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Monday, December 10, 2007

MG: cast-on tourism

new sock on my needles

Twisted Flower. the motif tessellations and transitions are fancy and smart and perfect; i love it so much i can't stop looking at it. its intricacies elicit thoughts of ooo, i made this?

i swatched with different needle sizes for fit and tweaked the ribbing and tried out new cast-ons. i want all the details to be just right, nothing to detract from the motifs. first, i learned the Italian, no-waste, tubular cast-on from Francesca's excellent tutorial. i've only ever done the provisional, pick-up tubular, which is easily amenable to some non-1x1 ribbings but less stretchy and a bit more fussy. i loved the no-waste technique--simpler to execute and stretchier, but my finagling of it for non-1x1 ribbing wasn't attractive. it'll be my go-to stretchy cast-on for 1x1 ribbing though.

after some googling about, i tried the German twisted cast-on. (photo and video tutorials. note the the photo version results in eastern seated stitches. i ended up with that version and knitted the first row twisted. works just as well but wanted to call attention to it.) there is a definite ridge to this cast-on edge, but it's tidy and very very stretchy. perfectly stretchy. equally tidy stretched or relaxed. yay, two more lovely cast-ons for me to use.

enjoyable edge & ribbing feeds into motif

3 comments:

  1. It's beautifully intricate! I love all the patterns in that knitting book--wish I loved knitting intricate socks :)

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  2. Those are going to be seriously beautiful socks. :)

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  3. Can't wait to see how it turn out. It looks complex.

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