Introduction to Steeking and Superwash

TRANSCRIPT Introduction to Steeking and Superwash

Okay, so let’s talk about steeking and superwash. So what is steeking and why does it appear to be so scary? Well, since stranded colourwork is generally knit in the round on circular or double pointed needles, the fabric that is created is a tube. Now that’s great if you want to knit a hat or a cowl or a pullover or sleeves. All these things are tubes. But if you want to knit a cardigan, that’s not a tube and it’s generally a hassle to attempt to knit stranded colourwork flat. So, steeking is the process of cutting into your hand knit tube of fabric to cut it open and make it like a flat piece of fabric.

Now as we talked about in the previous video, working with untreated, natural wool is wonderful because the scales of the wool will naturally cling to each other during the fulling process. That yarn has a sticky tooth so that means that when you finish knitting the fabric and then you wash it, the wool yarns will stick to each other a bit and create a firm, nearly solid fabric. So that means it’s quite hearty and it’s gonna hold together and you can cut into this fabric without it falling apart.

Sometimes if you’re not entirely sure if the fabric will unravel when you cut into it, knitters will get out the crochet hook and they will reinforce the edges before cutting into the fabric.

Now what if you’re working with some slippery or non-sticky wool? What if you’re knitting with the ever popular superwash wool? Or if you’re doing stranded colourwork with cotton or something shiny or slippery like that? No doubt if you cut into your fabric, the whole thing will fall apart.

So in these cases, you can reinforce the edges prior to cutting with using a crochet chain or working a blanket stitch using a needle and yarn. My preference is to make really, really, really sure that the edges are not gonna fall apart and so I use a sewing machine and stitch along a vertical column of the stitches to reinforce the edge that way.

So you can see this old vest that I knit from a Rowan pattern, this is Rowan yarns. I made this many, many years ago. It’s called the Electra vest and it was designed by Louisa Harding. The pattern originally appeared in the Rowan magazine, volume 38. The original design of this pattern was to knit it flat in two pieces and then seam it at the sides and the shoulder edges. But in this case, I wanted to knit it all in the round so that it would be easier to do the colourwork. And as well, I decided that I didn’t want to break the yarn at the arm holes here or at the front because then I would have to knit colourwork back and forth for these two front sides of the vest and the back. So instead, I just continued knitting this whole thing as a big tube until I got to the shoulders. And then I machine reinforced the places where I would steek the fabric and then I cut right into it. And then I picked up along the edges and just finished the vest. So, it sounds super easy, right?

So there are a few fine points here that I want to talk about. The first is about the yarn. So I knit this vest using Rowan Yorkshire Tweed DK and Kidsilk Haze, as specified in the pattern and while neither of these yarns is actually superwashed treated, they’re also still a bit slippery as far as tweedy yarns go. And the Kidsilk Haze is a mohair and silk lace weight yarn and I didn’t think that was going to stick together very well because it was being

MODERN COLOURWORK KNITTING // FELICIA LO // SCHOOL OF SWEETGEORGIA 1 COPYRIGHT © 2019 FELICIA LO, SWEETGEORGIA YARNS INC. THESE NOTES ARE COMPILED BY FELICIA LO. PLEASE DO NOT REPRODUCE. knit at a relatively loose gauge. So that’s why I decided to machine reinforce all of the edges.

The second point is that in order to hack the pattern to create the steek, I had to look at how many stitches were needed in the pattern and then add a few more stitches where the steek would go. And then this would allow me to have sort of a one stitch column where I could reinforce that and then I would pick up my edge stitches out of that column next to it. So basically I cast on two extra stitches where the steek would go, mark those two stitches to show where I would cut later on and so if you’re knitting with superwash yarn or slipper cotton yarn, you might want to make an even wider steek to give yourself more margin just in case the fabric runs.

Finally, this technique is more stable if you are working with a fabric that has been knitted at a fine gauge and relatively solidly. If you use a large chunky wool with a loose gauge, it’s much more likely that your fabric will fall apart when you cut it. But give these techniques a try if you’re interested in trying out steeking. I would say that after I steeked this first vest, I felt confident in this technique and that you can absolutely be successful with cutting into your fabric. And the bonus is that you can make your knitting process so much more efficient and consistent if you simply just knit your colourwork in the round.