Soooo… you want to be a better knitter?  Probably one of the single biggest wholesale improvements you can make to your knitting is:  use edge stitches.
Unfortunately, this is one of those knitting things that sometimes I hear complaints about:  that no one explicitly spells out this for you in a knitting pattern — you’re supposed [...]

You may remember that one of the things I recently finished was a pair of short socks for DH.  Unfortunately, they turned out to be short in multiple places:  one of which was the leg, as intended, and one of which was the foot, which was not.
And you may also recall that Sheryl’s remark opened [...]

The rest of the old Buddhist saying is, "…then the teacher will appear."
Well, usually I’m the knitting teacher — but in this case, I became the student. 
Last Friday, I was grousing about the short black socks I had knitted for DH while on the trip in New Zealand.  Although I had faithfully copied the original socks, [...]

Sometimes, the little tricks are the best ones — simple yet effective.  Here’s one that has cropped up a few times lately in various classes I’ve been teaching.
Actually, I posted this once before, a while ago — at the end of this post, which is way more than you ever wanted to know about binding [...]

Well, I’m sure both of you have done Kitchener stitch, or grafting, in the usual way:  it involves a tapestry needle, at least one reference book, and some quiet time alone — not to mention gnashing of teeth.
Wanna try another way?
But first, a warning:  for those who openly mock my habit of collecting of old [...]

Hey gang – time for yet another thoughtful and informative post about the vocabulary foibles of the knitting world!
I was considering writing about my experiences at Flock and Fiber, but I seem to have come down with some sort of cold since the weekend.  And while I’m starting to feel better, poor DH got it [...]

Hoo boy, it’s been a while since I posted a good, solid, technical article.
(Just in case you are wondering — yes, this does mean that my personal UFOlympics are sort of at a standstill.  I’ve spent a lot of time working on #5, the Rowan vest:  trying to figure out how to trim out the [...]

OK, even I can admit that this short row heel obsession thing may be getting a bit out of hand.
But there’s another little gem of genius here worth sharing, in my efforts to eliminate the inelegant flap-and-gusset-style heel from the face of the earth.
I’ve seen where some people, especially men, prefer the fit of an F’n’G heel, because [...]

Every so often, as I’m teaching a new knitter, the question comes up:
 

What is the point of purling?  Why don’t we just ‘knit’ all the time?

This is actually a really, really good question, if you think about it for a minute.  Why DO we bother with purling?
After all, a ’stitch’ is just a loop pulled [...]

So — a few weeks ago, I wrote about sock heels.  How I don’t really like flap-and-gusset style heels, and how the EZ afterthought heel usually seems too small for me, and how I’d been checking out all kinds of short row heels, in my search for the Best Short Row Heel of All Time.
I did [...]

So, flipping through a Japanese knitting book of pattern stitches one day, I came across a twisted rib and cable pattern that I thought would make a VERY handsome sock for DH…which it did.
If you’ve never seen a Japanese knitting book, let me tell you – very sensible system they have, those Japanese.  Everything is graphical.  [...]

So, while I haven’t been blogging much in the past week or so, I really have been busy.
One of the things I’ve been working on is a sock pattern for my friend Deb, whose blog lives over at www.fearlessfibers.blogspot.com.  She dyes bee-you-tee-full yarn and sells it on [Etsy ->] – which if you haven’t visited is a very fun [...]

The most important piece of knitting advice I ever found was in the Holiday ‘87 issue of Vogue Knitting.  (I must have found it while I was knitting those lousy boyfriend sweaters.)
A wonderful knitter wrote a letter to the editor which made a very strong impression on me, and it greatly influenced my knitting success.  In [...]

Binding off.  Well, there’s not a whole lot to say about that, is there?  I mean, you’re done knitting, you bind off, right?
Pshaw!  Of course not!
While I don’t think quite as many techniques exist for binding off as casting on, there are quite a few.  And the CO and BO edges can make or break an [...]

One of the biggest problems with knitted ribbing is the relative lack of stretch in the cast-on or bound-off edges.
 Ribbing is almost always at the edges of a garment, and we usually want it to stretch as much as possible. If the cast-on or bound-off edge is really tight, it can even break when the [...]

Many of my students get confused over the directive to “slip” a stitch.
To slip a stitch means simply to move it from one needle to the other without doing anything else to it.
That’s it. That’s all. Once I had a student arguing with me that “it can’t be that easy!” but believe me, it is.
Here are [...]