Oolong knits

This post is a short comment on an essay by Kant titled "An answer to the question: what is Enlightenment?" So, you're probably asking a completely different question: what does Kant have to do with knitting? right? Nothing. No need to write an essay to answer that. But there is so much a girl can say about knitting for the heck of it as opposed to out of obligation. Yep, I know this blog is about knitting, but I'll be damned if I'm wasting my time writing about knitting if I've got nothing I want to say about it, just because this blog has got knitting in its title. Besides philosophy is a nice complement to knitting, they sure as hell have got nothing in common. So, back to the subject of enlightenment. I'm talking about this little book on the  Great Ideas series published by Penguin. It comes with a series of 4 essays by dear uncle Immanuel, the first one of them provides the title to the book and the quotation on the cover which reads like this ...

I've kind of run out of things to talk about because I'm working on a sweater. I've been working hard on it for one month now and guess what, I've just begun it. The easy solution to this paradox is that I've frogged it, not only once, thrice! And I won' be surprised if I have to do it again, although I'm keeping my fingers very crossed hoping I don't. Why? Well, the first time I frogged it it was because I'd done a silly beginner's mistake, but the two other times were related to gauge. I've written a post on gauge before, but as many experienced knitters can tell you, there is not enough said on this subject. No matter how hard you try following every good advice on swatches, only the final piece will tell what its gauge is. Some pieces are trivial to gauge, others impossible to predict. This has a lot to do with how stretchy the stitch and how heavy the final piece. Here are some examples to illustrate what I mean: Fair-isle knitti...

It's hard to believe I've not written this post before. It is kind of a big deal for me. So, here is my late confession: I knit Portuguese. As you'd know if you've read one of my first posts , I've learned to knit only recently using the internet. I used the videos I recommended on that post and learned both English and German style knitting. At the time I preferred German-style since I found it easier. I believe the explanation is that even though it may use the left hand more, German style involves less hand movement and specially less coordination between the two hands and I must be one of the least deft people you'll ever meet. So learning to knit was quite challenging for me. I learned only as an adult because, funny enough, neither my mother, nor any other member of my small family, or any of her friends knitted. I think knitting had gone completely out of fashion for their generation, even though I remember seeing enough shops selling yarn when I was ...

So everyone knows that garter stitch is really easy knitted flat, you just knit every stitch. While stockinette is a bit of a pain, you have to purl every other row. In the round, however, this is reversed and stockinette becomes knit every stitch, and garter becomes purl every other round. Right? Yes, but there is a neat trick you can use to do garter in the round with no purls. Use two balls of yarn and knit one round in one direction, then turn the work around and, pick the other yarn and use it to knit the next round in the opposite direction. Continue alternating rounds using one yarn in one direction and the other in the other. Always knitting, no purling. You get a very good looking garter with a discrete (no holes, but still visible) transition where you've changed yarn and direction. There may be some easy way to fix this 'transition' (it is a kind of jog), but I neither know it, nor find it necessary.

I bet that after my last post some of you may be wondering, why would I want to knit circles? I'm going to be the first to admit that the reasons I mentioned in the post were kind of lame. Of course there are quite a lot of lovely patterns that involve circles. I'm thinking of those complex lace patterns in particular. Some of those are just amazing works of art. On the other hand, if you're following a pattern you don't need to know how to knit a circle... I was thinking about this when the following idea came to me. If you put a hole in the middle of a large circle you get a poncho. Brilliant! Right? OK... kind of obvious. So the question is, how to go about doing a circle with a hole in the middle? Well, it is kind of obvious. If you cast-on the number of stitches that corresponds to the size of the hole and then follow the circle procedure, you will obtain only the outer part of the circle. Elementary, my dear Watson. After figuring this stuff out, we're rea...