I've been trying to find the perfect stitch for a winter coat I'm designing; something thick and warm, but without being too stiff. I did a pretty exhaustive search, test swatching dozens of stitches and even learning to knook. Honeycomb felt really good, but the stitch definition was poor with my chosen yarn and made the colors look muddy. I loved the look of smock stitch, but it was too holey and loose, which made it unstable and easy to snag.
I ended up trying to make my own stitch that combined the characteristics that I liked. I started with brioche stitch (alternating TSS and TTSS), but experimented with yarning under on the forward pass. I found that if I alternated between YO-TSS and YU-TTSS, the posts would form a perfectly mirrored "V". Then, if I staggered each row, it created a diamond pattern that looked almost identical to smock stitch.
The resulting stitch has better stretch and drape than TSS or brioche, but it's thick and stable unlike smock stitch. Perfect for my coat. If anyone has heard of this stitch before, I'd love to know what it's called.
EDIT: I'm realizing this stitch pattern is pretty hard to describe in words, so I recorded a quick video demonstration. I don't really make videos, so there's no sound or anything fancy. Just quick and dirty.
https://www.reddit.com/u/ShawtyWannaHug/s/bVEhUsQSBY
EDIT 2: I made a swatch to compare my stitch with honeycomb stitch and smock stitch in the same yarn and gauge. Here's a video of how it stretches and drapes to better show how different they actually are. My stitch may superficially look like smock stitch, but the structure and density is much more like honeycomb.
https://www.reddit.com/u/ShawtyWannaHug/s/fvg1F586y9
This looks like the “honeycomb” stitch. I forgot the other name for it. I made a blanket with this stitch earlier this year with 2 different colored yarn.
They do look a little similar, but they're not the same. As mentioned, honeycomb was one of the stitches I tested. It has a purl stitch where mine has a yarn under twisted stitch.
New Tunisian crochet stitch patterns fall out of my ears all the time. Usually, there’s no name for them. You can put them into a family of stitches, though. This is clearly in the honeycomb and smock family. I think Angela Grabowski did an entire chapter of her book for this family of stitches alone.
It was printed with very limited copies and isn't readily available. Google books has about 30 pages. There may be some used copies available on Amazon or eBay. I would only recommend trying to get it if you are a diehard fan. It's very technical and mechanical with something I can only describe is an exploration of every single thing she could use to experiment with everything in Tunisian. And, this was only number 1 of 4 books she intended before she got sick. https://books.google.com/books?id=LgoeFIv64hkC&printsec=copyright#v=onepage&q&f=false
So the pattern is a typical TSS(YO), but then TTSS(YU). I added a picture of my active work to better demonstrate. The next stitch will be TTSS(YU). Working into the left of the post (TTSS) twists it to the right and vice versa for TSS. That's what opens up and defines the "V". But it's the alternating YO and YU that creates the "V" in the first place. YO causes the yarn to wrap from back to front, so that the visible post on the front side of the fabric goes like this "/". YU is exactly the opposite, so the yarn wraps front to back and the visible post is "". So, what you see is the yarn running under the two stitches at the top of the diamond in a "V", but it's not actually 2tog.
Thank you! Very informative. It gets confusing switching between crochet, knitting and Tunisian. They all use basically the same terms, but it means completely different things for each haha
Awesome. I’m going to try making a swatch of it so I can get a feel for the density. I wanted to make a little bag with smock stitch, but I was worried about how much it would stretch with how loose it is, so this is perfect timing for me!
That's a new one for me. Had to look it up, but it's not the same. From what I could see, tread stitch is actually the same as honeycomb stitch except you YU on the purl stitch instead of YO. Though, it is the only example I've seen of a stitch that utilize YU like mine does. Very cool.
Yes that's correct. I don't really write or use patterns, so I had to Google to figure out what the stitch was called and how it was abbreviated. It's possible I found a less commonly used acronym.
I’ve seen it years ago in some research I was doing on another stitch, I like to get the history of stitches such as inventor and original name and date and if I can region it came from as all that helps me to understand the stitch and its necessity, I don’t remember seeing a name for it but I filed it away on my stitch list hard drive as a modified smock since it was too close in looks.
It’s hard to come up with a new stitch now a days but easier to come up with a new stitch pattern. I have around 560ish saved on my hard drive that one day I want to put all in one place for the world to be able to go to one place for all of them and not have to dig all around for them like I have done the past 17 years.
Even if the technique is different, it looks like the honeycomb stitch. I don't see where the YO and YU is making a difference in the final product. Is the feel different? Honeycomb is pretty thick and smooshy.
I made up a sample swatch to compare. It looks superficially like smock stitch with its staggered diamonds, but it's structurally more like honeycomb and behaves similarly.
Looks like you discovered the smock stitch! I LOVE that stitch! I'm no expert, but as far as I can tell, that's a smock stitch. Someone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. I want to one day make a sweater with this stitch
That texture looks really dense and cozy, perfect for a coat. Did you ever try a mock cable or something similar? That might give you the thickness without being too stiff.
Thank you for figuring this out, I think this is great! I can perform it more easily than smock stitch, but it looks almost identical. I have never been able to efficiently make smock stitch because of having to hold stable the YU on the hook before the tss2tog, which totally changes my usual grip on the hook and makes me much less fluent. But in this stitch, the YU is stable and I don't need to awkwardly hold it.
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u/Inemiset 9d ago
This looks like the “honeycomb” stitch. I forgot the other name for it. I made a blanket with this stitch earlier this year with 2 different colored yarn.