Am I the only knitter who doesn’t like to sew things together?

I am getting better at it, but it always seems that once I finished with the knitting part of my project, it takes me forever to sew the pieces together. Sometimes, I am just about finished with the next thing before I get everything done. A few years ago, it wasn’t rare for me to have several finished project waiting in pieces to be put together. Even though I prefer knitting straight, I think I do some project in the round just so there is less putting together at the end, or I’ll make some stuff that don’t need any sewing for a while, like shawls or scarves. Are there other knitters out there who really hate the sewing part?

Like you, I must have half a dozen projects that just need sewing up and the neckband doing. I was very relieved to find that Elizabeth Zimmerman (who’s one of the best writers on knitting and idolised in some circles) writes that she (i) hates to purl, and (ii) hates sewing up, and therefore many of her recipes are devoted to ways of avoiding both.

Almost always I see whether I can knit from the top down – there’s a brilliant book by Barbara Walters which I’ll try to cite – and that works for a surprising number of shapes (i.e. you don’t have to make raglans; I’ve done orthodox set-in sleeves, saddle shoulders – great fun, they are – dropped shoulder and modified drop shoulder, and really it’s only if the fabric pattern is impossible to modify that I go from the bottom up). The one thing that I do have trouble with – and I once posed a question here and several people said they had the same trouble – is that when I do ribbing on a circular needle the darned thing slopes to one side and no amount of bullying will fix it. It’s OK for crew necks, because I make them double and catch-stitch instead of casting off, so I can join each stitch to its mate, but I’ve found that some of the fancy ribbings don’t give me the same problem. So my preferred ribbing on circular needles is: one row plain, one row of (twist 2, purl 2) so that the rib is actually formed from tiny cables, and I find that this is stretchy enough to behave as a rib should.

So, you’re in very good company (I don’t mean me, I mean EZ and her progeny) and I’d encourage you to give top-down a go because it’s also good for those times when you don’t know whether you’ll run out of yarn and are faced with the decision ‘long sleeves/short sleeves/no sleeves.’ In fact I wrote a review on eBay about it, which is headed something like ‘Found a great yarn and not sure how far it’ll go.’

Attagirl!

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