I decided that it would be fun to learn a new knitting technique, so a little while ago I purchased “Knitting Brioche” by Nancy Marchant. This week I finally had the chance to sit down and play a little. It turned out to be quite fun, and I’m definitely going to have to experiment a little more with this technique. Basically when you work a row you only work every other stitch. The other stitch is slipped, but instead of putting the working yarn in front of the slipped stitch (like with linen stitch) or behind the stitch (like in Mosaic knitting) you put the yarn over the stitch and the needle, so you are creating a yarn over on top of the stitch. On the next row you knit (or purl) the yarn over and the stitch together as one stitch, and slip the stitches worked in the previous row while creating another yarn over on top of it.
Nancy’s book is filled with illustrations to make this process eminently clear.
Because you’re essentially working each row twice, with the yarn running along the row twice, the fabric becomes thicker than regular knitting.
The brioche book was filled with a number of new abbreviations, for the brioche stitches. My favorites by far was brk1 (brioche knit one stitch) and brp1 (brioche purl one stitch) – because in my mind they came out as “bark one” and “burp one”. :-). So I may not be a master briocher just yet, but I have barked and burped aplenty in the past few days, and I have a few swatches and a piece of a scarf to prove it.
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