Knitting -- leftovers, a new stitch, and housewares

This isn't so much a new stitch as making a project with the double knit stitch I found in that 1892 Butterick book.

I had leftovers of Palette yarn from old projects. Palette is a nice fingering yarn and I thought I could get at least a couvre pied out of what I had. 

So I cast on 400 stitches to a size 3 needle with a 40 inch cable. The double knit is K1/Yarn to front/Slip 1 purlwise/Yarn to back and on the next row, knit all the slips (which  look like knits on the wrongside) and slip all the knits (which look like purls on the wrongside).

You do not need to do seed stitch or ribbing to keep the edges from curling.

A full skein of Palette does 27 of these double rows of 400 stitches each. 27 rows gives you just about 3 inches, so if you want a six foot long blanket, you need 24 balls of Palette or 5,544 yards of leftovers. With my leftovers, the blanket turned out to be 30 inches wide (400 stitches) and 36 inches long. All the white stripes are 9 rows. Everything else is what I could get out of what I had.

Double knit takes a long time to work. You actually have to work both sides of a row to get the pattern to come out right. But it's harder to make a mistake on than Eye of Partridge. The mistake I made most often was to pick up both the "purl" and "knit" stitch to wrap and sometimes it took me 20 stitches to realize what I did, depending on what I was watching on Youtube at the time.

Let me know if you can come up with any patterns other than stripes. I tried to do color work with a really simple two-stitch pattern and it was a disaster.

With its double layer, this stitch gives a VERY warm result, even warmer than the two-color work of Fair Isle because every stitch is doubled, unlike the base color parts of Fair Isle which don't have a second layer of yarn behind them. But if you need warmth, it's fabulous.