If the 2D tuck is one of my two foundational stitches, this is the other. And it could not really have been anything else.
There is a stitch called the cardigan stitch. It comes in two forms, the half and the full. So a brand called Cardigan Knitwear, making cardigans, had a fairly obvious decision to make about which stitch to build them from. I went all in. The full cardigan stitch it is.
It is a rib. A full, generous one, almost over the top. I love what rib does, and I think it is rarely allowed to do much. Too often it lives only at the edges, the cuffs and the hem, a finishing detail. A fully ribbed garment is its own aesthetic, and not where I wanted to begin. The full cardigan stitch gave me the structure and body of a rib without making the garment a statement about one.
And it gives so much back. Depth, weight, a proper drape and fall. It holds its shape and holds the eye. It suits more or less anyone, which matters to me, because a cardigan should. It also does something useful for the crystals: the stitch runs in clear vertical channels, and a crystal set into a channel has somewhere to belong, a line to follow rather than a blank field to float in.
For now it is the stitch of the Grandad. The half cardigan is coming, but it has not yet arrived.
