On Tuesday we looked at stranding done the traditional way. Today, we’re going o have a peek at it when you do it continental style. It’s the same basic idea, but you’ll find there are a lot more videos online showing the continental technique as more and more knitters are not only learning this way of knitting from the beginning, but learning it after learning the traditional way as they find it faster and easier. That will be the subject of a future post. You will also see that most knitters when using the continental style, don’t bother to drop one color and pick it up as needed. Instead, they hold both colors on the index finger of the left hand and simply “pick” the one they need with the needle. Oops, I guess I kinda let the cat out of the bag there, didn’t I?
Okay then, if you didn’t read Tuesday’s post about stranding, you should go back and do so right now, or you’ll be missing half the information and I don’t want to re-write everything here. If you knit continental style, you will have a little easier time doing the stranding method for colorwork. Here is a video showing what I have told you above. There’s no sound, but you can see how the knitter has both colors on the index finger and simply picks the color she wants for the knitting. While this is being done with the knit stitch in the video, the technique would be the same for the purl stitch if you are working on a flat piece of knitting.
So far we have looked at very simple patterning where you are dealing with not only 2 colors, but very frequent color changes. What would happen if you changed colors every 6, 7, 8 or more stitches? Or had more than 2 colors? Well, tomorrow we’ll tackle those questions when we look at the woven stranded technique. Don’t know what that is? Well, come back to find out!
Hugzzz 😎