Just because there’s nothing in my world that doesn’t get tinkered with just for the distraction of the tinkering, I played a bit more with twist stitch directions last night, and found a minor refinement that (for me at least) improves the look of a left twist – the one where the rightmost stitch ends up on top of a 1×1 cable:

I know the photo is very hard to make out (blame my cheap camera and poor skills), but in the purple circle is a left twist that looks a bit pinched at the bottom. That was done the way described yesterday, the way that’s outlined in Walker and most other books:

• Identify your two-stitch unit. Skip the first stitch and knit into the back of the second, then knit BOTH stitches together through the back of the loop and slide the entire unit off your needle

I did almost the same thing to the twist in the red circle on the left – with one minor additional manipulation, shown in red, below:

• Identify your two-stitch unit. Slip the first stitch knitwise, then return it to the left hand needle. Now knit into the back of the second, then knit BOTH stitches together and slide the entire unit off your needle

This flips that first stitch over and places its leading leg to the rear of the needle. This eliminates the slight twist that’s formed at the base of the topmost stitch. If you’re unfamiliar with the leading leg problem, there’s a short summary on it here.

Other than this minor epiphany and about an inch of the back of my Ribbed Leaf Pullover, not much got done here last night. I’m in the midst of holiday shopping (100% on-line), plus planning for our annual cookie deluge, and for the hand-made-tamales-to-feed-30 I promised would be ready for an annual holiday bash held on Christmas day. I also owe lots of personal replies to letters and notes. I’m getting there. Glub.

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