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Sunday, February 11, 2018

Knitting -- Adventures in Argyle 2 changing colors -- or not

No, you haven't missed anything. I posted about starlings last week.

So how many of you have already finished your Argyle top?

I'm serious. If all you were waiting for was a pattern, you got it last time and if you went old-style and have your seams all sewn up, that's terrific. Comment on this post with a link to a photo of your work. Encourage some others to try it.

Me, I ran into some issues that I'll tell you about in a couple of weeks and I got backed up, so for those of you who want to knit your argyle pullover in the round, let's keep going.

So here are instructions from my basic pullover to start us off.

1.  Cable on your hem and join leaving a long tail.  You'll see why you need that in the next part. 
2.  Do your rib and knit one round above that.
3.  Get a bobbin of the diamond color and knit one stitch of that right above the tail, then knit your rib color around to where the next diamond goes. For every diamond in your pattern, you need to add in one bobbin in that color and make a single stitch for the base of the diamond. Make sure these are evenly spaced.

Now you are back at your tail where the first diamond is. In the second round, the diamonds need 3 stitches.
Knit into the base stitch of the diamond in the same color. Knit one more stitch in that color.

Now use a Fair Isle technique to lock the colors together so there aren't any gaps around the diamonds.
Pick up the next stitch knitwise.
Wrap the diamond color around the needle THEN
Get a bobbin of the rib color, put a loop around the needle THEN
Unwrap the diamond color so it locks in the rib color but disappears to the back of the work AND
Pull the rib color through.

Knit to the next diamond.
At the last stitch before the bottom of the diamond, use the same technique to lock in the diamond color, drop the rib color yarn, and do the other two stitches for this round of the diamond.
Add a rib color bobbin to get you to the next diamond.

Keep this up for the whole round.  When you get back to your first diamond, make the third stitch in the round.
When I finished, I had ten diamonds, and 9 bobbins of each color, plus a ball of yarn in each color that I was using instead of buying any more bobbins.

At this point you will need two more techniques.

You are going to turn and purl the next round, and I will show you how to not leave a gap.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2020 All Rights  Reserved

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