Knitting. Sand and Arizona

KnittingMachine KnittingWork in Progress

May 25

Written By

It's Wednesday, which means it's time to share what's on the needles/crochet hooks at Yarn Along.

My WIP list is pretty short right now. Sand sweater I am working on is slowly growing. When I am knitting a tuck stitch on the machine it feels like weaving - so much hand manipulation. I will try to put a post with step-by-step photos to show you how it is being formed. The process is really mesmerizing - you have to stop every 4th row to change the carriage settings and the position of needles.I took the back part of the machine yesterday to see how the fabric is working out. Tuck stitch is creating a beautiful texture! I am using 100% mercerized cotton, so the fabric is pretty stiff right now, I hope it will loosen up after blocking. But just touching and looking at it brought so many ideas what else can be done with that. The fabric created holds the shape beautifully and I believe can be used for pretty structured garments! How exciting! I will finish this simple sweater, but I am sure I will use this technique more than once in the future. I imagine how different it will feel and look like in wool/alpaca/linen. So many possibilities for creativity!My second WIP is a cotton/silk pullover, Arizona, using a Contiguous method I told you about on Sunday. As you can see I haven't made much progress yet - I was experimenting with the number of stitches for a "shoulder seam" and increase methods. The beginning of a Contiguous method is very similar to top down raglan, the main difference is that you don't increase stitches for a sleeve, but create a shoulder seam out of which a set-in sleeve will grow later. The other difference is that you increase not every other row/every 4th row as usually done in the classic raglan, but you increase stitches outside of markers every row. I started using a usual M1 increase, but quickly understood it wasn't working out - the stitches were leaning into different directions. Turns out there is whole discussion devoted to shoulder increases in the Contiguous Method Ravelry group, where knitters experiment and share different ways of creating a shoulder seam with nice looking increases. I really loved one of the knitter's posts (mwaa on Ravelry) where she knitted a very big swatch and tried all kinds of increase methods, took photos of each of them and shared a step-by-step instructions!