Monday, July 4, 2016

Yellow Rose Mitts from Yarnivore - Day 4

If at first you don't K3TOG...

Let me just say this:  it is INSANELY difficult to knit three together on size 0 needles.   Especially with a beautiful but splitty yarn like this one.  

The number of times I wrestled that skinny little needle through those three loops only to come up with a single ply—well, it should be illegal.  Several not-nice things came out of my mouth after the third or fourth try on any given row.

So, I did what any smart knitter does—I found a work-around.  

The essential purpose of K3TOG is to decrease by two stitches, making a “point” of sorts.  It’s designed to lean one way, as the far easier—in this case—S1-K2TOG-PSSO (slip one, knit two together, pass slipped stitch over) accomplishes the same decrease leaning the other way.  So, I needed to decrease by two in the correct direction, as it were.  And I needed something that could be accomplished without nasty words or broken needles. 

I came up with knitting two of the three together—usually possible with sufficient grunting—, returning the knit stitch to the right hand needle, and then passing the final stitch over that one before returning it to the right hand needle.  It wasn’t perfect, but it leaned the correct direction, decreased the correct amount of stitches, and didn’t result in an angry knitter.  


Did I make up a stitch?  I don’t know. I later discovered that the folks at Heartstrings Fiber Arts came up with the same idea, so I know I'm probably not the first person to face this predicament.  

What I did do was make my knitting experience a whole lot nicer.  And on a weekend filled up by a killer set of revisions on my current book due Tuesday, that made all the difference in the world.

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