I am a fairly new knitter and can’t figure what this means:
"With right hand needle, pick up(but do not knit) 7 stitches along the right side of the center section, 4 main color and 3 white (approx. every other stitch). Slip 9 center stitches to the right hand needle Purlwise (do not twist). With left hand needle, pick up 7 stitches along the left side of the center section (same as for the right side)
HUH??
I seriously have NO idea what that means!:shrug:
I have searched this forum for picking up stitches, and it keeps directing me to a video that won’t work!!
What you can do is hold the knitted piece in your left hand and pretend it’s a needle, insert your right needle into the stitches along it and pull stitches through as if you were knitting, but it’s actually not a knit row. When you get to the 9 stitches that seems like they’re already on a stitch holder or needle, just slip them purlwise to the right needle and pick up another 7 stiches on the other side of them - 3 in white, 4 in the main color, just as you did at the beginning. You should have 23 sts on the needle now.
It is my understanding that if you find the directions “pick up” stitches and “pick up and knit” stitches that those terms mean the same thing. You are basically knitting the stitches up, but they don’t look like a normal knit row.
Another way that you can pick up stitches that is fairly easy to explain is the following. Take one free needle and designate is as the left needle, and hold it in the left hand. Insert that needle tip into the spot where you would like to draw up a stitch, so that you now have a loop (or maybe 2, that is probably more likely), then insert your right hand needle into that/those loops (as though they were one stitch) as though to knit and simply yarn around by whatever method you use and knit a new loop up onto the right hand needle. IOW use the LH needle to establish a new stitch loop(s), that you now knit as a normal stitch. Then move the now empty LH needle to the next spot you want to your left and do it again. Pick up all you need that way.
I’m worried about the specific instruction “but do not knit.” Why go to the trouble of thus differentiating it? I think that’s bad pattern writing if the pattern really means “pick up and knit.”
If you pick up without knitting, it generally means to put your needle through the loops without drawing any new yarn through. I think that might be what is wanted here, since the following stitches are all slipped – i.e., not knitted.
But I’ve never actually done that. Would the result look something like inserting your needle in a destination row? That would be one way to get your needle in and pick up one loop per stitch.
If I were doing this pattern, I’d just pick up the stitches with my right needle, looping the yarn through. Actually knitting them would happen the next row.