Last year when I decided I wanted to delve into scarves of my own design, I asked the ladies at knit night what book I should buy. They all recommended that I get one of the books in the Barbara G. Walker series “A Treasury of Knitting Patterns.” (or as my friend Page calls them “The Bahbrah Wawa” books)
I hope you have discovered her books already, if not, you should go check one out from the library or buy one. They are fantastic. Sadly not many yarn shops carry them, so you may need to order it online.
Her books are a massive collection of stitches. There are 2 stitches per page x 300 pages x 4 books. That’s approximately 2400 stitches that she’s documented. If you have her series at your fingertips, you will never want for stitches. I only have the first book in her series and it is one of my favorite knitting books. I use it any time I want to learn something new. My only complaint about the instructions is that sometimes they aren’t entirely clear to me and it can take me a few tries to get the stitch correct. I have to think about what’s not written on the page and what the purpose of the stitch is. In actuality I think this turns out to be good for me, because now I understand the construction of the stitch, not just how to copy it.
This week I have been struggling with the Threaded Stitch. I tried for 15 minutes to follow her instructions and I kept ending up with 4 stitches from 2. Now I knew this wasn’t correct, since it didn’t mention that I would have more stitches at the end of the row and there were no decreases to be seen in the instructions. I finally got it when I turned back a page and read the instructions for the Grecian Plait Stitch, which is a similar stitch. (I have a bad habit of never reading instruction books in order. Someday I will learn… maybe.) I was missing the goal of the stitch. The goal is to knit the second stitch through the first stitch, dropping the first stitch over the second stitch. Huh? You say. I was so excited when I figured this out, I made a video of it so I wouldn’t forget how to do it. Watch and you will see what I mean.
Want to try this stitch? I’ve placed a washcloth pattern using this stitch on the wiki. It’s very simple once you figure it out.
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