Double Knitting!

I'm learning double knitting, in yet a new way! I've done plenty of it like Beverly Royce wrote about, in the OOP Notes on Double Knitting. Very useful for skinny tubes, but I don't bother with it otherwise. Right now, I'm doing double knitting colorwork, M'lou style! Double Knitting: Reversible Two-Color Designs I'm really enjoying it. I want to do a cap, but I needed a gauge swatch, so, since Abe has refinished my old cribbage table, it needs some coasters...so here is the first.

the front

and the back.

I'm noticing a lot of unevenness...I think that many of the spots are from twisting the yarns together on the inside. The top bit has much less of this, and that was when I figured out how to make the yarns stay in the same orientation, and actually knit faster!

This is a really fun technique. You have double the number of stitches, and have to pass the yarn forward and back between each stitch, as you knit the stitches for the front, then purl the stitches for the back, working each pair, one in each color. SInce you use each color once for each pair of stitches, the tension problems I usually have when trying to carry two colors in one hand don't happen. So I'm doing this in Contental style knitting, because it's easier to pass the yarn forward between stitches.

I'm finding this hard to put down...I keep wanting to see what it'll look like when I get just one more row done. You can't see the pattern on the row on the needles, because it's doubled, with the reverse video interspersed, so you need to knit another row to see the last row!

I'm using sock yarn now, this is Knitpicks Palate. The cap will be in Regia.

I'm still chugging away on Ellen's sweater...but I've got 5 inches of stockinette to do, and I'm about an inch into it. It's in my bag, for my "out and about" knitting.