#fake decrease

One category I've been exploring is lace, because I always seem to revert to lace. Knitted lace often has lines of decreases, which distort the vertical columns of stitches into emphasized diagonals. Here is a small swatch of a lace diamond pattern, fairly bog-standard except for the cable crosses at the points of the diamonds. The top half of each diamond shape is framed by its decrease lines, while the bottom half grows vertically out of the YO increases.

By using some False Decreases, it's possible to add diagonal framing lines to the lower edges of the diamonds as well. Now they look more symmetrical, and have a nice kind of crispy-edges effect.

Here are charts for both stitch patterns:

Writing CSS always seems like a disproportionately large amount of work for a very small and unreliable result. I suppose no one expects people to actually type the stuff in a text editor; we're all supposed to be using AI code generators or something. Sigh.

Be that as it may, there are some instructions for knitting the Traveling Stitch* on my website now. They are very much not optimized for mobile. But the pictures do get bigger if you click on them.

The right-leaning version is fairly simple. You do a k2tog, but leave the worked stitches on the left-hand needle. Then you put the right-hand needle behind the upper stitch of the decrease, dip it into the lower stitch, and knit into just that one. Then drop both worked stitches.

This accomplishes two things. It shifts the column, the way a regular decrease does, but without reducing the stitch count. And it gives you a stitch that's hidden behind the 'decrease' which you can plausibly either knit or purl on the next row/round. It does these with a bit less stretching and distortion of the stitches than a regular 1/1 cable crossing.

The left-leaning version is slightly more fiddly. It starts by slipping 2 stitches knitwise, the way you would for a regular ssk. Then you slip them together, purlwise, back to the left-hand needle. Having flipped their orientation, you do the sneaking-the-needle-behind-the-upper-stitch maneuver, and knit a stitch into the back loop of the pair.

Without dropping either of the flipped stitches, now knit through both of them via the back loop, completing the ssk.

Below are examples of both versions, after one more row has been knitted above them.