More crossed stitches

 I have been working on crossed stitches for a while now - there were little swatches, some approaches did not work, some sort of worked. So, I stared doing bigger swatches to see if the approaches might work with a lot more practice.

This last week the swatches were hats. And, I woke up this morning feeling like I had been doing contests with Bruce Lee on who could do the most pushups on fingertips. I knew the feeling - my tools were wrong.

I had been using 7" pointed 2.25 mm steel needles.  I went back to the tool chest, and dug out the Shetland Making Pins I bought a long time ago and had not used for years and years. Fourteen inches of stiff, polished, pointed, steel; 3/32" in diameter.  They went into a knitting sheath that hangs below my belt.

An Edison moment; the right tools for knitting a hat from 2-ply woolen yarn with crossed stitches. 

The take away- - Old School Tools work for Old School Knitting.  I think this is the reason that crossed stitches have been less popular since Victorian knitters tried to do away with traditional knitting tools.

As usual, when I try something new, I get part of it wrong!

 It is perfectly possible to knit cross stitch / twisted stich / plaited fabric with blunt needles (and a knitting sheath.  It can be done as flat knitting or in the round. Just try every possible position and angle between the needles, and the last combination you try will work very well. With 1.5 mm blunt needles and dark 1,700 ypp thread, it can even be done in the dark, The blunt needles pop-in where they should and make it easy to feel what is going on.

As Cassandra said, "Beware of Greeks Bearing gifts, and knitting cross stitch in the dark".  Well, if  she did say that, she would have gotten the last half of it correct; and of course, she was under the influence of Apollo - god of Sunlight. 😊

In the last few weeks, I have ruined a lot of  yarn learning to knit cross stitch. Actually yarn is cheap compared to the satisfaction of working this little math problem out for yourself.  And, much of that yarn had been set aside as practice that I never intended to use on a real project.

Set up a swatch, and track (in your knitting journal!) how you  enter the stitches in each row, and which direction you wrap the needle, and how this row affects the next row.  

Done thoughtfully and purposefully, it can be done faster than the time you would spend in a class on the topic. 

The hard part is getting good at knitting cross stich because that involves breaking habits and building new muscle memory. This is where most of your "waste" yarn will go.

And having broken habits, all of your knitting will slow down for a while.  This does not bother me - I am changing knitting  patterns to take advantage of the virtues of cross stitch, and I ultimately expect to produce better objects faster.