Strange and Scary Types of Knitting Stitches Made Easy!
Practice new types of knitting stitches on afghan squares!
If you're interested in learning new types of knitting stitches but don't want to botch an entire project, practice on afghan squares. It's fun, quick, and an easy way to learn new types of knitting stitches: after all, you'll never have more than a couple inches to unravel!
Better still, your efforts can go on to benefit those in need: charities like Blankets for Canada and The Homemade Afghan Project are more than happy to accept individual squares, regardless of the types of knitting stitches used to make them!
If you decide to go this route, though, make sure you check on the size and gauge before you get started. Otherwise, your rectangle might not find the home you wanted. Blankets for Canada only accepts squares that measure eight inches by eight inches, while The Homemade Afghan Project prefers rectangles measuring six inches by nine inches. Of course, if your measurements are totally off, you can always put together your own afghan made from your own squares and find that its own special home instead!
Entrelac: It Even Sounds Scary
One of the first types of knitting stitches to scare my socks off was entrelac. Entrelac is a way of knitting one, two, or more colors into a diamond pattern, and it sounds weird and creepy. Worse still, there aren't a lot of decent instructions online: more than most types of knitting stitches, entrelac seems to scare people off.
Now for the good news: entrelac is actually pretty easy. If you can knit, purl, decrease, and pick up stitches, you're good to go.
In the next section of this article, we’re going to learn how to use entrelac types of knitting stitches to create a very cool multicolored diamond print square. For the purpose of learning these types of knitting stitches, we're going to say you're using two colors (A and B).
The most important thing to remember with entrelac is not to give up! I had to unravel my first piece made with these types of knitting stitches four times; now, I can whip through an entrelac square in a single night. You’ll get there, too. Don’t be afraid to try new types of knitting stitches: you never know what you’ll discover!
