The Left Twist, Revisited

Today, my post will relate to knitting and, to be specific, twisted stitch knitting. I have often wondered how Barbera Walker and other master knitters have been able to make a perfectly alligned set of left twist stitches, as mine always fall short of my fastideous expectations.

A left twist is traditionally done by skipping the 1st stitch on the left needle, knitting the second stitch, through the back loop and then knitting the skipped stitch through the front loop and pulling them off at the same time. In this photo, you can see that the right twist stitches march very neatly and uniformly to the right, while the left twist stitches kind

of straggle off to the left. Do you see what I mean? I think this is because, the left twist stitches do lean

to the left, but on the purl back, those stitches sit vertically, which makes for more of a left leaning zig-zag than a neat diagonal line. However, I did discover an alternate technique as I was looking through Barbara Walker's Treasury of Knitting patterns, Vol 2. In the instructions for the Twilled Stripe Pattern, she suggests the following..." LT as follows: skip one stitch and knit the 2nd stitch in the back loop, then slip the skipped stitch purlwise onto right hand needle, then slip the knit stitch also." Here's the result:

a vast improvement, to my mind, though I realize that the left leaning stitches are not knit every row, since one of them is slipped. Yet, the result is so much neater that I will be tempted to use this method regardless, hoping the difference will not be noticeable. If this slip stitch technique could be used on the right twist with equal effect, then there would be no difference. But I have yet to figure that out, maybe for another post. Meantime, this might be most useful in patterns that feature only a left twist. Like a standard twisted stitch cable, or the one mentioned above.