I readily admit it, I'm a nerd. One of the symptoms of being a nerd is a glee of digging through technical manuals. So when a friend of mine offered me an old knitting book she doesn't want anymore, I said "sure, I'd like that" when what I really meant was "WICKED COOL!" It's called The Principles of Knitting by June Hemmons Hiatt, published in 1988, and it covers everything from how to knit and purl to how to design your own pieces. It's 1 ¾ inches thick (yes I measured) and my heart is aflutter.

My friend gave this find to me at a Labor Day barbeque, so of course I ignored everyone and started to read it right away. The first thing I looked at was how Haitt covered left handed knitting. She suggests that since knitting is with both hands, a lefty can knit right handed. "However" she adds, "if you are left-handed and have tried the usual way of knitting and it persists in feeling clumsy and slow, by all means knit Right-Hand Knitting 'left-handed' instead."¹ How generous. She goes on to say that lefty knitting is a mirror image of the right, and even suggests using a mirror in the learning process. While that can be awkward, in 1988 that was the best to be had if you didn't have a left handed teacher (or a fabulous mother who found a left handed store). Today, however, you can go on the web and find a multitude of training videos and other material dedicated to lefty knitting.

Next I looked at the stitches section. Here Hiatt starts with variations on knit and purl stitches such as turned stitches, slip stitches, knit/purl through the back loop (or farside), etc. This section is very comprehensive, with diagrams to show both how to form the stitch and what it looks like when finished. This section is also peppered with pictures of applications of the techniques.

There are two features in this section that make this different from other manuals I have read. First, Hiatt includes how to do the same stitch from the purl side. While most patterns try to do pattern work on the knit side, you will may into a situation where you need to do this. It's good to have the reference. Second, she discusses how the various techniques stretch the stitches, and how that effects the finished piece. I've actually never thought about how a knit-two-together and a slip-slip-knit stretch the front loop in different ways, so that they are not exact mirror images. She gives multiple methods of some stitches and points out the ones which mirror each other.

I decided to test this out using the methods Hiatt describes for the Twist Stitch². She goes through four different varieties, and for each one she has the right and left side on both the knit and purl sides. The accompanying diagrams made these complicated stitches easier to do because I could follow where the thread was supposed to go, and make sure I matched. I'm going to need to practice to get the tension consistent, though.

I discovered that the stitch Hiatt calls the Cable Twist is another method of knitting a one-by-one cable that doesn't require a cable needle or slipping stitches off the needle to reverse their order. If you see the middle sample, the one on the left is made using her Cable Twist. The one on the right is made by slipping off two stitches and picking them up in the reverse order. Surprisingly I had more tension issues with slipping than the twist. This is definitely going into my repertoire.

The left sample is the basic Twist in both directions and on the right is the Wrapped Twist. There are subtle differences; you may notice the one on the right looks more like rope than than the one on the left. I don't think this really makes much of a difference, though. I also figured out that while the stretch issues are interesting, they don't really make a visual difference with this yarn. Maybe with other yarns it will matter more, but for the moment I'm sticking with my usual increases and decreases.

 Do you have a favorite technique book you would like to share? Write about it in my forum.

¹Hiatt, June, The Principles of Knitting; Methods and Techniques of Hand Knitting, p 7. New York, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.

²Ibid, pp 46-50.