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Sunday, December 16, 2007

Masters Monday 2.2

Only one completed swatch this week. Much of my spare time has been swallowed up by Christmas preparations.

Edited to add: It has been pointed out that the seam is about half a stitch off, with the tops not matching. Yup. Back to the needles.

This is Swatch 4 - Single Rib (K1P1), a seaming exercise. I'm not all that pleased with it. I seamed it in the manner described in the Seaming article in "Cast On" magazine, and it is not my usual method. The article suggests using an even number of stitches and starting each piece of ribbing with a knit stitch so that you end up seaming a knit stitch and a purl stitch together (leaving the ribbing pattern intact), supposedly hiding the seam "in the ditch" of the two stitches. Because the magazine article so strongly recommended this method I went with it, but I'm having second thoughts.

I normally seam ribbing by starting with an uneven number of stitches, starting and ending both pieces with a knit stitch and seaming up the centre of these edge stitches (leaving the ribbing pattern unbroken). I find it makes a finer seam (less seam bulk, especially at cuff edges) and it still turns out neat and tidy. The "Cast On" magazine article says that the seam turns out messier, but I'm not sure that it does. I think this might be worth a bit of additional experimentation.

For readers' further consideration (are you still with me?), Maggie Righetti suggests a third method in her book "Sweater Design in Plain English". She says to add an additional knit stitch so that your single rib ends in K2 at one end. This lets you seam with a full stitch, but gives you that knit/purl "ditch" seam.

3 comments:

Nancy said...

...may be totally me, but it seems as though your swatch is off half a stitch....

Am glad you're still getting holiday things done, despite constantly thinking of this process!

Laura said...

The bottoms of your swatches line up, but as Nancy said, the tops seem to be off a little. Hm. Is that the seaming method? Would that disappear if this was a complete sweater? Inquiring minds are curious... but not curious to knit their own swatches! LOL Good luck with your experiments. I love following along. :-)

Marlene said...

Yup, I'd say you are both right. Once again I am amazed at the things that you don't see until you take a photograph. I've found errors in my knitting projects AFTER I've posted them on my blog before.

Well this makes me even more determined to find a better way. I'm going to try my usual way of seaming, in the centre of the two selvedge stitches. I got the ribbing strips knitted up for that last night. I think I might even carry on and try Maggie Righetti's method too. I consider it research on a technique that I'll be using over and over again in my knitting hobby so why not find out what works best for me, hey?