A Knitting Riddle

What do you get when you knit a swatch of the most popular pattern on the internet, using the world's nastiest acryllic yarn?

You get a Crapotis! (Thank you, I'll be here all week. Please tip your server.)

Without going into the question of why I have such an awful yarn in my stash, I will say that I wanted to be sure I would be able to knit the ever-popular Clapotis pattern without having to ruin my beautiful Malabrigo yarn by frogging or tinking around with an unfamiliar pattern. So I grabbed this icky yarn and gave it a try, using the directions for changing the size. This swatch worked out to be, oh, 6 by 9 inches or so, and gave me enough of an idea of how the pattern would work to feel confident that I would be able to knit it.

I had a bit of trouble with the increases at the very end of a row; only one of my knitting books even mentioned the pfb technique, not that it was so named in the book, and the diagram and text were particularly unhelpful. Maybe that'll be another post some day. So I went to my friends at KnittingHelp.com and found this page; scroll down to the KFB section and look for the part on using this technique in a purl row. I practiced it in the middle of a row and found that helpful to get the general idea down before I tried to apply it at the end of the row. (I don't know why this was such a mental block, but 2 balls of yarn into my real Clapotis I am well beyond it now.)

I can also see, now, as I was pinning out the swatch, just why you hold the yarn in front when you slip the first stitch of a row, and slip it purlwise. If you slip knitwise with the yarn held in back, you'll get a much looser edge. I am still not sure why this would be so, but it is, and now I know. (And knowing is half the battle.) Now if only I could figure out why knitting books go directly from "here is how you knit a stitch" to "here is a pattern for your first sweater" without ever mentioning the stuff like this, I'd be a happy camper.

Real Clapotis pictures will follow, at some point.