More of the former binary sweater was knit up into a lap blanket by Knitting Sensei on her Ultimate Sweater Machine. Although finicky and somewhat cantankerous, the USM knit four square feet of stockinette in about three hours. That ain’t bad!

It makes me feel kind of like a little old lady, but I love draping it over my lap at work (when no one’s around to see). Shut up, it’s warm!

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Here, Darth Tater presents the “Split Granite” stitch. This is a handsome stitch I picked out of my copy of The Big Book of Knitting Stitch Patterns. It’s a little fancier than garter or moss stitch, but not so complicated that I lose track and mess up if I’m knitting while watching a movie. I like it, but it does tend to curl pretty badly.

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I made swatches, so many swatches. I applied the scientific method (observation, hypothesis, prediction, results). I thought I had solved the problem, through some mysterious process, by knitting backwards (knitting where I should purl, and vice versa).

But it wasn’t until I thought I had put the mystery to rest, and sat down to work on my next project (another Fibonacci scarf in garter stitch) that I finally solved it, for real. And the Fibonacci scarf #2 wasn’t even biasing!

The scarf was twisting. After only an inch, I could see a distinct corkscrew develop. After six inches, it was unmistakable. Something was really and truly, quite obviously, wrong.

But what?

I went back to basics. There’s only one thing to a garter stitch - knit stitches, endless rows of them. So maybe I was knitting wrong. This seemed implausible - nay, laughable - but I’m an open-minded person, and it was the only reasonable explanation.

I looked at these diagrams carefully, but it looked fine to me. Then I googled, and finally found Lucia’s article on twisted knit rib. I don’t know why - it didn’t seem to have anything to do with my actual problem - but I read the article anyway.

Lucia mentioned “knitting into the back loop” to produce a twisted stitch. And by “back loop” you mean…. something different… from how you usually…. ohhhhh.

I went back to the knitting diagrams and looked a little more closely. Very very closely. I held my needles up to the screen, and slowly, fumbling, made… my very first un-twisted knit stitch.

With a sinking sensation, I clicked to read the instructions on how to make a purl stitch. Yup, been doing that one wrong, too.

So there you have it, people: if your knitting is biasing or twisting, try making sure that you’re making the stitch correctly. I know it sounds stupid, but hey.

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