Tuesday, March 5, 2019

Mosaic Knitting

Lately I found lots of information about mosaic knitting on the Internet. But it's an old technique. Barbara Walker mentions it in her Treasury of Knitting Stitches. I have book 2 that has no charts only description. Then I recently bought her Mosaic Knitting book with lots of interesting charts. There is a book by Kathleen Kinder too, that I don't have and a chapter in Susan Guagliumi's Handknits by Machine.
Here is a triangle scarf I made with mosaic knitting.
Mosaic knitting is a tuck or slip stitch technique. There are always two identical rows and yarn changed every two rows. By changing the yarn that had tuck or slip stitches those stitches look as if they were knit with the contrasting color in the row with the other color.
Patterns are drawn in a chart that shows the design, like the following picture.
knitted picture

chart

You read it from the bottom right. Row 1 and 2 are dark color (shown in black) The black dots in a dark color row mean knit stitches, the white dots tuck or slip. Then going up row 3 and 4 are light color rows. Here the white dots mean knit stitches and the black one's tuck or slip. Drawing this in DAK the first 2 rows start on the right side with a tuck stitch, then knit, then tuck, then 3 knit stitches ...
Row 3 and 4 are light color yarn and start with 3 knit stitches, then 1 tuck, one knit, one tuck .....
In DAK tuck (or slip) stitches are the non selected needles, here shown in white, the selected needles shown in black knit.
Here is the DAK stitch pattern.

This looks very different from the mosaic chart on top, but is the correct stitch pattern.

For the triangle scar I made the pattern 400 st x 400 rows, did a horizontal and vertical border with this pattern. For the middle part its just 2 rows tuck, knit, tuck knit, and then 2 rows knit, tuck, knit tuck with the other color. That shows up as vertical stripes.

Here are a few more scarves I made.








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