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March 28, 2008

Swallowtail Shawl: Nupps

I've finished the ninth row of the first Lily of the Valley chart on the shawl. I took some time and practise yarn and worked on the dreaded nupps for a bit. Because of that practise, I am not finding the Lily of the Valley pattern very complicated at all. It's mostly knit and purl, and the nupps are pretty obvious, so I hardly need to look at the pattern at all. Certainly I don't need to be as detailed about where I am in the pattern as on the budding lace, where I was always getting lost and having to go backwards to refind my spot.

Technorati Tags: crafts, knitting, lace, nupps

Nupps, in case you did not know, are apparently from Estonian knitting, so it looks like this shawl would be good practise for a more complicated Estonian pattern. Here's the transition into the new chart from the budding lace, and you can see the nupps adding little punctuation marks in there.

The pattern for a nupp is very simple, but practise is a bit more fiddly. On the knit side you k1, yo, k1, yo, k1 all into one stitch, to turn one stitch into five. On the purl side you have to p5 those five stitches together, and that is fiddly, because the needle doesn't want to go through that far. I followed a suggestion online and slid the piece down to work it over the cable of my circular needle, and that works really well.

So in fact this portion of the shawl is going much faster than the previous portion, even though it seems like much of the web is filled with people freaking out that the nupps are so difficult. You can't blaze through them, but they're more detailed than complicated.

Here I have a half-nupp (the red arrow at top) and completed nupp (the blue arrow). I spent a bit of time being super careful about lining the five stitches up nicely on the purl, before realizing it would all come out in a soak and block, anyway.

The one thing I think I could be doing much better on this is handling my tension. For some reason the first half of the nupps get very tight so I've been loosening up on my yarn, but that makes the final nupp very loopy. But, you know, first time nupper and all.

Posted by ayse on 03/28/08 at 2:28 PM