A Year of Stitches Week 13

A revisit to a year in stitches.

In particular I want to see how many ways a black and white chart can be used.  Let's look at this chart as an example.

Clearly this is cross stitch.  So we know we can do cross stitch or duplicate stitch on the knit and crochet.  So we have a surface decoration.

 This would also be great for fair Isle.  We know how to knit fair Isle. We know how to crochet fair Isle.  This technique is working a stitch in the color designated on the chart and switching colors as the chart tells you.

In crochet, there is tapestry crochet. This is similar to fair Isle but instead of holding the unused color behind the stitches, the unused color is stitched over.

In knitting there is knit, which is smooth on the right side, and purl, which is a bump on the right side.  So if we make knit stitches on the white squares of the chart and purl stitches on the black squares, we will have a textured picture of the chart.  Another way to do this is to work garter stitch for the background and stockinette stitch for the pattern stitches.

There is shadow knit and shadow crochet.  One word of caution about this technique, it will lengthen it quite a bit.  For each craft, shadowing will be 4 rows of stitches for each row of chart

Double knitting will give you a 2 sided stockinette fabric.  One side is the negative image of the opposite side. To prevent flare on the cast on end, either hold the two colors simultaneously or with one color cast on and the first row is kfb across.  To prevent flare on the bind off edge, k2tog across in the bind off.  This closes the top and binds off neatly together.  An added benefit is you can use a much smaller needle size for the yarn weight than called for normally.  The only downside is that you have to be able to keep the front and back pairs straight in your mind.