I teach knitting classes
Most popular:
• specialized sock-heel workshops
• plaited cast-on class for socks, hats, and coffee cup cozies
• certified Knit Companion trainer
I travel to book readings and signings.
You can schedule a class or event on my Shoppe page.
In honor of Charles Dickens birthday, we wrote a book!
Perhaps—as his expression makes clear—he was hoping for a different type of book?
Regardless, What Would Madame Defarge Knit? goes into pre-orders today and will soon be in your hands, on your Kindle, your Nook, your iPad, your iPhone… you get the idea. (more…)
Along with the “How to Crochet” page I put up a bit ago—with the best video tutorials I found—I wanted to add Continental and British knitting tutorial videos to the mix.
Before I go any further, and because I know folks have opinions about these things, I want to put out there that I knit both British and Continental. My Grandmother taught me British when I was little, and later when I picked the craft back up as an adult I re-taught myself Continental. (Well, not just Continental, but Combination Knitting, just like Annie Modesitt (who has free online knitting classes)… only I didn’t write a book about it.[1])
All of that is a long way of saying I have no personal bias. I knit Continental most of the time, but I think that’s because I spent so many of my non-knitting years neck deep in crochet and thus holding the yarn etc in my left hand feels comfortable. If I do color work I knit both ways at the same time, and there are some needle and yarn sizes that simply require me to knit British.
So.
What the heck are Continental and British?
Continental Knitting has you hold your working yarn in your left hand (and generally that means you’re manipulating the yarn with your left and the needle with your right). British has you hold your working yarn in your right hand (and generally that means you’re manipulating the yarn and needle with your right). These, however, are not hard and fast rules. I’ve seen Continental knitters carry the yarn in their left but manipulate it with their right. It’s pretty cool. And ditto that in reverse for British.
All that is a long way of saying: if you’re doing something that looks like knitting and find that you’re making some kind of fabric and aren’t twisting your stitches, then you’re doing just fine. Unless someone can show you how you’re twisting something up, don’t let them tell you you’re doing it “wrong.”
Now, on with it!
Knitting is the process of making a series of slip knots but instead of making them in a chain (crochet) you’re making a loop and catching each loop on a needle. All those stitches on the stick are “live” and if you pull them off the needle and tug the yarn they’ll all rip out. Prrrrrrrrrrrrt!
Lesson?
Don’t pull your stitches off the needle.
There are two ways to look at knitted fabric, the flat side and the bumpy side. If you make a KNIT stitch, you’ll have the “flat” side facing you. This will look like “regular knitting” that you might see in a standard sweater you buy at a store.
If you turn that fabric over, you’ll see that the back side of the knit stitches is bumpy. That means you need to learn how to knit the flat “front” side and the bumpy “back” side. Those stitches are called “knit” (flat) and “purl” (bumpy).
Every move in knitting begins with either a knit stitch or a purl stitch. So, once you master these two stitches there is NOTHING you cannot do.
I’m a visual learner, so I’ve dug around to find the clearest videos I could. PLEASE feel free to put links to other good videos into the comments on this page. The more information, the better.
The Knit Stitch
The Purl Stitch
If you want flat knitting (not bumpy) then you will knit one row (often called the “right side”) then turn your knitting and purl back down to where you started (often called the “wrong” or “back side”). This is called “Stockinette Stitch.”
If you want bumpy knitting, use the knit stitch no matter which side you’re on. This is called “Garter Stitch.”
All of that is well and good, but you can’t practice if you can’t cast-on—that’s how you get the yarn on the needle to begin with. There are MANY ways to cast-on. I’ve linked here to two. The first video is the most common as it gives you a solid, generally stretchy cast-on row. The second requires less fiddling with the yarn initially, but it can make for a very loose cast-on which may look a bit baggy when you’re done.
Long Tail Cast-on
Backwards Loop Cast-on
And when you’re done, you’ll need to get the blasted thing off of your needle! For that, you need a bind off.
And now?
You can knit!
The only other things you need are to know how to increase and decrease. I found a page with very good tutorials on that, so I’ll just link you to them. And if the videos I’ve posted here don’t float your boat, please don’t despair. There have to be a metric ton of tutorials and videos out there. Poke around. I know you’ll find one that works for you. And don’t be embarrassed to go to your local yarn store. Buy some cheap yarn and needles, then plop yourself down and have them teach you. They will.
[1] I wrote a book about something else entirely.
From my CraftLit folks I often get questions about “how to”… fill in the blank. I decided I should get a move on and get some tutorials compiled here for y’all. So.
Crochet.
Don’t know that I agree with the arcylic recommendation (I’d just say any tightly plied yarn–no splitting) but I really like that they work you towards a product rather than just chaining forever.
Here’s Part I of the basics of crochet.
Here’s Part II of the basics of crochet.
Advanced Technique: Foundation Stitch
Those of you who keep track of me (or of the podcast) may have noticed the loooong stretch of radio silence. Ninety percent of that is due to getting the book into the capable hands of Shannon Okey over at Cooperative Press. Then there were the holidays (and family I don’t get to see nearly enough of). And then there was the snow (should be accompanied in your head by da da da duuuummmmmm).
We thought it would be nifty to go up to Gila Hot Springs and Cliff Dwellings in the Southern New Mexican mountains for a little dip in the hot spring during the cool weather while staying at the delightful and funky Wilderness Lodge.
And it was!
Nifty, I mean.
Until suddenly it wasn’t.
You know how sometimes you get those gut instincts that you KNOW everyone will groan at and say, “No, you’re just being [fill in the blank]… Everything’s fine…”
Then later, when it all goes to hell in a handbasket, you try really hard to refrain from saying, “SEE! I told you!”… or worse, you think, “Dang… I really should have said something…”
Yeah, well, I really should have said something.
On the 29th—the day before we were to head back home—we saw the warnings of a storm heading in to blanket the entire southwest. Arizona was scheduled for a cold snap the likes of which daytime temps haven’t seen in quite some time. In NM we were up above 7,000 feet (I can’t recall exactly, might have been over 8K) so we knew we’d at least get something. The report was pretty clear that roads would be coated and would need to be plowed.
Now. There is only one road in and out of this lovely little place. It’s a tiny valley at the top of the mountain range. You’re only there if you WANT to be there (there are good reasons to go) and since it’s not a main thoroughfare, the plowing priority was bound to be low, right?
I heard and read all this and I thought to myself, “Self. You need to wake the kids and get the heck outta Dodge pronto. You have old tires, 2wd, an eight year old car, and your children and husband with you.” Then, in my head I heard Eddie Murphy from his Delirious album menacing, “GEeeeeeT OUuuuuuuT!”
But I didn’t let that impulse go any further than my own self. [insert wagging finger here]
In the morning (30 Dec 2010) we awoke to find a GLORIOUS winter landscape—I’d been up half the night and nothing was falling at 3am or so when I finally went to bed. Truly gorgeous way to wake up. The kids had a ball! We had a nice breakfast. We paused and dawdled thinking that SURELY the plow would be through soon.
Then… we just… um… decided to go for it and muscle through.
Now, I was scared to death and didn’t take any pictures until we turned so I am relying on the kindness of the interwebs here. Please do visit the sites I’m borrowing pics from. Many are from real photographers and they do a much better job of chronicling weather that looked like ours than I would have done taking snaps of the real thing. I’ve noted from where I got what and hope they enjoy getting traffic from some people who might not have found their blogs otherwise.
Okay.
That being said.
If we’d been driving THIS
from http://blog.leasetrader.com_archive_2009_06_10_Land-Rover-Defender-Fire-amp-Ice-editions.aspx
we would have been fine. But instead we were driving this
no, wait… this
Our Chariot
and hadn’t had the money for new tires before we left. This crossed our minds, but blood and stones, knowwhatImean? At least we’d gotten new front brakes.
So.
Mom’s driving her CRV with 4wd and I’m driving the Vue with 2wd (however—and this is important—FRONT 2-wheel drive) and we get maybe four miles up the mountain and Andrew and I already know we’re in trouble. I keep losing traction, the snow is slippery, and blowing, and the visibility is garbage, and I’m scared.
I was a baby…an infant. I had nothing to be scared of… that day.
We finally called it when it looked like this (please know that the next bend began a 40 ° incline)
Point of Return
Point of Return—side view (NB: windshield started clear of snow. This was less than 2–3 minutes of snowfall accumulation)
and My Man put on my red coat and ran up ahead to flag down my Mom. She (magically?) turned her car around and came down to meet us. My Bro-in-Law helped me turn the car around (getting covered in snow all the while) and helped me carefully aim the car at a down-slope tree. That way, if we DID slide off the edge of the cliff, we’d have a tree stop us… until the back end of the car fish-tailed and dragged us down the mountainside….not that I’m paranoid or anything. Well… more paranoid than the RV driver we passed coming UP as we went down.
He figures later. Don’t forget that he was driving the RV up IN A BLIZZARD… without chains.
In Whiche We Stay Anothere Night
Well, we slowly made it back to the Wilderness Lodge and had a pretty good chance of securing a room for the night (the group of 27 due in were on the other side of the storm and didn’t appear to be able to get in—chorus of “duh” anyone?).
We collected a few more stragglers during the day (stranded couple of engineers, six campers who were in Crocs Without Socks) and had a curious night of Twister, Puzzles, and Trivial Pursuit.
The morning of the 31st broke bright and promising. The Engineers made it out (in their 4wd sedan thing) so we were pretty excited. It took a bit, but we finally got our act together, having heard that all but the last two miles into town had been plowed that night. Why, you ask, was the road plowed except those last two miles? Because that’s the point at which the RV had gotten stuck. They pulled him out, turned around, and went back.
Lovely.
Our intrepid host had found chains in his back room, so we were set.
But the chains didn’t fit.
And the weather was clouding up again.
And the mountain was disappearing.
We decided to give it a test run before committing to the drive with mom… and couldn’t turn around without spinning the wheels (and making the worst rubber/engine smells EVER). So the husband and I cashed it in. We convinced Mom to go as it was definitely snowing again and her window of opportunity was ebbing away again. We had a rather drifty, surreal noontime. Our wonderful host went up to the general store and tried to divine new chains for us, messed around with wiring the small ones to our tires, then heard a plow!
Andrew ran up to the road (it’s about a mile to do that) and lo and behold, the road HAD indeed been plowed. The Husband scoped out the best way to get up the last sharp incline of the rutted dirt road that would get us out of our digs and onto the main drag, and… we were off!
Those first two miles were glorious and looked like this:
https://lindamphotos.wordpress.com
See how there’s patches of road showing through the ice?
Well, it started with more road than ice, then gradually became the above (more ice than snow) then it was suddenly this.
http://www.pashnit.com/forum/
Okay, maybe not quite that severe… it was more gradual. And seductive.
We’d passed the turn-around-tree from the day before (I actually teared up seeing that we’d made it that far) and rounded the bend… and suddenly all the patches of road were gone. 100% ice.
But we had to keep moving to keep whatever traction we’d managed to get. It was 16 degrees and snowing again, though the wind wasn’t as bad as the day before. Heading up wasn’t nearly as bad as heading down.
http://www.nps.gov/glac/parknews/
http://www.hickerphoto.com/ice-road-6970-pictures.htm
Add about 20-30% more steepness to the pics above.
First gear.
5–8mph.
We took over an hour and a half to go 12 miles. Can I just tell you—my whole body ached for days after this. Like I’d run a marathon. Srously. I was panting and shaking. The boys were SILENT in the back seat and while the older is Oblivious Boy, the younger is not. He white knuckled it with us.
The other real evil part of this that I can’t get a pic of is that the plow—which had plowed off the top layer of snow and let the ice form on the road beneath—Did Not Drop Any Gravel! The bastages should be taken out and horsewhipped. Really? Seriously? No salt? Okay, environmental impact. I get it. But no gravel? WTH? Are you trying to tell me there’s an effing DIRT shortage in New Mexico? Oh there was SOME gravel. Maybe a stitch every mile or so. Why? Because that’s where they dropped some to help stranded cars out. I have a news bulletin for the New Mexican Snow Plow folks—you wouldn’t have to spend the time, money, or effort getting people out of the snow if you graveled when you plowed in the first place!*
So.
Did I mention we’d left at three pm?
http://rafalandronowski.wordpress.com/
By the time we got off the 15 and made the turn onto the relatively safer (relative is a useful term here) route 35 the day was looking more like night. It was still snowing and definitely darker.
The roads on 35 looked more like this, though.
http://www.fs.fed.us/r8/boone/09icestormpicts.shtml
Okay, well, not the fallen branches, but the trees heavy with snow thing, definitely.
A few miles (or a few hours?) down 35—still creeping along, mind you, as it’s still slippery—we met the 27 who were on their way TO the Wilderness Lodge. I really hope we didn’t seem too encouraging. They were parked walking distance from a different lodge (on a lake) and of their six cars only two had 4wd. Now, recall, it was getting dark, it was 16 degrees, it was snowing and getting windier, and we’d spent most of our time coming UP and over, they’d be spending most of their time going over and DOWN.
In cars unequipped for such shenanigans.
So we managed to stop (I figured with 27 of them, someone could help us with a push if we needed it…plus where they were was flat) and rolled down the window to ask if the were—indeed—the 27. Oh yes, they were. One husband said, “My wife doesn’t want to go any further but I’m willing to try it.”
I can’t really recall (adrenaline rush, anyone) what I actually said but it might have been something like, “ARE YOU EFFING OUT OF YOUR FREAKIN MIND?!!” Or, well, it may have been more along the lines of (weak smile), “really? Wow, um. That would be. Jeez. I don’t know. It’s really. You know. Icy [gulp] and getting dark…”
We learned later that the 2wd cars did NOT attempt it. We asked them to let the Lodge know we’d gotten as far as the lake and we pushed on.
Gradually over the next hour it eased up. The ice turned to snow (not always a better thing) and the car felt more in control, though the ice on the windshield wipers was not fun. Poor Andrew got out and had to take minutes in the 16 ° to chip off ice… using a Starbuck’s gum tin (multitasker!) as it’s been ages since we had an ice scraper. We got cell service back—oh, did I forget to mention, there was no cell service. If we’d gone off the cliff they wouldn’t have found us until March. We called my Mom. She called the Lodge to let them know we were okay. And eventually we made it to Deming and had a (remarkably mediocre) Chinese dinner for New Year’s Eve.
We had a lot to celebrate though, and I was up for staying in Lordsburg, NM (just down the road a-piece from Deming) just to have some downtime, watch the ball drop on TV, and maybe get a Very Big Drink. But all the folks stuck on the southern side of the storm were holed up there already and there were no rooms left in the (Days) Inn. We soldiered on, singing showtunes and imbibing caffiene (both candy and liquid). We made it home at 11:30 and tossed the boys in bed. Then we collapsed.
In Which We Reflecte on What We Hath Learnede
Here are the lessons I take away with me:
And family. That’s the biggie. I love my family. And, being the great parents we are, what did we say to the boys when we were safely on a road without ice?
“Don’t you EVER do ANYthing like that EVER in your life. Call your parents. We’ll send money. Nothing is ever important enough to make you attempt that.”
Ah.
Great way to start 2011.
*Why am I so down on NM? Back in 2006 I wrote this blog post. I have a history with the state and driving. This trip did nothing to improve my bias.
Yesterday, in anticipation of the upcoming release of What Would Madame Defarge Knit? our artiste extraordinairé created free holiday cards for you and yours to use this holiday season. 
You can view and download the goodies over at the Madame Defarge site. More goodies will be a-comin’ so keep checking back.
Then, in my other guise as edumacator, I thought I’d share this with you…just in case you didn’t know from Bayeux yet.
Welcome to the final part of A Christmas Carol brought to you by the podcast CraftLit: A Podcast for Crafters Who Love Books. In the previous episode I promised to link to a webpage with lots of A.C.C. and Dickensian information. This is the compendium of useful links. In this episode I point you towards the CraftLit episodes that cover A Tale of Two Cities, and two other books:
Here are the various file formats you can use to listen to Dickens.
Read by Glen Halstrom for Librivox
You can also visit CraftLit’s main site, go straight to the CraftLit Library to download mp3 copies of old episodes, go to the Podshoppe to purchase mp3 audiobooks-wiht-benefits, go to iTunes to subscribe to CraftLit for free, to the iTunes/Amazon/Windows8 store to grab the free CraftLit app (which takes up less space on your iPhone or iTouch than downloading the episodes does), or listen via the players on the CraftLit site or here at MamaOKnits.
Don’t forget the rest of the Dickens of a Christmas blog hopping fun! Please follow the linky-links above to
There will be recipes for the traditional foods Dickens wrote of in A Christmas Carol, or recipes that would have been found in Victorian England around the holidays. There will be a professional reading of the story available as a podcast. There will be giveaways, themed knitting patterns and quite possibly hats! There may be smoking bishop and suet cooked in organs. And there will certainly be much making of merry.
The blog entries will be rolling out starting this week and culminating Thanksgiving weekend to kick off your holidays in Victorian style.
So please do bookmark all our blogs and add them to your rss feeders. We’ll be using the below to link all the blog entries for the entire shebang so that you don’t miss a single one. We hope you enjoy this as much as we know we will! And we hope that you have a DICKENS OF A CHRISTMAS!
In case this all has made you hungry for your own bit of Dickens…
Welcome to part two of A Christmas Carol brought to you by the podcast CraftLit: A Podcast for Crafters Who Love Books. During the course of the episode I promise a link to a webpage with lots of A.C.C. and Dickensian information. This is the compendium of useful links.
Here are the various file formats you can use to listen to Dickens.
Read by Glen Halstrom for Librivox
Listen to or right-click-to-download A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens—Stave 3 mp3 audio only audio
Staves 4-5 will be uploaded Friday, 19 November 2010!
You can also visit CraftLit’s main site, go straight to the CraftLit Library to download mp3 copies of old episodes, go to the CD store to purchase mp3-CD compilations of the books, go to iTunes to subscribe for free, to the iTunes store to purchase the CraftLit app (which takes up less space on your iPhone or iTouch than downloading the episodes does), or listen via the players on the site or here at MamaOKnits.
Don’t forget the rest of the Dickens of a Christmas blog hopping fun! Please follow the linky-links above to
There will be recipes for the traditional foods Dickens wrote of in A Christmas Carol, or recipes that would have been found in Victorian England around the holidays. There will be a professional reading of the story available as a podcast. There will be giveaways, themed knitting patterns and quite possibly hats! There may be smoking bishop and suet cooked in organs. And there will certainly be much making of merry.
The blog entries will be rolling out starting this week and culminating Thanksgiving weekend to kick off your holidays in Victorian style.
So please do bookmark all our blogs and add them to your rss feeders. We’ll be using the below to link all the blog entries for the entire shebang so that you don’t miss a single one. We hope you enjoy this as much as we know we will! And we hope that you have a DICKENS OF A CHRISTMAS!
In case this has all made you hungry for your own bit of Dickens…
Mmmmmm.
Marmalade!
Now is the Season for Making Marmalade — Canning Across America.
Not only is this a great idea, but it’s also got a link to a truly useful article on how things like weather and elevation affect food prep. I’ve found myself frustrated by the difference in baking between New York and Arizona, so this was something of a culinary life-saver. (The articles are also written by an old friend of mine.)
Enjoy this interlude in the Dickens of a Christmas line-up.
Ever needed to add a few stitches—like to make up for thumb gusset stitches you just eliminated from the palm of your mitten. Well, here’s an easy and quick way to accomplish that.
The standard half-hitch manoeuver always left me with saggy cast-on stitches. A friend showed me this ages ago and I’ve never looked back.
Sometimes you just want a scarf that won’t roll—EVER.
Or sometimes you need the back of an item to look just like the front. The easiest way to do that is to double knit—and mirror your pattern in reverse.
On this sample, you’ll see the red side facing you with white “flea” stitches. The reverse side of the fabric is EXACTLY the same, but white with red “flea” stitches.
How do you do that?
Double knitting—knitting both sides at once. That means the red stitches will all be knit stitches, followed by it’s partnered white stitch which you will purl. It helps to remember that all stitches are knit side facing out and purl side facing in to the tube you’re creating (genius, no?).
And it makes a LOT more sense actually watching it.
For practice try doing a simple double-knit tube (bookmark?). Start by taking any size yarn and needles—variegated that changes color rapidly is quite helpful.
For the tube:
Keep going * to * for an inch or so, then pinch each side of the fabric and pull apart.
Neat, no?!
You can pull the sides away from each other because you formed a tube.
(If you CAN’T pull the sides apart that most likely means that somewhere you accidentally purled a stitch that should have been slipped.)
Now, pat yourself on the back and show this to everyone you meet today.
Someone will be impressed.
If you want to get really crazy, try the two colors in the video. Use a long tail cast on with one color going over your thumb and the other color over your finger. You’ll have a lovely little braided cast-on. Then start double knitting. At first you would want to keep one side one color and the other side the other color, as it’s easier to get the rhythm of the knitting/purling that way. But if you wanted to create a simple star pattern, you could easily use a pattern like this
The hardest thing to wrap your mind around is that you see five stitches on the chart, but you’ll really be knitting/purling ten.
Let’s break that down. Imagine you’re knitting with red and white. Start by deciding (this is arbitrary) that the blank squares in our little star pattern will be for the white facing you and the dots will be for the red facing you—those will be your knit stitches.
To mirror that pattern on the other side you need to purl it in the reverse colors—dominant red with a white star. That is what you will be purling.
So your first row will go like this:
I promise you this makes much more sense if you try it. I still have my first little tube bookmark and I’m still pretty impressed with myself every time I do this. Once you master this it’s easy to do other nifty things like knitting a sock inside a sock.
Oh the party games knitters can come up with.
Enjoy!
MamaO is Heather Ordover, author, designer, mother and knitter... not necessarily in that order. You can get posts from this blog sent directly to your inbox by signing up below, Follow her on Twitter and Like her on Facebook if you're feeling friendly-like.
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