Twined Knitting

I started a 3-Tuesday night class at the Elegant Ewe last night, in Twined Knitting. This is a fairly old (all right, I knew I was a snob, but I can't call a technique whose earliest extant piece is from, like, 1640, _really_ old) Scandinavian techique for making thick and elastic fabric, for mittens or maybe socks or gloves.

It will give me excellent habits for two-color knitting, which it somewhat resembles: you have two threads and you knit the thread from the stitch-before-last taking it OVER the other thread. If you were being good about twisting the second color in, you might be so diligent and get similarly close results. This is done in one color, however, so you get a solid result. It is less difficult to figure which thread to knit next than I would have expected.

What is interesting to me is that when I learned it, last night, I thought this was a technique I would just have to give up and knit with the working yarn in my right hand (English style) as opposed to my usual left-handed Continental approach. This morning I picked it up and began working left-handed as usual. Apparently my brain (proving its existence!),allowed the new stuff to settle in and figured out how to cope while I was asleep. It's only a little more fiddly than normal knitting, and will give me a wonderful feeling of breath-of-fresh-air when I continue the socks in my life (mostly stockinette right now).

The teacher brought two books to look at: one is in print from Schoolhouse Press, Two-End Knitting, but I was more attracted to the out-of-print Twined Knitting, so I have a bid in on EBay.

No picture yet, though I will say I am using a soft spring green Tiur, which is part mohair and makes me think of sprouting daffodils. At 11 am, it's 6 degrees F here. Which is nine degrees more than it was when I woke up. Twilly, stop eating my needle, please.