Thursday, January 24, 2008

what i'm learning

As requested in the comments, here's a little blurb on what I'm learning about colorwork and what works for me while working on Venezia.

The biggest thing was figuring out how tightly/loosely to strand the nonworking yarn. My first few rows are not as neat.... Good thing its on the bottom hem!

I've tried knitting continental style but it's super awkward for me. I've found it easier for me to "throw" with both yarns in my right hand. I keep the background color (white) wrapped around my thumb when not in use and drop the pattern color (Kureyon) when not in use. By holding on to the white when not in use, it keeps the 2 colors from twisting when I switch colors. White stays on top and Kureyon stays stranded on the bottom. It sounds slow and probably is compared to the colorwork pros, but it works for me.

The knitted product doesn't stretch as much as plain knitting. If I could go back I probably would have gone up one size. The body's a slim fit right now and I'm hoping blocking will ease it up a hair.

2 comments:

Marina said...

How would you block a shaped garment?

Anonymous said...

Jen, it sounds like you are really enjoying knitting colorwork! The colors you are using for Venezia are beautiful!

If you're interested in trying another way to hold both yarns in your right hand, I just did a weeklong series on my blog showing many different ways to hold the yarns in stranded color knitting.

If you go to the link below you can see a method of holding both yarns in the right hand without twisting the yarns or having to drop and pick up the yarns - http://knittingincolor.blogspot.com/2008/01/im-not-sure-i-can-top-heart-stopping.html



Anyway, hope this helps!