Both Sides Now

I was reading on the Interweave site a blog post about "picking up and knitting" vs "picking up and not knitting right away" (if you're interested, it's here) and they said they preferred the look of the former on the right side, but the look of the latter on the wrong side.

One reader replied "why not use pick up and knit on one side and just pick up on the other?" Which is such a fundamental misunderstanding of how sides work that I thought I should post about it. And here I am. So that's the back story.

(Oh, and if it'll bother you not to understand the knitting term, picking up stitches is a thing knitters have to do if you want to start knitting in an unexpected place. It's what crocheters constantly do: they stick their hook in a loop or loops, they wrap yarn around it, and then either pull the loop through or do something more complicated. Knitters can do the same thing: we can stick a fresh needle into a loop or loops, and now we have loops on the needle! Hurrah. That's "picking up." Or, if we poke the needle into loops, warp new yarn around the point of our needle, and pull the new yarn through, that's "picking up AND knitting." These techniques happen a lot in intermediate knitting, reaching an apotheiosis of sorts in Entrelac, seen here, where the constant picking-up of stitches in unexpected directions creates an illusion of weaving:

Anyway, back to the question: if a technique looks good on the right side, and another technique looks good on the wrong side, why not use both techniques thusly?

And the obvious answer is because that solves nothing: there is no fabric that only has a right side, or only has a wrong side. All fabrics use both.

(Of course, if knitting a hat or a sweater, something where the wrong side is hidden, then just use the "looks good on the right side" method (pick up and knit, rather than pick up first and knit later).

And that got me thinking about sides. There's one helpful person on Ravelry who continually insists "just trust the pattern, follow the pattern, do what the pattern says," and I know she's trying to be helpful. "Don't overthink it," she'll say. But my problem is often a matter of Under-Thinking it. I literally don't understand what the pattern is telling me.

What don't I understand? Well, often, the meaning of the word "side." First, there's left side and right side, which might mean the left and right side from your perspective, staring at the item, or might mean the left and right side from the perspective of a wearer, if it were a vest, or cardigan. There's also wrong side and right side, so the moment someone uses "on the right side" you have to worry about three possible intended meanings: the nice outside-facing flat side, or the edge over here, or possibly the edge over there. Yikes.

Take a simple dishcloth. This is my design, available on Ravelry here. How many sides does it have? Some of us would think 2 sides, the side we can see, and the side underneath. Others might think of sides as edges, so there are 4 sides, since it's a square. Yet more of us would think 6 sides, the front, the back, the edges, that all equals 6. The mathiest amongst us would agree (but probably call them "faces" which is confusing for a whole different reason: pictured, above, is the facing face of this very shallow cube).

So no, I can't simply follow the pattern when the pattern says "do such-and-such along the side" without being a lot more explicit. In fact, most patterns can't be followed without a little bit of know-how. Advanced pattern take for granted you understand basics. Basic patterns assume you don't, and explain things a bit more.

When dummkopfs like me try an advanced pattern, we can't work out the ambiguities because we can't conceptualize the mechanics.

Which brings me to Turning. Unless we're knitting around and around (hello, socks!) we turn our knitting often. We turn it much as we turn the page of a riveting Len Deighton novel, and no, I have no idea why that popped into my head as an example. Pages in a book, knitted items, it's the same maneuver: we reach for the right edge of our work, and we rotate it 180 degrees through space, bring that right edge up, towards us, and then lowering it down, away from us, toward the left. There it is: we've turned.

But there are other ways to turn. You've all taken your smart phone and realised the current app works better if your phone were on its side, so you turn it 90 degrees clockwise (or counterclockwise). This is quite a different turning. Knitters aren't entirely used to that kind, but it's often needed, e.g. when making a Garter Tab (which is a thing in shawls that I know how to do but still don't know why I have to do it).

Just today I read a pattern which required knitters to "turn the work around" ... by which (I can figure some things out from context) they mean the page-turn kind of turn. But they only use that term occasionally, mostly they say "turn," but each time they say "turn" they mean the page-turn kind. Ah, inconsistency! It gnaws at my very soul.

Knitting Updates

It's been a while since I posted—I'm busy, and have little to complain about, and aren't making as many hilarious mistakes as I used to! This Christmas I've completely stopped knitting (except for social reasons) as I am attempting to make temari balls for Christmas presents (pictured here, my first:)

And here are some my teacher has made. She's, umm, substantially better than I am.

Her name is Asami Kusakabe and she sells these at Etsy for astonishingly low prices, given the amount of time and effort it takes.

Happy crafting!