To brioche or not to brioche: brioching is a verb, right?!

 I’ll admit that I was late to the Shawlography party. I saw all the posts and the hype and thought I wasn’t going to bother. I was trying to get the right yarn to correct my Find your Fade shawl (which I’ll save for another post). At the very last minute, I got swept up in it all. I saw everyone’s beautiful yarn combinations and started putting together my own options. I figured I had enough skeins that I could do it from stash. I ALMOST did as well! 

I had bought a whole bunch of beautiful skeins from Countess Ablaze in her closing down sale. I also had two skeins that I had bought from her shop in person years ago. But they were all gloriously dark and moody. I needed something a bit lighter to provide the contrast, so I added in a skein of Fyberspates Vivacious 4ply and created the perfect, sumptuous colour palette. I was ready, and super excited!

I managed to start knitting at the end of the first week, so clues 1 and 2 had been posted. I love this way of knitting - so many short sections to complete means I get a sense of satisfaction and feel like I’m making good progress, even when the project is a big one. At first I would alternate projects, so work on something different at the end of each section, which would explain why this has taken as long as it has. However, since January I’ve been monogamous. 

I finally reached section 10 last week! In this section you can choose whether to brioche or not to brioche, and I decided to launch right in. I’ve never knit brioche before and had heard that it can be tricky, that it puts lots of people off. The mere fact that there was an alternative for this section was a big indicator too. But I re-wrote the pattern, as I always do, into my bullet journal (I’ll do another post on this one day) including all the codes and their meanings. This gave me a good chance to understand what everything meant. I then watched the support video by Stephen West. He is very good at explaining what is happening, including how to hold the yarn to make the movements more efficient. I should have inserted a lifeline at this point… but I decided to live life on the edge and just go for it!

Essentially with brioche you knit (or purl) each row twice; once with one colour, then again with a second colour (or with a second skein of the first colour if you want it all the same). The stitches are alternated, so one stitch is slipped and a yarn over is created over this, then the next stitch is knit or purled together with the yarn over from the previous row. I highly recommend learning on two colour brioche, as it makes it a lot easier to see which stitch to slip and where your yarn overs are. With Stephen West’s help, I found a rhythm for this very early on. It has also helped that I have recently taught myself to pick the yarn for knit stitches rather than throw it, though I’ve not mastered this for purling yet. 

I did make a mistake! In the second or third row. I missed a yarn over (or dropped it) which threw off my stitch count. But I saw that I had done this because of it being in two colours: there was only one color where there should have been both. I didn’t want to rip everything back, so I tried to fix it. I THINK I was successful! I tried to pick up the yarn strand to create a yarn over, but ended up essentially lifting a stitch from the row below. I decided to just put a stitch marker in it rather than tink, and deal with it when I met it again on the next row. I’m so glad I did this! When I got back to it all I had to do was lift the stitch with the marker in onto my needle and carry on. I’m pretty sure I’ve sorted it cos I can’t see where I did this any more. 

In conclusion, I would say ‘To brioche’! It’s no where near as scary as I thought it would be. The fabric it creates is beautiful - squishy and colourful. I’m really glad I tried it!