – link and comments yesterday – was that the sweaters they showed were old (not Arne’s pillow, so much, however). Somewhere – I’d guess Knitting Without Tears – EZ has a passage about how time and washing smooth knitting.

Mary Lou, when I do two-colour knitting with one colour in each hand, I let the right hand do the colour with the most stitches. Back in the Dark Ages, before there was such a thing as the Internet to set me right, I used to contemplate the pattern after every round of an all-over Fair Isle and adjust the yarns and the hands as required.

Non-knit


Thank you for the help with spiralizers. I’m still in a quandary. Today’s Mindful Chef meal didn’t involve spirals (and there was too much lemon in the dressing –my fault). Noseinabook, I have been deterred, like you, by the customer reviews. Maybe one of those things like a potato-peeler would do the trick – it’s called, perhaps, a “julienne vegetable peeler”. But it wouldn't be quite as much fun as real spirals. 

3 comments:

  1. I had the same thought about Arne and Carlos' examples, that tension evened out over the course of many washings. However, I must also add personal experience. I knit four Christmas stockings last year, using their pattern. When I held both yarns in the left hand the tension was much more even than one yarn in each hand. I found it a harder way to knit two colors, especially if the floats were more than three stitches and I twisted them, so used two hands for the those rounds and both colors on the left hand for the non twisting rounds.
    Does anyone else have similar experience?

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  2. I did recently knit a colorwork hat where I paid attention to the hand/color dominance question, deliberately switching for a few rounds. I think it does make a difference, but it isn't make or break it. I haven't been patient enough to work with two colors on the left, which is what I thought A and C were going to show us.

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  3. I have knit a lot of colourwork recently. I knit flat and just pick up the colours with my right hand as needed. With a complex multi-coloured pattern it would probably not be obvious, but on two colour patterns it is. I treat one colour as the background and the other as the pattern colour, picking that one up from below the other each time. On red and black mitts one can look like red on a black background and the other like black on a red background, depending which has been picked up from below.
    But styles of knitting vary so much between individuals. Reading EZ's "Knitter's Almanac" recently, I was intrigued to see that some knitters purl at a different tension to their knit rows, and that the solution was to use different sized needles. I've certainly had that experience on a piece of plain stocking stitch in a thick yarn - looks like ridges.

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