Magic Loop or DPN, That is the Question

Going Round In Circles

When Mom knitted hats and socks — which are usually knitted in the round — she used double-pointed needles (dpns). Sometimes they came in a set of four, other times in a set of five. For a set of n needles, you divided the stitches evenly over n-1 needles and used the last needle as the needle you were knitting onto. As the stitches moved from one of the stitch-holding needles to the working needle, the stitch-holding needle became free. Now that needle was used to work the next needle's worth of stitches, and so on.

(Results for "double pointed needles" on YouTube.)

When I knitted Donovan B. Bear his first hand-knit sweater (an Irish Fisherman style sweater, done traditionally from the neck down), I found it difficult to work a teddy-bear-sized sleeve in the round over those four or five needles. The stitches would become stretched, and the long ends of the needles got in the way of the work. I ended up having to use six or eight needles to work the small, narrow sleeves.

Magic Loop

Magic Loop is a circular-needle technique that, for many people, replaces double-pointed needles. Instead of rotating through free and stitch-holding needles, one uses a single, long-cable circular needle, keeps a few stitches on the needles but leaves most on the cable, and pulls out the cable between stitches to create a comfortable knitting space. YouTube demonstrations show this method working with as few as four stitches.

(Results for "Magic Loop" on YouTube.)

The biggest advantage to Magic Loop, as far as I can tell, is that it's easier to pack up your knitting and go: just slide all your stitches onto the cable, and slide them back onto the needles when you are ready to pick up again. (This is also one of the reasons circular and flexible needles are becoming popular for flat knitting: tip protectors can come off, allowing stitches to fall off a loaded needle, and one can't always complete a row or round when knitting on a train or bus, or at a Ravelry group meeting.) With double-pointed needles, there's a much greater chance your work will slide off a needle and require you to back-track.

Advantages to Magic Loop

• Today, it's a lot easier to find circular knitting needles in a given size than it is to find dpns
• The ends of non-active double-pointed needles can get in the way working with your active needles
• Unless they come with an organizing sleeve, it's harder to keep a set of dpns together — and when they come apart, you need a needle size gauge to be able to figure out what size a needle is, or to put together a set from all of the random dpns in the bottom of your needle drawer. (That said, many circular needles don't have the size printed on them, either, and if you lose their packaging...)

Despite those advantages, for the most part I hate Magic Loop. 

Advantages to Double-Pointed Needles

• I feel that Magic Loop distorts my knitting and forces a looser knit, especially on the fine yarns (such as sock yarns) for which it is usually used.
• I feel like I'm spending all my time slipping stitches onto and off of the needles and cables, rather than actually knitting
• Slipping the cable loop out between small, tight stitches aggravates the tendinitis in my hands (although part of that might be a stiffer-than-ideal cable)
• If I need to slip out the cable loop where it meets the needle, or bend the cable at that join, I fear that the stress on the connection will lead to needle failure

It Depends on You, and on the Project

Because I was moving between (and trying out) various needle sizes (and the yarn kept sliding off my dpns), I ended up doing my fisherman's rib cap using Magic Loop and and interchangeable needles. On the bulky yarn, it wasn't too bad. But right now, I'm working on some handwarmers, and Magic Loop has been a Magic Pain. Switching back to dpns is saving the project.

Fishing for Brioche Ribbing (Not Just for Breakfast Any More)

The first bread cookbook I ever purchased mentioned brioche as a particularly difficult-to-make bread which is usually baked in a special fluted (ribbed) pan. While "brioche buns" have become popular in fast-food establishments, I still haven't had the experience of eating a real, fresh-from-the-oven, French brioche.

Some years later, a knitters' stitch guide I purchased included a photo of what I'd considered a particularly elegant set of patterns called "brioche rib" and "contrary brioche stitch". While I still haven't tried them out, the important thing to note is that these patterns were designed for single-color knitting.

Today, many knitting patterns with "brioche" in their names are made in a rib technique where alternating rows are either "knit below" (k1b) or "purled below" (p1b) to create a two-color rib, with the prominent "knit" stitches showing in one color and the recessed "purl" stitches in the second color. On the opposite side of the work, the colors are reversed.

I used the yarn leftover from the Koala Basket project to do up Red Heart's "Brioche Rib Fisherman's Hat". It's not that I have a lot of opportunity to wear hats (I commute by bicycle, so most of my time outdoors in cold weather is in technical cycling clothing), but rather that I wanted to learn this increasingly popular style of knitting. After a few false starts, I got the hang of the technique. After that, the bulky yarn worked up quickly.

Searching for more about brioche knitting, I found a whole website devoted to brioche stitch techniques — and I learned that what I thought was a brioche rib, and what a lot of what the mainstream knitting press has been calling "brioche rib" for the past thirty-some-odd years is actually "fisherman's rib", (and that true brioche stitch uses yarn-overs (yo) combined with adjacent stitches to create depth and stretch). But I also learned that in the Netherlands, the terms "brioche rib" and "fisherman's rib" are used interchangeably. Go figure?

While working on the hat's briochefisherman's rib-knitted brim, I decided I'd like to try making a briochefisherman's-rib-style sleeveless jacket for Donovan B. Bear in a #5 or #6 yarn. I think it could look very stylish because of, rather than despite, the yarn's disproportionate weight. And now that I know the difference, I need to learn the real brioche stitch and variations. So many project ideas, so little time!

The Great Fabric Medium Experiment, Part IV

I finally got some time to finish up my patch tests. Instead of buying another new T-shirt just to paint up, I pulled an old, bleach-stained blue T-shirt from the rag pile. This means that as colors become less opaque, the perceived color will shift towards the blue, rather than towards the red. I shouldn't see an issue with more opaque colors, and the increasing thickness of the paints in my test suggested that my colors would be more opaque.

The last three paints

As you can see, that was not quite the case. While there was little color shift with the dark Martha Stewart Multi-Surface Satin Acrylic Craft Paint in Chipotle, both the Folk Art Acrylic paint in Wicker White and the Liquitex Acrylic Paint in Light Portrait Pink showed significant opacity issues with fabric-medium dilution. Also, the Folk Art paint — which I had expected to be a better quality craft acrylic paint and more opaque than the Martha Stewart paint — showed the same opacity issues as the other acrylic paints. (This might be an issue of the particular pigment: Folk Art also offers a Titanium White, which is considered to be a more-opaque white pigment.)

Also noteworthy: the Folk Art paint was also subject to the same sort of bleeding exhibited by the most fluid paints.

Opacity Issues, Random Controls

The blue shirt also has a couple of control swatches: on the top left, I have Americana Shading Flesh by itself, and Golden High Flow Acrylic Cerulean Blue Hue both by itself and diluted 1:1 with GAC-900. The difference between these color swatches and those on the red shirt suggest that even apparently opaque paints are subject to color shift on colored fabrics. There's also an open square of GAC-900 by itself, It has discolored the fabric, but I'm looking to see how it will work as either a surface prep (like gesso) or a resist. Similarly, there's a closed square of Delta Ceramcoat Textile Medium on the right side, along with a rectangle of Fabric Creations Soft Fabric Ink in Yellow (which is not nearly as opaque as it had appeared to be when creating my "Star Struck Person With  Headscarf" portmanteauji T-shirt).

Preliminary Observations

Before heat treating, my impression is that for any non-fabric-specific acrylic paint thicker than Golden High Flow Acrylic, the paint swatches are very stiff until we get to a 1:1 paint-to-medium ratio. Unfortunately, this is the point at which pigment dilution issues start to become obvious. Also, since all of the fabric mediums were thinner than all but the Liquitex  Professional Acrylic Ink and the Golden High Flow Acrylic, the lower the paint-to-medium ratio, the higher the likelihood of bleeding.

Because of pigment dilution, a more concentrated pigment is needed for better results on non-white surfaces. This suggests that our usual method of painting T-shirts with craft paints is probably the least effective method for getting a good result.

The samples were done with a single coat of paint, with a second layer applied to the upper half of the Apple Barrel and Americana control samples; a second coat may be necessary (but may further stiffen the textile).

Next step, heat treatment.

The Great Fabric Medium Experiment, Part III

I decided to use the back of the red t-shirt to run the next few sets of tests. These used different brands of craft acrylic paint, which is about the same consistency of Golden Fluid or Liquitex Soft Body acrylic paints, but less expensive, and is the general paint of choice for fabric painting.

Closeup for bleeding check

This second set of tests covered Craft Smart Multi Surface Premium Satin Acrylic Paint in Rich Lilac, Apple Barrel All-Purpose Craft Paint in Victorian Green (a discontinued color), and Americana Acrylic Paint in Shading Flesh (also a discontinued color). Going into this set of paints, I found less bleeding with the GAC-900 than I did with the lighter-weight artist colors. On the other hand, the opacity of these craft paints started out pretty low, and only got worse as the paint dried.

The camera enhanced the opacity of the paints.
The true appearance of the controls is closer to that of the 1:2 paint:medium ratio.

You can see from the photo (but not barely on the garment itself) that I ran a second control paint layer over half of each of the Apple Barrel and Americana tests.

Liquitex mentions on its web site that its Basics line of acrylic artist paints is not as pigment-dense as its Professional line of paints. It's not a far stretch to assume that, at about 10% of the price of the professional soft/fluid acrylics, craft paints are even less pigment-dense.

I'm going to need to move to a second T-shirt to finish testing my craft paints (Folk Art and Martha Stewart) and move to my very old Liquitex Acrylic Paint (which, in the absence of a product-name modifier, is probably closer to their Basics paint than their Professional Heavy Body paint). I'm also curious to know how brands and formulations from the same manufacturer vary in response, so I will probably run a control of similar colors of Apple Barrel, Folk Art, and Martha Stewart paints (all from Plaid), and I may need to purchase a small tube of Liquitex Heavy Body and a tube of Golden in one of my existing colors of those brands to find out.

The Great Fabric Medium Experiment, Part II

Now that I'd decided to do a "scientific" experiment on the choice of paints and fabric mediums for t-shirt painting, I had to gather my supplies. Searching "fabric medium" on Michaels' website came up with three relevant products: Liquitex Fabric Medium, Americana Fabric Painting Medium, and Delta Ceramcoat Textile Medium. While we only sell the Liquitex product online, we do sell Golden GAC-900 and Martha Stewart Crafts Tintable Fabric Medium — both of which did not show up in the search — in-store. This gave me four fabric medium products to test.

Fabric Mediums

My craft paint stash includes Apple Barrel, Americana, Folk Art, and Martha Stewart Crafts acrylic craft paints as well as a few old tubes of "Liquitex Acrylic Artist Color" and a couple of colors of Fabric Creations Soft Fabric Ink (which does not require the addition of fabric medium).

Craft Paints

Old Liquitex Acrylic Paints

I added to this a bottle of Liquitex Professional Acrylic Ink in Cadmium Yellow Light Hue, a bottle of Liquitex Soft Body Acrylic Paint in Cadmium Orange Hue, a bottle of Golden High Flow paint in Cerulean Blue Hue, and a bottle of Golden Fluid Acrylic Paint in Teal. Based on Golden's website and the samples on the bottles, I expect both Golden paints to be relatively opaque.

Thinner-Bodied Artist Paints and Inks

Because I'm looking at doing this in our classroom during off time, I'll also have access to the CraftSmart acrylic paints and Tulip Soft Matte fabric paints leftover from previous events. While I should probably add our house-brand Artist Loft acrylic paints to the mix, I think I have enough variety — four mediums at five paint-to-medium ratios times nine or ten paints, plus a control (no fabric medium) for each... we're talking over a hundred samples, and possibly over 200. The samples need to be at least an inch square, if not two inches square, to have enough material to bend to check flexibility and tendency to crack. Because of the number of samples I'm going to need, I'm not going to heat treat until all my samples are done, and I'm going to wait the full week after that until laundering them.

I brought my materials into work a couple of hours early on Monday, so I could start work on the project. After about an hour and a half of solid painting work, I'm four paints into the project, and the entire front of one T-shirt.

First four - a bit overexposed to show the Liquitex Ink (top set)

I'm debating whether to use the back of that shirt for my next set of samples, or if I should start a new shirt so I can hang the patches side by side.

Meanwhile, it's become apparent that (at least among the thinner paints I've tested so far) paint-to-medium ratios of less than 1:1, produce is some bleeding. In general, the thinner the paint, the greater the bleeding — but what surprised me is how much more bleeding there was with the GAC-900 — which is supposed to be the highest quality of the fabric mediums I used — compared to the other fabric mediums.

GAC-900 is the top row of each paint set. Control at far left; ratios go from 3:1 on the left to 1:3 on the right

I want to see if the bleeding reduces as I test the heavier paints. It may be that the paint-to-medium ratios, and the preferred fabric mediums to use, may change with the viscosity and pigmentation of the paints used. It's also apparent that the dilution effect of fabric medium decreases the opacity of the paints  —  and that some fabric mediums are worse than others. Again, this may change with both the quality and thickness of paint as well as the individual fabric mediums. Since I've only gotten through about 40% of my test slate, the answers are still waiting to be found.

Pigments, opacities, bleeding, and resist

Spoiler alert: I can't resist playing with "new toys", even if I'm not ready to run an "official" test with them.

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When I was a little girl, my father used to match inks for a living.

Back in the days before process-printing (where all colors come from the overprinting of between four and eight mostly-transparent inks) was king, a lot of color printing was done color by color, using inks formulated from the same pigments used by artists. It was Dad's job to look at the colors of original artwork and determine what combinations of pigments would be needed to match each color exactly. There could be some variation in the mixture depending on both ambient and processing conditions (heat, humidity, pressure), but the result had to be the same. Each color for each project had notes, in case a second print run was needed, so that the colors of the new printing would exactly match those of the old printing.

That sort of work required knowledge of pigment materials and colors, some knowledge of chemistry, and a very keen eye for color — which he did his best to pass on to me. For most of my life, though, my internalization of color has been relative, not pigment-based. It wasn't until I started working at Michaels that my childhood memories of pigments came back to me.

Today, a number of paint manufacturers sell products with the old pigment names followed by the word "hue" — for example, Alazarin Crimson Hue. As opposed to the HSB digital colorspace (where "hue" refers to redness, blueness, etc.), "hue" in a pigment name means that the color was manufactured to come as close as possible to that of the original pigment, but either avoiding toxic materials, or at a cheaper price point, or both. (While there are differences in the behaviors of real and "hue" pigments, I also remember Dad telling me how many of his colleagues died in their thirties because of exposure to those chemicals.)

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My first new "paint" acquisition for the Great Fabric Medium Experiment was Liquitex Professional Acrylic Ink in Cadmium Yellow Light Hue. I've been wanting to play with artist acrylic ink since finding out that Speedball non-black calligraphy inks are acrylic-based, and I can apparently use these inks in dip pens as well as with brushes. I chose the yellow because it was bright and light; I wanted something that should show up on both a dark shirt and a white shirt. What I didn't know is that Liquitex Cadmium Yellow Light Hue Ink is a transparent (see-through) color, meaning that some of the color of the medium (or underlying paint layers) will show through. A dropper full of well-shaken ink all but disappeared into the red shirt scrap I'd been using for small-scale testing for my Michaels app T-shirt. [I warned you I can't resist playing with new toys!] I learned from Golden's web site that transparent pigments are better for mixing and blending than opaque pigments. Both Liquitex and Golden publish charts that rate their color products for transparency, lightfastness, and permanence.

Another issue I'd run into in my recent T-shirt projects was bleeding. Basically, the thinner a fluid, the further a drop of it will spread — and the more absorbent the surface it is dropped upon, the more it will seep into the surface (rather than rest on top of it). This is one of the reasons that artists cover their canvases with gesso (and let it dry) before putting paint to canvas. (Note: prepared canvases, like the stretched canvases we sell over at Michaels, have already been primed with gesso and are paint-ready.) Acrylic paints in general, and craft paints in particular, are usually thinned with water to create the correct consistency for their intended use. If a paint has settled and has not been sufficiently shaken up, or if a paint has been thinned too much for the surface, it will either run (drip down an upright or angled surface) or bleed (absorb into the surface and spread beyond the borders of the brush stroke). One way to stop bleeding is to set a boundary beyond which the paint (or dye) is not allowed to spread. This boundary is called a resist.

The dark halos around the lighter paint patches indicate bleeding.
The light halo around the paint patch on the right is where the paint has encountered a test resist.

If you've ever done tie-dyeing, you understand the basics of resist. If you've ever used stencils with paint, you understand the basics of resist. Batik, another fabric-coloring technique, uses wax as a resist. Since dried, bled-in acrylic paint seems to serve as a resist for an overlaid color of paint, I'm wondering if fabric medium can do the same. Also, we sell a lot of Elmer's Washable School Glue. I wonder if that can be used as a resist medium...

While I don't have a formal experiment planned for testing those two fluids as resist mediums, I might just add a couple of test patches along the way.

The Great Fabric Medium Experiment, Part I

So, after the disaster that was last month's Halloween costumes (post-wash), I began to wonder whether my issues with fabric medium were a function of the specific brands I used, the brands of paint I used, the mixing proportions, or something else. My craft paint stash includes Apple Barrel, Folk Art, Martha Stewart, and Americana colors. The various fabric medium containers I've read have suggested anything from a 3:1 to a 1:1 paint to medium mixture, and some might have even suggested flipping the proportions (1 part fabric medium to 2 or 3 parts paint). Some instruct you to heat set with an iron or a press; others say you can toss your (dry) t-shirt in the dryer. Potentially crucially, a couple brands also suggest you let the heat-set paint cure for up to a week before washing, and/or to not let heat-set hand-painted fabrics anywhere near the dryer.

If this sounds confusing, you're not alone.

And just in case you were thinking it was just a fabric medium labeling issue... I'm pretty sure some of those mixing ratios should change with the initial thickness of the paint one is using (less fabric medium with thinner paints, more with thicker ones). In addition to CraftSmart, Americana, Folk Art, and Martha Stewart craft paints, we sell Liquitex acrylic ink, BASICS paint, soft body paint, and heavy body paint; we sell Golden High Flow, Fluid, and Heavy Body colors, along with Golden's GAC-900 fabric medium.

In the end, what I need to know is how much fabric medium, if any, to add to what type of paint, for the best effect — and what sort of after-painting treatment to use for anything I intend to wear more than once (or anything that needs to not fall like cardboard). So like any self-respecting person with an engineering degree (and full STEAM ahead), I'm going to experiment. I'm gathering a selection of my existing supplies, purchasing an array of fabric mediums, adding in some professional-level paints and artist inks for good measure, and using a leftover T-shirt or two as a canvas (excuse the pun) on which to test these paints and fabric mediums methodically. The result will be a sort of paint patch-test which I can then use as a reference for future fabric painting.

Inspired by Slime (Cupcakes)

Yesterday's class was supposed to be "Slime Cupcakes", but there were no signups, and nobody walked in. Part of the issue might have been timing: this was a Hallowe'en craft for which everyone's Hallowe'en parties were already done, on a night where — if our customers' behavior were an indication of the norm — everyone was too frantic making last minute costumes, or trying to find last minute costume details. We did have one woman looking for Hallowe'en cupcake picks, but she (like everyone else) was not interested in spending the time to actually decorate cupcakes.

To be sure, the "slime" was designed to look more like either Ghostbusters ectoplasm or snot — it was hard to say which — but the concept can be "degrossified" and transformed to create other designs and plan for other holidays.

Photo from Michaels Slime Cupcake class sign-up page

The method used for creating this effect is simple: use Wilton Leaf Green and Lemon Yellow icing colors to tint Wilton White Decorator Icing, fill a bag and use a 1A (large base, plain circle opening) tube to create a cupcake swirl, and drizzle light green Wilton Sparkle Gel to create the oozing, dripping, slime. Of course, we were out of the light green Sparkle Gel, but since we were on the green theme I pulled the Leaf Green Sparkle Gel, which looks more like a Christmas green.

Riff 1: Substituting for the Sparkle Gel

First Option: If we had had any Piping Gel in stock, I would have of course mixed some with the same yellow-and-green color mixture that we were to have used in the icing, added some Leaf Green Pearl Dust, and filled a second bag with the #3 tip we were supposed to use to core the cupcake (to fill with more Sparkle Gel), and used that to create the ooze. Second Option: We did have some Wilton Glucose, which is just thickened corn syrup. If you add color and Pearl Dust, you will get something that's a bit thinner and runnier than Sparkle Gel, but which will ooze through a #4 or #5 round tip just fine. (Tip: stir the glucose slowly: the faster and harder you work it, the more resistant it gets — but it will loosen right back up when you leave it alone.) The samples below I made at home with a butter-based American buttercream icing (I don't believe in hydrogenated oils when I can avoid them!).

Sparkle Gel (left) vs. Colored Glucose (right)

Third Option: The snotty-looking mess to the right started out as cornstarch and water, sweetened with glucose. It congealed too rapidly, creating whitish lumps and bumps. These were eventually made less opaque with the addition of water, glucose, and sugar — and then colored with food coloring. Next time, I'd start with simple syrup and add colored cornstarch water in as the syrup reached a boil. Or, I'd start with a colored custard base.

Colored Glucose with Corn Starch Mixture piped on top

Fourth Option: Jelly, preferably brought to room temperature, or possibly a seedless jam. I used a seedless raspberry jelly to simulate blood.

Riff 2: Another Hallowe'en Variant

"Cranial Folds" Last year, our Hallowe'en Baking display included "Vampire Red" Sparkle Gel. Substitute Red Sparkle Gel on a grey-colored cupcake to create a "Zombie"/"Brains" effect, or over a dark purple or black cupcake to indicate "blood" for a vampire. Here, I've created a series of u-turns from one side of the cupcake to the other, and back, to simulate cranial folds. A few drops of jelly to create blood, and we're done.

"Zombie" Cupcake

Riff 3: Christmas Tree With Sparkle Gel

The Christmas green color of the Leaf Green Sparkle Gel reminded me (as if our stock didn't!) that Christmas is less than two months away, and holiday baking often starts as early as Thanksgiving. I could use that dripped Sparkle Gel technique to make Christmas Tree cupcakes!

Base using tip #21	I loaded Christmas green icing into a bag with an open star tip. My first attempt used a #21; the second used stiffer icing with the ubiquitous 1M. Starting from the center of the cupcake, draw a line out to the side of the cupcake. Continue around in a star pattern to create the base of the tree.
	Between the spokes of the star, pipe another, smaller star.
	Continue piping stars to create the body of the tree.
Finally, pipe a pool of green icing at the center of the cupcake and draw straight up on the release to create the tree's top.
	Use white or gold Sparkle Gel to create the tinsel garland. Sprinkle red nonpareils for holly berries, gold stars, or any Christmas sprinkle mix to simulate ornaments.
Tip 21 Tree With White Sparkle Gel and Gold Sanding Sugar	Tip 1M Tree

Now, these Christmas Tree cupcakes do take up mounds of icing (you'll need to double or treble the amount you make) — and they'll need to be made of royal icing rather than buttercream if you're putting them in a Gingerbread House scene — but they'll be a fun addition to your Christmas table.