The Safety Line

Ever wanted to try something new, awesome, incredibly exciting? Lots of colours, intricate lace patterns, rare yarn, new techniques? Well, I do! And if you're anything like me, you probably know from experience, that trying out new stuff quite often results in a lot of tears and frustration.

Why? Because it doesn't matter how well you know your gauge. If you try out lace for the first time, the fabric gets rather stretchy, so you'd better cast on a couple of stitches less. Knitting with more than one colour stranded? You'd better knit rather loosely, but be sure to cast on a couple of stitches more. But here is the 100 Mio. $ question: How many more (or less)? To find that out you would have to knit a gauge in the proper pattern. If you knit socks, you'd better do it in rounds, too. And if you're anything like me, you'd probably skip that part, because you want to get started with your project. Right now!

Maybe there are parts of your project, that you do not have to worry about, except for, let's say, a particular heel, which is an awesome fit, but rather difficult, because it involves a lot of counting. If you make a mistake there, you know what follows: FROGGING! There it is, the dreaded word: frogging. Tearing up a faulty part of ones work is annoying enough. But the process of picking the stitches up again, can be maddening. Twisted stitches and ladders. They can become trusty friends.

What to do, what to do... just imagine, if there was an easy way, and a cheap one, too, to 'save' the current state, try out the difficult part, and if it doesn't work out, you can just revert to the saved state and start again. And if it does work out, you can just continue. And maybe even have several 'safety points'? Wouldn't that be great?

Well, good news: there is such a thing: The Safety Line! A safety net that consists of a piece of waste yarn and a tapestry needle. But how does it work?

Well, simple really. The piece of waste yarn has to be long enough, so that it fits comfortably, even when stretching the fabric. So for a sock, maybe you'd better take a piece of yarn, that is twice the circumference of the foot. And it has to be of the same thickness as the yarn of your project, or better still, a bit thinner. And do not use a fluffy thing! The colour doesn't matter, since you will pull that thing back out, if you do not need it anymore.

If you have yarn and tapestry needle assembled, you are ready to start: First insert the needle into the first couple of stitches as if to knit:

Pull the yarn through and keep on doing that until all the current stitches do not just hang on their needle, but also the yarn. While threading the yarn through the stitches, do not take them off the needle!
And here is, what it looks like after working the difficult part:

The heel is knit, the yarn can be pulled out!
If you had made a mistake, all you would have to do, is to yank the needles out and frog as long as you can. Do not worry, as soon as you come to the safety yarn, you will be stopped! Then pick up the stitches again, but be careful not to divide the safety yarn!

Sooner or later, you will know the proper gauge. Maybe you hit it right the first time, maybe the second, maybe the tenth. But no matter how long it takes, the rest of the sock is safe.

Continental vs. That Throwing Thing

I am rather partial to continental knitting. That's the way I learned it from my granny all those years ago and promptly forgot until Summer 2009, when I suddenly got the notion into my head, that knitting might be cool.
Since my granny was not immediately available (she lives about 80km away), I bought a heap of knitting books the height of K2 and immediately got knitting. It didn't take me long to get the hang of it, being rather clever with my hands, and I soon advanced from a simple bag for my mobile to my first ever sock!

And that's where my addiction truly started. Naturally, like most addicted people, I couldn't get enough, and I proceeded to enhance my repository of techniques and patterns and books. So I shopped at amazon and I googled my fingers off. And that's where I first came into contact with the other kind of knitting: That Throwing Thing, or the English Method.

At first, I had trouble identifying what style I am knitting myself in , but a couple of minutes on youtube soon cleared it up. And I also got a better look at the throwing style. But I can honestly say, that I still do not understand how so many people (most of GB and the USA) could persist in using a technique that is so slow, prone to very loose tension, and so unneccessarily complicated as That Throwing Thing. Yes, you've read correctly: complicated!

The question Continental vs. English has been discussed before. At length. And one of the most featured arguments was and continues to be, that the English method is much simpler, easier to learn and therefore much better suited to beginners. I disagree. Strongly. Essentially, the knit stitch is a knit stitch. Whether you knit it in Continental or English, it always looks the same. To understand how such a stitch works, is totally independent from the knitting style. Whether you grasp the concept of how the stitches all hang together is more a matter of your intellect and dexterity and not whether you throw something or not.

In my opinion, That Throwing Thing is slow and messy, because to knit a stitch you have to:

Insert the tip of the right needle into the next stitch, change the working needle from one hand to the other, while taking care that the tip of the needle does not slip out of the stitch, find (and untangle) the working yarn, wrap it around the needle tip and push (or shove) the tip out of the stitch. After that, you have to tug the yarn a bit with your right hand to get some tension, change the working needle back to the right hand, only to almost instantly change it back to the other hand again. And so on...

The English style of knitting makes you spend most of the time playing musical chairs with the needles and organizing the yarn with too much movements and chaos and far too high a potential of losing needles, stitches and yarn.

Compare it with the Continental knit stitch:

Starting a row, you grab the needle with all the stitches to be worked on in your left hand, wrap the working yarn around your left index finger and take the other needle in your right hand. While knitting, you never let go of either needle or working yarn, so you only have to do this procedure once every row, after which you can keep the yarn wrapped around your finger and only have to change the needles.
The actual knit is produced by inserting the tip of the right needle into the next stitch and catching the working yarn with a quick twist of the right hand. After you caught the working yarn with the right needle, you can just yank the old stitch off the left needle, give a short pull with the left index finger to adjust the tension and shove the next stitch further to the tip of the left needle to be worked on (you can do this with your left thumb) all at the same time.

Since you never let go of either needle or working yarn, you do not have to waste time to organize or untangle anything and your movements are on a much smaller scale. This makes you fast, the steady tension of the yarn keeps the tension of the yarn... well... steady, and it also ensures that the neatness of the project overall is the same. The Continental Style is just one fluid sequence of tiny motions.

And what about purls? Yes, alright! The purl is not that different from the knit stitch when throwing, but it can be a real pain in the *** when knitting Continental. All I have to say on this subject is: google for ‘Norwegian Purl’. And that beats the English again.

In short: Knitting Continental gives you the freedom to think about your knitting, your pattern and the construction details, without being harassed by procedural stones in your road. Adjust the process to the workflow, not the workflow to the process!

Maybe it should also be noted, that most of the people, who detest one method, started to learn knitting in the other style. I count myself among those. Although it is curious, that there are (or at least appear to be) more people who change from English to Continental, than the other way around. And why do so many English knitters idolize Elizabeth Zimmermann? She was a Continental!

I have to be honest here, though. Sometimes I do knit in a mixed style. I do that, when I knit with two different colours (e.g. two yarns) at the same time. Essentially, I still knit continental, but when the pattern calls for the next colour, I drop the old yarn and wrap the other around my finger. This does require a lot of untangling and organizing and it does notably slow me down. Maybe, if I practised a bit more, I could use the two-yarns-wrapped-aound-the-left-index-finger method. But since I mainly knit with one yarn at the time, I do not feel the need right now to learn it.

And this is exactly the point: If you always use the same yarn, why not keep hold of it as long as you need it? Why do you have to throw it away so often? And is that why it is called The Throwing Method?

Socks Socks Socks: 70 Winning Patterns from Knitter's Magazine Sock Contest

Dowdy and dilettante - that's how the socks in this book look like! The colors are horrid, the craftmanship awful. Well, maybe not that awful, after all those are socks we're talking about and socks are by definition not for the novice (and some of those techniques are rather difficult - I do admire that!), but still - this was a contest for amateurs and it shows.

As the other reviewers stated, there are a great many different styles and techniques. Something for everyone. I agree with that. But please! Socks in a book for knitters should at least try to look professional. You could make socks with all of those techniques but way better looking. (Well, I have to be fair - some techniques were quite interesting, but then they had to go and spoil it by choosing those awful colors!)

Out of 70 projects there were only about two that were actually worth reproducing. One of them entrelac (but with horrid colors, yuck!) which I have seen elsewhere before and one lace pattern which was quite pleasant, but not all that stunning either. If I had to choose from this book, then I would choose that lace thing (I forgot the name - something in lavender). But one out of 70? That's not worth buying the book for. Especially since the other patterns are not just not great, but actually ugly and/or something I wouldn't want to be caught dead in! It reminds me of those horrible bulky sweaters in Waldschrat-green and those itching wooly underwear that my granny used to bestow on us kids when we were too little to defend ourselves...

There are other books that have a variety of patterns to offer just like this one, but with much better looking socks and way better craftmanship. Like 'Outside the sox' (another Knitter's Magazine contest, actually). Or that 'Around the world with socks' (or something like that) by Stephanie van der Linden. Or check out that toe-up book by Wendy D. Johnson.

And as for doing such a great job explaining how to work a heel and stuff...well...yes...there are instructions, but...are you kidding?! I found the instruction pages were just pro forma, but there are much better instructions in other books. Seriously.

I love knitting socks and I love books about knitting socks. I just can't get enough! And when I read all the high praises that the other reviewers heaped on this book, I knew I had to have it! Boy, was I wrong! What is so great about this book? I do not understand. Are we talking about the same book?! I have never been more disappointed.

The very first post

So, this is obviously the first post. I'd like to write something truly spectacularly here, which will be quoted by generations to come, but right now I just can't think of something.

Since my blog has 'knitting' and 'socks' in its title, most of my posts will probably include stuff related to knitting. And socks. And sometimes something else beside socks. But probably always something to do with knitting.

So let's get the needles out, yarn's wasting!