Knitting With Granny LJ

Good morning.

I have been asked about taking out stitches that are on circular needles.  Taking out stitches in a knitted work is tricky.  When I first started knitting I would discover a mistake and say a few rude things to the project I was working on and tear the whole thing out and start again.  I really do not like starting things over.  But I was still tearing out projects that I discovered a mistake in when I started shopping at Yarn for All Seasons.

Dodie, my friend and mentor, taught me how to tink.  It is as important as learning to knit and purl.  It is easy and a skill that every knitter, in my opinion, should have.

Tinking:

Examine the piece you are working on and find the problem.  The problem is, of course, what needs to be taken out and reknit.  I usually mark the problem with a stitch marker.  If the candidate for thinking is in the same row you may want to skip the marker.  If it is several rows back, trust me, mark the place.

Put the point of the left hand needle in the stitch below the row you had been working on.  Pull the stitch onto the left hand needle and slip the upper stitch (the one on the right hand needle) off and pull the yarn so that the upper stitch is gone.  

Because the word  “purl”  comes out “lrup”  I use  the word tinking for taking out both knitting and purling. 

The one thing to remember is to get those lower row stitches back onto the left needle in the same direction they were knit or purled onto the right needle.  Otherwise, when you get to replacing the stitches, they are difficult to re-knit or re-purl.   And those re-knit/re-purled stitches  are visible in the finished work.  I have done that frequently in my early knitting days and have ended up taking  out work that I wanted to avoid taking out by the tinking.  Some of my more frustrating knitting moments. 

So that is tinking.  I work on circular needles, as I have said before, and switch to double point needles for topping off.  I have tinked on the double points, too.  And the method is the same as on the circular. 

Until I learned to tink, I was seriously considering crocheting my caps because crochet is so easy to pull out and redo.  But thanks to Dodie, I can now tink my projects, if necessary, as well as I can knit  or purl them in the first place. 

Happy knitting.  Granny LJ

Good morning.

Remember?  I wrote on my Blog on 01/09 about how I came to be a capper — the story about knitting 2 or even 4 parts of a piece before it is done.  I have often thought of myself as a “little Johnny-one-note”  with respect to knitting.  And have even apologized for not doing more than the caps.  However, last night I had a moment of definition and justification.

One thing nobody ever tells you about hitting old age  is the problem with sleep.  For as long as I can remember I have gone to bed with a book — or several books — and read until I could no longer see the words, then turned off the light and slept.  Lately, that has not  really worked very well.  I have to take pills at a certain time at night, so some of my reading is done between the first set of pills and the second set.  And then I read a little bit more and eventually nod off.   But in the last year or so, I have not been able to go to sleep after the second set of pills is done. I find that I have to get up, drink some milk and go back to bed if I want get any sleep. 

OK, that said:  Last night was a little different.  Instead of playing computer games while I drank my milk, I sat in my knitting chair and grabbed up a knitting magazine that was near.  It happened to be a copy of KnitSimple, the holiday issue of 2008.  I leafed through the magazine and looked at the projects and wondered again why a simple project like a cap needed to be complicated.  I wandered page by page through to the end of the magazine and on the final page was the column “Last Stitch.”  I still had half of my mug of milk left so I decided to read the article entitled “Process makes perfect”  by Laura Bristow. 

I read down to the second paragraph, still sipping my milk, and discovered a knitter after my own heart, almost.  She has the same “problem”  as I have.  She apparently knit a lot of socks for people with only one foot and mittens for people with only one hand, when she started knitting.  My German-Swiss ancestors rose up yelling in my head about the waste of time, waste of yarn  — the whole litany of reasons for not doing multi-faceted project — i.e. two mittens.  Please see my  earlier Blog entry. 

So now I KNOW.  I am a process knitter.  I really do enjoy  knitting  the caps.  I am all but gleeful when I cast on a new cap and try to envision the yarn becoming what I see in my mind.  I love working the body as the yarn actually becomes what I have visualized.  And topping off?  That is a giant “WOW!”  when everything looks like it should and even matches what I saw in my mind.  What is more, the ancestors are saying not a word about the work. 

Where things become, for me, a little unhinged is getting to the finish work, and the tagging,  and  logging each cap into my record  system.  But I grit my teeth and do the work, because I really love to see the caps when they are laid out for a show. 

So thank you, Laura Bristow, and KnitSimple for giving me a name for what I have been doing this past decade — I am a process knitter who makes beach-walk caps. 

Have a great day.  Happy knitting.  Granny LJ

Good morning:

I just got back from walking Parker on the beach.  Uusually, as you know,  Karen and Red and Parker and I go down together.  But a couple of days ago, Red took something of a fall and has not been well since then.   Karen is taking him to the vet this morning.  For those who would a visual image of Parker and Red, Karen has done a web page called English Cocker Photo a Day.   Go there and see who I have been talking about all these weeks.

At any rate, Parker and I got down for a pretty good walkabout this morning.  Found one agate and a very interesting shell that has given me an idea for topping caps.  But I won’t say much more than that until I have experimented with it and see if it is doable.

Also had a response on this site by another knitter, and am excited about having another knitter to communicate with.  It is good to know, too, that someone is reading this Blog. 

Back to knitting:  I have the Contest Cap finished and Karen took some photos of it the other day.  And we have another photo shoot to do after she gets back from the vet with Red.

Currrently, I have started 2-color cap with Galway (Plymouth)  as the base and Handpaint Originals (Brown Sheep) in dark blues and lavender.  I have had a 2-color pattern picked out  before I cast on, and have gotten 2 rows of the pattern done.  I like doing 2-color work.  I really enjoy watching the pattern grow as I am knitting. 

I have another cap on my work table that is ready for top-off.  It is in a really rich red-lavender with a accent of a wirey kind of speciality knit in the red-lavender and gold wire.  It rather lost priority while I was working on the Contest Cap.  I think this one will be a pretty cap, but not a very practical one.  It was just that in looking at the 2 yarns together, I really had to work them into a cap. 

Well, that is about all from here for today.  Glad to have you aboard, Deb.  Good knitting to you all.  Granny LJ