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knit cam­BR­DIGE

This Septem­ber, Sue Sturdy will be yarn­bomb­ing¹ the Main Street Bridge in Cambridge.

This is all kinds of cool, and earlier this spring, she put a call out, ask­ing for knit con­tri­bu­tions to use for the install­a­tion. Yay for com­munity involvement!

Now, I’ve been crochet­ing, badly, for 4 years now, but I con­fess it — I’ve got ser­i­ous knit-envy. I love the tex­ture of the fab­ric.² I love the click­ing sound of the needles. All the good pat­terns on ravelry are for knitting.

And Sue’s pro­ject was the per­fect gate­way drug. Any size piece would do, knit with any type of yarn, any pat­tern of stitch­ing, and it would be oh-so-forgiving of mis­takes. But unlike end­less prac­tice swatches, this was still a goal-oriented; there was a tan­gible reason to pick it up and keep work­ing, and more import­antly, a dead­line to meet.

This piece star­ted off as rib­bing sampler from Fear­less Knit­ting Work­book, by Jen­nifer E. Seif­fert.³ Rib­bing gets bor­ing pretty quickly, though, so I star­ted to improvise.

Before this piece, I could

• cast on, poorly
• knit stitch in a com­fort­able position

and that’s about it.

With this piece, I’ve learned how to

• cast on with a long tale (and meas­ure that long tale with reas­on­able accuracy)
• purl, with reas­on­able comfort
• read a pattern
• count my stitches
• read my stitches, so that I don’t have to count them
• pre­dict how a par­tic­u­lar com­bin­a­tion of knit­ting and purl­ing will effect the tex­ture, gauge, and elasti­city of the fab­ric (i.e., ver­tical and hori­zontal rib­bing, bas­ket weave, and why stock­in­ette makes such a lousy edge)
• tink⁴ stitches, when I’ve made a mistake
• pick up stitches, when I’ve dropped one (but not if its run more than 1 or 2 rows)
• bind off
• block

So that’s me knitting!

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