Knit for Brains dot Net

Posts Tagged ‘Andrea Wong’

Wow! I just experimented with doing two-color, fair isle knitting with the Portuguese style and it works great! Easier than I thought. I’ve seen Andrea Wong’s sock video where she demonstrates fair isle knitting on socks, but she does the second color English style, which I don’t like and it would just slow me down. If you are good at English then that might work, but you know me…

I tried it with my Portuguese knitting pendant that I invented, but with two hooks, and it worked great. No slowdown, just as fast as if I were doing just the one strand Portuguese style, and I found it was as easy to do right side and wrong side. I had seen another video on fair isle for socks using two knitting pins, but I think it was also socks and was done wrong side only…? I was afraid the yarn would tangle or something because i was turning the work but it took care of itself and I had no problems.

Anyway, I was so excited I went and bought a web cam so I can do a video of it. I will do it this weekend and post it here via youtube, so make a note to come back!

Now I need a fair isle project. I think I’ll go for a vest of some sort.

Andrea Wong is known for her gread DVDs on the Portuguese style of knitting and travels to teach it as well. I did a wikipedia search for the phrase “portuguese knitting” and got a surprise. In the list of results was an entry for the word “andrea”, stating that in the Romanian language it actually means “knitting needle”! How about that. The Romanian version of the name Andrea is spelled “Andreea” so as to distinguish it, but it doesn’t mean knitting needle in that spelling.

Small world of words.

I am very pleased to say that the first comment (it’s attached to the Knit for Your Brains – Really! post) my young blog has earned comes from Andrea Wong herself, author of the DVD Learn How to Knit Portuguese Style, with which I learned to knit that style, one of the two I favor.

I wrote to Andrea with some questions to clarify yarnovers in her style and she kindly replied as follows:

Andrea Wong created the Portuguese Knitting DVD. Visit her site to order.

“Purl- YO-purl: When you finish the first purl you have the yarn below right hand needle. Use your left thumb and flick the yarn counterclockwise around needle and purl next stitch.”

There you go. It was easier than I thought. I was deliberately wrapping the yarn around the needle but it seems yarnovers in PK are almost automatic.

By the way, you will get a k-yo-p yarnover if you don’t move the yarn under the needle before doing the pearl stitch. I haven’t tried yet, but I betcha a p-yo-k yarnover is done by not putting the yarn on top of the left needle before doing the knit stitch.

Thanks Andrea!