Reading your Knitting

What does it mean to be able to read your knitting, and why is it important?  Reading your knitting is the ability to look at a piece of knitted fabric and determine exactly what happened on the needles to produce that fabric.  This is an important skill for lots of reasons.  How many times have you been in the middle of a project, put it down, and then wondered where in the devil you were in the pattern?  Have you ever been watching a movie and forgotten to advance your row counter and wondered how many rows you’d worked since that last decrease?   Then there’s all that looking at what you’ve done, knowing you’ve made a mistake, and wondering what it was you did and how to fix it.  Honestly, how can you fix a mistake if you don’t even know what you’ve done wrong! 

Maybe you never make mistakes and you never stop without writing down exactly where you are in the pattern.  Good for you.  But let’s say you changed your pattern slightly on the back to better fit you.  Of course, you meticulously wrote down every change you made so that you’d know just what to do on the front.  But what if you're knitting one afternoon, and your knitting BFF spills her coffeeonto your paper and destroys your notes.  How will you ever figure out what you did?  Well, if you knew how to read your knitting, you’d know exactly what you did on the back and could easily duplicate it. 

In our Reading your Knitting class, you'll learn how to look at your knitting and see and understand what you have done – right or wrong.  If you can see what you’ve done correctly, then you can easily repeat it for the other side of your jacket, the second sleeve, or the next time you make that garment.  If you have made a mistake, it’s essential that you be able to identify exactly what the problem is before you can correct it! 

This class will help you answer these and many other questions we all have when we look at our knitting:

1.    How many rows have I knitted
2.    Am I supposed to knit or purl this next stitch/row
3.    How many increases/decreases did I do?
4.    Where did I make my increase/decrease?
5.    What kind of increase/decrease did I use here?
6.    How many rows are there between my increases/decreases?
7.    Why is there a hole in my knitting? – Is that a dropped stitch?
8.    Why does this stitch look so long and loose?
9.    Why are these stitches twisted?
10.   How many stitches have I bound off?
11.   and my favorite - This looks really wonky – what did I do?

When you’ve completed this class, you will truly understand your knitted fabric, and you will be able to answer all of those questions listed above.  Additionally, you’ll be able to un-knit correctly stitch by stitch or rip back several rows and still getting your stitches safely back on the needle.

Saturday, February 2nd in La Plata and Sunday, February 10th in Leonardtown 12-3.  Call the shop to register.