Saturday, July 14, 2012

Rows and Rows of Short Rows

The dreaded short row has been the bane of my knitting for such a long time. I avoided making socks because of short rows. I have hated the way they looked in crescent shawls but love crescent shawls. One of the shawls I am working on now is Maluka, this shawl is done by making an edging then picking up stitches on one edge and knitting short rows to form it into a crescent. The pattern does the short rows in the typical way for crescent shawls by knitting past the center and slip stitch knit (ssk), turning slipping the first stitch, purling past the center again then purling 2 together (p2tog) and turning. This makes a bit of a hole where the gap is closed and seems to me to be a little messy in some patterns. Some designers incorporate this into their design so it is less noticeable, but sometimes it seems unavoidable. After looking at other project pages for this pattern I had read some people used wrap and turn (w&t). I have never really been able to get this to work for me so I knew that wasn't the way for me to do it. I found this project that pointed to another blog on japanese short rows, I had looked at this before but really didn't need it at the time.

Maluka - 7th shawl in 2012
This worked great! It was a bit more work in a way because I used safety pin markers to make the thread that needed picking up but really that just made it easier in the long run. I realized about half way through that I wasn't decreasing like the pattern wanted. I didn't want to rip it back again so I just continued. I love this technique I totally plan on doing it again for crescent shawls in the future.

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