Techniques

That’s a piece of lace, straight off the needles. Looks pretty unimpressive, doesn’t it? It’s nothing like the beautiful delicate lace creations that you see on people’s Ravelry project pages, and it’s easy to think that something must have gone wrong. It hasn’t, and there’s one magic word that will reveal the loveliness.

Blocking.

Blocking is the yarn equivalent of styling your hair. Sometimes you just want to give it a quick brush and tie it back, sometimes you want to do a bit more. Lace needs that bit more: it takes a little time, it needs a little care, but the results are oh! so worth it. This post illustrates the entire process of blocking a triangular shawl for you, because we’ve been asked several times to cover the topic (and because it was an excuse to knit some lace specially!).

The materials you need are simple: a basin of cool water, a towel, some string, some rustproof pins, a measuring tape and something you can stick the pins into. That can be a carpet, a mattress, or blocking mats. (If you use your own bed first thing in the morning, your lace will be dry by bedtime. NB: do not use your bed if it’s a waterbed; trust us on this.) If you’ve got blocking wires, you won’t need the string, and the whole process will go faster, as we’ll see below. A spray bottle filled with plain water is useful if you’ve got warm conditions, so you can give your lace a nice misting to stop it drying too fast as you block it out.

Before you start, weave in your ends, but don’t clip them short just yet.

Next, thread some string through the long side of your shawl, using a piece at least one and a half times the length of the side. (You can expect lace to grow by 30%, so longer is better than shorter here.) Tie a loop in each end of the string so you can pin it to your blocking surface.

Give your lace a nice long soak in a cool bath. If you want, you can put some wool wash in there, and some people swear by a drop of hair conditioner (after all, most yarn’s hair too). Leave it for at least twenty minutes, because you want to make sure the fibre is all evenly saturated (an hour’s even better, and overnight won’t hurt).

You want your lace to be evenly damp but not dripping, so blot it in a towel so remove excess water after you rinse. Leaving the rolled-up towel for a couple of hours will ensure that you’ve got nice damp lace, but if you’re in a hurry, standing on the rolled-up towel will hasten the process.

Pin the string, well stretched out, to your blocking surface, and then pin down the point of the shawl.

Now you can start pinning out the sides. The measuring tape comes in useful here to make sure you’re getting an even size.

Keep on pinning until you have the points all pinned out and the long side straight – pinning out the string rather than the lace on the latter helps to keep your edge nice and even.

If you’re using blocking wires, then the procedure is even simpler – just thread one wire through the long edge of the shawl and another through each of the short sides:

Then pin out the wires. A few pins on each side will be enough, rather than a wee forest of them for the string-and-pin option:

When you’ve got your lace all blocked out, leave it to dry completely. Overnight will do nicely, or overday if you’re using your own bed. It goes without saying that you should exclude your beloved pets from the area (though this won’t always work, as this Ravelry thread demonstrates). Other humans, large and small, should be dissuaded as well.

Then unpin your lace and prepare to be amazed.

Magic!

Counting rows has been much on our minds lately. Both the Fan Jacket and Sandrine, the cardigans in the Spring Knit-Along, feature stretches of regular increasing and decreasing – “work the decrease round every six rows seven times”, that sort of thing. Not counting rows at such times gives you weird sleeves.

There’s many ways of keeping count – you can use a mechanical device like the barrel counters and the Kacha counter that we mentioned in this post, or you can make neat marks on paper. But both of these require you to count the row at the time that you knit it. (Hopeless confusion results otherwise. Ask us how we know).

There’s another way of keeping track which has several advantages. It’s easy, it’s flexible and best of all, if you forget to check off a row, you can make it up later. Instead of counting individual rows, it counts blocks of them, so it’s perfect for keeping track of your spaced-out increases and decreases.

All you need is a length of contrasting yarn, a bit longer than the final length of the piece you’re going to knit. When you come to the first row you want to mark (say, your first decrease row), just lay the contrast yarn over the work, between the needles.

Then you just leave it there and knit on.

It sits there, minding its own business, and as you knit on, it gets further and further down. It’s easy to count the number of rows above it, and so to spot when your next increase or decrease row comes along.

After you’ve marked a few rows, the contrast yarn will start to look like giant running stitches in your work, just as in the first picture above. When you’ve finished your work, the contrast yarn just pulls right out.

And if you forget to mark a row, why, then poke the yarn through the fabric at the right place and act innocent.

We talk a lot about shawls here – lovely things like Swallowtail and Aeolian and Ishbel. When you first come to knit one, though, the very start can seem puzzling. So we thought it would be a good idea to do a post on how to do the garter stitch tab start that so many of them share.

To begin with, you cast on a very small number of stitches. We’re going to be working on a garter stitch tab three stitches wide, which would turn into a three-stitch garter border on a shawl, with five stitches in between the two garter bits. Of course, the number of stitches and rows that you work here may differ in any particular pattern, but the principle will be the same.

The very start is provisional, which just means that you’re going to set things up so that you can knit away in one direction and then come back later and knit away from the same place in the other direction. Any provisional cast on will do (they’re really all the same), but one we like is this one.

Take some waste yarn – something non-sticky and non-hairy, like cotton – and tie a knot in the very end (we’ll explain why in a moment). Crochet a small number of chain (seven is easily enough), cut the waste yarn and fasten off the chain.

Now let’s consider the shape of a crochet chain. One side of it has a line of interlocking loops, just like a cast off edge in knitting – we’re not interested in this side.

The other side (the one we’re interested in) has a line of little bumps running along it.

Starting with the end of the crochet chain closest to the knot, poke your knitting needle under one of those bumps, a stitch or two in from the end.

Wrap the working yarn around the needle, and pull a loop of it back under the crochet chain bump:

Continue like this – needle under the bump, wrap the working yarn, pull a loop back through the bump – until you have four new working yarn stitches on the needle:

Then knit along your new row of stitches, knitting the second and third stitches together (casting on one stitch more than you need and decreasing it away immediately ensures that you have the right number of loops to pick up later on):

Work ten rows of garter stitch in total, which will give you a little strip of garter stitch like the one below. Knit the first stitch of every row rather than slipping it if that’s your usual habit – you want the little bumps along the edge that you get when you knit the edges.

Turn your little garter stitch strip so that you’re facing along its long edge, and poke the tip of your needle under the first edge bump you encounter…

…wrap the yarn around the needle and pull a loop through under the bump. You now have a new stitch on your needle, bringing the total up to four:

Repeat this procedure at each edge bump along the garter stitch strip, getting five new stitches in total (one for every two rows of garter stitch that you worked earlier):

Now you’re back down at the provisional cast on, and you need to retrieve the stitches from it. The easiest way to do this is to take another needle and poke it through the loops at the cast on:

Then knit these stitches.

At this point you’ve completed your garter tab cast on, and all you have to do is remove the crochet chain. The chain will rip back only in one direction, towards its beginning – this is the reason for the knot right back at the start, because the knot tells you which is the beginning of the chain. If the chain sticks at any point, though, you can just snip it. Because you’ve already knit the stitches from the provisional, nothing bad can happen if you do need to snip the chain.

And when you’ve removed the crochet chain, you’re left with a cast on like this:

You’ve got three stitches from the top end of the garter stitch strip, five picked up from the side, and three retrieved from the provisional cast on: in other words, you’ve got stitches emerging from three sides of your little garter triangle. It’s clever, it’s easy to do, and when you knit away from it, you won’t even be able to see where it happened!

And then you can start literally thousands of neck-down shawls. Can we see, please?

One of our most popular inhouse patterns is the Party Lace Scarf. It’s the pattern that we use in our lace classes, and it’s been made in an amazing variety of weights and fibres (though the original is in luscious mohair and silk).

The little touch of beading at the beginning and end is optional, but it makes the scarf that little bit prettier, and we’ve been asked for help in adding it several times. So we though it would be a good idea to post a tutorial here.

There’s several different ways of adding beads to your work. This one involves threading the beads onto the yarn in advance. For this, a beading needle really helps – it’s essentially all hole, so there’s no difficulty in threading your yarn through it.

So thread your beads onto your yarn, and move them well up away from the end. You’re going to need enough beadless yarn to cast on with before you get to the beading stage.

Cast on the required number of stitches, ignoring the beads entirely.

Then begin to work your beaded row. We shot this part way along the row, so there’s some beads already in place, but each of them is placed in exactly the same way, and here’s how. Bring the yarn to the front as if you were going to purl the next stitch…

… and slip the next stitch purlwise without working it at all.

Hoosh the closest bead up along the yarn until it’s right in front of the stitch you slipped:

Then bring the yarn back to the rear of the work. This snuggles up the bead to the front of the slipped stitch:

When you knit the next stitch, the bead will be held firmly in place.

And this is the result: a bead placed neatly along the edge of the work, just like its neighbours.

We’ve found that a willing helper to do the hooshing up of the beads along the yarn makes the process faster, if you can recruit one. And we’ve learned the hard way (so you don’t have to!) that if you’re placing beads in a specific order – say, in a coloured pattern or using several sizes – the first-placed bead should be the last one threaded.

Now we want to put beads on everything. And we can’t really think of a good reason not to. Can you?

The Glenties Cowl is one of our most popular shop patterns, and we suspect that the pretty cast off is a good part of the reason for this. It’s a picot cast off and it’s very simple to work. It’ll give all sorts of things a neat touch – check out the Miss Potter mitts for another really effective implementation.

We often get asked at the counter how to do it, so here’s a tutorial. As usual, we’ve cast on thirty stitches or so and then worked ten(-ish) rows, so if you want to work along with this, that’s all the preparation you’ll need.

The exact number of stitches involved in picot cast offs can vary, but we’re working here with an instruction that reads:

Cast off 2 stitches, *slip the stitch that remains on the right needle back to the left hand needle.
Cable cast on 3 stitches.
Cast off 5 stitches.* Repeat from * to * until all stitches have been cast off.

In other words, the picots will be three stitches tall, and each of them will be two stitches away from its bobbly little neighbours. So to start with, cast off two stitches using the usual cast off:

You’ll have lots of stitches on the left hand needle and only one one on the right. Pop that single right hand stitch back onto the left hand needle, leaving your right hand needle empty.

Now you’re going to cast on three new stitches, using the cable cast on (it gives you a firmer cast on). Put the tip of the right hand needle behind the first stitch on the left hand needle, between that stitch and its immediate neightbour:

Wrap the yarn in a normal knitting motion around the tip of the right hand needle:

Pull a new loop towards you between the two stitches – this is your new stitch:

Pop that new stitch up on your left hand needle:

Repeat this procedure, casting on a total of three new stitches…

… and immediately start to cast off, casting off five stitches in total (your three newly cast on stitches, and then two of the original ones):

When you’ve cast off the five, stop and have a look at what’s happened – you’ve got a little protruberance of yarn:

At this point, slip the single stitch from the right hand needle back to the left hand needle, ready to cable-cast-on three new stitches for the next picot:

When you’ve completed these steps a few times, take a moment to admire the result – and try not to put picot cast offs on everything you knit. You’ll want to, you know.

There’s a matching picot cast on as well, which we’ll do a tutorial for soon.

And here’s a Christmas decoration to admire as well – we’ve just been awestruck with the ingenuity of you all:

Those four little words induce dread in a lot of knitters. You find them in pattern shaping instructions like this:

Shape front
Inc 2 sts at end of next and following 6th row, then on following 0 (2; 2; 3; 4; 5) 4th rows, then on 2 (2; 1; 2; 0; 2) alternate rows, then on foll 6th row and at the same time dec 2 sts at beg of 9th (5th; 5th; 9th; 5th) rows, and at beg of following 3 (4; 4; 5; 5; 6) alternate rows.

We’ve made up the numbers in this particular example, but it’s not hard to find plenty of published patterns with this sort of instruction. We get a lot of furrowed brows asking for help with this, so here’s a way of making life easier for yourself.

First of all, there’s a lot of numbers in there that aren’t really relevant – the numbers for the sizes you’re not making. So start by using a pencil or a highlighter to mark the numbers that do pertain to you. Right away, the pattern will start to look less cumbersome. In fact, it’s always a good idea to wield the pencil for this right at the very start, before you even cast on, and mark up the whole pattern. We’re going to assume here that we’re knitting the second size (the first one inside the brackets).

The first thing to do is to get a sheet of paper and number the lines. Each line is going to correspond to a row.

Looking at the instructions above, there’s one set of instructions for the beginning of even-numbered rows and another for the beginning of odd-numbered rows. This tells you that the piece will be changing shape at both sides at once. But marking up your sheet of paper, it’s easier to concentrate on one of these at a time, so we’ll illustrate with the odd numbered rows first.

The first line on the page is Row 1, so it gets the very first bit of shaping. Then you count 6 rows on from there on your paper, and that’s where you put the second increase. We’ve found that you don’t need to write down anything more fancy than “Inc 2″.

Inc 2 sts at end of next and following 6th row

Carry on like this, putting in each odd row instruction, and your sheet of paper will look like this:

That’s the shaping for one side of the piece sorted, so you can move on to the shaping on the other side, which you work at the same time (that’s that phrase again!)

and at the same time dec 2 sts at beg of 9th (5th; 5th; 9th; 5th) rows, and at beg of following 3 (4; 4; 5; 5; 6) alternate rows

Starting back down at the first row, mark the rows where you decrease on the even-numbered rows. In our sample, that’s on the 5th row and then on every second row 3 times, which is four decreases in all.

When you’ve added in the even-numbered row shaping, you’ll have a sheet of paper which tells you for every row whether you increase or decrease on it. Even though there’s two sets of shaping going on, you never have to worry about any row other than the one you’re on, and your chart tells you whether you need to do anything on it or not. Having only one row to think about makes the whole thing much easier.

As you work up the piece, you can tick off the rows you’ve worked as you go, so you always know where exactly you are. That way, you can even chat or watch TV … at the same time!

Once upon a time in Dublin, there was a little crocheter. A lady called Kathleen taught her how to chain, and how to do doubles and trebles, and she made lots of things from patterns. She had heard that in America they used different words for the stitches. But that didn’t matter, because she was living in Ireland and America was a place on TV. When was she ever going to be using an American pattern?

Then they invented the internet.

It’s like petrol and gasoline. The things are the same, but the words are different. When you know what the equivalences are, then you can use any pattern from anywhere in the English-speaking world and your crochet horizons widen greatly. But if you don’t know how to navigate the two systems, patterns using the unfamiliar one just won’t work. So here’s how to translate from one to the other.

Let’s call the two systems US and UK, though the latter includes Australia, South Africa, Ireland and so on. Put very simply, the stitch that the UK calls a double, the US calls a single, and the stitch that the UK calls a treble, the US calls a double. A UK double treble is a US triple. There’s absolutely no difference at all in how the stitches are made, though – the only difference is the names.

Any stitch whose name is made up from these will also differ. So an UK half treble will be a US half double, and a UK linked triple treble (like those in the Dublin Bay shawl) is a US linked triple double.

That’s the easy part. It can seem a bit complicated when you’re trying to find out which system’s being used. So here’s some tricks that might help if the designer doesn’t tell you (some like Aoibhe Ní do).

The first thing is to check where the pattern’s published. If it’s published in the US, it will use US terminology; if in the UK, it’ll be UK. The spelling conventions can help you too: look for words like “color”. Spotting UK spellings like “colour” isn’t foolproof, though, because Canadian English hass them but increasingly uses US crochet terminology.

If there’s a picture of the stitch pattern, that will help hugely. Doubles and trebles differ so much in their appearance that it’s very easy to see which is which. The smaller green swatch at lower right above is UK double, the larger pink one is UK treble.

But what if you’ve downloaded a pattern from the web with no picture and no indication of where it was written, what can you do? There’s two big clues that will tell you. You can use the first clue if the pattern states its tension over either doubles or trebles. UK doubles (US singles) are almost as tall as they are wide, so if you come across a stitch/row ratio which makes a 10cm square with numbers like, say, 17 stitches and 20 rows or 20 stitches and 22 rows, then you’re dealing with UK doubles. (Actually, if the pattern’s talking about tension rather than gauge, it’s probably a UK pattern in any case, though this isn’t foolproof.)

UK trebles (US doubles) are much taller, so the ratio of stitch to row is very different. If your pattern states a tension over doubles with half(ish) as many rows as stitches (19 stitches and 10 rows, for example), then it’s talking about US doubles, or UK trebles.

If the pattern doesn’t mention tension at all, then you’re still not stuck. Since the actual stitches don’t differ, UK doubles/US singles are the same thing and need the same number of turning chain (1 chain). In the same way, UK trebles/US doubles need 3 turning chain. So if you come across a row instruction that reads “Ch 3, sk first dc, dc in each ch across, ending with dc in third chain of turning chain”, the three turning chain tell you that you’re dealing with UK trebles/US doubles. Similarly, an instruction that tells you to “ch 1, 1 dc into 1st st, 1 dc in each st to end” is telling you to make UK doubles/US singles, because of that one turning chain at the beginning.

Now, if there were only enough time to make all the crochet patterns we want to….

One more thing to mention: last week we announced next Thursday’s Opening Party and Louisa Harding’s Drop In Workshop next Friday. Both of these are now up on the booking system and bookable. The booking page for the party is at this link – there’s no charge, but it would make the Health and Safety people happier if we had an idea of how many of you to expect, so please register to tell us.

Louisa’s workshop is bookable at this link. Though it’s from 12.00 noon to 3.00pm, you can drop in for as little or as much time as you like, and the cost is just the price of the skein of yarn for the project.

We’re looking forward enormously to both events – it would be lovely to see you there too!

Back in August, we posted a tutorial on directional decreases. In the comments, Laura asked if we could do one on directional increases. So here it is. We hope it’s useful.

There’s actually a couple of ways of making increases directional. The ones we’re going to concentrate on are called lifted increases, because they involve lifting up a strand of yarn from the previous row and working into it. They’re straightforward to do and they give a really neat, practically invisible result.

Here’s a picture of the lifting – the strand connecting two stitches on the row below the current one is lifted up with the tip of the left hand needle.

It’s possible to work into that strand exactly as it presents itself. This will give you an extra stitch all right, but it will also give you a hole. If you want a hole in your knitting at that point, then knit the loop as it is (this is a great fix if you’ve forgotten to make a yarn over on the previous lace row). In the picture below, you can clearly see the hole developing.

But most of the time, you don’t want holes in your knitting when you’re increasing. Indeed, this issue was what Laura most wanted to avoid. So for the rest of this post, we’ll concentrate on how to make directional lifted increases without any holes at all.

The secret is to pay attention to how you lift the strand, and then to twist the strand as you work it.

To make a right-leaning increase, pick up the strand from the row below by moving the tip of the left hand needle under it from front to back, just as in the first picture, which you can see again here:

But instead of working the front leg, put the tip of your right hand needle through the stitch from right to left, so you’re ready to work its back leg.

Wrap the yarn as usual…

…and complete the stitch. At this point, it becomes clear why this is a right-learning increase, because the new stitch is coming out to the right of the loop it’s made out of:

And here’s the new stitch, neat as you please and with no hole:

The corresponding left-leaning increase starts out very similarly, with the strand from the row below lifted over the tip of the left hand needle. But this time, lift it by moving the tip of your left hand needle from back to front. This gives you a strand lying over the left hand needle that looks like this:

Again, you make the new stitch by twisting the strand. Since it’s oriented the other way, though, you need to work its front leg. This is fiddlier than the right-leaning version, but it just needs a little wiggling:

Wrap the yarn as usual…

…and complete the new stitch. And now it’s clear why this one’s left-leaning, because it emerges from the left side of the twisted loop.

When it’s completed, the left-leaning increase looks like this – again, no nasty gaps:

Directional increases are useful because they can be paired – imagine the thumb gusset of a glove with all the increases right-leaning on one side and left-leaning on the other. These little touches make your knitting look neat and professional. And to show what the two look like when they’re paired, here’s the same swatch knitted on a little further, with matching increases three stitches apart four rows below the needle:

They’re practically invisible, there’s no holes, and they sprout off in different directions.

Laura, can we say thank you for suggesting this as a topic – we hope you find it useful. And if there’s any other techniques we should include, please tell us in the comments. We love the feedback!