Kitchener Stitch Revisited

Good Morning!

Cloudy and rainy here in NY again...with Hurricane Deb pounding up the coast.  I hope she calms down a bit by the time she reaches New York.  We will just have to wait and see.

I had a great class on Saturday.  It is a drop in class that Mary, the shop owner of yarnandteashop.com, calls my Drop-In Knit Fix class.  Two students came who needed help with Kitchener Stitch for their socks.  Both had attempted to work Kitchener on their own and became lost, with the toes of their socks looking rather sad. 

With a darning needle, I picked apart all the stitches that had been worked.  This was a somewhat lengthy process as the yarn tails had been worked in already.  Once the yarn was unraveled and the stitches released, I placed them on double point needles.  My student and I spent some time making sure the stitches were straight and not twisted and then carefully checked  to see that there were no dropped stitches.

Using a new piece of wool, the yarn tail there was pretty worn, we began to stitch.  There is a mantra that I teach my students that makes it really easy to execute the Kitchener Stitch:

Front Needle: Slip the first stitch as if to knit, take it off (the needle)
                       Slip the second stitch as if to purl, and leave it on (the needle)

Back Needle: Slip the first stitch as if to purl, take it off (the needle)
                       Slip the second stitch as if to knit and leave it on (the needle)

I worked the first sock and my student the other and she was amazed that with just a quick instruction on how to move back and forth between the front and back needles, she was able to complete the second sock. 

Kitchener Stitch has so many uses besides weaving sock toes.  There are sweater/vest shoulders, hats, sock feet to legs (as in my daughter's knee socks.) just to name a couple.  In the case of my daughter's
knee socks she wanted to knit, she had a deadline for them to be finished.  However, she had never knit socks before.  So I designed the top of her socks, ankle up, and I knit the feet.  When all the knitting was finished, I Kitchenered the feet to the legs...no one would ever be able to tell, after all, the join was at her ankles.

If you area still having some difficulty, please go to my website, youandmeknit.com, and click on the YouTube button.  It will take you directly to my videos (one so far) the first one being on Kitchener Stitch.  Leave a comment below or click on the ball of yarn on my Home Page and send me an email and let me know how the instructions worked for you.

Have a great day and Happy Knitting!

To Knit or Un-Knit!

Good Morning!

It's another cloudy and soon to be rainy day here in New York. Our laws are lush with green and mushrooms.  Wish we could share the wealth with some of our drier states.

Yesterday I had mentioned that I had taken a class this past Saturday.  Always a fun thing to do if you can attend one, not only for the learning in the class, but all the great tips that you can glean from other knitters.

I have been knitting for a very long time and I picked up two knitting terms that just hit my funny bone. They are perfectly descriptive and relevant and whoever came up with them must have an extremely creative mind.

The first one involves ribbing.  SSHH!  If you know the answer to this please don't tell!  Anyway, there are so many ribbing styles:

• 1 X 1
• 2 X 2
• Twisted
• 3 X 3
• And on and on, almost as many as you can imagine

The word of the day was "Frogging." Yep!  "Frogging" ----> Ribbing ----> "Ribbit!  Ribbit!"  Okay, maybe it wasn't that funny, but my morning class had a good laugh.  Guess we were still tired.

The next one is relevant to ripping. I know that every one of us rips, some more than others, but just the same, we all do it. There is an up side to ripping that I must share because it sometimes helps to know that there is a positive result from the negative. If you look at ripping, or un-knitting, as a learning tool, especially as a newer knitter, it may take some of the frustration away.

I define ripping as taking your knitting off the needle, pulling out the offending rows and then picking up the live stitches again.  These are a few techniques one can learn from ripping:

• Above all, this teaches Bravery!
• You also learn how to pick up the loose stitches, and get them back on the needle.
• There might also be a few stitches that come un-done which will have to be worked back up again.
• And then there are the twisted stitches.  My main focus when picking up stitches is to get them on the needle.  That means that some of them are straight and some twisted.  Learning the difference between the two comes easily this way, believe it or not.

The other type of ripping, is un-knitting.  This method un-knits one stitch at a time, and is mostly used when you only have a few stitches to undo.  Sometimes it is also used when working a more complicated pattern and need to keep more careful track as you "back up."

What is knit backward?  TINK!  So...now when you have to rip or un-knit, you can use the term TINK!

Have fun with your Frogging and Tinking!