Kitchener: The stitch we all love to hate.

August 9th, 2005

My previous experience with the Kitchener has been minimal. Usually only small projects call for them. Grafting parts of the Rogue hood, sock toes, hats (?). Nothing REALLY big or involved. Because of that, everytime a pattern tells me to use the Kitchener, I have to consult the oracle and relearn it all over again. I’ve read countless instructions, looked at many, many pictures, read even more instructions, all from different sources, and no one can seem to explain this stitch in a way that is memorable. Perhaps it’s just a complicated thing, this grafting idea, but one would think that it could be broken down into a nursery rhyme or something.

I also wonder who this thing is named after. For all of eternity we will know the kitchener stitch and all our bellies will rumble with apprehension knowing that once we finish knitting these pieces, our pattern is going to tell us to do that damn stitch again. Is kitchener someone who had something to do with its creation? Or did the woman who created it hate it so much that she named it after someone she despised, so we could all grow to hate Kitchener as much as she did. Forever. Smart woman, if that’s how it went down.

Today I’m working on the Lace Leaf Pullover that appeared in the summer IK. It’s a beautiful sweater that is knit in the round. The only hitch is that the body is knit in two pieces – top and bottom. And then you graft the two tubes together. The knitting itself was finished in a couple of days. But the grafting… I started yesterday while I was sitting in the office at the place I volunteer at, with the mistaken impression that I could remember how to kitchener without looking it up. When I discovered that my idea of kitchener was not the same as the sweater’s idea of kitchener, I ripped back… Luckily IK has a page of directions in the back of the magazine, so I tried using those. Before I packed up to return home I reviewed my work and found a couple of funny looking holes in the middle of my grafting. BAH, I said, and stuffed my work in a sack. Along with my sorrys. (Five thousand points to the likely ONE person who got that.)

That was yesterday. Today I’m calmly sitting down with a nice cup of coffee and my extra denise cords and needles, and figuring this thing out. It will be okay. I’ve discovered one useful thing about the kitchener. Aside from the fact that it really is a seamless and undetectable join, I’ve realized that it would be relatively easy to shorten a sweater done in stockinette with this method. Sure, you have to be super careful when you cut the sweater across the middle, but provided you pick up the stitches neatly and carefully, it should look like you meant to do that. You, me and Pee Wee.