Our homework for the July City and Guilds class was on stitches which distort the fabric, slits, slots, dropped stitches and elongated stitches.

My first two samples are in black, which unfortunately didn’t photograph very well. The first shows vertical slits in the fabric. Each section is knitted separately and then they are all united in the row that joins the slits. I gave each of the interior sections a one-revolution twist, one in each direction, before the join.

The second sample is of horizontal slots in the fabric. These are made like large horizontal button holes.

Then we moved on to dropped stitches (intentionally that is). The extent of the dropped stitch is controlled with a yarn over. The yarn over is worked at the point you would like the dropped stitch to stop unravelling. I like to mark the stitch I am going to drop with a safety pin so I can keep track of it as I am knitting. You can make it travel across the knitting using balanced increases and decreases, make a decrease on the side of the marked stitch that you would like it to bend towards, then make a corresponding increase on the other side so that the total number of stitches remains the same. For this sample I only used one dropped stitch. Since the stitch is wider once it has been dropped, I made two decreases at the start of the dropped section, one on either side of the yarn over. Then made two corresponding increases once I had dropped the stitch at the top of the section.

Next onto more elaborate patterns. These are all from Barbara Walker’s A Treasury of Knitting Patterns.

First Vertical Drop Stitch:

It was interesting to see how this looked with different yarns. They are all wool, apart from the top purple which is 75% wool, 25% nylon. I think this pattern actually looks quite good in the yarn with a slight variation of colour, but the very multicoloured yarn at the bottom is too much and obscures the pattern.

Next elongated stitches. Elongated stitches are created by wrapping the yarn more than once around the needles when a stitch is created, then dropping these extra wraps on the next row. First Simple Elongated Stitch:

Then the slightly more complicated, Twisted Elongated Stitch:

They were all fun to do, though I am not sure whether I would incorporate the slits or slots into a garment. They might be fun if you wove ribbon through them. I find the change in texture interesting when you have a line of elongated stitches or dropped stitches and I’m sure you could create something which used that to good advantage