Advice for steeking?

November 3, 2005 5:32 PM

I'm looking for advice on "steeking," which is the traditional technique of knitting a fairisle garment in the round and then cutting into it for armholes, neck, etc. Anyone know any good reference books (beyond out-of-print $150 Alice Starmore hardbacks) or have practical experience with this?

I've actually already made one steeked garment, the Baby Norgi sweater from Knitty. (Pic of my finished sweater here.) That was just a pattern though, and now I'm looking for a more in-depth general discussion of it so that I can start adapting my own designs. I've got a children's cardigan that I'm planning at the moment and, while I get the general gist of how to do it, I'm running up against specific niggling little details: How wide should my front and arm steeks be? I'm going to be using Filatura di Crosa "Zara" 8ply, which isn't a very "felty" yarn. (And I'm definitely going to be machine sewing these puppies before cutting.) What do I do with the raw edges on the fronts? Sew them down inside? The Baby Norgi pattern had me knit some extra at the top of each sleeve which was sewn down inside to cover the raw edges; should that be general practice? Can I just strand across my steeks, or should I do a checkerboard thing (alternating the colours) to lock them in together?

I've been Googling and searching Amazon without much success. Steeking doesn't seem to be very "hot" right now, and even the best current knitting reference books don't seem to devote more than half a page to it. Are there any older books that I should be on the lookout for? (Besides the Starmore, but I'm not willing to pay that much right now.) Or does anyone know of a steeking expert that might be willing to answer some questions?

posted by web-goddess to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (10 answers total)

have you tried posting a question on craftster, or to the stitchnbitch newsgroup? I'm a new knitter and both of those resources have proved very helpful. People are very nice about answering questions and lots of them are very accomplished knitters.
posted by chelseagirl at 5:51 PM on November 3, 2005

I'm not a steeking expert by any means, but what I did with the raw edges in my cardigan was basically this:

- Serged them to seal them closed.
- Picked up a row of stitches perpendicular to the main garment about 3 stitches in from the cut edge and used those to knit the button band, which was double sided.
- When I folded over the button band to the inside, I sewed it down to the same column of stitches I had picked up the stitches from in the first place, thus encasing the cut edge in the button band.

On my first cardie, I didn't use button closures, so didn't want the whole double sided button band thing, so I just picked up the stitches and did an i-cord bind of again immediately. That folded the cut edge back under to the inside of the sweater, and I sewed it down with thread.

I hightly recommend, by the way, knitting gauge tubes and trying the technique you're thinking of on the tube rather than waiting until you have a hundred hours worth of painstaking knitting and a pair of scissors in front of you.
posted by jacquilynne at 6:42 PM on November 3, 2005

If you look at wendyknits links sections, she has a couple of steeking tutorials up.
posted by gnat at 6:44 PM on November 3, 2005

Response by poster: I hadn't bothered posting on craftster mostly because my experience with the big knitting websites is that they tend to be more "OMG, check out this super scarf I knitted with a skull on it!" rather than traditional sweater knitting techniques. Maybe that's just me being a jaded, prejudiced knitting shop employee though... :)

I really like the idea of doing a double-sided button band and using it as the facing for the raw edges on the cardigan. I just may use that idea, jacquilynne!

Thanks for the links to Wendy's site. I'd already read the steeking tutorial up on Knitty (which went along with the Baby Norgi pattern, which she wrote) but it's useful to see the technique being used on some other garments.

I do know some hard-core traditional knitters that I could hit up for advice, but I really prefer book-learnin' myself. It bugs me that nobody's ever written some definitive guidelines for this stuff. I guess asking is probably going to be my only option in the end...
posted by web-goddess at 9:21 PM on November 3, 2005

Best answer: Wendy's tutorial is great. I used that last year when I had to perform surgery on a sweater. It really wasn't so bad. The discussion list Knitting Beyond the Hebrides ("KBTH") is geared toward in-depth discussion of traditional knitting techniques with a huge Starmore fan-base (long, sordid story about the name later). They're rebuilding their web presence, but here are some fine resources from them -
Anne Featonby's steek page
Lucy Neatby's steek page

("Whilst the stitch pattern in two-color-per-round work across the steek is not vital, an alternating salt-and-pepper pattern of stitches with a 'double' on the centerline helps to define the steek, beds the yarns together as intimately as possible, and highlights where to cut later; for these reasons I prefer 'even number' stitch steeks.")

Schoolhouse (Meg Swansen) Press' steek page
Dawn Brocco's steek page - with a very nice hand-sewn steek demo

All of these have pretty deep information.
The baby norgi looks great! Good luck with the steeking.
posted by mimi at 5:08 AM on November 4, 2005

I'm sure there's someone on Fair Isle might be able to advise. They're pretty well connected.

I'm pretty sure my Fair Isle sweater, which I got on the island in 1993, isn't steeked.
posted by scruss at 6:22 AM on November 4, 2005

Meg Swansen's Sweaters From Camp has several different steeking techniques, and a discussion of their relative merits.

You might want to check out the Knitty message boards, too. While there is an element of "look at this fun fur scarf I made!!!!!" They can sometimes be helpful.
posted by Lycaste at 9:02 AM on November 4, 2005

I have an odd kind of experience of this in that I'm not a knitter at all but spent last summer working in my friend's wool shop using a linking machine to do this, along with linking seams etc. (I'd never heard the phrase steeking - cool!)

I just wrote you a really long email trying to explain what I did and convert it into doing it by hand, grossly handicapped by using layman's language as I don't know knitspeak - I was kind of a trained chimp who could just put all the bits together. I'll send the mail anyway but I think in summary it was this method:

- When I folded over the button band to the inside, I sewed it down to the same column of stitches I had picked up the stitches from in the first place, thus encasing the cut edge in the button band.

Most of all, I agree it's worth doing a couple of practice runs, and don't panic - the cut edges really don't run like you think they would. I did dozens without sewing first and never had a run.
posted by penguin pie at 9:54 AM on November 4, 2005

Response by poster: Thank you, everyone! mimi's links pretty much answer all my questions. (Funny, I've actually been to your site before to read about the sweater surgery but I forgot all about it. I should've just e-mailed you directly!)

And I'm still going through penguin pie's long e-mail, but I think I get the gist of it. So you actually cut out a circular piece for the neck, huh? That's mentioned on one of the links mimi gives but I'll probably forgo that in favor of just doing a traditional neck steek. Wastes less wool! :)
posted by web-goddess at 2:39 PM on November 4, 2005

Now I'm back home and have more time to look at mimi's links more closely, I may have misunderstood what it's all about, so don't waste too much time on my email! Sorry!
posted by penguin pie at 4:12 PM on November 4, 2005