Basics Basics Basics - Lesson 3 - Gauge!

Lesson 3 requires knitting 5 swatches, all in the same yarn and with the same needles, in 5 different stitch patterns, garter, stockinette, seed, cable and lace, and then comparing the gauge. This was a l iberating assignment! My head is full of ideas for sweaters combining different stitch patterns. But I’ve been reluctant to tackle them because I wasn’t sure how the gauges in the various patterns would work together. I knew a cable required more stitches than stockinette and that seed was different from both and I wasn't quite up to sitting down and figuring out how to combine them. The answer, of course, is simple! Make a swatch, measure, then add or decrease stitches accordingly. After this lesson, I have the courage to do it.

The last and optional swatch required choosing a cable, knit a swatch and write the pattern for the swatch pattern. I was surprised how difficult that was! There are so many details to include. A careful pattern writer earns every penny of the cost of a pattern. Deciding what to knit is the easy part. Writing it down for someone else to follow – that is difficult! Hopefully it will get easier with practice!

Basics, basics, basics gave me a excellent foundation for growing as a knitter. There are areas where I need to improve. My seed stitch still has holes. My cable still has the occasional stretched stitch. But I have a much better sense of what I need to do to improve.

More importantly, I’ve found a new confidence and willingness to try more difficult designs. And I'm ready to tackle TKGA's Masters Program.

Basics Basics Basics - On to Lesson 2

Decreases!

Like most knitters I had done many knit-two-togethers and slip- slip-knits. But I had never really studied them. I’d never asked myself what makes ssk the closest mirror image of k2tog. Nor had I really thought much about what made a decrease full fashioned. I just followed the pattern, using the decrease the pattern directed for the left and for the right . I never really thought about why. I had used several of the alternate decreases when that was what a pattern called for but I hadn’t examined whether I thought they worked as well opposite k2tog. This was Lesson 2.

Again, I fussed about tension. In her comments, Arenda suggested I worry less! But she did point out that my left slanting decreases stretched. She suggested knitting decreases on the tips of my needles. Her commend made me realized how much I had been manhandling my yarn, oblivious to how I was stretching the stitches, and this affected their appearance. This insight was a big step to significant improvement in my knitting!

Finally, perhaps because I have been knitting lace recently, my lace swatch was the best of my swatches!

Basics Basics Basics - Lesson 1

Lesson 1 of the Basics Basics Basics Course got me started with casting on, binding off, garter, stockinette, ribbing and four different increases. Like most who take the course, these were not new techniques. But the class required that I look carefully at what I did, how it looked and consider which of several techniques look better in which circumstances. For instance, I’d always know the long tail cast on creates the first knit row but I’d always relied on the pattern to tell me whether the next row should be right side or wrong side. After taking this class I’ll make that decision myself.

My first difficulty was figuring out how to work each of the increases. I knew how to make them but I didn’t know which was which. The names aren’t standardized. So I did what I tell anyone getting started or back into knitting to do: check out the instructional videos at KnittingHelp.com. Once I figured out that the bar increase is called KFB (knit in front and back) and the Make 1 increase is called either KRL (knit right loop) or KFL (knit front loop) on KnittingHelp.com, I had no problem making the increases.

I did have problems making them well and really struggled with the Make 1. The instructor sympathetically assured me many knitters find it difficult. The increase is made from the row below and when that bar is pulled up it affects the tension of the row below. The suggested inserting a yarn over in the row below the increase where increase will be made and use the yarn over yarn for the increase.

TKGA teaches weaving in the ends with duplicate stitch. Try it! This alone made the course worthwhile. Woven in this way the end disappears never to be seen again.

I wanted these stitches to be perfect but they weren’t! Despite pulling the yarn tight on the beginning of a new row, my selvedges weren’t as neat as I would like them although careful blocking did help considerably.

Finally, I decided the swatches were as good as I could make them. I sent them off and within the week had them back from Arenda. She complimented my garter stitch, the placement of my increases and the way some of the increases were made. She pointed out with threads drawn through the swatch where my tension wasn’t even and gave me pointers for how to make it better. And she pointed out I had misread the directions for the swatch 5. Don't look at that one as an example for what it should look like!

I resubmitted my M1 increase swatch with lesson 2 but it still needed improvement. This is a learning class, I didn’t have to prove I’d mastered it. I’ll practice this one on sweater sleeves soon. I will have to get it better for the Masters.

Basics Basics Basics

While on vacation in Banff I admired beautiful qiviuk yarn at $138 for 2 ounces, about 200 yards. The small knitted items were soft and light with a beautiful halo. The yarns may well have been the most beautiful yarns ever and, even at that price, I was tempted to buy enough for a small scarf.

But I knew my knitting wouldn’t measure up to that yarn. It’s not that I am a perfectionist! But I want to be a better knitter. I want my knitting to be worthy of beautiful yarn. I want the things I knit to have the look of “hand made” not “home made.”

And so I came home and signed up for Basics Basics Basics, a correspondence course offered by The Knitting Guild of America, TKGA. The course was recently revised by Arenda Holladay, who now acts as the instructor. The three lessons covering pretty much everything necessary for basic knitting: casting on, binding off, garter, stockinette, ribbing, lace and cable stitches, four increases, four decreases, gauge and basic pattern writing. The pattern writing is an optional assignment for students who want to continue on to TKGA’s Masters classes. The student knits swatches for each lesson and sends them to Arenda for a very thorough evaluation. Arenda is amazingly quick to send the swatches back with both compliments and suggestions for improvement. If a student is having difficulty with a particular technique Arenda invites, but does not require, her to try again and send another swatch in for review. I had difficulty with the M1 increase and repeated that swatch for review.

The Basics course does not require the student to master each of the skills. I wanted my first swatches to be perfect. They weren’t! Despite knitting and reknitting, they just weren’t perfect and when Arenda sent them back to me, she had pointed out where I needed to make improvement. Interestingly, the spots pointed out by Arenda were not the ones I had stressed over. Lesson learned! The next two lessons I made a good faith effort to knit my best but sent them off knowing they Arenda would return them with suggestions for how I could make the stitches better.

Probably the most important thing the class taught me was to look at my knitting not just critically, but with an eye for why something I didn’t like was happening. Why is a stitch stretched out? Why is there a hole where there shouldn’t be a hole? I didn’t learn to fix everything immediately but I learned to think about it and had suggestions to practice that would fix it. In the end I knew I’d learned a lot when right after sending off my last swatches I cast on the ribbing for a sweater. Thanks to what I had learned in Basics Basics Basics, my ribbing looked so much neater than any ribbing I had ever knit before. Thank you, Arenda!

In my next postings, I’ll photograph the swatches from the three lessons and share some of what I have learned. But right now I’m off to sign up for Level 1 of TKGA’s Masters Knitting Program!