When last I wrote about my knitting, I said I was finally getting the flow of my Kokkeluri mitten. When I finished the first one I had a couple of observations:
1. It took forever. A week for a single mitten? I normally knit a pair of complex patterned socks in a week.
2. My hands and arms hurt more than they have in a very long time.
3. It looked like crap.
The tension was uneven, the joins between needles were lumpy and they yarn felt really splitty to work.My colourwork didn't look as crisp as other peoples. Now, I know how to knit colourwork, and I can do it so it looks good. I came up with a theory - I recently looked up how colour dominance is supposed to work, and as Kate Davies writes on her patterns - the foreground colour is held in the left hand and the back ground in the right. I'm a continental knitter, so I normally hold the yarn in the left hand. I think for all my other colourwork projects I have held the background colour in my left hand, because there is more of it and it feels more natural.
So, for this weeks project, Pawkies stranded mitts I decided to do one using each technique:
And as is blazingly obvious in the one on the left looks much better, which is the one I knit with the main colour in my left hand. It turns out that because I knit looser with my right hand, the colour shows up better if I hold the yarn the reverse way to everyone else. I'm glad I worked this out, and I'm not sure what I going to do about the Kokkeruri mitten. Rip and repeat, or just call it a learning experience and walk away.
1. It took forever. A week for a single mitten? I normally knit a pair of complex patterned socks in a week.
2. My hands and arms hurt more than they have in a very long time.
3. It looked like crap.
The tension was uneven, the joins between needles were lumpy and they yarn felt really splitty to work.My colourwork didn't look as crisp as other peoples. Now, I know how to knit colourwork, and I can do it so it looks good. I came up with a theory - I recently looked up how colour dominance is supposed to work, and as Kate Davies writes on her patterns - the foreground colour is held in the left hand and the back ground in the right. I'm a continental knitter, so I normally hold the yarn in the left hand. I think for all my other colourwork projects I have held the background colour in my left hand, because there is more of it and it feels more natural.
So, for this weeks project, Pawkies stranded mitts I decided to do one using each technique:
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