Bistitchual

I don't know how common this might be, but I do my nalbinding (nålbinding/naalbinding/etc) quite a bit differently than any instructions show. I keep my working loops on a long long knitting needle, and hold that the way an English cottage knitter does. I use a small tapestry needle for my naal, and I mostly work with thinner cotton yarns. Since you can't wet splice those, I Russian join the segments together. The whole thumb-hold thing never really worked well for me; even when it went right, my fabric would be all loose. That's probably just a skill issue that I could overcome with time, but my way works now, so I stick to it lol. Also, it helps me keep track of which loop is which. If I'm doing it correctly, this ought to be Mammen stitch. I hope.

That said, the traditional way clearly works very well for most people! Look at this person's beautiful stitches.

Chances are, there's a chapter near you of some group dedicated to a specific niche textile. Many of these arts are a little neglected these days, so groups dedicated to them are usually really happy to get new members. Plus, they'll usually have something cool like "Guild" or "Society" in the name, which just feels neat to be a part of lol. This group linked here is having a Lace Weekend on 11/2-11/4, with lots of different crafts present. If I make it out there I'll report back, with pics.

At some point, we should probably add a page to the wiki linking to all the official needlecraft Guilds and Societies out there. Or at least all of them that we can find, they can be pretty obscure!

A weird thing about Tunisian crochet is that the flat and in-the-round variants are quite different from each other! Flat uses a singed ended hook, and round uses a double ended hook. Flat builds up stitches on the hook in one direction, and removes them from the hook in the opposite direction. Round builds up stitches in one direction, and removes them in the same direction, but off the other side of the hook. There are patterns you can produce in round that seem impossible to do in the other, and vice versa. Here, I'm trying to guess at one possible flat method to mimic this traditional in-the-round pattern.

So, intuitively it seems doable the standard way, at first. The beginning goes easy enough. You work forward in yarn color A, then tie in yarn color B and do your return pass in that. Now, you go to do the next forward pass, but gasp! The working end of yarn color A is still over on the other side of the work! You left it there when you tied on yarn color B.

One attempt I've seen done is to carry the unused yarn along the back of the work, but it's messy and makes for a loose fabric. I went another method:

How this goes is, you use the double ended hook you'd usually use for in-the-round. You pick up and remove stitches with the two ends as you would in the round, until you get to the other side. This is where it gets weird. Now, you do that exact same thing over again, except you do everything in reverse! The side of the hook you were using to remove stitches, now you're using it to pick them up. And the side you were using to pick up stitches will remove them. It doesn't feel great or intuitive, it's basically like switching from left handed to right handed or vice versa.

It works, but as you can see there's one more problem. The vertical ribs in TSS always tilt slightly to one side, but now the tilt direction changes each row! There is a way to fix that using twisted TSS stitches on alternate rows, but to make it more complicated, I also wanted to have a solid color border at the left and right. This is roughly how I thought it could go, combining this new method with the float method mentioned earlier for the sides:

So, incorporating all this, I tried it again. Here's the comparison, with LOTS of mistakes. It was eally hard to get the hang of lol. Check it out:

Usually tablet weaving is done with square tablets that have 4 holes, but 6 hole tablet weaving is known from various times and places throughout history. It opens up tons of possibilities for new color patterns and strength. The late great Peter Collingwood's book The Techniques of Tablet Weaving goes into some detail about it, but the patterns are quite daunting! As you can see in the pic, though these are 6 hole tablets, I'm only using 4 of them for now. Working my way up lol. Not even a particularly fancy pattern on this practice piece:

I couldn't find any hexagonal tablets for sale that matched what I wanted, so I 3d printed these ones. The design has changed since:

The pips around the outer holes helps you keep track of which thread you're on. The idea with the center hole is that you can put a star shaped rod through it that holds everything still as needed. I thought I'd be able to use the rod to make turning easier, isolate out individual tablets easier, etc. However, (obvious in retrospect) the threads just get wrapped around it and make it hard to remove after turning. Whoops!

I've since been told that you can use a central hole to give each plied warp of the finished work a core thread/wire for super strong fabric! So that's pretty cool.

Has anyone else experimented with non-square tablets?

First, for anybody unfamiliar with it, the basic idea is to create knitted fabric with a crochet hook, thus knit-hooking, or knooking. Anybody familiar with both knitting and crochet will know one of the major differences is that knitting keeps a whole bunch of live stitches open the whole time, while crochet keeps just one. Where crochet stitches are dependent on just the stitches at their sides, knit stitches are also dependent on the stitches above and below them. To achieve knitting via crochet, the basic steps are:

• Use what looks like a basic crochet hook, except at the back end there's a eye-hole, like in a sewing needle.
• Attach a length of yarn/cable/thread/etc to the eye-hole.
• Do all your picking up and transferring of stitches with one hook instead of two needles.
• Keep all the live stitches on the length of yarn at the back, which can be reached by the hook since it's flexible.

It's a relatively new invention, and still very niche, as one can tell from the fact that it doesn't even have it's own Wikipedia page. It only gets a brief mention on the wiki pages for crochet hooks and for knitting in general.

Now, the topic for discussion in this post is whether knooking is capable of, and suitable for, making it's very own structures. Is there a way, using what can generally be thought of as "knooking", to make a fabric that is not identical to either knitting or crochet? I've asked this question in the past, and one person took it upon themself to investigate further. They suggested:

...a knitting type stitch (by that I mean it should not close the stitch as in regular crochet but leave a loop on the hook/cord) but with some loop through loop drawing that requires the hooked end to make. What I'm thinking is something like a knit stitch through which you draw a loop (or more than one) like you were making a crochet chain.

Internet sleuthing hasn't turned up many results on this topic, it seems like not many people have really looked into it. If anyone has any thoughts, or has given it a try, or would like to give it a try, let us know!

I made this mostly as a way to practice as many Tunisian in-the-round stitches as possible. It is a pretty comfy purse though! The yarn is interesting, I found these enormous spools of it at Goodwill. It's very fine, maybe lace weight, except it's slightly fuzzy? It's not very strong but once it's worked up into a reasonably dense fabric, it'll hold up. Gives the finished object a soft and fuzzy feel.

There's no pattern, but it's very simple. Just work the body of the purse in-the-round as one big cylinder, switching types of Tunisian every few rows for coolness. Then separately make a thin, lonnnggg band of flat Tunisian simple stitch. Slip-stitch the band to the bottom of the cylinder to close it off at one end, and then continue stitching it up the sides of the cylinder. The excess band at the top becomes the purse strap. Overlap and stitch together the ends of the band to form a nice thick padding for your shoulder.

Tunisian in-the-round hooks are little harder to find than hooks for working flat. I really love the set I used to make this purse, but the company discontinued it! I've lost a few of them since then too...

This is a very versatile technique in which you use a special tool (a gripfid) to split the plies of a yarn, and then feed other yarns back through. You can do some pretty amazing colorwork and stitch patterns with it. Everything I've made so far has this very pleasant and unusual "squishiness" to it. Most commonly it's done with 4-ply yarns, splitting them in half each time, but there are tons of other variations. Linda Hendrickson's books on the topic have been a huge help! Something I do that I don't think I've seen mentioned elsewhere is dipping the free ends of the yarn segments into hot wax. This keeps them from fraying as you work, makes them easier to insert into the gripfid, and makes them less likely to come loose.

A bag made with interlaced sprang weaving, and a braided drawstring. Sprang weaving is amazing!! My brother abused the heck out of this thing for years and it held up really well. It's perfect for bags (and pants), because it's super stretchy width-wise and completely inflexible height-wise. I learned most of what I know from one of Carol James' books , but there's so much I haven't tried yet.
Basically, the concept is that it's like weaving, but with only warp threads and no weft. You start with a warped loom, but then you twist the warp threads across each other. Each row you (usually) twist the threads across each other in a different way. Like maybe on row one you twist each thread with it's neighbor, and then on row 2 you skip a thread and do it again so the pairs are different, then on row 3 do the original pairs again except twist them the opposite direction, etc.
In yet another example of modern historians wildly misunderstanding/undervaluing the "women's work" of ancient textiles, check out this amazing article on the history of tight-fitting colorful clothes! Spoiler, it was probably sprang.

Hi stitchers! I have a question for you, but I'll provide some examples/context first. So, depending on your crafts of choice, hopefully you'll be familiar with some of these.

First, the structure we most commonly know from (usually accidental) twisted knitting stitches. This same structure can be created through a technique called cross-knit looping, from the larger field of looping in general. And once more, it can also be created through the method of knooking. While the work is in progress, none of these techniques look anything alike, but the resulting structure is exactly the same, as seen here:

Second, the structure we most commonly know from the simplest form of tablet weaving. Each card/tablet holding 4 threads is spun, and in that process those 4 threads are plied into 1 thicker yarn. But at the same time, a weft thread is being fed between these plies, and locking each card's yarn to the next:

Well, this exact same structure can be created in reverse through a form (darning) of ply-spit braiding! Yarns that are already plied have their plies separated by a special tool, and a weft thread is fed through, connecting one to the next:

So finally my question to you: What other examples of this phenomenon have you observed? Textile structures that are generally identical, but created in wildly different ways. I really enjoy these and I'd love to hear about ones you've encountered in your crafting adventures!

As in bi-stitch-ual. I didn't come up with it though, there's a very popular subreddit by that name, and one whose presence I've sorely missed since moving away. While there are already a bunch of needlecraft communities in the fediverse, as far as I could tell, most of them are dedicated to specific popular crafts (knitting/ crochet/ cross-stitch/etc). That leaves a void for folks interested in, say, ply-split braiding. Or combinations of crafts, like knitted garments with tatted trim.

Also, since PieFed isn't exactly a 1-for-1 Lemmy clone, I figured it could use some of it's own versions of communities anyway.