Getting knotted the French way!

Bonjour tout le monde!

I’m sure the lovely Pat at will correct my french if that was wrong!

God I wish I knew how to do that linky thing in my posts!  I’ve been trying and trying… the lovely Joyce tries to help me out there, but still no linking!  Any other instructions???!!!  (Thank you by the way Joyce!  I wish I could make it work!)

Onto today’s post!!!  I’ve done a tutorial on french knotting because my next pattern/tutorial involves french knots, so I thought I’d address them first, so the whole thing doesn’t look too complex!  It involves knitting, crochet and embroidery skills, so let’s get the embroidery skills sorted first!  I’m sure many of you know how to french knot, but it’s something I’ve just learned.  It took me about 10 tries before I accomplished my first knot, so here is my easy to follow tutorial!

I’ve knitted up a swatch to demonstrate… I discovered, that if you make your knot through the wavey bit of the knitting, it sits better on top of the knitting instead of half-coming through the holes in the knitting and not looking so knotty.

There they are… two lovely french knots.

So thread your wool needle and sew through the back of the garment where you would like your knot to be placed.

I do believe I see a piece of Raymond’s fur on that knitting… I tell you, it gets everywhere… I like to wear a lot of black and in the springtime when he moults… it’s all over for me… I can’t even sit down without looking like a crazy cat lady when I stand up.

Back to the knotting.  So now you want to wrap the wool around the needle TWICE.  Here’s where I messed things up about ten times.  This is a two hand job, don’t be fooled by my hands in this shot, I needed one of them to take the photo…

When you wrap, you want the tail of the wool to be the bottom “wrap,” to be closest to the garment.  Does that make sense? 

Now pull it firm… not too tight and not too baggy… and thread the needle back through the garment, just next to where you sewed through originally.

Gently pull it through…

And voila!  A french knot!  Or ten!

I’m shit at keeping secrets, so I’m going to tell you that I’ve been french knotting some booties (I was serious about the baby fever…) the first bootie has tentative, not so wonderful french knots as I was practicing, but the second bootie!  Well I was almost a pro by then!  Speeding through the knots, I was surprised!  All of a sudden I’m fluent in french knotting and totally excited about this new skill!  The possibilities!

I hope you give it a try too if you’ve never had a go before!  Or maybe this tutorial will inspire you to pick up the needle again and do some lovely embellishing!

So come back soon and see what I’ve been french knotting!  I have to tell you… my creativity is waning this week… I managed to finish Leonie’s wrap but I’m not enjoying how it fits… I put the armholes too far down so it has large lapels!  Then I decided to knit myself a scarf out of the lovely hand-painted touchyarn I was given, so I ran out of wool before I could even wrap it around my neck properly!  Frogged it!  (OUCH) The ball of wool is back in my stash looking a bit crumpled… So two time consuming projects which yielded no joy… I tink I’m going to have to have a surf around all of your blogs for some much-needed inspiration!

have a lovely, lovely day, blessings coming your way, from Alice and Raymond XX

I must admit I’m concerned that my spell checker picked up knot every time I typed it!  I’m sure I know how to spell knot!