Knitting Inspiration - New Year, New Skills Part 1 - Brioche Knitting
I’ve seen this sort of thing cropping up a lot lately, and while it didn’t really strike my fancy at first, I think it’s grown on me quite a bit. It could be that I spent so many months heavily focused on texture, or that I’ve been making striped things recently, but I think what’s more likely is that my process knitter side wants a challenge. In the past year I’ve done a lot of new-to-me things and found myself muchly grown as a person as a result. It’s really that feeling of learning and accomplishment that I find most inspiring right now, so I’m going to dedicate the next few weeks to sharing a bunch of knitting things I’ve not yet attempted with the goal of having a learning experience with you.
Brioche knitting is Part 1 in this series only because it shares its name with a pastry (mmm…delicious word associations). I actually know nothing about it beyond its visual impact, so I’ve taken the liberty of pulling in some quick internet research (yes, I know that Wikipedia is hardly “research,” but I’m not getting graded on this)
Brioche knitting is a family of knitting patterns involving tucked stitches, i.e., yarn overs that are knitted together with a slipped stitch from the previous row. Such stitches may also be made by knitting into the row below (equivalent to the slipped stitch) and dropping the stitch above (equivalent to the yarn over).
The basic stitch of brioche knitting is the brioche-knit stitch, or the bark stitch (abbreviated “brk”), which consists of a knit-stitch knitted together with its “wrap,” a yarnover from the previous row. The brioche-purl stitch (or the burp stitch (abbreviated “brp”) is the same only for purling.
Each bark or burp stitch is followed by a yarn-front, slip-one, yarnover (yf-sl1yo). This sets up the bark and burp stitches for the next row.
In brioche knitting, it takes two “passes” to complete a single row of knitting, since only half the stitches are knitted each time. The other half are slipped. For this reason, it takes more knowledge to be able to count rows and stitches and measure gauge.
It’s made of barks and burps? WTF? Slipped stitches are familiar to me, but this whole business of tucked stitches and crazy extra yarnovers is just not clicking. I think I need a visual aid.
Webs has a video that shows just the basic brioche knit stitch. What the hell? Are those backwards yarnovers in there?
Here are two tutorials that manage to give instructions for a very simple brioche scarf without any barks or burps. This makes a lot more sense to me than the video tutorial, but that could have something to do with how distracting I find right-handed knitting.
Ahhhh, here’s a tutorial for brioche knitting in the round. Very clear photographs of barks and burps.
Okay, this is starting to make some kind of sense. I wonder if the two-color version just involves switching colors every other row. This works more or less like other slipped stitch knitting, right?
Right! Just like other slipped stitch colorwork.
It also helps to know how to decrease and increase.
This is looking a lot less incomprehensible to me now. In fact, I think I’m probably ready to just cast on something and learn by doing it (really the most effective learning strategy for someone as visual/kinesthetic as I am). Unfortunately, that will have to wait a couple of days until I’m done with my last gift knit, but I don’t mind if you want to get a head start.
Sources are, as always, in the captions. Fort those of you who employ some sort of wizardry to view tumblr on your mobile device, they are also below.
areudirty
vaporwave
snowghoul
andulkaphoto
annaxmalina
stormborns
