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posted 7 October 07 & filed under knitting
i just picked up a ton of stitches to start the skirt section for the tilted duster, from the latest IK, and though i picked up the amount specified, i have a theoretical question:
if you cast on x amount of stitches, then isn’t x the maximum you can pick up from that cast-on edge without making the resulting knitted fabric pucker?
that’s what i understood, and yet here, we pick up 40 stitches, for example, from the 36-stitch cast-on edge of the left front (+2 stitches for selvedge that i almost always tack on). i assume nora gaughan knows better than i – and no one else knitting the duster has even peeped about it online – but i’m still a tad confused. what am i not understanding?
thanks ~ and btw, columbus sucks.
i don’t have the pattern nearby, but could it have to do with different stitch patterns giving different gauges, say if one’s a st st and the other a rib, which would pull together more?
~ kris
Sorry! I’m no help here with the knitting question. But I did want to reiterate, “Columbus sucks,” indeed.
Also, thanks for sharing the letterpress photos (re: the wedding invitations). I’m living vicariously through you right now, but someday (soon, I hope!) I’ll get to try out letterpresses myself :)
You posted last year’s Columbus entry shortly after we met, and I remember thinking, “I like this girl!”
Norah Gaughan is on Ravelry and is super helpful – you can post questions to the Norah Gaughan fans group, and she answers them! I like her even more now. I think that group is where all the Tilted Duster chatter is happening… I will send you an invite so you don’t have to hunt for the group!
You can definitely pick up more stitches than there are stitches in a cast on, just as you can pick up fewer. It’s all a matter of gauge. almost every time you pickup and knit for a collar or facing, you are picking up a different number than the number of rows or stitches on that edge. Generally, you pick up fewer, but the concept is the same.
As Kris said, if you are picking up to work a different stitch pattern, the fabric should lie flat presuming your gauge in that stitch pattern is the same as the authors.
~ Marnie