Thursday, July 09, 2009

Crochet Ribbing

I'm sure 99.9% of crocheters know about the sc ribbing-work back and forth in sc, working in the BLO of each stitch. This does make for a stretchy piece of fabric, but sometimes it doesn't seem to be stretchy enough, or it loses its stretch.

I was reading online somewhere (I'm sorry, I can't remember where, or what pattern) and the person was using a SS (yes, slip stitch) ribbing. I thought to myself, "How ingenious". It's basically worked the same as the sc ribbing, only you use ss, still only crocheting in the BLO. This ribbing-although it's more tedious-is far superior to the sc ribbing, IMO. It's very stretchy, looks almost exactly like the k1, p1 ribbing of knitting. The only thing you need to look out for is accidentally not crocheting all the sts, and to keep your tension on the loose side. If you tighten the sts too much, it will be very hard to do the next row-believe me, I've had to rip back when I wasn't consciously trying to keep my tension a bit looser than normal. And it really isn't too tedious if you keep your tension slack, it goes fairly fast once you get going.

Anyway, I thought I'd share this information to any crocheter out there who would like to try this for sweater, sock, mitten or fingerless glove pattern-it really is soft and stretchy.

Edit: I found it-it was a free pattern for crochet socks that I found and saved.

This is a pdf file, so you'll need either the Adobe reader, or some equivalent to be able to read it.

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