Ok short rows…short rows are how you make the egg look like an egg, rather than a weird circle. And short rows are also one of those things that can feel completely confounding when you first hear about them (I mean they did for me, and I assume I’m not totally alone in that).

But all they really are is a little bit of extra fabric you sneak into your work to change the shape of the piece. That’s it. Everything else is detail. And folks get really really really into that detail! Like people have OPINIONS about the correct way to do them in different circumstances. But the fundamental concept is ‘make a little extra fabric in just the right spot to adjust the overall shape of your knitting,’ and everything after that is just talking about how make it either more invisible or more decorative or more efficient to work.

Here I’ve worked a section of short rows to make a blob on the side of my otherwise round egg. It’s (more or less) the bits I’ve scribbled over with pink below.

Compare that to the equivalent stretch of fabric somewhere else on the egg that doesn’t have short rows below. See how there’s just some extra fabric on the one with the short rows?

For this (a toy egg, where the edges of the short row section are going to end up on the bottom where you won’t really see them), all the details of various types of short rows just deeply don’t matter (at least not to me). So I did them the simple way that I don’t have to go look up to remember how to do. If you’re new to short rows, that’s what I’d recommend you do too. This is a great project to see how they work and make them feel less mysterious. I promise they’re not as daunting as they seem the first time you hear about them. (And if you are one of those people with opinions about short row techniques, totally feel free to work them however you like best, I won’t mind.)

Next time we’ll talk about how to do something to that yolk so that it looks more like an egg yolk and less like an oddly colored nipple!

Admin/Navigation:

• I’m posting a series of videos to go along with our upcoming egg pattern. Anyone with any level of membership (yes even the free one) has access to watch all the videos!
• The pattern will be out in a few weeks. Rampant Nonsense folks always get all the new patterns as they come out, and it will be eventually be available to other folks in some format or another.
• You don’t need to watch the videos if you don’t like to learn that way! You an always use the patterns by themselves, you don’t need to watch this to use the pattern. This is just for folks who like to listen to someone talk them through it or want to see it rather than read about it!