I'm Back... and A Cool Knitting Tip

Skip and I arrived home on Easter Sunday after a 6-day drive home from the Rio Grande Valley by way of Graceland in Memphis, TN and visiting a friend just north of Indianapolis. The driving was fairly uneventful - just LONG.  It took us quite a few days to recover from the change from Central to Eastern time and so many days on the road.

I have been doing some knitting and spinning, which I will detail in the next blog post.

However, I stumbled upon a technitting.blogspot.com post where she discusses dealing with the unsightly purl bumps visible on the right side in knitting when ribbing:

I remember dealing with this when I knit Skip's Dale of Norway St. Moritz sweater. There were stripes on the ribbed cuffs and along the bottom. I LOVED that the pattern included the direction to eliminate the purl bumps of the next colour.

The technitter explanation is a thorough one and is found here.

I will give you the abbreviated version. When you are doing ribbing and change colours, in the first row/round of the new colour, knit ALL the stitches. Then in the second row/round, begin the ribbing as indicated in the pattern.

That's it!

Basically when you do the ribbing after the knit round, the knit stitches are buried between the rows of purl stitches so there are no unsightly purl bumps in the new colour.

If you look closely, you can see 3 rows of knitting but only two rows of purling in the ribbing.

That is because the knit stitches sink beneath the textured purl stitches and aren't seen. On the reverse side, you can see the solid purl row (created by knitting a row on the right side) where all the purl bumps in the new colour appear.

Because it interrupts the ribbing on the private side, it won't work where you are using the ribbing for a reversible effect, such as a cuff of a sleeve you might fold back or the edge of a ribbed hat that might get folded back. However, you can certainly see its advantages when changing colours or knitting stripes in ribbing.