Knitting Patterns: Avoid Mistakes

Video Transcript

"So we talked about that ridge stitch which has a four row pattern repeat. When I said you want to read patterns through because sometimes patterns will throw things to you that say "at the same time" or "while doing this". One of the worst things that can happen when your knitting something is you're going happily along knitting and you didn't read it through which, even though I say read it through I don't always read it through. All of a sudden it says "while at the same time" so all the while you were doing A you should have been doing B as well. So, here's an example where they said, you know, they want you to do an increase every row, every fourth row five times more. So again, there's a bit more of our symbols. So sometimes what people find helpful is to write out the rows. So you can go one step further and write the ridge pattern out. So you'd have knit, purl, knit, knit. Then what you can do is circle every fourth row like that and you can write increase so that as you go through you can cross off or make a hash mark or whatever it takes to let you know what you're following 'till you get to the end. So here it said "repeat pattern rows 1 though 4 for 21 rows. So, I wrote the numbers one through 21 and then I want to increase every fourth row five times. So I circled the fourth row five times. That way you know what you're doing. Another thing you'll come across on is charts. The dreaded charts. With charts, you know, this is something that is definitely an advanced technique. The chart is going to give you a pattern. It will be a cable or some kind of raised stitch. So a pattern is going to tell you a chart and it'll tell you how many stitches wide it goes. It's going to tell you what you're doing and what all the symbols means. It's also going to give you the words involved. Some people prefer to read the words, some people prefer to read the pattern. What you do is you take a magnetic board or something or a sticky and you just run it up as you go so you know where you are."