Ruthless Knitting

I’ve really been wanting to write a new post, but until today, I had nothing of interest to report. As of this afternoon, however, I have finished the Clementine Shawlette. It still needs a good blocking, but in the meantime I can at least offer a few not-so-fantastic photographs and a mini-tutorial on grafting courtesy of Lucy Neatby.

I knew how to graft before I encountered Lucy’s technique, but I couldn’t do it with much facility. A few weeks ago, I watched the Knitting Essentials 2 DVD (available here, and highly recommended) and learned Lucy’s approach, to which I am now a convert. Lucy says that she knows how to graft perfectly well off the needles in the standard way but that she prefers her method. So do I.

What Lucy suggests is that rather than graft the live stitches off two needles, you knit an extra inch or so in a contrasting color, run the waste yarn tail through the live stitches, and then use the first row of contrasting stitches on each piece as a guide for your grafting yarn to follow. Once you’ve finished grafting, you unravel the waste yarn.

I thought Lucy’s approach might be helpful with the Clementine Shawlette, whose pattern directs one simply to knit the last pattern row on each piece (which is garter stitch from the right side but includes some purl stitches) and then graft the thing together. Now regardless of the approach you take, you’re going to have an obvious seam down the middle of the shawlette. I wondered whether it was possible to graft in pattern to some extent. I didn’t trust myself to create a beautiful seam (or even a tidy-looking one) using my normal approach, but I had an inkling that Lucy’s would enable me to graft in pattern without really knowing what I was doing. It worked!

For anyone interested in giving this a try, here is what I did.

After completing the last pattern row for each piece, I changed to some green yarn of approximately the same weight and knit a single row in pattern in the green yarn. I then changed to a second contrasting color and knit another row in pattern. I continued in garter stitch for an additional four rows, broke the yarn, and used a needle to run the tail through all the live stitches while removing them from the needle.

Now I had two pieces that looked more or less like this. (Please forgive the quality of the photographs. I don’t have the proper camera for this sort of close-up.)

I then threaded my needle with a length of the Sea Silk — not the same yarn that was attached to either piece, but a new length — and lined up the two pieces. About an inch and a half in from one edge, I found two stitches that I wanted to line up above one another and used the green yarn as a guide to where to put my needle into each piece. Basically, you want to follow your guide yarn where it connects to your main yarn. But when the stitch dips down into your second color of waste yarn, you don’t follow it there. Instead, you follow the guide yarn on the other piece, connecting the two together.

Once you’ve done a few inches and everything seems to be going well, you can go back and pick up the other end of your yarn and use it to close up that first inch and a half. You don’t want to leave this job for last, because if it doesn’t line up properly, you’ll have to start over. (This is Lucy’s wisdom, not mine.)

The advantage to using Lucy’s method for the Clementine Shawlette is that it makes it pretty easy to graft tricky maneuvers like double decreases and yarn overs.* All you have to do is follow the guide yarn. Though I am extremely inexperienced with lace and an admittedly poor grafter, I got all of the decrease and yarn over sections to line up nicely.

Once I’d worked my way across in both directions, I could inspect both sides. On the top, the grafting yarn now covered the green yarn completely and formed a new row of stitches. It looked like this:

The back looked like this (but, you know, in focus):

All that I had to do then was pull the tail of the waste yarn out of the live stitches on each side and unravel. Since the grafting yarn had replaced the first row of green yarn on each side, there was no chance that my knitting would come apart. I just unzipped, and voila!

You’ll have to wait until tomorrow to see blocked pictures, but I’m fairly confident that I will be happy with the appearance of my grafted row. I’m also pretty sure that I would not have been as happy had I grafted the way I usually do. For this I have Lucy Neatby to thank.

In return for her tutelage, I will plug her Knitting Essentials DVDs: If you haven’t already got your hands on them, you should seriously consider doing so. They are full of excellent tips for new, intermediate, and advanced knitters alike, and it’s much easier to understand her visual directions than any directions you’ll find in a book.

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*If you have to graft yarn overs, I especially recommend using two colors of waste yarn. The guide yarn seemed to dip down into the second color of yarn at these points, and if I had been looking at only one color, I don’t think I would have been able to work out how to do the grafting.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 4th, 2007 at 4:08 pm and is filed under Projects in Progress, Reconstruction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.