Saturday, December 29, 2007

Zig-zag bands

includes 7 illustrations. Click any illustration to enlarge
Knitting better bands the TECHknitting way:
ZIG-ZAG BANDS
Way back in October, as this series on better bands and cuffs started, I told you that garter stitch does not curl. (Neither does seed stitch. Neither does ribbing.) Yet you know from experience garter stitch bands on a stockinette fabric DO curl. You see, it is the stockinette fabric to which the bands are attached which curls. (For more about WHY stockinette curls, click here.) The end result is that the bands on your scarf, sweater or afghan are prone to flipping AND curling.

So far in this series, many cures have been recommended: rolled edges, or seaming the garment or steam blocking and/or ironing. Today, yet another recommended cure: zig-zag bands.

The fact is, that bands want to curl along the edge where the bands meet the stockinette. If you break up the line, you'll have less curling. The same is true about flipping: If you break up the line where the band meets the stockinette fabric, you'll be less likely to have flipping.As you can see, the scarf in the photo above is a stockinette stitch scarf with a garter stitch border all around. Yet, the scarf does not curl, and the borders do not flip, and here is why:
  • The rolled stockinette edge along the bottom of the garter stitch horizontal (bottom) band adds stability--by curling up so markedly, the rolled edge counteracts the inward curl of the stockinette fabric in the middle of the scarf.
  • Zig-zag bands both vertical and horizontal, where the garter stitch meets the stockinette stitch. By interlacing areas of garter stitch and stockinette, the "fault line," for flipping/curling is eliminated
  • A slipped selvedge helps prevent future ruffling along the outside vertical edges of the garter stitch border. (Click here for more info about slipped selvedges.)
  • Also, the scarf has been steam blocked.
Due to these four tricks, the scarf photographed above does not curl very much, and nor does it flip. Below is a close up of the corner, showing details of the curled bottom edge knitted in stockinette which rolls up below the garter stitch part of the bottom band, a bit of the zig zag design in the garter stitch part of the bottom band and a bit of the the zig zag side edge.One more close-up for good measure:


* * *
Here are two diagrams showing how to make these non-curling bands. The diagrams show garter stitch, but you can readily adapt these for seed stitch.

* * *
One last note: The zig-zags have to be in proportion to the amount of stockinette stitch in order to provide a non-flipping edge. An empirical rule of thumb seems to be that ON A GARMENT WITH TWO EXPOSED EDGES (SCARF, AFGHAN) the peaks have to extend approximately 10-15% of the way into the stockinette along each edge you want to prevent from rolling, in order to prevent flipping. So, in a a 250 stitch afghan knit all in one piece, for example, that would be a side zig-zag which protruded 25 to 38 stitches into the stockinette at the tip of each peak, along both vertical edges. The bottom edges also have to have zig-zags with peaks just as high as the side zig-zags in order to prevent flipping. Obviously, the wider/higher you make the tip of the peaks, the less likely is flipping, but the minimum seems to be about a 10-15% protrusion. Of course, that means that you have to adapt the above two diagrams to the width of your garment.

FOR THE FRONT BANDS OF A CARDIGAN (one exposed edge), a rule of thumb seems to be that peaks extending about 1.5 or 2 inches into the stockinette will do the trick, and this is true regardless of gauge or yarn weight.

* * *
This is part 7 of a series. The other posts are:
How to knit better bands and cuffs, part 1: Opera and Soap Opera (November 1, 2007)
*How to knit better bands and cuffs, part 2: Why cuffs and bands are wonky, and what to do about it (November 14, 2007)
*How to knit better bands and cuffs, part 3: Hems and facings:(November 22, 2007)
*How to knit better bands and cuffs, part 4: Knitting shut hems and facings (December 9, 2007)
*How to knit better bands and cuffs, part 5: Sewing shut hems and facings (December 23, 2007)
*How to knit better bands and cuffs, part 6: Your steam iron: a mighty weapon in the fight against curling and flipping (December 25, 2007)
*How to knit better bands and cuffs, part 8: Provisional tail method of 1x1 tubular cast on (January 11, 2008)
*How to knit better bands and cuffs, part 9: Tubular cast off for 1x1 ribbing (it's pretty) (January 15, 2008)
*How to knit better bands and cuffs: the wrap-up (January 23, 2008)

--TECHknitter
(You have been reading TECHknitting on: zig-zag bands)

Tuesday, December 25, 2007

Your steam iron: a mighty weapon in the fight against curling and flipping bands (and why bands want to flip in the first place)

Today TECHknitting has a new use for an electrical appliance you probably already own: your steam iron. A stem iron is a mighty weapon against curling and flipping, so part of this post takes a detour into WHY bands want to flip in the first place. But before we plunge into all that, a brief look at the iron itself.
 
Steam irons, 101
Steam is vapor from boiled water. In order to make steam, your iron boils water inside a little chamber. Water contains minerals. Sometimes, the mineral load of the water is high enough to cause problems. If you always use the same pot or kettle to boil water, you already know whether boiling your water leaves behind mineral deposits. If your kettle stays clean regardless of how much water you boil in it, you have no worries. But if your kettle is mineral-encrusted, then so will the inside of your iron be. 

 A new iron will not give you trouble, even if you put in high-mineral-content water. This is because when water turns to steam, it leaves behind its mineral load. But as the inside of the iron's heating chamber becomes coated with minerals, the steam channels get clogged, and the iron starts spitting bits and flakes. Where I live, the water is hard from dissolved limestone, and tap water in a steam iron leads to whitish powder spraying out with the steam. In other areas, more staining minerals might be in tap water: iron (the metal) dissolved in water would cause your iron (the appliance) to stain your clothing in gray or brown splotches. 

Therefore, if you have an new steam iron, keep it new by topping it up only with distilled water--a gallon from the supermarket will last a LONG time in most households. If struck with a sudden yen to start steam ironing, boiled COOLED water is a near substitute. Boil the water, let it cool in the pot, and pour the cooled water off, leaving the minerals behind. DO NOT USE BOILING WATER--first, you will hurt yourself, second, you might wreck the plastic parts of the iron, and third, the water does not shed the minerals until it cools. 

 If your iron is old, you should also use distilled (or boiled, cooled) water. Fill the iron with fresh water and steam-iron some old towels on the highest heat setting and the highest steam setting. Run at least three or four refills of water through the iron (this won't take that long--steam irons have tiny reservoirs). This will get the worst of the minerals out. If the iron seems to be getting clean, you might trust it on your woollies, but if you have any doubt, prudence dictates a pressing cloth or a flour-sack kitchen towel between the iron and the woollies. (This is also a good idea to prevent scorching, more, below.) 

 Another problem with irons is gooey sticky stuff melted onto the sole plates. This arises from ironing plastic-y dust onto clothes, or ironing synthetics on a high setting: they melt. The cure is iron cleaner. The old fashioned remedy was to turn the iron off, then rub an old paraffin candle end on the sole plate. The melting wax dissolved any sticky, ironed-on goo, and the excess wax was ironed off onto an old rag. Nowadays, you are probably better off with the commercial remedies. If you do resort to candle ends, do it CAREFULLY--hot wax is a BURN hazard. It is also a FIRE hazard as are old waxy rags--make those single use. And of course, with any remedy, home made or commercial, be sure to iron all the residue off onto rags.

GETTING THE CURL OUT (or at least taming it)
Stockinette curls. Perhaps the most annoying curl of all comes when a stockinette item is edged with a non-curling fabric--an edging which is SUPPOSED to stop the problem. Up flip the sweater hems, bands and cuffs, or down they curl, or maybe both. The one thing they don't do is lay flat. 

A tangent on band flipping and curling

Typically, a garment pattern will call for a band of a non-curling fabric to be knitted onto a stockinette fabric. The chain of logic behind non-curling stitch bands is this: the garment designer notices, correctly, that stockinette stitch curls like mad, but that garter stitch (seed stitch, ribbing etc.) does not curl or flip. 

"Ah ha!" says the designer, "I will put a garter stitch band on this stockinette item I am designing, and then the stockinette fabric will be tamed, and the garment edge will not flip or curl." 

Logical, yes. But still wrong. 

See, garment edge itself will not curl up. However, the whole garment continues to curl, taking the "non curling edge" right along with it. The fact that the bands are curling and flipping is due the stockinette fabric to which the non-curling stitch bands have been attached, rather than with the bands themselves. 

One last note before we plunge in: this post lays out the steam-iron method for dealing with already existing curled edges, like the sweater bands. This NEXT post shows how to knit edges less likely to want to curl in the first place.

 
Helpers in the fight against curling: CHEMICALS, BLOCKING and STEAM IRONING

Chemicals, blocking and ironing are all actually very common knitwear treatments, albeit commercial knitwear. Think about it: don't you wonder why machine-made items of stockinette consent to lay flat, while hand knits want to curl so badly? The answer is partially because machine-made knits are generally knit from finer yarn than handknits, and so the thinner yarn from which they are made can exert less curling force. However, that is not the whole answer. 

 In fact, machine-made knits have the same tendencies to curl as hand knits, but industrial processes like giant tentering (steaming/stretching) machines overcome this tendency. Machine-knit fabrics are also often relaxed with chemicals

Hand knitters faced with curling or flipping can take a page from commercial knitting's playbook. For chemical treatments, fabric relaxer is a good start.  Evidently the relaxer is essentially a wetter, which lets moisture into the fabric fibers, causing them to swell a bit, and de-kink. Once damped with fabric relaxer, the item can be further wetted with a spray bottle of water, or even a quick trip to the sink for a brief soak, and this treatment can be followed by wet-blocking or steam blocking. 

As far as mechanical processes, it is not just industrial knits which are stretched. Hand production knitters of the past have traditionally employed extreme blocking. Those picturesque sweater forms (wooly stretching boards) in the old photos of the Shetland Islands had a very serious purpose, and couture knitting also employs these techniques.  Of course, extreme blocking like this is not only going to tame curling and flipping, but it is going to make the fabric grow. Commercial knitwear factors this in, but knitting purposely small followed by serious stretching isn't part of the program for most hand knitters--lace shawls being the exception.

And, this is where the steam iron comes in. It is the most mighty weapon against curling and all the other tricks hand knitting gets up to. Now, a steam iron in the hand of a knitter is capable of producing three things:
  • steam,
  • heat, and
  • pressure.
Each of these factors has the capacity to alter hand knit fabric, sometimes fatally, so the first rule of using the steam iron on your woollies is BE CAREFUL and amp up the power gradually. 

STEAM
On wool and acrylic, the steam has as nearly as much effect as the pressing, so be sure that the STEAM setting on your iron is set on "high" right from the start. It may be that steam with hardly any pressure at all will do the trick, as it does on kinked yarn .This is called steam blocking, and if it works, you're all set. In other words, on acrylic and wool, the ideal is to start with a steaming, billowing iron held just above the fabric, and only if this does not work, would you next progress to light dabs, and only then to pressure. If your item is silk, bamboo, cotton--anything but acrylic or wool--do NOT start with billowing steam. Instead, start with the absolutely lowest steam AND the lowest heat AND the least pressure. Increase the steam in the same manner as you increase the heat and the pressure: in tiny increments.

Once your garment is nice and steamy, spread and smooth it with your hands (careful of the hot fabric though!) If needed, keep steaming and spreading, steaming and smoothing until the garment looks the way you want and the bands lie flat--or flatter, at any rate. Then, let it dry in the smoothed and stretched position. The dry time for steaming is far less than for wet blocking, but it still does need some time.

HEAT
Heat is a powerful tool on fabrics. Most obviously, a too-high heat can burn your precious hand knits. Even at non-burning temperatures, Heat can "set" woolen fibers--kink them permanently. It can melt acrylics, and can change the very composition of these and other fibers. Therefore, be careful. If the garment is woolen, be careful of scorching--maybe use a pressing cloth or flour sack towel between the garment and the iron. If your item is acrylic (or another synthetic) use the cloth or towel PLUS be careful of melting--increase the heat by VERY slow degrees, and realize that non-wool, non-acrylic fibers are generally even less resistant to heat. SLOW is the watchword for increasing the heat.

 
PRESSURE
All knitting three-dimensional, so ironing has the capability if flattening it. When working on stockinette garment with garter or ribbed bands, remember that the bands have no tendency to flip. It is the stockinette which presents the problem. Luckily, the stockinette is far flatter than the garter stitch or ribbing, and less likely to show the effects of pressure. If you get as far as actually ironing the fabric, keep the iron dabbing lightly on the stockinette part of the fabric only, and the greater the pressure you are exerting, the more careful you must be of this.

 
COMBINATION OF ELEMENTS
For wool and acrylic, start with a fully steaming iron. Progress in pressure and heat carefully.  For other fabrics, start with the bare minimum of steam, and progress in steam pressure and heat carefully, increasing each factor, one at a time, in tiny steps. 

As to the interplay of heat and steam, most irons will give steam on the wool setting, but there are two higher settings, usually: cotton and linen. For hand knits, I can't think when you'd ever get above the wool setting for actually touching the fabric with the iron, even with a thick ironing cloth. However, you might get into the higher settings if you want to generate a lot of steam. So, if you're on the cotton or linen setting for the steam effect, turn the iron back down to wool setting and let a cool a little minute if you're going to actually touch the iron to the fabric.
 Steam ironing is a big gun--it certainly has the power to persuade curling stockinette to mend its ways, thus helping in the fight against flipping. But, there's a trade-off. The price for actually ironing at high heat, pressure and steam is a listless fabric. 

 I knew a production hand- and machine-knitter who HEAVILY ironed all her garments--and she made many, many garments over the years that I knew her. All those many garments did her bidding. They lay flat, yessiree, no question: never a curl, never a flip, no misbehavior at all, and the bands got up to no tricks. However, all those garments were oddly limp, with none of the spring normally associated with knit garments. 

--TK
* * * 
This post is part 6 of a series. The other posts are:
*How to knit better bands and cuffs, part 1: Opera and Soap Opera (November 1, 2007) 

ALSO RELEVANT:

(

You have been reading TECHknitting on: "Steam iron your knitting.")

Sunday, December 23, 2007

Sewing shut hems and facings (part 5 of better cuffs and bands).

includes 4 illustrations--click any illustration to enlarge
Today's post is about sewing shut a hem or facing: it is part 5 of the series "better cuffs and bands."

After the last post in this series (about knitting shut hems and facings) you may wonder whyyou might want to sew shut a hem. Here are three reasons to hunt out a large-eyed, sharp-pointed sewing needle and get sewing.

First, and most obviously, it is not always possible to knit shut a hem. Knitting shut a hem only works for items started on the same edge as the hem (a bottom hem on a bottom-up sweater, a top hem on a top-down sock). Knitting shut a hem on the cast off edge isn't feasible. 

Second, you can't knit shut a hem facing made of a different color. Why would you would want to knit a hem facing of a different color? 
  • plain old good looks. Have a look at the top of the man's sock in the photo below. From the outside, this is a practical black sock, suitable for business wear. But on the inside, it features a flaming red hem facing which makes its wearer smile when dressing.
  • Another reason why a hem facing might be a different color when you reduce bulk by knitting the hem facing of a thinner yarn. The birthday sweater (click HERE) from the last post had a thinner hem facing than the outside of the hem, and so do the socks, above--the red of the hem facing is a thinner sock yarn than the black of the sock body. It would be unusual to find a perfect color match between a thinner yarn and a thicker one, so this bulk reduction trick is often going to land you with a hem facing of a different color.



At the black arrow, you see that knitting shut a hem draws a little "collar" of the hem stitch (hem made in red) to the fabric surface (knitted in green). In the illustration, the red of the hem facing shows as a little collar around by each green stitch where the green and red come together in the blue "knit-together row." The knit-together row is illustrated in blue so you could see it easily, but even if the knit-together row were green, like the rest of the garment front, that little red collar of the red hem facing would still show around the base of every stitch in that row--not a nice look. Therefore, you cannot successfully knit shut a hem when the hem is knit in a different color than the garment. (Although, to be fair, you could get around this by knitting the top row of the hem in the original color!)

The third reason to sew shut a hem or facing instead of knitting it shut is that a sewn hem is less likely to flip.

 How to do it, bottom up

  • Begin the hem by casting on via the long-tail method. Alternatively, if you prefer to sew down live stitches, use a provisional cast on and plan to remove it before sewing up time, placing the live stitches back on a small gauge of circular needle.
  • Knit the hem. You may use the same yarn as you will use for the body of the garment, OR use a thinner yarn for bulk reduction (recommended). 
  •  If using thinner yarn, knit the facing loosely on the same number of stitches as you will knit the garment, using the same size needles with which you will knit the garment. The thinner yarn, knit loosely, should make a hem slightly narrower than the garment, which will help prevent flipping.
  • If using the garment yarn for the hem facing, knit the hem as deep as you would like it, then purl one row. If using the garment yarn for the hem facing, also consider casting on and knitting the hem on slightly fewer stitches (5% or so) than the garment, increasing to the necessary number of stitches TWO rows before the purl row. Again, having the hem slightly narrower than the garment helps hold in the flip. 
  • If using thinner yarn for the hem facing, switch to the garment yarn when you are one or two rows shy of the ultimate hem depth. This helps prevent the hem from peeping out. Work a row or two in the garment yarn, then purl one row.
  • The reason to purl one row is to make a nice fold, shown here.
  • After the purl row, you will be knitting the first row of the garment--that part which is on the public side of the hem--the garment front. 
  • If knitting the bands in ribbing, the facing should have been knit in ribbing also, in opposite patterns, so that they nestle together when folded. However, ribbed bands aren't as often lined as stockinette ones. 
  • If knit it in stockinette, sewing the hem facing to the back of the garment will prevent stockinette rolling as well as hem flipping. 

If working top down, finish the garment, knit a fold line, then knit the hem, then bind it off (recommended) or just work on sewing the live stitches. Again, consider using fewer stitches or using thinner yarn and knitting the facing loosely. The facing should not bind, and should be bound off loosely, but the aim is to make it slightly narrower than the circumerence of the body, to help prevent flip.

Whether working top down or bottom up, the below illustration shows the situation if the hem was bound off. 

On the illustration below, the knitting has been finished. The hem (white) has been folded up over the back face of the garment fabric (purple). The "knit" side of the hem shows, while the "purl" side of the garment fabric shows. Thread a sharp pointed needle with a thin yarn (in the picture, green). In real life, of course, you would not use a green yarn to sew up a white hem to a purple garment, you would use a sewing yarn as close as possible to the color of the garment face--the sewing thread is green in order that it shows in the illustration.


The action of sewing is as follows: with the sewing needle, reach under one arm of the long tail casting-on at the very edge of the hem, then pierce (skim) through the top of a purl "bump" on the target row--the row TO which you are sewing the hem. Draw the needle through, and repeat this action, adjusting the tension of the green yarn as necessary. Be gentle in your adjustment, you want to avoid any puckering on the outside.

If you are sewing down live stitches, the sewing action is the same, only you must take each stitch off the knitting needle on which it is held before sewing--a bit more tricky than sewing down a bound off edge. 

The photo on the left side of the illustration below shows the back of a sewn hem. The hem is made of the same yarn as the garment face, but sewn shut with dark yarn, to show the path of the sewing. The right photo of the illustration below shows the front of this same hem. Even though this swatch is stockinette, the sewn hem has tamed the both the stockinette roll and the hem flip. You can also see that the sewing does not show on the outside--this is the front of the same swatch on which the hem is sewn shut in dark yarn.


One final point: Hems combat "hem flip" best when the hem facing is slightly shorter than the outside of the hem and when the hem is sewn shut very slightly (1 row) ABOVE any ribbing or garter stitch on the outside of the hem.

* * *
This post is part 5 of a series. The other posts are:

*How to knit better bands and cuffs, part 1: Opera and Soap Opera (November 1, 2007)
*How to knit better bands and cuffs, part 2: Why cuffs and bands are wonky, and what to do about it (November 14, 2007)
*How to knit better bands and cuffs, part 3: Hems and facings:(November 22, 2007)
*How to knit better bands and cuffs, part 4: Knitting shut hems and facings (December 9, 2007)
*How to knit better bands and cuffs, part 6: Your steam iron: a mighty weapon in the fight against curling and flipping (December 25, 2007)
*How to knit better bands and cuffs, part 7: Zig-zag bands (December 29, 2007)
*How to knit better bands and cuffs, part 8: Provisional tail method of 1x1 tubular cast on (January 11, 2008)
*How to knit better bands and cuffs, part 9: Tubular cast off for 1x1 ribbing (it's pretty) (January 15, 2008)
*How to knit better bands and cuffs: the wrap-up (January 23, 2008)

--TECHknitter
You have been reading TECHknitting on: "sewing shut hems."

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Negative ease and positive ease

Two phrases much in the air on internet knitting discussions are "positive ease" and "negative ease." Do you wonder what these mean? You are not alone.

Ease is the amount of extra room built into a garment which allows the garment to slide over your skin as you move--it is the extra bit of room which stops your shirt from riding up as you lift your arm and stops your pants from tearing when you do something athletic. When the garment is larger than the person wearing it, the garment is said to have "POSITIVE" ease.

Logically, you would think that garments made from woven cloth need more ease than knitted garments, because woven cloth does not stretch as readily as knitted cloth does. This is true, but all ingenuity of the dressmaker's art is bent on narrowing the difference: darts, bust shaping, plackets, zippers, gores and slits are all devices which allow woven cloth to fit the body closely without tearing or ripping. Yet with all their tricks, the best that the dressmakers can do is create garments with NO ease: gowns so close-fitting that the wearer has to be sewn into them.

Knitters can go dressmakers one better, and make garments SMALLER than the person wearing them, garments with NEGATIVE ease. A knitted gown can be constructed which fits so tightly as to leave no anatomical feature unseen, and yet require no darts, slits or sewing to get into. (This is because knitting is stretchy, having a good deal of "reserve" yarn built into the fabric: for more info, click HERE.) When the garment is smaller than the person wearing it, the garment is said to have negative ease. You need not go as far as exotic gowns to use the concept of negative ease in knitting: hats are an every-day example of NEGATIVE ease: made SMALLER than heads, hats cling because they have to stretch to fit.

Despite the fact that knitting stretches, however, knitters are not restricted to garments with negative ease. The "boyfriend sweater" is a familiar example of POSITIVE ease: made BIGGER than the wearer, it should fit as if the wearer had borrowed the garment from a big fellow--her boyfriend. (Or maybe his boyfriend????)

It is not always the case that a garment with negative ease is better suited to flattering its wearer's anatomy than a garment with positive ease. A garment with positive ease is said to "drape" and this means that the excess fabric which creates the ease hangs in a potentially very flattering manner off the wearer's body. A shawl worn by a stately woman is a lovely example of a garment which flatters the figure perhaps better than a garment with negative ease could do. Garments with negative ease, of course, do not have any drape, they cling, rather than hang.

Knitted garments go in fads about ease, as do all other fashions. The "sweater girls" of the 1940's certainly wore garments with negative ease, and the fashion is now embraced as the most modern trend, spawning a raft of popular books. No doubt, the pendulum will swing back shortly, and close fitting garments will be considered SO last year, while baggy sweaters with lots of positive ease will be the most modern trend--indeed, the trend seems to have started already.

Ease and drape are not only about fashion, however, they are also concepts important to utility garments. Hats have already been mentioned, and hats with negative ease are indeed a familiar concept to knitters. Most socks are made with negative ease, and most cuffs, whether sweater cuffs or mitten cuffs, have negative ease.

For more information about ease and fashion (and the related concept of gauge) click HERE.

--TECHknitter
(You have been reading TECHknitting on "Negative ease and positive ease")

Sunday, December 9, 2007

Knitting shut hems and facings (part 4 of "knitting better bands")

There are two ways of tacking down a folded-over band. One way is easily done with knitting needles--today's post. The other way requires a sewing needle--that's the next post.

The knitting needle method of
knitting shut doubled-over
hems (and facings)

The knitting needle method of knitting shut hems is similar to a 3-needle bind off. The stitches in the first row of the hem or facing are knitted together with the stitches in the last row of the hem or facing.

Here are 4 illustrations:

1. (below) LOOSELY cast on the hem using the long tail method or the long tail method for LOTS of stitches (casting on is shown in red, below). Work the ribbing (shown in green, below) to TWICE the desired height. Arrange to finish your hem so that the long tail cast left over from the casting-on is on the left, and the running yarn (shown in blue, below) is on the right, as shown below.
2. (below) The live loops of the hem are on the purple needle. Pick up the right arm of each bottom loop onto a different needle, as shown in light blue, below. If the cast-on edge is a bit tight, use a smaller needle to catch these bottom loops. (Although this is illustrated on a ribbing hem, this also works on a stockinette hem, a seed stitch hem or any other stitch, and the action is the same--you pick up the same loop of the long tail cast on, and do everything else the same, too.)

3. (below) Hold the cast-on stitches on their light blue needle at the inside "behind" the live stitches on their purple needle. As you can see, the cast-on stitches on their light blue needle present LEFT arm forward when they are held inside-out behind the live stitches on the purple needle. Use a third needle (the golden needle in the illustration below) to knit together each live ribbing stitch with the cast on stitch held behind it, as shown below.
4. (below) The finished product: the "knitting together" row is shown in blue, the cast-on stitches which are caught into the back of the hem facing (the "inside" of the hem) are shown in red, the balance of the fabric in green. Of course, in real life, the row of live stitches in front and the cast row behind would be the same color, and the cast-on row would therefore not show on the front of the fabric, unlike the red cast-on stitches in the illustration below.

* * *

The finished product "in the wool" is shown in the photo at right.

By knitting the top and bottom of each column of ribbing together in this manner, the hem is fastened down in a folded-over manner, and no sewing is required.

However
, as slick as it is, this "knitting needle method" of shutting hems and facings has a limitation.

This knitting-together method has an incurable tendency to FLIP, and this is true regardless of whether the band is in stockinette, ribbing (foldover ribbed band) or any other fabric. Therefore this trick is best on narrow tubes (socks, sleeves) where the shape of the garment counteracts the flipping. You can try this on a hat, too, but it works best with deeper, longer hats--you may get flipping on a shallow beanie-type hat. The long runs and loose shapes of a bottom band or a front band allow a knit-shut band to get up to the kind of shenanigans it prefers: flipping straight over. Consider the sewing method to combat flip. 


* * *

We'll end this post with a Q and A:

Q: Why do you use a long tail cast on, instead of a provisional cast on for this trick?
A: Many knitters (most knitters, probably) DO use a provisional cast on, as follows: Remove the provisional cast on and put the live loops on the second needle (the light blue needle in the above diagrams). Holding the live loops at the back of the hem, use a third needle (the golden needle in the above diagrams) to work together a stitch from the front of the fabric (on purple needle in above diagrams) with a live loop from the back of the fabric, using the same method as shown above for long tail. However, if the hem seaming gives way, live loops will run out, whereas a bound off edge will not. 


sock top hemQ: What about the fold line? Are there any tricks for that?
A: Certainly. You can knit a simple fold-over hem as in the 4 opening drawings of this post. OR, you can knit a hem facing of stockinette, then create a single row of purl and then knit the outside of the hem--in a texture pattern if you like. The row of purl makes a lovely sharp edge for folding. The gray ladies' sock in the photo at left shows a stockinette hem facing, a purled edge row, and a ribbed outside of the hem. (For an additional image of a purl fold row, click here.)

elastic drawstringQ: Any other tricks with a hem?
A: You bet! A knitted hem is a tube--and you can run a drawstring or an elastic through it. Socks made with an elastic garter in the hem will simply not fall down--nearly all my socks are made this way--including the gray ones above. Here is an entire post about elastic in socks.

Another trick: This commercially knit sweater shows you can run an elastic drawstring through the hem. This is a a good idea for a heavy outdoor sweater like this high-end Norwegian ski sweater. The elastic helps hold the hem down plus combats flipping. 

Next post: SEWING down the hem on the inside.

--TECHknitter

You have been reading TECHknitting on knitting shut hems.