Stash tackler ornaments - The seventh door

Few of you will remember my very first wire crochet Christmas baubles. Unbreakable, unusual, some of them still available ;-) Since then I have made different kinds of decorations, but most of them were wire knitted which I only realized after a conversation with a co-worker the other day. Why had I never tried to crochet around a bauble?
Well, that could easy be changed. I had already strung some, okay, a lot of mixed color seed beads on a copper wire and I choose black baubles for the filling as the contrast would show the difference between the two techniques nicely.

After starting the wire crochet bauble, I knew why I prefer wire knitting for ornaments. To achieve the perfect shape for your bauble, you actually work on the bauble, at least I do. That's a lot easier to do if you knit because the wire structure isn't as dense, is much more forgiving when you press it against the bauble and easier to shape, and of course because the beads are between the stitches.
In wire crochet you usually work from the inside if you don't have a flat piece and the beads appear on the outside, but try to do that if there is already a bauble on the inside! So I turned it the wire structure around after a few rows, so the beads are on the inside now, but you can still see them peek through.
The other downside is that it takes even longer than knitting around a bauble, but it definitely has a very different look and also gave me two new ideas for later some time.

Now the wire knit bauble. You see all the beads perfectly well, the look is very airy and less "messy" as you have just one layer of wire whereas crocheting is more three-dimensional because you pull the extra wire through to make a stitch.

Here they are in one picture together, so you can compare them even better. Let me add that in the right light the wire crochet bauble sparkles more because the layers of wire and the texture capture the light better. I wonder which one would win the sparkle battle, though, if I had used only silver lined beads or maybe even crystals as the beads are so much more visible in the wire knit bauble.
I also feel the temptation to see which one breaks more easily when dropping them, but the crochet bauble just took too long for that.
In the end I guess it's just a matter of taste which one you like better (let's not forget these are quite unconventional colors for Christmas baubles, too ;-)).

This post goes well with my other posts about the difference between techniques like wire crochet, wire knit, netting, and Viking knit, by the way. You can find them here, here and here.

Wire knit, Viking knit and netting

"Why do you call it knitting if you are using a crochet hook?" "I like your crochet." "Is that woven wire?" "You can't knit with a crochet hook." "It's called knooking." "Is that spool knitting?" "Oh, but that's Viking knit!"

I admit it can get confusing. I blogged about the differences between wire knit and wire crochet before, in this and more elaborately with sample pictures in this blog post. I didn't want to repeat myself here, so please look up these two posts if you want to know more.
The wire knitting I do is also not the same as Viking knitting although I get why people may think that at first. Knitting is knitting after all, right?
Actually it's not.

A few things before I show you my samples:
I am by no means a Viking knit expert, so far I have only dipped my toe in. For the sample I skipped the making of a base part. This is NOT a tutorial, this is just supposed to show you how differently wire knit, Viking knit and netting look.
I do knit with a crochet hook. I could use knitting needles and end up with the same look, but with a crochet hook I feel I have more control over the wire. I call it knitting because the result are not crochet stitches, they are knit stitches.


This is a knitted wire rope sample and this is a very short explanation of how it's made with an ordinary crochet hook.
First you make a row of chain stitches (which is different from the first row if you knit with needles) and close it (if you make a flat piece, you just work your way up back and forth, but the technique is the same). Then you pull the wire through the first loop with your crochet hook, towards yourself and bend it upwards over your loop to avoid the wire slipping back out. You will see that it looks like a knit stitch already, and that's how you go on. Go through the next loop with your hook, catch the wire, pull through and bend upwards.
The wire in the last row is in no way anchored to the other stitches and unravels easily if you are not careful.
You don't have to cut a length of wire off your spool for this technique. If you use it with beads, however, you have to put the beads on the wire before you start knitting.
You can use a draw plate to even out your rope or make it longer and slimmer.

This is a simple single Viking knit sample.
The loops are woven around the loops of the last row. No unraveling there. You can use a mandrel, a dowel, a special Viking knit tool that helps you with the start, a pencil ... I used a large knitting needle for this sample.
There are different Viking knit variations like double or triple knit.
You have to have a length of wire cut off the spool to be able to weave the loops, but you can add wire while you go along. To even out the chain and make it longer and give it a different look, you can use a draw plate.

Last but not least I made a small netting sample. In this case loops are not woven around loops, but around the wire between two loops which makes this a very open net.

I hope I made the differences at least a little clearer, but should you have questions, I'll do my best to answer them!

I do have to say, however, as I keep getting asked that I don't make tutorials and don't plan on starting making them. Thanks for understanding.

Wire knit or wire crochet?

Two of the favorite techniques I use in my work are wire knit and wire crochet. People often ask me why I have different names for them because they know that I use a crochet hook for both techniques. There's an old post here where I started to explain the difference, but then I thought it might be interesting for you to if I dig a little deeper. First of all let me say that there's no official term that everyone uses. What I call wire knit, might be called wire crochet by others, or invisible spool knitting. I took some pictures of basic samples for you to hopefully clear the confusion up a bit. Even though it might be hard to believe ... ALL of these samples started out with eight chain stitches and ALL of them were worked on with the same size crochet hook – and the same fingers. So what exactly is it that makes them look so differently from each other? Let's start with the flat piece. The first difference you might notice is what I like to call "open stitches". They make a piece much easier to unravel, that can be a good thing ... and it can be very bad if a cat tries to run off with your wire (which is not something I ever encourage). As you can see, the wire knit sample has all open stitches while the wire crochet only has one open stitch at the end. Again, open stitches can be good if you found a mistake you want to fix, but more often it is not something you want. This goes for all shapes of wire knit or crochet, you will see that in the next pictures. Of course it is nothing you get  to see in a finished piece, so that fact is interesting, but no help in identifying a technique.

The other thing you can see is that the wire knit sample has a much more open, airy structure. Compared to it the other sample is tighter and a bit smaller, too. Why is that? In wire knit you put your hook through a stitch, grab the wire with it and make a loop. That's it. You move on to the next stitch, grab the wire, make a loop, to the next, and so on. In wire crochet however you put your hook through the stitch with the last made stitch still on your hook and grab the wire. Now you have two loops and you grab the wire once more with your hook and pull it through both of them. So there is more wire in crochet pieces, which makes them less slinky and delicate looking than knit pieces. They also can't be pulled as easily as knit pieces which again can be both an advantage and a disadvantage. On the other hand it makes them sturdier and the stitch pattern is maybe more interesting. Next I will show you two rope or tube samples. Wire ropes offer endless possibilities and I love to play around with them to make new designs. Again you can see how much more open the wire knit sample looks. I deliberately took the pictures on reflective underground to point that out even more. It makes this technique perfect for filling beads into a tube. The beads are not hidden as much as in a crochet tube where we know more wire is involved. Also the beads help maintaining the shape of the knit rope because they don't just look delicate, they really are. A crochet rope withstands pressure from outside  a lot better. I wouldn't recommend wire knit ropes around children for example, or you might end up with a flattened rope which is not that easy to re-shape if possible at all, or you suddenly have a slimmer, but much longer necklace which is something that can't be changed back at all.

Last, but not least I'll share the disk with you which is often the base for making bezels for rocks, beads or cabochons. Thanks to being so flexible a wire knit disk can be shaped beautifully around a stone, even the free form ones. I have also used it for rings, earrings and pendants, with or without beads. The crochet disk is sturdier and therefore harder to use on irregularly shaped stones, but works great for rounds or ovals. I have also used it as focal for necklaces or earrings. Of course I know I have only scratched the surface with this, but I still hope that has helped a bit for the beginning.

Bigger, closer, sharper

Once upon a time there was a lady with a compact camera. Although the lady loved that compact camera dearly, she wasn't always happy with the macro mode. Sometimes she just wanted to get closer and closer, but all she got were blurry pictures.

Then the lady stumbled upon a guy, David ... and David had a special lens ...

I won't try to explain to you how exactly it works. What I can do is tell you that communication was great, shipping fast, and that in the end I held my Little BigShot in hands.

What else I can do is show you two quick pictures that I took of the same sample piece, and you'll be able to tell the difference yourself.

Isn't that amazing? As you can see, I even got closer to my sample piece in the first picture which is the one I took with the lens attached, and it's still not blurry.
I'm only glad the lens didn't break when I had dropped it on the tile floor just seconds before, ehem.

I'm just a pleased customer, so I can't answer any questions. I'm not affiliated with David in any way.
If you want to know more, check out the videos on David's page, Little BigShot, and also visit his photo help blog, Photography Central for Online Sellers.

Wire knit and wire crochet

When I posted a picture of one of my wire knit rings, an online friend asked me if it shouldn't be called wire crochet because it's done with a crochet hook.

Thank you, Tina, I think this is the perfect subject to catch up on blogging!

Let me say first that there are different takes on the subject. I know people who call it wire crochet for the tool used, there are people who think it's spool knitting which it actually does look like if it's a rope, but the explanation wouldn't work for flat pieces and I do not use a spool (although I have done so before), there are people who use knitting needles, and lately I have learned that there is something called "knooking" for which a special crochet hook is used.

For me it's in the kind of stitches I do. Yes, I do use an ordinary worn down crochet hook and wire, but in the end it looks knitted, just as if I had used knitting needles.

I have started using the technique beginning of this year, and it's growing more and more as I'm trying out little variations for the setting of the beads in flat pieces for example, but also because it works better on some cab shapes than my wire crochet.

Let me show you the difference between one of my knit and one of my crochet ropes (it's not the same wire gauge and I didn't use the same hook size, but don't let that confuse you, just have a look at the stitches themselves). As you can tell the knit rope uses less wire and therefore works better for putting beads inside for example as you can see them better. The crochet rope is a lot sturdier however, concerning pressure from the outside. Try pressing both ropes between two fingers and you'll see which one will go flat first - hm, maybe don't try it, but just believe me, I know what I'm talking about.

As for speed I would say that I'm quite a bit faster crocheting, but it hurts my hands more.

As always both techniques have their advantages and disadvantages, and it's always a personal thing which one you like better.

I love to use them both and as so often also to combine them. To me they are like siblings, one might say ... and they are both welcome in my studio! ;-)