Double Knitting

For those who haven't yet come across this handy little technique, it lets you knit something, in the round, on two needles. While it is not going to challenge the use of circular needles, it is very useful for those little things that are a pain to knit on double pointed needles, legs for soft toys, small bags for ipods and phones, or in this case a little bag to hold my tatting.

This one is knitted in a 4ply sock yarn as I had some left over from something or other.

What you do is, first, cast on an even number of stitches.

Then you (knit one slip one) across the row. At this point you have knitted half your stitches and therefore worked half the round.

Now, work back, knitting the slipped stitches and slipping the knit stitches you worked before. One round complete.

Work about a centimetre.

You will notice that the purl side of the knitting is on the outside. Don't worry, you will be able to turn it inside out later!

At this point, gently pull the back and front of the knitting apart and you should be able to tell that your knitting is in two layers with an open centre.

A word of warning! If you knit a stitch you should have slipped, at any point!, your knitting will stick together and you will not have a hollow tube!

Apparently, when my mother was at school, about 1930, there was a fashion, at least at her school, for double knitted scarves. She knitted, and knitted, and it seemed to go on for ever. Then came the day when she should have been able to pull her scarf into a tube, instead of a flat piece of knitting. But, oh dear, it was caught together in lots of places, where she'd done the wrong thing. She was devastated and never felt kindly about knitting again!

There are techniques for increasing and decreasing, but I find them a bit of a nuisance, so I feel that this technique is most useful for a straight sided piece.

When I had worked the body of the bag, I slipped one set of stitches onto a needle and the other set onto a holder. This is the crunch point when you find out if you have really produced a bag or just a stuck-together-somewhere piece! If you want the knit side out, you can turn your work inside out at this point.

Now you can work each side of the top separately to form the hem and the cord casing.

In this case I worked stocking stitch to the top, put in a purl turning row, and worked back down, forming a double thickness hem which I stitched down in two places to form the cord casing. But there are any number of alternatives I could have used.