Needles & Hooks

I’m back to working on the sock yarn gloves again and yesterday was sunny, so I was able to take a few photos to illustrate my magic loop technique.

When you do normal magic loop, the loops that come out of the ends of your knitting are open. The tendency of the circular cable to open up puts a strain on those stitches at the end. See the area in the red circle:

When I do magic loop, I put a twist in the ends before I start working the next side. This twist reduces the stress from the circular cable and keeps the stitches at the end close together. Again, see the red circle:

The twist is accomplished by crossing the needle end over the circular cable before starting to knit with it. In this next photo, the red arrow points where the needle goes over the cable. My right hand (which is taking the photo) would pick up the needle and begin to knit with it.

This next photo shows the state after a few stitches have been worked. The needle is still crossed over the cable and the twist this achieves will remain.

Finally, a wider shot. In the circle on the left, you see the end that I’m knitting toward. The twist is there at the end of my stitches. At the right, the arrow points out where the right hand needle is, still crossing over the cable as seen in the photo above.

You may have noticed that I’m working all the fingers at one time. It’s going very quickly, but the one thing that I didn’t realize is that the way have I have done it leaves big gaps in the fourchettes between my fingers. The pattern I was following calls for you to pick up stitches from the fourchette of the previous finger. However, in my case, this is not possible, because the stitches are all only one row deep when I make the fourchettes. I’ll have to sew them closed after I finish them and figure out a new technique for future gloves. Maybe I’ll play with it when I work on the other glove. But here’s a shot of what the gaps look like close-up:

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 6th, 2005 at 1:19 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. 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.