Giving The Slip

I've been fascinated with slip-stitch knitting of late and continue to be amazed at all of the ways that it can change the texture and color of otherwise plain knitting. I first got a taste for it on the heel of my socks, where the slipped stitches are twice as big as the normal ones next to them giving an interesting ridgey texture.

But what I didn't realize was it's potential for integrating different colors, heck even completely different yarns into the same row without fussing with two yarns at the same time.
Now we can see on the magazine cover above (let's move right past the funky yarn and just focus on the stitch pattern, ok?) that two different yarns are slip-stitched together to form a boxy sort of ladder pattern. So I decided to swatch it out and see what would happen.

Ok, the bottom part is actually just reverse stockinette with a few stripes of knit thrown in. I'm a sucker for collecting interesting stitches and sometimes simplicity goes a long way. I started slipping the knit stitches towards the grey yarn and you can see what a difference in size that makes.

Strange how it looks like plain stockinette from the front! This is where I threw in some funky handspun grey llama wool I got from eBay a million years ago. When I first got this yarn I really thought it was great stuff; it had that handspun look and I couldn't figure out what the heck to do with it. Now after spinning for a while I can see that the yarn is actually crap. It's way overspun, uneven in tension and thickness, and filled with weed crap. Not just little bits that I can totally understand not being picked out. Huge stuff, like that debris in the picture below that the needle is pointing to. I have to laugh at myself because I thought it was so great when I got it. At least I have more idea of what to do it. I'll probably ply it on itself; that will remove some of the overtwisting, even it out and fluff it up a bit. In theory.

Using little bits of it at a time also helps. The pictures don't show at all how well the colors and textures of the red wool and grey llama yarns complement each other. The slipping creates little boxes that I find pretty interesting. Below we can see how the grey yarn is stretched over the red rows to rejoin the knitting above. That is slipping; passing the yarn loop from the left to the right needle without actually knitting or purling it.

I like the reversibility of this pattern (until the funky llama yarn hits anyway) and I haven't yet decided whether to turn this swatch into a scarf or not.