"It's not a trick, it's an illusion..."

Mar 18, 08:34 AM by Kate Bolin

I’ve gotten hooked on illusion knitting. With a pattern, two colours of yarn, and a simple knit-and-purl routine, you can create some utterly amazing things.

I started with Alice Bell’s Rosalind, which was a nice introduction to illusion knitting. A fairly simple pattern, a great concept, and I just happened to have two balls of Rowan DK wool available. So Toxic Rosalind was created pretty quickly.

Toxic Rosalind

Unfortunately, because I didn’t add garter stitches on either side, it rolls up, but it is incredibly warm and comforting, plus I know the DNA strand is there.

And illusion knitting piqued my interest. There’s so much potential — any pattern can become an illusion pattern. I started looking for things that would be quick and easy to knit up, but with a strong impact when you viewed it at an angle. I wondered about my iPod covers that I keep on saying I’ll make — would people want illusion knitted monograms on their covers? What about DNA?

I mentioned this to my friend Caroline. She looked at me, frowned a bit, and said “Why not an Apple logo?”

After hitting myself on the head for not coming up with that idea, I started trawling through the web for a knitted Apple logo. There were plenty of options, but I settled on the pattern available with Alison Hansel’s TechGuy Socks. A nice, simple Apple logo, easily converted into illusion knitting.

I made a practice swatch, blocked it, and it’s pretty darn amazing.

Illusion knitting swatch - at an angle

The next stage is to actually make the iPod cozies. I’ve finished one, save stitching it up and making sure it fits your average iPod Classic/Touch/iPhone. And I’m working on another one. Cotton 4-ply works like a charm with illusion knitting, and I’ve really enjoyed what I’ve been doing.

But I do have problems with most illusion knitting patterns. They have too much information. Rather than showing the pattern as it will appear, it gives you all the knit and purl information for each row, drowning you in stitches.

For example, the Rosalind pattern looks like this:

Rosalind Illusion Scarf Pattern

It’s a simple view of the pattern, laid out on a grid. You only work it on the wrong side, and, depending on what colour you’re on, you either purl or knit the grey stitches. It’s pretty easy to read, easy to work with, and doesn’t require a lot of thought.

But most illusion knitting patterns look like this:

Dark Mark Illusion Scarf Pattern

(Taken from the Dark Mark Illusion Scarf by Lindsay Henricks)

And that’s incredibly confusing to me. Do I really need the right side in the pattern, since it’s just knit stitch all the way through? Are little dots (or dashes, as the Stitch n’ Bitch books do) the best way to show which stitches to work on, just so you can have both colours of yarn represented?

I end up having to take graph paper and redraw the entire pattern, colouring in the stitches that need working and removing the right-side rows. While that’s good for small projects, it can be extremely frustrating for longer projects (as I discovered when I had to redraw the Dark Mark Illusion Scarf in order to work out what I would be doing).

It’s confusing and annoying and makes illusion knitting seem so much harder than it actually is. So here’s the easy version of illusion knitting:

  1. Grab two balls of yarn that are the same weight, but different colours — enough of a contrast to count. Use the more striking colour for your contrast colour — something that’ll really pop out.
  2. Take any image pattern you already have. Hearts, stars, green clovers, purple horseshoes, whatever. If you have an image for it, use it.
  3. Put a row counter on a needle, and cast on using that needle the number of stitches you’d need. Set your row counter to zero, and don’t touch it.
  4. Knit one row in your main colour. This is your right side knitting.
  5. Knit the next row in your main colour. This is the wrong side knitting. You’re knitting onto the needle with the row counter, and that’s how you remember which side is which.
  6. Knit the next row in your contrast colour.
  7. Purl the next row in your contrast colour. This means that on the right side, the main colour is bumpy, but the contrast colour is smooth.
  8. Knit the next row in your main colour. And now we begin.
  9. Turn your row counter to one, and look at your pattern. Since you’re on your main colour, you’ll be knitting the white space and purling the pattern. Count the number of stitches that need knitting, count the stitches that need purling, and follow the pattern. Most patterns are on grids that have a strong line every five stitches, which can really help. You focus less on the total number of stitches and more on the five you’re working on.
  10. Knit the next row in your contrast colour.
  11. Turn your row counter to two, and this time, since it’s the contrast colour, you’ll be purling the white space and knitting the pattern.
  12. Take a deep breath, follow steps 8 – 11, and just keep going. The pattern is there, the routine is simple, and you’ll have something awesome before you know it.

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