Steeking Technique: Crochet Reinforcement

TRANSCRIPT Steeking Technique: Crochet Reinforcement

You can see in this example here, this is a sweater that I started that I don’t think that I’m ever gonna necessarily finish but you can see that I also planned out a checkerboard here for my steek and in this case, this is five stitches wide, so this is a five-stitch checkerboard pattern and what I aim to do in this case is I would crochet up each side to reinforce these stitches and then cut up the middle stitch. So basically if I have five stitches wide and if these were stitches one, two, three, four and five, so if I were going to cut up this steek, what I would basically do is I would cut up the middle of column number three and I would basically apply my crocheted reinforced stitches to the right leg of column number two and the left leg of column number three and then again reinforcing the right leg of column number three and the left leg of column number four. So, doing a crochet reinforcement on one side and a crochet reinforcement on the other side and then cutting up through the middle of number three. So, I’m gonna show you how to do that now.

Looking at the back side of this checkerboard pattern, this is where I’m sort of focusing my attention right now, so what I’ve done is what we’re gonna do is we’re just gonna do an example where we just cut up the steek of this corrugated ribbing section, so on the back side what I’ve done is I’ve taken any of the ends that have sort of come up like these ends and I’ve just woven them in so that it’s nice and flat and tidy and so, I wanna weave those ends in away from this checkerboard area otherwise when I go cut into it, I’m just gonna cut and make that a short end and then it might work its way out, so I wanna try and work it to the side and to the other side so that way when I cut through it, that none of those things will become short. I’m gonna use this heather purple colour here so that you can hopefully see my stitches very well but basically I’m gonna pull this apart so I can see this little bit better but what I’m gonna try to do is I’m gonna catch this left leg and this right leg in a stitch.

So, let me just fold this in half, so folding down the middle of my checkerboard pattern and what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna catch this leg and this leg. And crochet those two together. So, I picked up one of those stitches and then going onto the next stitch, going through this leg and this leg. And pulling up another stitch and then crocheting through both of those stitches like so.

So, doing that again. Going through one leg and then the next leg, pulling up another stitch and then crocheting through both of those stitches. And with this checkerboard, it’s easy to see where I’m supposed to go next because with those first legs, if the last one was black, then I know the next one is supposed to be plum and then alternating between the two colours, so I know which one is coming next and that I haven’t missed anything. So, the last one was plum, so the next one is gonna be black to start with. And plum. Pulling through another stitch like so. So, going in a little bit closer and showing you. Next one is this one. And black. So, you can see I picked up one leg of black and one leg of plum and again, making another stitch and then making another single crochet.

So, here you can see that I’ve finished running up one side of the steek with my crochet stitches. These are all my single crochet stitches. The nice thing about this is when I cut through here and I turn this to the back side and it will lie flat, this crocheted edging will lie flat. So, what I need to do is in order to do the other side of the steek, I’m gonna turn my work around so that I can again go up this side and make my crochet stitches again because if I

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. were to come the other way around, then the stitches would not look symmetrical when I go ahead and I cut it open and then make it lie flat.

So, I’m again gonna work from the other side, turning around my work and working from the other side and doing the same, going in and crocheting along the side of these stitches. So, as I crack this open, and I sort of open up where these stitches are gonna go, my aim is to cut right in the middle of that one stitch that I’m reinforcing and so, you can see that the next edge that I have to do is basically here. So, I’m gonna start reinforcing my stitches here. Now this side goes significantly faster because I can see where the middle of the row is or the middle of the columns is, the middle of those stitches are, so I can see exactly where I need to reinforce.

Fantastic, so you can see that these are the two columns that have been reinforced and these are the crochet reinforcements, so basically what I’m gonna do is I’m just gonna cut straight up this middle in order to separate the two sides. I’m just doing the corrugated ribbing just as an example to show you guys but we’ll just go ahead and just check to make sure that everything looks kind of free, and clear and we can go ahead and cut right through here. I’m using these tiny little scissors so that I can make small little snip cuts making sure with each snip that I’m not cutting into the crocheted reinforcement as well. And ta dah, it is all cut open, you can see that these stitches are basically bound with crochet edging and they are not gonna go anywhere.

So, now if you were to fold this to the inside, you fold your checkerboard to the inside and if you wanted to, you can just very quickly tack that down and then that would lie flat and that would be the end of that and then you could also pick up through here, through this last checkerboard just in the pink edging here, you could pick up and then that would be sort of picking up for your button bands or things like that.

So, that is that for crocheted reinforcement of your steeks.