Peaches is good at keeping up the rhythm. She practices on her daddy’s tummy when he’s trying to relax. The only problem he has is that her claws are sharp, and he has to put a folded towel under her to keep from getting stabbed. She doesn’t care. She’s into the rhythm.
She looks really big there, but it’s the way she’s sitting. She’s actually our smallest cat. She’s a little less than nine pounds, I believe.
Keeping the rhythm is important, whether you’re a cat or whether you’re knitting. I find that if I put off my knitting for a while things get cold, and I have problems getting back into it. So whatever you do, keep up the rhythm.
Knitting
I’ve been knitting on a lot of little things lately in between bouts with the two shawls I’m working on. I have been knitting some little dishcloths. Here’s a group photo of some of them.
The one in the back is the sand stitch cloth from this site. I thought it was a pleasant knit. I do think that the original colors were much more interesting. I don’t think my pink lilacs quite cut it. Here’s a closeup of the pattern, though. I did alter the pattern slightly. I had some purple solid, and I made two stripes of that across the top. They bleed into the multi-colored yarn a bit, and I liked the way that looked.
Then the yellow one is from the Monthly Dishcloth Knitalong on Yahoo. It’s an oak leaf, in case you can’t make it out. Here’s a closeup of it.
It was a quick one to do. Everyone on the list enjoyed the border on that one. It lies flatter than most of the others, but if I make it again, I’ll make it larger. It’s a little too small for me.
Then the green one is from the archives of the Monthly Dishcloth Knitalong. It is a fun cloth to do. I like little houses in a row.
I also knitted a double knitting potholder while I was at it. You can get it here. (She has all her patterns on her Yahoo group now, so go to My Patterns on the right and that will take you to the Yahoo site.) I’d never done double knitting before, so I thought I’d try it.
Because it’s double knitting, you wind up knitting two sides of the potholder at the same time; you do one stitch of one side and one of another. Except where the colors change, you wind up with tubular knitting. Here’s the reverse side.
I learned some things from this project:
1. I decided that I had to hold my yarns with one in each hand. I couldn’t seem to manage them both in one and keep any tension going at all.
2. The tension on the yarn in my left hand was always slacker than that in my right, so I gave each stitch done with the yarn in the left hand an extra tug to tighten it before I went on. Slowed me down some, but that helped the look of the work a lot.
3. You have to bring both yarns to the position you need for the next stitch. That is, if you are purling, bring both yarns to the front. One of them won’t even be stitched; it’s just along for the ride, but it has to go. If you don’t, you wind up with an ugly carry across the stitch on the other side. Ask me how I know. One nice thing about that mistake, though, is that if you do forget to bring both yarns forward and manage one of those ugly carries, you can move it between the layers when you find it on the other side. Just slip the stitch off the needle, flip the carry to the inside and put the stitch back on the needle. Easy peasy. Don’t worry; that cotton yarn isn’t going to ravel out before you can catch it.
4. Carol had the instructions thoughtfully written out as text–she does good instructions, but she also provided a handy chart. (I tell you, she’s a nice lady!) I started with the text, but I soon abandoned it for the chart. I much prefer to stitch from a chart anyway. It wasn’t as hard to figure out as I thought. Every square represents two stitches, a knit and a purl. The knit is done in the color shown on the chart if you are reading right to left. The purl is the second yarn. When you have a row that goes from left to right, remember to switch the colors shown in the chart. Again, though, the first stitch you do is a knit and the second is a purl.
5. Ripping out double knitting takes a while. You are ripping out two sides of the potholder at once. I found it helped me to hold both yarns in one hand while I ripped out. Oh, I forgot to tell you that I had to rip! I got more than halfway through with it, and I realized I’d goofed way back right above the shoe. So I just pulled out my needle and ripped. Then I put the stitches back on the needle and continued. It was much easier than ripping it stitch by stitch.
One reason I ripped it was that I’d put an extra white stitch in on the blue side, and if I dropped a stitch and worked it back up the correct way, I’d have way too much leeway in the white yarn on the error row. If I’d just knitted and purled the wrong colors, the tension would have been fine had I just dropped the stitches and worked them back up. Second, I decided I could do a better job on my tension since I’d been working on it a while. So I redid the knitting, and I’m more satisfied with it.
6. The tension thing in double knitting is a problem for me. I really need to practice it so that I can do better. I think this looks a little more uneven than it should. I don’t think I want to do her Sunbonnet Sam, but I will have to try another double knitting project soon.
7. As I’ve said many times before, I have arthritis in my hands, and I found double knitting painful. I restricted myself to only a few rows on this a day, and that seemed to help. As I went along and my hands became accustomed to the extra weight and the extra tension I had to put on the thicker yarn, I found I could knit a little more each day than I could at the start.
8. This pot holder has real possibilities. I thought when I started this that it would probably be too loose for you to have any protection from hot pots, but it is pleasantly thick.
9. Two layers of stockinette in double knitting doesn’t curl. It always remained as flat as could be. It was nice not to have to fight that. You could have the same thickness from two pieces of stockinette sewn or knitted together, but you’d have to fiddle with the curling in the making of them.
10. Count, count, count. Watch your pattern and be sure you have it right before you go to the next row. That saves ripping later. It also accustoms you to thinking about the chart in the right way. Every block on the chart is TWO stitches.
I hope you’ll give double knitting a try if you haven’t already. It was fun.