More New Techniques

This weekend I took two classes from Maureen Mason-Jamison, Japanese Knitting Techniques and Hole-istic Lace. Again, I left both classes with some new techniques or knowledge that I will be able to apply to future projects.

Japanese Knitting Techniques
• I learned how to do Japanese short rows on the knit side and the purl side of the fabric. I’ve never loved the wrap & turn method of short rows, so I’m excited to see how this will work out on my next pair of socks. Since I need to rip out Ella’s socks anyway, I’ll be trying out these new short rows on them.

• Then we moved onto the basic Japanese three-needle bind-off, and some fancy variations. I really only imagine using the basic bind-off on sweaters with cable or color patterns where the pattern extends up to the shoulders.

• We learned how to add edge stitches to the ends of sweater bands to that the bands extend to the edges of the sweater.

• The Japanese short row buttonholes were kind of nice if you want a horizontal button hole. But I still like the one-row ones better.

Hole-istic Lace
• A lot of this class was repeat for me. But we did learn how to use a running marker of waste yarn instead of a ring marker. Supposedly it won’t distort YOs, you’ll see mistakes faster, and it won’t slow you down. Personally I found it a lot slower than just sliding over a ring marker, and I never had a problem with a ring marker distorting my YOs. So I may not be using this technique, but maybe in a complicated pattern.

• We also learned about hard and soft decreases (an a-ha moment), and how to change the direction of wrap for a yarn over or purl stitch to tighten or loosen the stitch. This I may be able to carry over to my ribbing to make it look neater. I haven’t tested it yet.

• Oh and the most useful piece of information I learned was that instead of doing my usually SSK (slip 1st st knitwise, slip next st knitwise), if I slip the second stitch purlwise, I get a much better (and neater) match to my k2tog. Excellent.

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