Tuesday, January 24, 2006

if you don't knit, you can skip this

i like to think of myself as fairly smart. i'm pretty quick on the uptake, and have taught myself a lot of things. also, i am crafty, so i figure i should be a smart crafty girl, right? not always. today while working on the hell* of my socks i realized i'd been making a fairly big mistake, which is why i had to rip it out over three times!

ssk=slip, slip, knit. i thought this was meant literally: slip a stitch, slip another, then knit one. what it really means is: slip a stitch, slip another, then knit those two slipped stitches together. it's essentially the backwards version of K2tog (which is knit two together). the way i was doing it wasn't decreasing a stitch, which is the whole point of ssk, and therefore i was running out of stitches to do my thing and making a lumpy mess! i felt pretty dumb when i figured it out, but better now that i realize my pattern might not be totally full of shit and that at some point this week the chances are good i will have a sock that i knit myself.

whew. also, that link has a handy video that show you how ssk should look.

*ha! i meant "heel" but "hell" works okay too.

(and! i got to hear maggie on the phone today. she's got lungs and is not afraid to use them.)

2 comments:

amanda said...

but you didn't know that i didn't know what ssk actually meant! i totally thought i did.

Anonymous said...

Ahhh, but why ssk when you can k2togtbl. That's knit two together through back loop...which is truely the opposite of k2tog. Looks exactly the same as ssk but not quite as fiddly.