Elka Knits: Its a dialogue

April 25, 2005

Its a dialogue

I received the pattern for cardigan via email Friday and, after dutifully swatching, decided it was late enough to call it quits and move onto a little Weekend Knitting. I finished the fifth and final flower and planned on showing you the bouquet. However my kidlets had great fun pretending to be frogs in a waterlily pad covered pond last night and the waterlilies are now drying. Look for the FO pic tomorrow.

Have you ever noticed how sometimes something is on your mind and somebody blogs about it? This happened to me last night. I was planning on comparing the larger chartreuse flower to the other flowers. Larger because the chenille broke on one of my sts so I intentionally loosened up my knitting by knitting far down on the shaft. Not that I knit my new sts onto the tips mind you. The resulting flower is hidious due to a too loose gauge and the ineveitable rowing out. Too bad~ I am particularly fond of chartreuse. Anyway I took a little break from sewing in my ends by catching up on some blog knitting. Mary blogs on Sundays and last night she posted about Knitty's Loosen Up article. You can read Mary's post and following comments[two by yours truelly] here. Reading the article caused me to nearly burst a blood vessel hey not ranting was last years resolution the gloves are off and I cannot get it off my mind. Lets go over it point by point:

You are a tight knitter if:

1)care about your needle tips. Well! I like tapered pointy needles for standard yarn or fine gauge knitting. Not only because it is easier to "ooch your way into the next stitch" but because its faster to slide into a stitch with a narrow pointy tip than a blunt tip. If you don't believe me turn your strait needles backwards and try knitting onto the knob end. In fact lets give Lisa some needles with bulbs on tip end and see if she doesn't care. By and by I prefer blunt tips for novelty and splitty yarns. The needles
should suit the project and you should care about them.

2)have to go up several needle sizes to achieve gauge. Knock, Knock Hello! I usually go down several needle sizes but I have occassionally used the needle size called for and very rarely gone up several needle sizes to achieve gauge. So I am what? Does my going up 2 needle sizes to knit Mare's Magical Hat make me tight? Does my going down several needle sizes on most projects make me loose? Or is it that I am normal and Mare is tight and most designers are loose? Puh~lease tell me what is normal.

3)your FO isn't as soft as the yarn in ball. Where should I begin with this one? First most knitted fabrics are going to be firmer than just plain ol yarn. Your sts are flanked side by side and top to bottom by other sts which compress them whereas the yarn just laying there shouldn't be compressed or stretched out in any way. Furthermore most animal fibers bloom or full a bit upon washing/steam blocking and that compresses the sts even more since there is less air between sts. Of course some projects are intentionally knit to create a gauzy fabric think lace vs sweater jacket. This is called achieving gauge to produce the intended hand/drape for the project and is a design feature I could use the exact same yarn to knit a shawl and a sweater and you can bet your bottom dollar the yarn will feel softer in the shawl than in the sweater. In fact feel free to bet me~ I could use the money to buy more yarn.

4)you buy twice or more yarn than called for. I was confoozled by this one for a second but there is one reason for this that is so obvious I am ashamed it didn't pop to mind right off. Gauge. Yep gauge. If you are acheiving gauge you should use the same amount of yarn as called for. Maybe a smidge more cause you leave several feet of yarn at sides instead of joining new balls mid row via splicing or weaving in ends. Or maybe you got a crappy ball of yarn with tons of knots or that was short yardage wise. But gauge is key here. Some beginner patterns don't give any gauge at all. Think those garter st scarves that is teaching tool du jour: CO X sts with Y needles and knit every row til Z long BO. Did you see a gauge on that? I didn't either. But say you have graduated from scarves and are now ready for the next standard drop shouldered no waist shaping involved sweater. I am willing to bet that half the time there is no row gauge. Now row gauge is generally unimportant for such garments because you won't be trying to fit so many rows and sts bound off of sleeve cap to what is usually a work til armhole measures so long after the initial BO. And bulky yarn patterns esp those in your novelties don't often give row gauge~ trust me I have knit for several yarn companies that specialize in bulky novelties over the past 10 years. Fat yarns can only compress so much stitch wise. Some, in fact, only have one stitch gauge possible because you would have to move from a size 19 to 35 to notice any appreciable difference. I say this is a fact because I once designed a garment and started on a size 19 needle then moved on down to a size 11 needle and the stitch gauge stayed the same. The bitch of it all was that the row gauge did compress and I kept going down until the drape was firm enough for the project. If working with a st gauge only you may be using more yarn since you have to knit more rows to get length if you are working with a kind of yarn that is so bulky that it cannot possibly have less sts per inch than called for in pattern.

OK so if these 4 things apply to you then you are a tight knitter because you tug your yarn according to Lisa. Well I think they all apply to everybody at one time or another tho not necessarily all of them all the time. If I had to define myself it would be as a loose knitter. I say this because I have 20+ years[I dont remember how I knit from age 9 to 21 cause I knit sporadically at best those years] of going down 2 needle sizes to achieve gauge. Because when I am swatching for fun and try to match ball band gauge instead of a pattern gauge I start 2 needle sizes from habit. Because I knit a Dale Heilo sweater at 22sts/4" on size 1 needles. I'm fairly sure I am looser than avg. And this brings me to the rub of it all... I tug. I tug and tug and tug. I purposefully and knowingly tug. And I am loose. Meanwhile Mary and some of her comment leavers state that they are tight knitters and do not tug. Tugging and tight do not go hand in hand. Tugging might tighten up your individual sts but then you might hold your yarn in such a lax manner that its the only way you tension your yarn at all. Here let me show you how I hold my yarn[ugh to be a 3 handed person just once please]:

Insert needle tip into stitch:

Note that the yarn travels from knitting between middle and pointer finger, loops around pointer finger to yarn ball. None of the creating a spider web on my hand for me. Ummm cept for cacoon of course ;^> Also NOTE the looseness of the yarn~ it is swooping instead of taunt.

Wrap yarn and pull new stitch through:

Note there is still no spider web and the yarn is still looped just around the pointer finger and travels directly to the yarn cacoon.

TUG:

The thing that really gets my goat is that now there will be a bunch of knitters who rely on the web for instruction agonizing on if they are tight, normal or loose knitters. I cannot believe this woman teaches knitting. POP oh my poor blood vessels :^>

Posted by Elka at April 25, 2005 11:01 AM

Comments

I'm glad I'm not the only one who was a little bamboozled by that article. Like you, I am quite a loose knitter (2 needle sizes down for most projects--I almost always start 1 or 2 below recommended and often get gauge on the first try), but I do some of the things described--I care about points in the same way you do, and I do the spider web thing though not the tugging thing except at the first stitch in a row on a flat-knit to compensate for a stretched out final stitch in the row below. My biggest problem is that I'll get gauge for a swatch and for the first few rows and then I'll loosen up even more as the knitting progresses. The faster I knit, the looser it is.

I just figured I was missing something about the fabric hand/amount of yarn used--it didn't make sense to me at all. Unless knitting tightly is slowing you down, well, more power to you.

Posted by: mamacate at April 25, 2005 12:59 PM

I was just plain confused by the article. I'm a tight knitter and have no problem with it. If I need to loosen up to make gauge it slows me down tremendously.

And yes, I do care about needle points.

Posted by: Nanette at April 25, 2005 02:06 PM

Thank you for posting this! I'm a slightly tight knitter (usually have to go up one needle size), and was bothered by the article. I do not tug, unless I'm working with a nubby yarn that catches on itself and needs extra supervision. I run the yarn between my pointer and middle finger on my left hand, not spiderwebbing it or wrapping it around any finger.

I've been talking to other folks at my LYS about this and looking at your pictures. I think a big difference (besides how tight the yarn is held/wrapped) between the looser knitters and tighters knitters at my LYS is actually that the looser folks knit further down the shaft of the needle. I tend to keep my working stitches much further toward the tips of the needle, and we (myself and the gals at my LYS) theorize that this creates slightly smaller stitches since the work stays very close to the yarn and less yarn is taken up as the fabric slides between the needles.

Not that this matters at all or one way is better than the other. I just found it to be an interesting observation, and food for thought. After sitting around and watching each other knit for an hour and seeing how different styles affect the fabric, we all had a kind of "Huh" moment, and went off to think about the way we do things.

Posted by: Elizabeth at April 29, 2005 10:26 AM