Foiled

I finished the last surprise gift. Click here if you'd like to see and your name isn't Rachel. I promptly cast on for another gift. It uses double knitting, which I've never done. The first row was pretty fiddly, and it took some work to figure out how to hold both strands of yarn, but after a frog or two I was trucking along.

When I'd done a few rows, I noticed something unexpected.

Double knitting is supposed to give you two thicknesses of fabric. Each side looks like stockinette, and one side is the reverse (in terms of color) of the other. Cool, right?

This doesn't look like stockinette. It looks like reverse stockinette. In non-knitter speak, it's bumpy instead of flat.

Huh.

To the Internet I went, where I saw a video of someone doing double knitting.

It was dramatically unlike what I was doing. The knitter in the video was moving both strands of yarn to the front or back of the work EVERY TIME she made a stitch, even though she was only using one strand at a time. Who would have thought?

I admit to losing my cool at that point. I frogged it, but then it kept getting tangled as I tried to rewrap it around the ball of yarn. I also admit to yelling, "For fuck's sake!" and throwing it across the room. It was at this point that Andrew looked at me with an eyebrow raised and said, "Maybe you should go change the laundry while I rewind this."

Yes, that's an excellent idea.

In related news, I'm knitting Andrew a pair of socks.

3-1 Ribbed Socks knit in Schoppel-Wolle Zauberball Starke 6, colorway 1289 1701