Tonight four of my children will be sleeping under my roof, which makes me feel like all's right in the world. They are sitting at the dining room table with Elwood and playing Sheriff of Nottingham, a game in which each player tries to sneak contraband past the crooked sheriff. It stresses me out a little just listening to them play, because it pushes my rule-follower buttons. You mean the RULES say I'm supposed to LIE and SNEAK? That doesn't make ANY SENSE!
I have been knitting instead. Remember when I told you that the election broke my brain? I tried to start a pretty happy brioche project that night and I just couldn't manage it. Today it was supposed to be a diversion in between stretches of grading, but I wound up not doing a lot of grading. I submitted a manuscript at lunchtime and something in my brain said, "Well, that's probably enough work for one day. It's Thanksgiving break, after all."
So let's talk about brioche stitch instead of grading. Do you know about brioche stitch? It is an unusually pleasant and squooshy way to knit, and it yields a warm pretty fabric. Or at least the fabric is pretty if you do it right. Brioche stitch is much more complex architecturally than plain-vanilla knitting, because you're either wrapping a stitch in a second strand of yarn or working a stitch together with its wrap. Oh, and you have to work each row twice, so that each stitch can get the treatment that it didn't get the first time. In ordinary knitting, dropping a stitch is like dropping a pea into a glass of water at the dinner table. It's mildly annoying, but you can fish it right out. In brioche stitch, dropping a stitch is like-- remember in Fellowship of the Ring when Pippin dropped a stone into a well in the mines of Moria? Kind of like that.
But I found this nifty brioche pattern and I decided to make the two-color version in a pair of luscious Malabrigo yarns. One is a deep velvety saturated purple, and the other is this gently variegated blue-green with pops of lavender and also of gold. It reminds me of the gardens at Giverny. This picture does not do justice to the colors, or to the pattern.
Oh, HA, I did not know until I went looking for the pattern link that the texture-y bits were inspired by Princess Leia's hairdo. Here I thought they must be something floral.
Another distinctive thing about brioche knitting is that it gives you a reversible fabric. Cool, huh?
This is the third time I've used brioche stitch. I made Stella a hat, and there was a brioche section in the shawl I wound up giving to a friend a couple of years ago. But I've never quite figured out how to sort things out if they go catawampus. Learning to fix knitting mistakes was unexpectedly freeing: you can try anything if you know how to repair your mistakes. Brioche stitch, though-- so far I just stare at the mistakes and think, "Huh, that's not what was supposed to happen." In knitting as in life, the "Maybe I Just Won't Make Any Mistakes" plan is never a sensible tactic. It seems likely that knitting up 200g of fingering weight yarn in brioche stitch is going to offer me some opportunities to figure out what to do when things go catawampus.
We'll see how that works out, I guess.
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