Eureka!

Woohooo!! The wrap-and-turn problem is solved! I’ve been doing a little recon as I prepare to knit the Lizard Ridge Afghan, and I was saying yesterday that I’d gotten into some rough terrain with my picked up wraps from the short rows in the pattern. As you can see in this photo, the wraps I picked up from the purl side were all kinds of fugly.

Picked Up Purl Side Wraps 2 adj

 

I knew there had to be a better way, but I couldn’t quite work it out. Thank goodness for Google and Liat Gat over at KnitFreedom. This video has the answer. It’s all a matter of how you pick up the wrap and put it on the needle.

With the “normal” way of doing things, when you pick up a wrap from the purl side, the wrap ends up on the “right side” of your work, and there it will sit, strangling its stitch, forever and ever, amen. What you want to do is HIDE the picked up wrap on the “wrong side” of your work.

Liat shows exactly what to do in her video, but basically it’s this. As you look at the work from the purl side, you reach your right needle over and behind the left needle to pick up the wrap and then bring it up onto the left needle and over to the left side of the stitch it was wrapping. With this orientation of wrap to stitch, you go ahead and purl, and voila! No more fugly!

Picked Up Purl Side Wraps copy

 

Even unblocked and with my maiden “backwards knitting” attempt throwing the stitch tension completely off, these picked up wraps look worlds better than the original ones, don’t you think? Liat thanks Never Not Knitting for turning her onto this technique through the Cedar-Leaf Shawlette pattern, so I certainly want to thank her too. Aren’t knitters the best?!! I just love how everybody passes the good stuff along.

I’m still working on the cutest ever doggy sweater, among other things. We’ve got errands to run in civilization later today, so that will mean a fair amount of knitting time in the car (yayyyy!!!!). I’ll see if I can get a couple of fun knitting-in-public pics while we’re out and about and post those here on Sunday. Happy Knitting everybody!

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