I'm trying my hand at this double knitting technique I read about. You use two different colors of yarn and when you're done your work is one color on one side and another color on the other side. If you work a pattern into it-I'll be trying that next, once I get the technique down good- then one side will be an x-ray of the other-dark bg on one side, light bg on the other.
It's a really interesting technique-basically you're just doing a 1x1 rib with two different colors-you cast on double the # of stitches you actually need with one of the colors and then you knit one stitch with one color and purl the next stitch with the other color-always carrying both yarns to the back or front- so you come out with stockinette on both sides. You're basically working on both sides of the piece at the same time. I did some Googling on this technique and I've found different ways of casting it on and I intend to try the other methods later.
If you're making something with more than, say, 50 stitches a circular needle would come in handy to accommodate the larger number of stitches. The result of this is a thick fabric-the thickness depending on the weight of yarn used-and would be useful for potholders, really warm scarves, wraps, baby afghans, lapghans.
I'll keep you updated on my progress, I'm trying a rectangular wrap with two different varigated yarns.
It's been a few hours since I wrote the above-I had to frog it and start over because somewhere I either had two knits or two purls and I didn't feel like looking for them and since it was just the first row I decided to just frog and do-over. I cast on 150 sts, which will give me a 75 stitch wide wrap-not sure how long I'll make it, I'll go to the end of the skeins of yarn and see if it's long enough. I can always get more, it's RHSS and Wal-Mart carries it.
Anyway, one thought of mine is-you definitely need to do this technique with two different colors of yarn or you'll get lost pretty quick over which yarn to use on which stitch-I would recommend either two shades of the same color or two contrasting colors. I'm using a varigated blue and a varigated berrys, they should look neat together.
One last thing-what's up with Blogger? It's slow, timing out, I can't click anything in the toolbar-has Google frelled it up completely?
Well, I posted this at MySpace since when I tried to post it here I couldn't do anything, now it seems to be behaving itself.
More notes: I've found a rythm that lets me go at a pretty steady pace. It still isn't as fast as regular knitting because of juggling two yarns but I expected that. It's not exactly mindless since you have to be careful about which yarn you're supposed to be using. I intend to experiment a bit more after I make this wrap, maybe in a potholder size so I don't have so many stitches to work with but I will finish this wrap-I'm five rows in and I like the way it's looking and the thickness will make it nice and warm. If I use yarn in this thickness it should make good potholders-I wonder if I used cotton yarn if it would make a nice thick scrubbie *ponders*
I'll get to that some other time-after I finish this wrap, Joseph's outfit and some other things.
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