Knitting by Any Other Name is Still Knitting

 

I have been knitting for a very long time – not only because I am old but also because I started at a very young age.

There was no internet, and if there were books I was not aware of them, so anything I (and others like me) learnt about knitting was from our mothers and grandmothers. However you held your needles and yarn, you were knitting.

The age of the internet has put a name on everything so now it is not just knitting or knitting with your yarn in left or right hand. It is throwing or flicking or lever or cottage or eastern or eastern crossed or uncrossed or any of the myriad of made up names – usually made up by the people who did not grow up in the areas where this was the normal way of knitting. For them it was just knitting albeit in their native language.

Another name that has started to appear more often is the Finchley Graft. Which is a fancy name for grafting two edges together from the reverse side. I do this all the time on my socks and didn’t know that it had a special name. (It doesn’t need one.) And should it be named after me or all the other people who have worked it out for themselves? Grafting is where you create an extra row of stitches to join two pieces together. Toes of socks being the most common but also tops of mittens and recently I grafted the underarms of a cardigan. I am not going to go into the exact details of how to graft but very very basically you go into the first stitch on the front needle knitwise and the second stitch purlwise then you go into the first stitch on the back needle purlwise and the second stitch knitwise. Well, when you are doing this “new way of grafting for people who hate grafting” you go into the stitches on the back needle first knitwise and the second stitch purlwise then you go into the first stitch on the front needle purlwise and the second stitch knitwise. So what is the difference? There isn’t because you are creating a row of stitches. So why have knitters been convinced that this is the “new” method? All I can see on the demonstrations is that they are putting the darning needle through a back stitch and then the front stitch before pulling the yarn through and slipping stitch off the needle. Instructions for grafting from the right side usually have each move separate.And you can break down the Finchley method into separate moves the same as you can combine moves in right side grafting.

But, although I think there is nothing magical about this method, knitters are being told it is easier, so they just assume it is and forge ahead. Which is a good thing. Just don’t tell me this is not grafting.