I am a bit confused. Through my book and web reading I have found lots of referrences to double knitting/dk but they all seem to mean differrent things. So far it seems to have meant:
A particular weight or type of yarn
A type of knitting that has the same pattern on both sides
Knitting with 2 yarns at the same time.
Please explain
Yep, it can mean all that. Though knitting with 2 yarns at once is more often referred to as double stranded knitting. And double knitting doesn’t have to have a pattern, you would be knitting a double thickness with both sides have a RS facing.
It’s usually fairly obvious which is meant - DK yarn is thinner than worsted and heavier than sport weight, and will be used in patterns only where the yarn needed is given. Double knitting will involve a k1, sl 1 type of pattern and double stranded will say to use 2 yarns at once.
It seems to me that it revolves around manipulating 2 sides at once.
You can manipulate 2 sides on straight needles to form a tube out of a single strand.
You could double knit with many different strands to make a lot of vertical stripes intarsia style, do many strands fair isle style or fake a fair isle style by reversing a 2 color design’s colors from side to side.
Theoretically you could “double knit” an infinite numbers of layers, but I guess that would be triple, quadruple, etc knitting.
My guess is double knit yarn is called that so you can have the double layer without adding as much thickness.
I drew this to explain why it will make 2 sides to someone. http://www.flickr.com/photos/mykknit/3322550631/
My guess is double knit yarn is called that so you can have the double layer without adding as much thickness.
Not quite. Fingering weight doubled (knit 2 strands together) is equal to DK weight yarn. Fingering was used mostly for baby items and still is, but if it was doubled made nice warm adult sweaters. This was common mostly in the British isles years ago and explains why DK weight hasn’t been around too long in the US.
Well that doesn’t make sense. Double Knitting has been around for ever so all they were doing by calling it that was causing confusion.
They should’ve called it Double Fingering.
Here I always thought it was like how those cheap machine made hats are warm even though they’re thin vs how hot my <----- hat is causing few people to double knit with worsted so they made one in between that and sport.
They didn’t call it fingering weight way back when, it was just knitting yarn. So when it was doubled it became double knitting weight.
That makes better sense.
In New Zealand double knitting weight yarn is 8ply or the equivilent of 2 strands of 4ply.
So I am not as daft as I thought - it does have differrent meanings.
Because much of the yarn in Ireland is imported from the UK that would explain why I am seeing so much DK yarn. I am off to the library to find a Yarn Encyclopedia.
Irishmam