A Joint Venture

Sometimes I think that knitting is like learning a second language.  If you learn a language early enough, you become fluent and it seems easy.  If you learn it late in life, you never speak without an accent.  For the things I learned to do early—designing simple sweaters or working with cables and lace—I’m skillful and confident.  For the things I learned to do late in my knitting life, most notably the Kitchener stitch, I’m plodding and clumsy.  And so, after two evenings and more tries than I can count (accompanied by yet more innovative combinations of x-rated words), I finally managed to join the back of Ed’s collar.

This technique requires a “double Kitchener stitch”.  Not willing to acknowledge my limitations, I plunged into this enterprise with more zeal than common sense.  But I did manage to do it, and I’ll show you how.   In describing this type of ribbing grafting, Montse Stanley says it is good for grafting single ribs worked in opposite directions, as for the button bands or collar on a sweater.  For grafting ribs going in the same direction, there is a more elegant method, shown on p. 243 of her book.

Note that these photos were taken at night with artificial light and a flash, so the color seems uneven and dull compared to the real thing.  But if you’re better at grafting than I am, you should find this easy and useful.  It does indeed make a very nice join for a ribbed shawl collar.

You need 4 DPNs.  A fifth is handy if you blunder and need to pick up dropped stitches or to smooth out a lopsided grafted stitch (ask me how I know).

Step 1: Divide the knits and purls on the ribbed collar so that the knits are on one DPN and the purls are on the other.  Note that when you turn the collar around around, both sides have knit stitches facing you.  So you will be grafting using knit stitches only.

Separate the knits and purls on both sides of the collar.

Step 2: With the inside of the collar (the side that will not show to the public) facing you on both halves of the collar, begin to graft the stitches on the two closest DPNs.

When you are done, your work will look like this.

Step 3: Turn the collar so that the outsides are facing you.  At this point, I took the yarn I used for the inside-collar Kitchener stitch and I wove it in to the grafted row on the inside.  And I did the unthinkable—I made a small knot.  I don’t ever want to take this apart to fix a raveled stitch.

Then graft the outside stitches.

When you’re done, the outside of the collar will look like this:

The collar is now completed, and I’m very pleased with the result.  Tonight it is on to the pockets, and if there’s time, to the finishing around the buttonholes.  I have two more cool knitting nights before the heat and humidity return, and it would be nice to get the front details done so I can block the body and start the sleeves.

Comments

[Judy G.]

That is a nice neat join, but I'm still not going to try it. Too much like sock toes, and we all know that's no fun.

[Luni]

While that looks so daunting, once I take a deep breath and look at it rationally, I can see that it is a much better approach to grafting narrow ribbing than the one I used, which involved turning the knitting over and back again. Of course, I was grafting 4x4 ribbing, so it wasn't too bad, just tedious.
Nonetheless, thinking about it is much easier than doing it! Your join looks fine.

[Barbara M.]

Wow.. it looks great! I took a class with Lucy Neatby which changed my attitude toward Kitchener forever. One thing she does is to use a long piece of yarn, thread one end on your needle, and then start grafting from the middle, not the end. When she gets to one side, she leaves the thread loose, goes back to the middle and threads the other end, turns her knitting and grafts to the other side. This keeps it nice and loose and makes it much easier to keep the tension even on each stitch. Worth the cost of the workshop.... and her "toe chimney" is a miracle!

The DVDs make it so easy to follow. She is a marvelous teacher!

[robin]

I LOVE the regular Kitchener stitch but had never even HEARD of double kitchener. Thanks for the great pics!

[tiennie]

I've never heard of that before! See, the cool things I learn from visiting your blog!