Tessellated Fish Testing 1, 2, 3

I've been working on finding the best way to attach my tessellated fishes (fish-a long) together without sewing. I think it's a good idea to knit the fish in strips. To do this you knit two fish, but do not bind off. (You will needle multiple sets of needles to do this.) Then with right sides facing do a 3 needle bind off. You now have two fish, tail to tail. You can then pick up the stitches at the mouth of the fish and continue on ...

I have learned a few things in knitting the fish and this one point is very important. When knitting your fish you HAVE to make sure you knit the slipped stitch very loose. Almost to the point of an exaggerated looseness if you get my drift. The fish will not lay flat if you knit too tight. This was difficult for me. As you can see my test fish are pretty much rejects, but they were good for me to test out the joining. Now that I have shown you my results they will end up in the frog pond.


The first thing I tried was knitting them together...picking up the slipped stitches on the side and bind off. If you want to see closer details, just click on the photo for a closeup.






It's ok, but it did leave a ridge on the back, which I'm not crazy about. You can see in this photo how much the fish is buckling. The fish I am now knitting are nice and loose and flat!






The next thing I tried was knitting the fish and attaching it at the same time by picking up a stitch at the end of every row of the fish.







The back is nice and flat. Not bad at all...I rather liked the way this turned out.




Then the last technique I tried was Cathy's (Bits and Bobs ) braided crochet. Cathy's blanket is what led me to the fish-a-long! I can't tell or show you how to do this. If you are interested be sure and join the Bits and Bobs group!
Why do I like this one? A chain forms in between the ridges of the slipped stitches. Here I made the chain in blue -same color as one of the fish, but on my future blanket I'm planning on using a contrasting color. I think it will look similar to this. Note this blanket is the original tessellated fish blanket (Fish Blanket from Knitter's Magazine issue 51 (Summer 1998)). I'm using Knitting Arrow's pattern.



This is the back...nice and flat with no ridges. This is definitely how I'm going to put my fish together!



Now, back to work. I'm really having a hard time keeping up with emails and blog visiting. Please be patient with me....I'm working on it. I really thought once the boys were out of school I'd have more time...now that's another story!

Happy knitting and fishing :)