'Blended' Ribbing

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This is a great ribbing technique that will give a ‘blended’ transition into the main fabric and it’ll keep the ribbing from flipping up where it joins the main fabric, like some ribbing can especially on shorter ribbed bands.  Most of the time, the flipping doesn’t irritate me that much but there are times when I want more of an edging rather than the typical ribbed effect with the definite line after the ribbed section.  This has been in my bag of tricks for just ages and I really don’t remember where I picked it up from but it has come in handy from time to time.   I used a 1x1 ribbing for this garment and I haven’t used it with anything other than 1x1 but I can assume that it would be just as attractive in other ribbing configurations too.  Give it a try and do some experimenting.

I didn’t use a tight ribbing on this garment because I wanted the peplum to lay more flat rather than pulling in at the bottom.  The body is knit at T3 on my midgauge machine with this yarn so I knit the ribbing at T0 on both the main bed and ribber bed.  After completing the 10 rows of ribbing, I loosened the tension to T2 on both carriages.  Then I transferred every other stitch from the ribber to the main bed and knit 3 rows for the bottom edge and 2 rows on the sleeve edge.  Then I transferred every other stitch of the remaining stitches on the ribber bed to the main bed and knit 3 (and 2) rows again.  Then I transferred all remaining stitches to the main bed.  I took my tension up to the body tension of 3 and continued with my garment.  It looks and behaves just as nice on tighter ribbing too and doesn't leave the defined separation line and doesn't flip.