Saturday, November 03, 2012

Knitting again: Brioche stitch

I wasn't really planning to start knitting again, but I had an opportunity to take a class with Nancy Marchant, the Queen of Brioche. This stitch is common in Europe but little known here. It's actually a kind of double knitting, with each row knit twice. I'm practicing it on this one-color scarf, but it's really best for two-color patterns. What you get is fully reversible. Crazy, huh?

Here's the back of the scarf. If you're a knitter, you'll see what I mean. No purls!
The orange yarn starts as a lifeline every four rows, then gets pulled to the edge and tied off to serve as a row marker so I don't lose my place in the pattern. I started doing the lifelines after I screwed up at the very beginning and had to rip out 20 rows and start over. Grrr!

Even so, I've made at least one mistake I didn't catch in time and was too afraid to try to fix (it's a tricky thing to do). Oh well. A knitting expert will notice it, but no one else. I hope.