Knit Along: Plymouth Yarn Market Bag from Knitorious - Day 2

Eat Knit Caffeinate

It’s so darling, even now. I could watch the bag take shape practically from the first repeat of the webbing pattern. And with size 15 needles, progress is snappy.

You need to watch the row marker however. When you get to the row that starts with a yarn-over, those markers have a nasty habit of migrating forward or backward a stitch since the yarn-over can’t really keep the marker in place. Might be a good place for the clip-on kind of marker rather than the circle kind.

Still, patterns like this make the case for being what a friend calls “knit literate.” This is the skill where you can look at the knitting and recognize what stitches you’re seeing. In this case, you could look at the stitches to the left of your marker, recognize where the yarn-overs and knit-two-togethers are, and calculate where the stitch marker ought to be even if it’s wandered a stitch or two. It also helps in a four-row repeat like this, because you never really have to count rows--the stitches themselves tell you where you are.

I don’t know how to teach this skill, it just sort of happens with experience. But paying attention to your knitting, looking at it, studying what things look like, can only strengthen your abilities. I also believe such literacy is the first step in being able to do the magic “fix it” thing so many of us lack in knitting. I can’t count the number of times someone has come up to me with a tangled project, saying they know something’s wrong but not what’s gone askew or how to fix it. Knowing how “YO, K2tog, K2” is supposed to look is the first step to knowing why what you’re holding isn’t what it should be. Then you can slowly work what is into what should be.

And then people start calling you “the knitting fairy” and folks dial you from their cell phones in your driveway begging for a knitting rescue. It’s a calling.

What I can’t yet master is the “YO, K2tog” in continental. After about a dozen rows I got the yarn-over part down, but I can’t for the life of me knit two stitches together in continental without tangling my fingers or engaging my right index finger to hold the yarn down tight enough to get it through two stitches. I won’t be fast at lace knitting until I master this, but so far sheer volume of stitches hasn’t helped. I must seek out a knitting guru to show me the enlightened way to K2tog in continental.

Then I can write an “Eat Pray Love”-esque memoir and entitle it “Eat Knit Caffeinate.” Do you think Julia Roberts is free? I know she knits....