A while ago I joined Carmarthen Library. I have been using the Cardigan one for several years and have found that I have read a lot of the non-fiction books that interest me. Carmarthen has a much bigger non-fiction section and, of course, almost all of them are new to me. I also discovered that there is a mobile library van which comes to my nearest village. It is the type of service which is under threat when economies are to be made and I wanted to support it. As it is quite easy for me to combine a walk to the library van with exercising the dogs it works well. The downside is that often I choose books online and request them without having been able to look inside. One of those was a knitting book which seemed to offer a different way of creating texture.
It is an interesting technique. You mark certain stitches by working them in the reverse of normal – so a knit where one would normally do purl and vice versa. A few rows on you pick up the ‘legs’ of the marked stitch and knit them together with a stitch on the current row making a fold. If the marked stitch is not directly below the one it gets attached to the fold is a dagonal and, as in cabling this may be to right or left. It is hard to describe but easy to do apart from having to knit one stitch through 3 loops (the 2 ‘legs’ and the stitch).
Using small amounts of leftover yarn I did some swatches to try out different arrangements of folds. The result is less ‘crisp’ than cabling and the first one I did had very wavy edges which would make it difficult to stitch pieces of a garment together. The next 2 I did with a garter stitch border which helped a bit.
So it was interesting to try but I don’t think I will be using it again. If you read my previous post you will realise that my crafting has been educational but not very rewarding lately!
Going Batty in Wales 