My stocking stitch has been wonky for a long time. Not, I think, forever, but definitely a while. I remember my mother remarking on it (she rather liked it, I should say), and I don’t think we’d knitted in the same room since Covid. You can see it in the picture: after the waggly lines of garter stitch on the cuff, there are a couple of rows where the stocking stitch shimmies right and then left, the tails of each stitch crossing over each other rather than lying flat next each other.
For a while I thought it was just something about the way I held the yarn, or something like that, just one of those things. Then I started knitting socks, got my head around knitting in the round, and suddenly my stocking stitch was flat and well-behaved. Hmm, I thought.
When you’re knitting flat, you have to knit the front one way and the back the other. To make stocking stitch, you knit (needle goes through the stitch from front to back, left to right) on the right side and purl (back to front, right to left) on the wrong side. But when you’re working in the round, you can just keep knitting and knitting and knitting, no purl required unless you’re doing something fancy.
So, like an inadvertent elimination diet, my knitting in the round had revealed the problem. If the knit stitches were fine, it must be the purl. Some time after this (because actually I much prefer knitting in the round and didn’t have any flat projects) I went back to the books. And there it was. All these years, I’d been taking the yarn clockwise to make the purl stitches, and it should have been anticlockwise. You can see in the picture the moment I tried it the other way.
Or maybe not. That’s one of a pair of sleeves, you see, so I had to do the second one to match, and goodness knows I can’t remember which one was which.
I announced my discovery and a friend said this is in fact a recognised variant called combination stitch. So now I know.
What I don’t know is when I started doing it. Have I always been purling backwards? It’s possible. But switching to anticlockwise felt very natural, so much so that I had to keep stopping to check that I was doing it right now. So did I start out doing it by the book? If so, when did I switch? Do I have enough old knitting projects still extant to find out? Am I really that bothered? Probably not, to be honest, but it’s interesting how the brain can accept that of course things are a certain way when in fact they might not be that way at all.
Do you know, I do quite like the look of it.
