It's Alive!!!

What is that thing crawling around that poor headless woman's neck! Is it alive? Is it dead? Is it endangered?

This Möbius Strip collar was knitted on 10-1/2 needles and used only one 50g, 85 yard ball of Skacel EVO yarn. All man-made fiber, EVO is 45% Polyester, 30% Acrylic and 25% Polyamid lace-weight boucle with loosely woven, braided strands spun into the yarn here and there. I prefer wool. I don't usually use machine-made yarns except for children's clothing or design tests. But this was one of those irresistible yarns we all have in the bottom of our stash. The one we kick ourselves for buying, but dig out and admire from time to time.

So no, it's not alive, dead or endangered. No I didn't think up a Möbius collar, and no I didn't think up the lace stitch. But using a Novelty yarn to knit a lace collar was one of those wicked flashes of insight that pops up when each and every one of us works with fiber.

If you were spinning a yarn like this, you would spin one single of very fine lace weight yarn and then ply it boucle (or spiral) style around a machine made thread. Every so often ... every 6 inches let's say ... you'd introduce a 1 to 2 inch long piece of yarn in between the twisting threads. I would suggest that you consider running the commercial thread up and down around the join as you treadle to tie the snippet in with coils.

You don't have to go to that trouble. Joann's, Herrschner's and many other online yarn stores are having fire sales right now, and you can pick up a skein of expensive novelty yarn (online or in their store) for $.99 cents to $2.00. If you're goofy enough to sign up for their email fliers (like me) you'll also get 40, 50 and 60% off coupons to make the deal even sweeter. Or, if you have a local privately owned yarn shop in your town, now's the time to dig around in their bargain box. You'll find all kinds of dreadfully mangled, single skein wonders in there.

So it's time to dig down in your stash and pull up that tiny skein of novelty yarn that you couldn't resist buying and still haven't used.

Gideon's Knot is Nothing

The main problem with novelty yarns like these is that you have to use extremely large knitting needles in order to show off their true beauty and you still get a loopy mess that has very little warmth to it. Needles you would normally use to knit a sport or worsted weight wool can turn the yarn into a little dollhouse welcome mat. If you make a mistake with Novelties on smaller needles, you might as well cut your yarn and pitch it. These yarns are almost invariably un-ravel-able if not completely incomprehensible and unwearable when knitted on normal sized needles.

Personally I hate using any knitting needles larger than 8. I'll use 10-1/2 if necessary, and that size worked very well for this project. But they still don't feel comfortable in my hands, and have a tendency to drop straight out of the work if I don't have a good grip on them. I won't be seen knitting with those, it's just too much of a caricature.

But there is a way to deal with Novelties by knitting them up with a simple lace stitch called faggoting. The two columns of garter stitch and two columns of yarn-overs produces a knitted piece that marries the novelty yarn extremes of TOO dense and TOO loose into one delightfully wearable piece with just a touch of warmth.

An extra long cast-on tail can be used to blanket-stitch the two ends together to make a Möbius strip. I suggest snipping away the fluff and tassels where you can on the cast-on tail. Take it down to the base threads if possible. I didn't when I made the sample and spent a lot of time cussing when every snippet festooned stitch tangled. Luckily it's not that noticeable but it is an infuriatingly messy join.

The Graph!

If you've never used a lace knitting graph before, it's much simpler than working the written pattern. A key explaining each symbol usually accompanies a graph. In our key, a circle equals a yarn-over, a slash equals K2tog and a blank equals a knit stitch. You read a knitting graph from right to left, just the same way you knit.

This pattern works with a multiple of 4 stitches. The Möbius scarf has 24 stitches, though if you wanted you could work with 16, 20, 24, 32 ...

If you know a flashy nun, 3 or 4 skeins of yarn worked on 72 stitches would make a racy wimple.
Cast on the number of stitches, multiple of four, that you want to work.

Knit one row, turn.
*Knit the first four stitches (white blanks from right to left), then yarn-over, K2tog, K2 (the yellow portion from right to left).
Repeat the yellow portion only until you get to the end of the row. Turn. Repeat from *.

Another way to write this pattern would be: *Knit 4, [YO, K2tog, K2] Repeat between [ ] to the end of the row. Turn.* Repeat between * until you're out of yarn.

You'll be repeating this simple sequence --knitting the first four stitches of the row and then repeating the lace block to the end of the row -- on both the wrong and right side of the work, until you get down to the last couple of yards of yarn.

Finishing: Plain knit one row. You're matching the first knit row at the other end where you cast on. Now Bind Off. Sew the two ends together. Weave in any stray ends.

Whew!

Melissa, a friend I'm knit-coaching, inspired this project.

Sandy has sent in the first suggestion. She's curious to learn how to knit a sock on two circular needles. That and knitting with the magic loop will be the topic of August's Newsletter. If you have suggestions on what you'd like to learn or what you'd like to see in the newsletter, let me know. You can email the name Suggestions at prodigalsock, or just use the "Contact" button on the front page of the web site.

Have you made a blog or website about fiber arts? Send me the link. If you don't have the time to blog because you're busy reading them, but have pictures or tips you'd like to share ... send them along. I pay nothing and I can't promise not to edit it down to the bare bones, but I won't charge you anything to broadcast it to my Newsletter subscribers, your name attached of course. And I'm sure everyone will enjoy the relief from the "I, I, I" .

If you're looking for a good laugh, and there is something you'd like to see me try to explain, send it on. Sandy did. You can too!

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That's if for July! See you all in August!