Happy Halloween

Happy Halloween to all who celebrate.  For those in the US, I hope your kids stay safe during trick or treat.

A Year of Stitches Week 43 Happy Halloween

Yes Halloween is immortalized in Fair Isle again.  Others are better at thinking Halloween than I yet again.  It's not really one of my favorites.

Let's see what you do with this.  Will you follow it blindly?  Will you incorporate texture with the color?

Will you use it twice over for a bag for your child to collect candy in?  Pillow cover?  Done in super bulky yarn and made into an afghan?

A Year in Stitches Week 42 Happy Halloween!

Here's a chart for you to choose how to use.  It can be knit or crochet.  You can use color work or stitch work.  It's large enough to be done twice for a treat back or once for the treat bag (sewn to a canvas bag the same size) or used as a pillow for those who decorate for this holiday.  This is 2/3 of the whole chart.  You can see where the center is by the pumpkin and the two cats staring each other down.  This is a very nice chart.  Have fun with it.

A Year in Stitches Week 41

Now let's venture a little further afield in the chart world.  Here is a chart for a cable.  It's fairly easy to work it for knitting.  That's what it's designed for.  Try making it in color work?  How did you choose to do this?  Let's see your choices.  But how do you choose to use this chart in crochet?  Let's see your choices.  For the knit version, the blank boxes are purl.    For the crochet version, the boxes with the | are the single crochet on the back.

Here is the chart to work from. 

A Year of Stitches Week 40

Zooming right along, we can still utilize the same charts from the last few weeks and do something different with them.........  Let's combine the colorwork with the changes from last week.  Hmmmm...  This could be fun. So for the knit swatch, choose to knit or purl the background stitches in color A.  Then use the opposite stitch and a contrast color for the accent color.  How do you like this?

For the crochet swatch, still using bobbles, use color A for the background doubles and color B for the bobbles. 

A Year of Stitches Week 39

Let's switch things up this week.

Here's a make ahead for Christmas.  Do you hang stockings for gifts?  Do you hang them for ornaments?  For an ornament size, try fingering weight yarn (size 1 on the ball band) and a size 2mm needle or 1mm size hook (this dips down into the steel hooks).  Want it for gift giving?  See suggestions below.

Instead of color work, let's do knit and purl stitches for the knit swatch.  Instead of crochet Fair Isle, let's try bobbles.  What do these 2 changes do to your work?  What do you think of it?  Are you able to keep the front and back rows straight in your mind?  Did you use stitch markers?  Good for you if you did.  Tools are there for our benefit.  Didn't need to?  Great for you too.

Charts - Love them or hate them

Charts are here to stay.  For the advanced stitcher a simple chart is all that is needed to create a garment that is a work of art.  For publishers one picture is worth more than a thousand words, it can be worth extra advertising space on a page.  For a stitcher who speaks only one language,  charts are universally available.

Let's all agree that crochet charts come with a standardized set of symbols.  . Is a slip stitch,  x or + is a single crochet and so on.  However,  in following a wide variety of Pinterest boards and Picasa accounts from around the world, I have seen a wide variety of symbols in knit charts.  Most are reasonably self explanatory with knit and purl and in indicating if a left or right leaning decrease should be used. Yarn overs seem to be universal in their use of O.  Looks like a hole,  acts like a hole

Here's an easy crochet chart.  You'll see what I mean.

Now for the knitting charts.  These are the ones that can throw me for a loop if I'm not paying attention.  As I mentioned above, the yarnovers are a circle or o on charts.  Easy so far.  Knit and Purl are equally easy.  They are either a blank square or - for one and | for the other.  Depends on where and when the charting was done.  That is also fairly universal.

The ones that sometimes confuse me are the cables and the decreases or increases.  Cables are sometimes like the magenta swatch with a horizontal line and vertical line and another horizontal line.  By looking at the picture I can tell that the way it's drawn it needs to be a Back cross or a Left Cross.  However, there is also the green variant and the grey variant below which shows 2 other ways to diagram cables, with the cream colored cable at the bottom showing a 4th way.

The decreases also are different in each case.  Some draw a diagonal line in the box with a half diagonal going the other way (white lace just below).  This shows which direction the decrease needs to lean and you pick the one you know and like the best.  Another variation is a triangle following the 3/4 x just described, (the grey, blue and purple in the middle show this).  Again the goal is to show you which way the decrease needs to lean.  There is the odd symbol that looks like a bird foot in the magenta swatch that indicates a 3 to 1 decrease.  Some would k3tog or SSSK, but, to get the solid line of knit stitches, you need to work the decrease differently.  Here's one way thanks to TechKnitter.

3 STITCH DECREASE
(3stdec)

1. Inserting from left to right (knitwise), run right needle through TWO loops at tip of left needle and slip these two stitches onto the right needle. Note: You are to slip both stitches at the SAME TIME, therefore, insert the needle from L to R through the second stitch from the tip, then through the stitch at the tip, then slip both off the L needle, together, onto the R needle. 
2. Knit the next stitch. 
3. Next, insert the tip of the left needle under the 2 slipped stitches and lift them OVER the knitted stitch. (This is called "passing the slipped stitch(es) over" and is abbreviated "psso.")  
4. If 3stdec looks like combination of k2tog and ssk, that's because it is. The stitch which originally lay two from the tip of the L needle comes to lay on top of the resulting stitch sandwich, and it is pointing straight up--the orange stitch in the above diagram, while the two stitches lower down in the sandwich (green and red) slant R and L, respectively, as shown.
5. One stitch appears where 3 were before, so 3stdec is a two-stitch decrease.

--TECHknitter