I’m dipping my toe into the water of craft shows once again, this time I’m armed with Christmas trees and Holiday cards.
It’s actually more of an open studio at Jered’s Pottery in Berkeley, but those folks sure know how to make you feel welcome, so who could resist? Here’s the details:
Saturday, November 21, 2009
12:00pm – 6:00pm
Jered’s Pottery
2720 San Pablo Ave
Berkeley, CA
If you’re in the neighbourhood, drop by for some hot punch, cool ceramics and maybe one little knitted card?
I’ve already shared some short row shaping hints and tips with you, but those have always been for garter stitch fabric. It’s also possible to do short row shaping in stockinette stitch, although the results can be more uneven as you can see in the above photo and unless you are a knitter with tension like steel, you’ll need to do some adjustments.
Wrapping the Stitch
In order to turn your knitting mid row, you will need to wrap the stitch you are turning on, so that there isn’t just a big hole in your work. In stockinette stitch, the wrap goes like this:
(In a knit row) slip 1 purlwise, yarn forward, turn the work, slip 1 purlwise, yarn forward and purl
(in a purl row) slip 1 purlwise, yarn backward, turn the work, slip 1 purlwise, yarn back and knit
As you can see from this photo, that basically means that you are wrapping the yarn all around a stitch and you’ve transferred it from the left needle to the right and back again in order to do this.
Picking Up the Loops
When you knit back across a stitch you have previously turned the work on, you will need to pick up the loop made by wrapping the yarn around the stitch. Unlike with garter stitch short row shaping, where this stage is optional, stockinette stitch needs these loops picking up so that you don’t end up with little bars across your stockinette stitch vs.
These loops look different and need to be treated slightly differently in a knit or a purl row.
In a knit row, the looped around stitch will look like this:
You can see the little bar very clearly, you will need to knit into the loop and also the stitch above it at the same time, like this:
In a purl row the looped around stitch is less clear, you may have to rely on the look of the stitch, just as you get to it, it will look like this:
You will need to purl into the loop and the stitch at the same time, which will look like this:
And that’s all you need to know to make short rows in stockinette stitch.
Just a quick word of warning, the short row shaping patterns I’ve made available will only work in garter stitch. Stockinette stitch and garter stitch have completely different sized stitches plus the different methods of wrapping mean that the stitch counts will be wrong. That being said I am working on some stockinette stitch short row shaping patterns, they should be ready early next year.
This is the first knitted thing I ever designed. I made it to practice garter stitch, sewing together and picking up stitches. It was quite a mammoth undertaking at the time.
And now as my son transitions into his big boy bed, that blanket is finally getting used!
Of course it has it’s flaws, the sewing is terrible and if I was designing this again then I would change the orientation of the smaller squares so that the blanket would keep it’s shape better. But all that being said, I couldn’t be happier with it.
Not that I have anything against the queen of UK paper crafting, I just don’t have her skills. Which leaves me in a bit of a pickle when it comes to my hand knitted holiday cards.
I’m pretty certain that proper card makers don’t have cards that look like this on the inside:
I thought it wouldn’t matter, in fact I even thought it could be an advantage to make the patch easy to remove. But the more I look at how ugly they are the more I realise that this is not professional enough for the NattyKnits brand (ok, that sounds weird, but I knew I could do better). So I’ve taken the cards out of the etsy shop whilst I come up with some solutions.
Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:
1. Stick paper over the inside left hand flap of the card. It looks ok, but it does wrinkle a bit where the stitches were and because the paper is white you can still see the stitches.
2. Use thinner card and stick two cards together so that the offending stitches are sandwiched between two pieces of card. This looks really good, except that the card needs to be matched up perfectly and stuck down well. And of course, it doubles the price of the card stock.
3. Just sell the knitted patches as patches for the clever card makers and scrapbookers to work their magic with.
What do you think I should do? And do you have any crafty solutions that might help?
This morning a NattyKnits item made it onto the Etsy front page. This is the first time this has ever happened and I couldn’t be prouder. Thank you very much to Fluffy Flowers and Holyhock Alpacas who spotted the alpaca baby ball and told me it was there.
I’ve recently developed an obsession with etsy blog giveaways. I’ve been entering them whenever I find one and I’ve finally won something. More to the point I’ve finally won something very cool from the MakingPaper shop.
I won a set of 10 of these beautiful cards (I opted for no wording, although they can be made with custom wording). They are such great quality, the linen card and the printing is top notch and they arrived well packaged too. Making Paper is now firmly on my list of favourite etsy sellers.
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