Advent Calendar Scarf 2014, Day 7

Hello:

The subtitle for today's post should be Nupps! Rhymes with Soups.  These balls are made by knitting into a stitch, yo, knitting into the same stitch, yo, repeatedly until you have a certain number of loops on your needle.  For today's pattern, it was 7 loops.  You leave those 7 loops on your right needle, and when you are purling back, you slip your needle through all 7 of the loops, and purl them together.  The front side part of a nupp is not hard, but it is very tough to catch all of the loops when you are purling them together.

Kristin has a link on the pattern to a video of how to make a Nupp with a crochet hook.  This is a much easier method.  Basically, you use a crochet hook instead of your needle for the front part where you are making all the loops, then instead of transferring all of the loops to the right knitting needle, you YO one last time, and with the crochet hook, pull the yarn through, then transfer just one loop to the right needle.  It is way easier to pull the yarn through with a crochet hook than it is with a regular knitting needle.

I finished one full repeat (there are 14 rows with 6 nupps in each section), but I was really unhappy with how my nupps looked.  Well, they looked ok, but they were all at the back of the knitting, and I couldn't find a way to pop them to the front so you could see them.

Again, I ripped the whole day section back to the garter stitch spacer, and started over.  I was at Panera's in Redmond for the Eastside Stitchers Sunday Morning group.  I think by this time, GwenS and I were the only people left at the table.  I really wanted to solve this problem before I left for home.  I decided to try making the nupps on the backside, instead of the front.  When I got to the stitch for the nupp on the front, I simply made a knit stitch.  On the back I made the nupp using a size 1 crochet hook, then after a bit of experimenting, I KNIT the next stitch instead of purling it.  This almost guaranteed that my nupps would pop to the front of the scarf, and stand out.

As you can see in the above photo, the Day 7 pattern involved Nupps. They are certainly not perfect, but I am very happy with how they came out.

Peace,
f1bercat
shaping the planet with little yarn balls called Nupps.