*New to me, anyway!
I recently designed several patterns for a new yarn company called Our Back 40. They sell gorgeous 100% alpaca yarn sourced from American farms and produced in mills in the U.S. This yarn is really a luxury to work with and to wear, and it's perfect for accessories such as the Cabled Winter Headband (2nd photo), Cabled Infinity Scarf (3rd photo), and the Cabled City Mittens (shown above). Unfortunately the patterns are available only as part of a kit (yarn + pattern) at the moment-- although the kits are a lovely indulgence, should you be inclined to treat yourself (or someone else)!
And during the process of developing the headband and scarf patterns (the scarf is just a longer version of the headband), I discovered the "duplicate stitch" or "contrasting color" method of grafting, which I am super excited about! As you can see in the above photo (first 3 photos copyright Our Back 40), the headband has an allover cabled stitch pattern. What might be less obvious is that the stitch pattern is actually worked not quite sideways, but on a diagonal, with the band shaped by increases along one edge and decreases along the other, so that the finished band before seaming is actually a trapezoid. The problem with this was that the seam would not be a short vertical one at the back of the band, but a longer diagonal one that would be harder to hide or ignore.
And I have never liked grafting and never been good at it; I'm not a sock knitter, and so any grafting I've done has usually involved either fixing a nasty mistake or seamless sweater underarms, along with unsightly beginnings and endings, excessive amounts of time, and muttered chanting. And I had heard that grafting of ribbing was especially daunting, and maybe even impossible to do perfectly (and the cable pattern is based on a 2X2 rib).
A recent post by Techknitter about the contrast color/duplicate stitch method of grafting pointed me in the right direction. This method immediately made sense to me, because you use a row of stitches formed by contrasting waste yarn as a guide for your grafting yarn. There are no knitting needles in the way, and no trying to remember or figure out how each stitch should relate to the loops of yarn around it, and once you are done, you simply remove the waste yarn. When I decided to try this technique, I also added a 2nd color of waste yarn, so that the line of stitches you are trying to follow with your tapestry needle stands out very clearly. To summarize the set-up briefly, you cast on using one color of waste yarn, work a row or two (these rows just hold your contrasting yarn loops in the proper position), switch to your contrasting waste yarn, work for one row in pattern, then switch to your main yarn. You then work along (on your cowl or whatever) to the end of your piece, leave a long tail for grafting, join contrast waste yarn again (on the SAME pattern row as the first row of waste yarn, if you are doing any kind of stitch pattern), work one row, then switch to your other waste yarn, work a row or two, and bind off. You then graft away (see below for more on that).
After carefully perusing Techknitter's posts on grafting, I realized that even though she (and others) stated that it was not possible to graft ribbing without a half-stitch offset (without heroic measures and/or sacrifice of stretchiness, anyway), this was only because she (and others) were talking about end-to-end grafting, where the two pieces of knitting are going in opposite directions-- the kind of grafting you do for a sock toe. If you are talking about grafting the ends of a continuous loop, where the knitting is going the same direction on both ends, you can theoretically graft ANY stitch pattern perfectly. And while for ribbing or lace, this would be a painful and frustrating (and MENSA-worthy) activity using the traditional Kitchener stitch, with the duplicate stitch method, it becomes... well, maybe not easy, but doable. (You don't see a seam on the headband, do you? It's not just out of sight in the photo; there isn't one!)
So at this point I've tried it on the above cabled stitch pattern; 2X2 rib; and "true" lace (lace stitches every row, that is). And WOW! I'm even enjoying it! So I've made my first ever technique videos (written descriptions and still photos just didn't seem sufficient) and posted them to YouTube. Note that the videos form a 3-part series, and the first one is at the bottom of the page. I suppose there's a way to embed them here but I haven't figured out how.
I'd like to post better photos soon, but here are a couple of photos of that lace pattern ("Milanese Lace") I was talking about: the first halfway done, and the second with graft almost finished.
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