While working on this garment, knitting left-handed in the Continental style I usually use with circular needles, I had patches of loose stitches. Sometimes, this was due to dropping the tension when doing purl stitches - I'm still developing my reliability with tension when switching between stitch styles.
However, during the arms holes and neck bands I realised how this was happening. (I knit faster than I think, it would seem...)
Here's a picture of how the tension is meant to be held when knitting Continental:
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| The wrapping and hold or traditional Continental knitting |
This yarn is lovely and smooth. in these winter months my fingers are slimmer, cold and smooth and the yarn just slips through like ribbon. Here's how I held it for this project:
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| The way I wrapped and held my yarn for this project. |
And here's how those loose patches turned up:
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| The ravelled loop already in my hand, and what the little blighter looks like when drawn out. |
As the garment is turned the yarn becomes ravelled*, sometimes into it's twist and sometimes against. Either way, a little loop sometimes evolves and travels towards the work as I knit. Soon, it's inside my fingers and I haven't even noticed it's there until it's too late, slackening my work - even just one or two stitches, and developing a loose bunch of stitches.
In my hurry with this project, I haven't taken the diligence to go back, unstitching suspect bunches and reknitting them with better tension. I also let my work space be very crowded, with bags, needles and my book, because I was keeping it from little hands. This meant the yarn got wrapped up in things sometimes - another tension trap!
The solution is to anchor the ball of yarn somehow, and some distance and gravity would suffice. So whether it's next to your feet or in a container, hang your ball low so that the yarn doesn't loop on itself before it gets to the thing that should control the yarn: your tension hand!
*yup, I choose to use that word this way
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