Learning Twined Knitting

Well, last night, was Woolgatherer's night, and I learned something new. I learned that I'm doing twined knitting wrong. Which is too bad, because the right way is slower and it twines up the yarn into mangled little bits that are more frustrating to work with than simply allowing the ball to unwind from all the yarn twisting.

Here's why:

Store-bought yarn is plied in a certain direction. Spinners, like myself, call this twist an S-Twist. When doing twined knitting with store bought yarn, if you knit the way you should in twined knitting, (that is to say, twisting the back yarn over the top of the front yarn as it presents on the back of the work during the execution of the knit stitch) the yarn plies untwist. Therefore, you must spin a Z-twist yarn (or yarn that is spun in the opposite direction of store bought yarn) so the plies will not come apart and "re-ply" together along the length of yarns coming off the ball.

This does not necessarily make a store bought ball of yarn unusable, however.

Simply twist the yarns in the reverse direction (back yarn UNDER front as it presents on the back of the work), and the yarns will not unply. They will still twist around each other, which can be undone by allowing the ball to dangle. For a purl stitch, you would also work the yarn in the opposite direction--rather than back under front, you would work back OVER front, which is slightly more difficult to execute.

The change in twining (over to under) causes a tighter stitch, I think, which comes out looking as if the stitch is knit in the wrong direction--as if you wrapped the yarn around the needle incorrectly--causing the stitch to be mounted incorrectly, but it's not impossible to knit as an incorrectly mounted stitch would be.

Now, I realize that for many of my readers, all of this chatter about plies and twisting yarn and technical jargon is probably very boring to you, but if you ever step out into the world of knitting by other cultures and how they knit over the many years of the past, and all the techniques that are still out there, but FAR less well known, this information may be valuable to you. For others less so. I just thought it should be said, otherwise, knitters might never try twined knitting for the lack of Z-twist yarn and the frustration of trying to work twined knitting with yarn that simply falls apart at the needle, but wraps around itself between your hand and the ball--which is HORRIBLY FRUSTRATING (ask me how I know).

Of course, there is value in learning to spin and making your own yarn---

I'm just sayin'!