SAL: knitted fringe

Finally, back to the Mountmellick embroidery stitch along today. I apologise for the very long delay in moving on to the next part of this. It has been weighing heavily on my mind, but I have had several projects with deadlines.

We’re going to talk about the knitted fringe that traditionally goes around the edge of all Mountmellick embroidery. For those of you who have our book Mountmellick Embroidery: Inspired by Nature the fringe we will be using is method 2. If you have one of our balls of knitting cotton, you will also find the pattern on its wrapper too.

To knit the fringe, you’ll need four balls of 4 ply knitting cotton, which we have available for purchase. If you are working on a small project, you can sometimes get away with one or two balls divided into 4 equal groups. The easiest way to divide a ball is to note that one ball weighs 50 grams net. If you want half of this in a ball, wind off 25grams worth (use your kitchen scales). This should give you a new ball of 25 grams, and the remainder of the original ball at about 25grams. If you want to divide one ball into 4, you’ll need about 12 grams in each part ball.

The knitting cotton that we supply has been specially chosen for its appearance. It is completely matt – it has no shine. It is reasonably finely twisted, and is not fluffy. There are lots of white knitting cottons out there, but this is the best one that we have found available to us. And so we are pleased to make it available to you!

We need four balls of knitting cotton because we knit with four strands all at once. This gives the fringe a much more full effect.

Knitting needles: You will need to use metal knitting needles. You can’t use bamboo or plastic as they will break. Cotton thread has pretty much no “give” – its not stretchy – and four strands of cotton used together will break plastic or bamboo needles. Ask me how I know…!

What size knitting needle? No 10, 11, or 12 (UK), No 2 or 3 (US), or 3.25, 3, or 2.75 mm (metric) knitting needles are usually used to knit the Mountmellick knitted fringe. Larger needle size will produce larger scale fringe, with relatively longer loops, while smaller needle size will produce a more compact result.

I spent yesterday experimenting with making a video of how to knit the fringe, so hopefully I’ll figure out how to upload it today or tomorrow. So get your supplies together, and get ready to knit! (The video does assume some prior knowledge of how to knit, so hopefully you can…!)