Knitting: Embellishing Starts When You Choose Your Yarn

KNITTING CORNER

Knitting with embellishment (Photo – Alex “Skud” Bayley).

Sometimes you want to knit something plain and unadorned. Sometimes you don’t. That’s when you knit up an embellishment.

By Robin Southworth

Embellishing starts when you choose your yarn. Yes, yarn is an embellishment. The choice of yarn is what makes the difference between a simple grey sweater and a pink fuzzy object of admiration and lust. What stitch you choose is also an embellishment. If you change from a plain-but-serviceable garter stitch to a seed stitch, you’ve embellished. Adding notions embellishes, too. Ribbons, buttons, satin flowers, or pearls are things you can add to embellish your knitting. Crocheted edgings, too, are also embellishments.

What else is an embellishment?

Entire lines of books have been written on the subject. Nicky Epstein has a series of wonderful books on embellished knitting: Knitting on the Edge, Knitting Outside the Edge, Knitting Beyond the Edge, and so on.

You can knit embellishments on the ends of your garment. A cabled turtleneck crowning an otherwise unassuming sweater. A strategically placed grouping of pearls on an elegant garment. An edging in a contrasting stitch.

You can think of your knitting as a canvas. A place to put embellishments on.

Embellishing in your knitting. You can always add embellishments while you knit. Adding color, like the dots on a sweater. Add bobbles on a child’s sweater. Eyelet’s at the bottom of a garment, then turning the hem at the eyelet row gives a picot trim.

There are all kinds of embellishments to be found out there. Go look on-line…Pinterest or even a Google search can yield up some wonderful results.

Now let’s embellish something!