on knitting and wearing
In the Minamo pullover, I used Twisted Yarn Over increases, and not just the good old regular Yarn Over (YO) but the Backwards Yarn Over (BYO) too – but knit into the back leg and the front leg respectively to twist the holes shut.
Increasing like this might seem needlessly different when the usual Make One (M1) increases are a lot better known and usually suffice, but I think Twisted Yarn Over increases are better suited for the contiguous set-in sleeve construction.
If you’re familiar with stranded knitting, you’ve probably heard of the concept of colour dominance. I won’t be writing about how holding the yarns determines dominance because there are so many different knitting styles, and so many smart knitters have already written about it more eloquently than I could, but I do want to have a little look at how colour dominance can affect the look of a stitch pattern.
My Dashes hat uses a very simple and small chart, with the background colour, MC, making up the majority of the stitches – but not overwhelmingly so. Still, enough for me to prefer holding the MC in my most dextrous finger, which puts the CC behind it and therefore in the dominant position for me.
To have a good comparison between MC and CC dominance in this specific stitch pattern, I made this little swatch. Because knitting colourwork flat is the worst, and because you’re meant to swatch in the round for items you’ll be knitting in the round anyway, a swatch like this is a great way to check your gauge and have a look at dominance while you’re at it. For this little experiment I cast on 40 stitches, with 20 stitches on each needle using the magic loop method. One needle I knit with the MC (background) dominant, and the other with CC (dashes) dominant. For gauge purposes you should definitely knit a bigger swatch than this though!
Because the stitch pattern is basically vertical, the stitches get very elongated (did you notice the gauge actually has less rounds than stitches per 10 cm / 4″?), and knitting with the MC background dominant can make the MC-only columns pop out visibly.
Being a left-handed “mirror” knitter is a little more challenging than knitting the conventional, right-handed way, but I think most of us lefties don’t mind trading in a little confusion for the comfort of doing something that feels more natural. After all, we’re accustomed to dealing with lots of tiny, mildly annoying little thing like the perpetual ink on your pinky, having to look around your scissors to actually see what you’re cutting, or carving up one wonky bread slice after the next, and let’s not forget, being called sinister (though let’s be honest, maybe some of us think being spoopy is kind of cool).
As I’m starting to write out some patterns that hopefully will be intelligible to other knitters besides me, I find myself doing the mirror switcharoo backwards, swapping my lefty instructions to the righty way. An overview of exactly what it is that that needs switching and what just stays the same seemed like a good idea, so for my own reference as well as for any fellow lefties out there, I decided to put together this list of what to do when following a regular knitting pattern as a mirror knitter.
