Skip the sewing, make it one piece!

As I told you, my grandmother taught me to knit, making cast on, knit and purl stitches and casting of, when I was a kid. Since then I’ve been learning more knitting skills through help from my mom and simply experimenting. Knitting is a mathematical thing, and I’ve been using my brain mostly, enjoying knitting a lot. One book that a much loved one brought back to me from the states was “knitting in plain English” by Maggie Righetti. I started reading it a few days ago and got amazed. The author describes almost every step in knitting. And even though I figured out most of it before, some things aren’t that obvious. For example, most patterns describe the knitting of the right and left front and back separately for a cardigan, simply because they quite often are knitted using a machine. But if you aren’t using one, you might as well knit both front and the back in the same time on a circular or flex needle. Less sewing is always appreciated, especially when knitting in bulky yarns. So, when I started the knitting of this cardigan, I simply cast on all stitches for right front, back and left front except for the 4 edge stitches that would be used for sewing the pieces together. I marked the transitions between the different parts to be able to make the decreases according to the pattern (except for the armhole, where two stitches less per side should be cast of).

If you learnt knitting skills by experimenting you might like this book as much as I do. The author is a rather old lady that has her own ways. But since I’m not a native English speaker I don’t bother about the complaints of an odd language.