Last week I didn’t do a Messy Tuesdays post because I had a falling-out with The Man over my untidiness and it felt wrong to celebrate or affirm the joy of mess when it was so obviously having a negative effect on my favourite person.

So this week I have mostly been tidy.

…like I said, mostly:

For shame.

This is the mess I’ve been making with my clothes since I left hospital. I basically haven’t really unpacked my hospital bag yet; it’s been taken upstairs since my downstairs bedroom was dismantled and I moved back upstairs but then it’s just gotten dumped in the wardrobe area along with a bag of miscellaneous crap, an empty suitcase and a huge pile of freshly washed laundry. People who are good at organising will be upset by the lack of categorisation taking place here.

Whilst busily not tidying my wardrobe, I have been working on some linen-stitch patterns. It was the wonderful Liz who suggested that for short colour-change variegated yarns something like Linen stitch might be a way of getting a good result from the wool.

Intrigued I looked up the stitch pattern and discovered that for linen stitch one does this:

Any odd number

Row 1 (RS): k1, *sl1 wyif, k1; rep from *
Row 2: k1, p1, *sl1 wyib, p1; rep from *, end k1

I tried out a few different approaches.

Approach #1: lengthways. (I think 23 stitches across.)

Knitting along a longer number of stitches means you get less obvious striping. When you slip the stitch with yarn either in front of behind the stitch, it kind of wraps the slipped stitch, which is what produces the woven effect. It’s very easy to forget yourself and slip into just doing moss-stitch, but if you keep an eye on yourself you can get great effects with the strands of yarn patterning across your knitting. Knit lengthways like this the slipped part and the knit part are almost always different colours, which gives a certain effect with your variegated yarn.

Approach #2: widthways. (I think 9 stitches across only.)

Going back and forth across such a small number of stitches makes a really dense fabric but you also get some very definite striping with this approach.

Approach #3: widthways with 2 different lengths of yarn. (Still 9 stitches across.)

I just did linen stitch back and forth but from 2 different balls of yarn, so as to diffuse the striping effect of the narrow knitting band.

Now to apply this systematic, analytical and ordering frame of mind to the wardrobe…