let me explaiKnit

Housekeeping

A couple of matters I've been meaning to note:

From time to time, I teach short knitting programs for my local knitting guild, and often I create a handout for the students to take home. I usually try to make these handouts self-sufficient, so that they're useful even if one didn't take the class, and since they do stand alone fairly well, I've also put them up as PDF files, with the thought that my readers might find them useful.

Also on occasion, I create some simple patterns, often for children's items, which I judge as not complex enough to try to place in knitting magazines or the like, but which nonetheless may be useful to others. Those are also up as PDF files.

The reason I mention this is that I know a lot of you read blogs through Bloglines or another aggregator, and it's just occurred to me that you might not ever see new things that I drop into the sidebar. Therefore, I'm calling these to your attention: there they are, over on the sidebar, together with links to those articles and patterns I have published elsewhere. If you normally read through an aggregator, drop by for a look.

I sure would like to hear some feedback, both on the patterns and articles themselves, and on their distribution. Do you like them? Are they useful? Have you, Heaven forfend, found errata? Should I put a short note here when I put new ones up, to call them to your attention? Please, let me know!

Public Service Announcement

Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, the Yarn Harlot, has written the most wonderful post about breastfeeding education and support. In conjunction with this, she is helping with a project to provide knitted fruit and vegetable baby/toddler hats to low-income families as part of a nutrition education program. For those who would like to help, please contact Stephanie for the address to send your hats.

For those who are more comfortable working from a pattern, I've provided a few over in the sidebar. The 16-inch size of the watermelon hat will fit most children from a couple of months through toddlerhood, and the apple hat is sized for preemies through schoolchildren. If I come up with some more, I'll add those as well. And, of course, you could always knit the pineapple!

Thanks for your help with this very worthwhile project, and happy knitting!

Interjection!

Normally, I don't talk much about what I personally knit. However, I am going to make something of an exception today, because my first commercial pattern has just gone live!  It's called Lanai, and it's a pineapple hat, in entrelac, sized for babies through adults; it's available through Chiagu. As you might imagine, I'm pretty excited about this!

If any of my readers knit it up, I would love to hear some feedback.  Thank you!

You put your right...er, no, your left... um....

Just to minimize the possibilities for future confusion (or at least to give me a place to refer back to when said confusion arises), I want to explain something about how I explain things -- a meta-explanation, if you will.

In all cases where I do not explicitly specify otherwise, my explanations are made with the assumption that the reader is knitting in a way that starts with the stitches on the left-hand needle and causes new stitches to be made upon the right-hand needle, so that the knitter moves from right to left across the fabric.  I can, and upon request I very well may, explain things for those persons who knit in the left-to-right direction, but my general expectation is that if you are one of the people who knits in that fashion, you are probably well-accustomed to translating explanations to suit your orientation already, and that any attempt to accommodate you generally would be redundant for you and confusing for others.  Therefore, rather than constantly trying to provide two sets of explanations, or to use some other nomenclature like "dominant hand" and "non-dominant hand" (especially confusing if one is a left-hander who knits right-to-left!), I am going to make the above assumption.  If you need help translating to the other case, however, please ask; I am usually accommodating.

Furthermore, unless I say otherwise, my explanations contain the assumption that the knitter's stitches are oriented in the standard Western fashion, to wit, with their rightmost (leading) legs in front of the needle, and their leftmost (trailing) legs in back.  Those knitters who knit in combined style will find that their orientation after purling does not match this, and will need to compensate in some instances.  Because these instances are fairly limited, and are something I am generally aware of, I will try to specify when such compensation is required, but I am not promising always to do so; if you knit combined, you need to learn enough about the structure of knitting that you know when the Eastern orientation of your purls makes a difference and when it does not.  If you are having difficulties figuring out whether this applies to a given technique, however, please ask, and I will try to clarify it for you.

To the best of my knowledge, my explanations will not contain an unstated assumption of either the Continental or the English style of Western knitting. In the vast majority of cases, whether the yarn is held in the right hand or the left hand makes no difference at all to how knit stitches are formed, and so no assumption is necessary; in those cases where which hand is being employed for yarn control makes a difference, I will explain for each.

"let me explaiKnit"??

Um, what?

Okay, let me explain this.

This is going to be a blog where I attempt to explain various aspects of knitting, as this is something I've been told I have a talent for.  So I had to work the word "knit" in there somewhere, and "explainKnit" is what I came up with.  Work with me here, okay?

Anyway.  I'm going to try to explain things, such as how to do various techniques, why they work the way they do, why you might want to try them, and that sort of thing.  This probably won't be a daily blog, but more of a when-I-have-something-to-say blog.  We'll see how it goes.  If you have something you'd like me to explain, please say so!