fantasticmio.com

The rivalry between Knit and Crochet has often compared to the Sharks and Jets. Stories abound of crocheters feeling unwelcome, or even actually being unwelcome in yarn shops, which doesn’t make any sense when you think about it. A sale is a sale, right? And crocheting takes more yarn than knitting, all other things being equal. (it seems this isn’t true… I’ll need to experiment!) It simply doesn’t make any sense to be actively ignoring that kind of customer. I’m not as familiar with how knitters are treated by crocheters, but I’m betting there are some hard feelings there.

But knitting and crocheting overlap an awful lot. Knitters use a crochet hook to pick up dropped stitches, or add a decorative, or structural border to their pieces. Crocheters use knitting needles for making broomstick lace.

In my mind, though, the true crossover, the merging of the two crafts, is found in Tunisian Crochet.

You use a hook, so it is crochet, but you work all of the stitches onto to the hook, like you would with knitting. Most importantly, though, there is something called the Tunisian Knit Stitch, which creates a fabric that looks a lot like stockinette stitch. The back looks less like the back of a knitted piece, but to the uneducated eye… well, who looks at the wrong side of an item other than die-hard yarn crafters?

Why is this important?

Well, over the last several years I’ve been making hats and scarves for charity. I make the hats on the Knifty Knitter knitting looms, because it’s easy and fun. I’m doing the e-wrap stitch, which produces a form of stockinette stitch, but the stitches are all twisted.

Here’s a hat in progress. It looks blue, but it’s actually a lovely royal purple colour:

The problem I’ve had in the past is that making hats has always been more fun than making the scarves. Flat panels are certainly possible on a knitting loom, even the round ones. You simply wrap the yarn around x number of pegs, then turn around and wrap the yarn around the pegs until you’re back where you started. The problem arises in that knitting curls. If you only use twisted-knit stitches, which are by far the easiest and fastest to make, then you get a scarf that curls so much you might think it was supposed to be a long tube!

The solution to the curling problem is to add purl stitches, which are also quite possible to do on the looms, but they slow me down a lot. There’s also “planning” and “paying attention” to be done, which, frankly, makes it ill-suited to working on during my commute, which is when I normally work on this sort of thing.

Charles’ sister Beth sent me a large tunisian hook a while ago, and now that we’ve moved I’ve finally had a chance to really test it out. It looked like it’d be about the right size to work with the hat yarn, so I tried it out.

The tunisian simple stitch is lovely, and I use it a lot, but if I made the scarves with that they wouldn’t really match the hats. The answer? The tunisian knit stitch, of course!

I made this number, modeled here by the always lovely Roopurt, today on my commute home. I started it at St. George Station, and was weaving in the ends while waiting for the bus at Kipling Station.

(7 stitches across, Patons Melody, soft rose colour, no ball band)

Here she is in the scarf I made on the way in to work, and finished on my lunch break (sleepier in the morning, the double-stranding slowed me a bit, and I was squished in my seat because it was busier) :

(7 stitches across, Bernat Soft Boucle, two strands, dark brown, light brown)

Here’s a scarf and the hat next to one another:

(just imagine how alike they’d be in the same colour!)

So, I’ve found a fun and easy way to make matching scarves. You’d think my problem of uneven numbers of hats and scarves would be solved now, right?

(3.5 scarves, still waiting on that hat to get done…)

.
.
.
Have we met?