Techniques

Nothing finishes off a garment so nicely as the right buttons, neatly and securely sewn on. At this time of the year, there's a lot of snug cardigans and jackets under way, so a post on sewing on buttons is timely. First of all, not all buttons are alike. In the picture above, you can see the two basic kinds:...

A lot of the yarn that we sell comes in hanks like this, and it sometimes makes people curious. So we thought we'd answer some frequently asked questions about the matter here. Like most of us, yarn likes to be relaxed. Winding it up tight will stretch it. Then you crochet or knit with it, and it's still stretched when...

One of the questions that we get asked most is "what's the best way to join in a new ball of yarn?" Well, as with many questions, it depends. It depends on the yarn, mostly, and on the project. So we thought it might be a good idea to talk about it here. Today, we're looking at splicing non-superwash wool....

One of the commonest technique questions in the shop is how to finish off the ends on a piece of crocheted or knitted work. So we thought it would be useful to provide a tutorial for this (all those carefully worked Christmas presents deserve it!). A neat and careful finishing-off starts right at the very beginning of the work. Leaving...

You know when you're knitting away happily, only to look down and see, several rows below, a stitch that should have done differently. A purl bump interrupting your smooth expanse of stocking stitch, for example, like in the picture up above. There's a few ways to deal with this. You could use an afterthought lifeline to rip back down, or...

That's a picture of some contented knitting which knows that whatever goes wrong later, it won't need to be ripped out. You see, it's got a lifeline through it. We've talked about lifelines before - how grateful we are to the clever knitter who worked out how to save your work as you go. That line of non-sticky yarn lying...

Most of the time, stocking stitch is worn with the smooth, unbumpy side out - the side that you can see facing you in the picture above. The picture shows the construction of a wee baby sock. The smooth side is intended to be the right side, and that's the side that's facing the knitter. Very often, though, your little...

Last week on Twitter, we got talking about how common household objects can help with crochet and knitting. We were delighted at the ingenuity of the suggestions. So we thought that it would be a good idea to mention some of them here. It all started with trying to measure without a ruler. It turns out that we all carry...

A few blog posts back, we promised that we'd show you how to fix a missing yarn over. It's very straightforward, and it will save you a lot of ripping back. In this post, we'll show you both how to deal with the issue both immediately after it happens and when you only realise a couple of rows later what's...

We encounter a lot of yarn overs at This Is Knit. We also get a lot of questions about how to do them, and so we thought a tutorial would be useful. The picture above shows the finished product, a yarn over one row after it's been made, showing the hole that's been created. And here's how to do it....

We're always counselled to leave nice long ends for weaving in safely (15cm is a good guideline most of the time). But sometimes we can't (or don't). The yarn breaks, we just squeak it to the end of the cast off - there's lots of reasons for ending up shorter than ideal. Here's a cunning little trick for dealing with...

That's a piece of lace, straight off the needles. Looks pretty unimpressive, doesn't it? It's nothing like the beautiful delicate lace creations that you see on people's Ravelry project pages, and it's easy to think that something must have gone wrong. It hasn't, and there's one magic word that will reveal the loveliness. Blocking. Blocking is the yarn equivalent of...

Counting rows has been much on our minds lately. The patterns in our Spring Knit-Along feature stretches of regular increasing and decreasing - "work the decrease round every six rows seven times", that sort of thing. Not counting rows at such times gives you weird sleeves. There's many ways of keeping count - you can use a mechanical device like...

We talk a lot about shawls here - lovely things like Swallowtail and Aeolian and Ishbel. When you first come to knit one, though, the very start can seem puzzling. So we thought it would be a good idea to do a post on how to do the garter stitch tab start that so many of them share. To begin...

One of our most popular inhouse patterns is the Party Lace Scarf. It's the pattern that we use in our lace classes, and it's been made in an amazing variety of weights and fibres (though the original is in luscious mohair and silk). The little touch of beading at the beginning and end is optional, but it makes the scarf...

The Glenties Cowl is one of our most popular shop patterns, and we suspect that the pretty cast off is a good part of the reason for this. It's a picot cast off and it's very simple to work. It'll give all sorts of things a neat touch - check out the Miss Potter mitts for another really effective implementation....

Those four little words induce dread in a lot of knitters. You find them in pattern shaping instructions like this: Shape front Inc 2 sts at end of next and following 6th row, then on following 0 (2; 2; 3; 4; 5) 4th rows, then on 2 (2; 1; 2; 0; 2) alternate rows, then on foll 6th row and...

Once upon a time in Dublin, there was a little crocheter. A lady called Kathleen taught her how to chain, and how to do doubles and trebles, and she made lots of things from patterns. She had heard that in America they used different words for the stitches. But that didn't matter, because she was living in Ireland and America...