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Friday, January 8, 2010

Zipper Knitting

Last week I started to explore entrelac knitting. I soon got side-tracked. Entrelac consists of rows of blocks which appear to interweave diagonally. The initial row of blocks is a series of triangles and the subsequent blocks are small rectangles . Each small rectangle is knitted in turn. The result, in the example I was trying out, is lots of blocks of 12 stitches each, with a turn a the end of each row of each block. That's lots of turning, and turning never was my favourite part of knitting. What to do?

Enter the zipper knitting technique: knitting to and fro without turning the work. I found this technique on a number of sites. It seems like the perfect solution to my problem. So for the last couple of days I've been knitting a stocking stitch sample: knitting right to left as usual for the knit row, then knitting left handed from left to right for the next row--instead of turning and knitting a purl row--like this:
It feels awkward at first--as most new techniques do--but it works. When I'm feeling a bit more confident with it, I'll get back to the entrelac. I'm hoping to just zip through the small blocks then. I'll let you know how I get on.

1 comment:

Dee said...

hmm that is how my view of my knitting looks all the time. i guess that makes you an ambidextrous knitter.