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Thursday, July 21, 2011

Helical Knitting

This past Saturday I took a class sponsored by the Knit at Night Guild.  The class was held at Park Avenue Yarns and taught by Kenny Chua.  What did we learn about? Well, we learned about helical knitting and how to do a tubular cast on.  Both of these techniques are amazing!!  The tubular cast-on is absolutely amazing.  It creates a very "professional" looking edge for ribbing.  I believe it works best for one by one ribbing, but I think it is possible to use for two by two ribbing.  

However, the cast on does take some time.  Basically you start out by casting on half the number of stitches you need using waste yarn.  After knitting a couple of rounds in stockinette stitch with one round being an "elongated" stitch round, you then switch to your main yarn and knit a round.  During the second round of main color knitting is when the magic happens - creating your ribbed edging.  Essentially you knit one stitch (that from the previous round) and then pick up a main color purl bump from the first round and purl it.  Voila! Once you complete the round you will have double your stitches and created the one by one ribbing!  Not sure that explanation makes sense, but once you try it (or see it in a video) then it will be crystal clear.

Helical knitting - a hat
Once you get past the edging then it is time for helical knitting.  This technique is really neat because it creates jogless stripes.  Believe it or not, you are actually knitting all four colors during one round. The colors are knit in sections throughout the round - knitting one color until you get to the next then dropping that color and picking up the next.  After a couple of rounds you can see the magic has happened and you've created stripes!  While I understand the principles behind this type of knitting, I'm still having to wrap my head around how it ends up working out.  I think that I just need to think about it more.  This piece will be a hat and I'm thinking it will be perfect for my nephew. 

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