Interruption: Brioche Knitting

My Two-Color Under Dutch Skies Brioche Shawl designed by Nancy Marchant.

I want to take a minute to interrupt my intended series of posts about my Blythe doll family lineup because I saw a video this morning on Instagram of someone frogging (ripping out) a brioche knit sample. This video sent me tripping down memory lane, back to my first foolhardy attempts to experience first-hand the joys (and headaches) of brioche knitting. At the time, I headed straight for LACE brioche knitting instead of starting with the basics like a fisherman's knit or a brioche hat. Not only that, but it was TWO-COLOR lace brioche!

You see, I came across this most INCREDIBLE Nancy Marchant brioche lace shawl called 2-Color Under Dutch Skies- a completely reversible knitted marvel with one color dominant on one side, and the other color dominant on the other side. It was a mind-boggling optical illusion that seemed impossible to knit, and I just bought the pattern and dived right in. I needed to learn how to do that! The learning curve was very steep, my friends...

After merely reading the pattern instructions until I was cross-eyed, (and purchasing and studying Ms. Marchant's Brioche "bible," Knitting Brioche: The Essential Guide to the Brioche Stitch), I pulled out some leftover acrylic-wool blend worsted-weight yarn to give the pattern a whirl. I must have thought I had beginner's luck or something, because I thought, "Oh, this is not that hard!" I was thrilled by the soft squishy texture of brioche knit combined with the delicacy of lace, and impatiently switched to the fine alpaca lace weight yarn that I had bought for the project. I didn't get very far because I had grossly overestimated my understanding of what I was doing. I simply wasn't ready. Back to the book.

About a week later, I humbly stash-dived again and found a couple of balls of leftover sock-weight alpaca yarn to practice the shawl's pattern stitches. Quickly, I had discovered a few things:

Berroco: Spiceberry 1293 and Prune Mix 1284

1. Row 19 of the Under Dutch Skies pattern gave me so many fits that I eventually dubbed it "The Curse of Row 19."

2. The wooden interchangeable circular needles that I was using was driving me bonkers because the yarn kept catching at the joins. I had to go buy a pair of Addi Lace metal needles to save my sanity (and yarn).

3. Using a heather brown yarn as yarn A and a heather purple yarn as yarn B may have seemed like good color choices at the time, but I quickly found that the heathered colors in the Berroco sock yarns started to blend together and they looked the same to me after working with it for a few minutes. I'd find myself staring intently at whichever strand was in my hand under good light to make sure I was holding the right one for the row that I was currently working. Many nights I had to put it away because I simply couldn't distinguish between the heather brown and the heather purple because they both had gold, browns, and natural colored fibers mixed in and they were both dark colors (the pattern recommended contrasting colors- one light and one dark). Seems that there was only a single color in the heather mixes that separated the two strands-- purple in one and brown in the other. This was NOT a project for tired eyes.

4. Lifelines... oh my god, they're called lifelines for a reason! Thank goodness I knew how to use them because they were the only reason why this project wasn't sent to the permanent frog pond (or the trash bin-- see number 6 below...)

5. Did I mention the Curse of Row 19??!

6. You can't just rip out brioche knitting.

When we knitters make a mistake in our knitting, we would often remove the needles from our knitting, and pull at the yarn to undo a row or multiple rows (or the entire project) of knitted fabric in order to get rid of an offending mistake. There are, of course, other ways to fix mistakes, but at the time I didn't have the skills or the confidence to try any of them with brioche-- what with all of the fancy and unfamiliar stitches, the colors in the two strands that blended into each other, and the sheer mind-boggling-ness of the project. See, with Brioche knitting, there's two strands of yarns involved in creating the beautiful squishy fabric, and they don't travel the project in tandem. It's hard to explain, but basically you knit one yarn strand down one row, and then instead of turning your work over to the back side to continue knitting your way back to the beginning, you push your stitches over and abandon the yarn you were just working with on the right-hand needle to pick up the 2nd yarn strand at the beginning of the row. And then knit the other color down the same row until both working yarns are on the same side. Then you turn your work over and start knitting your way back... one yarn at a time. In other words, in brioche each row of knitting is knitted twice, but with two different strands of yarn. Don't worry if that didn't make much sense- it's just one of those things I'd need to actually show you in person.

Anyway, with regular knitting, you can rip and rip until you are finished. With brioche, you can only rip so far-- and then it all literally gets stuck at the end of a row because you have to then go back to the beginning to get the other yarn and rip it back. On both sides. You can't rip brioche out mindlessly, enjoying the riiiiiiiiiip-it, riiiiiip-it, riiiiip-it sounds (rippit-rippit = frogging, get it?), and blithely watch as a pile of pretty yarn grows at your feet. You also can't release your ire by violently undoing it all with exaggerated arm movement and grotesque facial expressions. Not with brioche, no.

So many times (because I was constantly frogging mistakes-- damn you, row 19!) I had been denied the therapeutic effects of a full-blown, theatrical, ugly-crying Frogging Session, because I had to concentrate. Too many evenings ended with a me making a fatal brioche mistake, choking on my frustrations, biting back a tortured cry. Instead, I'd very carefully slip my knitting off of the needles, and very carefully pull it out back to the lifeline, painstakingly get everything back on the needles, carefully secure my rubber needle tips on the needle points (to keep it all from slipping off the slick needles inside the project bag), gently fold and roll the knitted fabric with the needles tucked inside, gingerly putting everything into a nice big ziploc baggie, placing that baggie inside a tote bag and tying the handles closed... and then WAILING at the top of my lungs, blubbering senselessly, choking on my rage, shaking my fists at the sky, and drop-kicking the bag with the offending brioche project across the room. Then I would just melt into a puddle and cry myself to sleep. I was consumed with brioche knitting. I spent my lunch breaks reading Ms. Marchant's book, I'd sneak a YouTube video on brioche at my desk while at work. In my sleep, I dreamed about knitting brioche. I dreamed about the wrapped stitches, I thrashed and whimpered through nightmares about Row 19. I mean, it was bad. And it grew to the point where my sweet husband would ask, "What are you knitting, Sweets?" only to have me growl or mutter something about "my brioche lace." The poor man would get this extremely anxious and stricken look on his face, wring his hands, dart his eyes wildly around the living room (looking for retreat and safety, I'm sure), and he'd whisper, "Uh oh...." Sometimes that actually made me laugh. Sometimes.

Finally, three months after starting this project-- after one crying fit too many-- I gave myself permission to put it away for the rest of the year. I immersed myself into more familiar projects to soothe the wounded beast in me-- a few hats, a scarf, and I worked on my mom's sweater. The next year, in late January, I took a deep breath and picked up the brioche lace project again. Here is what I wrote down in my knitting journal about that monumental event:

January 21, 2012

Resumed Under Dutch Skies this afternoon-- was kind of confusing at first because I couldn't remember where I left off (I'd assumed row 19 because I vaguely remember feeling resentful that it was time to sew in another lifeline... it's all working out well! Like riding a bike, really! There's nothing like fresh eyes!

Less than a month later, on February 7th, I finally finished the shawl at 4:30 in the morning by knitting the bind-off. I washed and blocked it on my office floor at the library a few days later. I still look at this thing and can't believe that I knitted it! My hands made this! This brioche lace shawl was the hardest thing I have ever knitted, in every sense of the word. Yet, it was also oddly one of the most satisfying knit because brioche knitting has this beautifully musical rhythm to it- the knit-wrap-knit-wrap-knit-wrap sequences becomes mesmerizing in a very pleasant way. I discovered that I could memorize each stitch easily because each one developed a certain musical effect and/or tone to it in my head as I recited the names of the stitches to myself. It wasn't long before the names were shortened to just the musical notes. As a former classical guitarist, that phenomenon was very fascinating to me. And as all of those series wrapped stitches grew longer and longer, the resulting notes were almost like the movements in a classical score. Not quite theme-and-variations, but not simple repeats either. It seemed at times that I was knitting actual music inside my head. There's a bit of muscle memory in knitting brioche as well, for me anyway, and I find that I sometimes miss the movements of brioche knitting. No other type of knitting has quite this effect on me, except for the Estonian nupps! Ah! But that is another story for another time...

I have since gone on to knit 4 more Under Dutch Skies lace shawls, including a tiny one for one of my dolls-- a 24-inch ball-jointed doll name Yuliya (Dollstown Bandi), and a so-called "swatch" for a friend in Australia. GWizz wanted me to knit her a little brioche swatch so she could get a better sense of what she had been seeing in all of the pictures I'd posted on Ravelry. I promised to mail her a swatch, but decided to instead surprise her with a whole completed shawl that I knocked out in two weeks. Yeah... she was surprised, ha!

I started my 6th 2-Color Under Dutch Skies Brioche Shawl on September 7, 2014, but never finished it. I only stopped because the yarn I was using overwhelmed me with the sheer number of breaks and ties in each skein. It was a new base for the company, and apparently they received a lot of complaints about that issue. Ironically, I had named this project "Bitter Basalt" before my discovery about the yarn (the green colorway was "Bitter," and the gray was "Basalt"). Maybe I will get back to it. Faintly but with certainty, the lilting cadences of my very own Brioche Sonata is calling out to me. And my fingers, and my arms, and my neck, my body-- all are yearning to dance along in movement.

Bitter Basalt

~Tinooseus!