For those of you who asked about the Bernat Aero needles, they have a great tapered tip and are about the least expensive needles you can find. I love them! I purchased mine at Wool-Tyme but Yarn Forward also lists them.
TWINED KNITTING, Part I
Lisa reported recently that Schoolhouse Press is coming out with a new book on twined knitting. I found the tvaandstickning blog entry I wrote on 3/31/03 so I thought I'd re-run it along with a scan of the sample swatch I did, front and back.
I'm greatly enjoying reading Twined Knitting: A Swedish Folkcraft Technique by Birgitta Dandanell and Ulla Danielsson. Twined knitting is also called Tvaandstickning or two-end knitting and essentially means working with two yarns of the same color (although the book briefly mentions working with 2 colors) and alternating the yarns every stitch. It is traditionally done with both ends of the same skein of yarn but I've seen others recommend against this as you can't untwist the yarns as easily. I tried a small sample and I needed to let the knitting hang from the needles and untwist quite frequently. The back of the work looks interesting - purl rows alternate between twined rows but the front also looks different. Stockinette stitch in twined knitting has a different look - the left half of the knit stitch stands out more because of all the twisting going on.
The purling is interesting in twined knitting. If you're just purling one stitch you leave both yarns in the back of the work. If you're purling the entire row of stitches you leave both yarns in front of the work and twist each stitch. But where twined knitting really shines is when you do a crook stitch - K1, P1, K1. For this one you leave one yarn in front for purling and the yarn in back is used for knitting. To do a chain path - you do two rows of crook stitch offset by one stitch. So on the second row of crook stitch you knit the purl stitches and purl the knit stitches. You get a really pretty loopy-looking O stitch. You can kind of see the crook stitch sample at the top of the first photo.