This summer I have been diving into the fabulous world of knitting I-cords.

What is an I-cord, you may ask? It’s the border and loop you see in the mini washcloths above (knit during Modern Daily Knitting Summer Camp, which was all about dishcloths that use I-cords!). They are delightful and pretty and sometimes functional, as we see here!

The I-Cord obsession began with the Sophie Scarf and Sophie Shawl—if you knit, you need to knit these patterns because they are truly delightful and adaptable. These projects use applied I-cord for the pretty edging. All this means is that you slip two stitches with the yarn in front at the end of every row, and voila! I-Cord!

I’ve made three Sophie scarves (one as a gift, two for me), and one shawl. They make fabulous gifts!

I-Cord is also used in Andrea Mowry’s Everyday Cowl—both for edging and bind-off. I-cord bind off is sort of the equivalent of one step forward, two steps back, but it does look nice and tidy.

Then I decided to get really crazy, and learn how to do two color I-cord bind off for Andrea Mowry’s The Shift cowl!

This wasn’t in my plans. I’ve been trying to work down my Ravelry queue of patterns and use up stash, which is what happened with both the Sophie Scarf above and the Everyday Cowl. But when I saw that Andrea had designed this pattern for the Edinburgh yarn festival, and since I’m going to Edinburgh in September, and all the colors she used were named after places in Edinburgh, I not only had to make this, but I had to use the original colors. (They’re the bottom three colors here.)

I also learned mosaic knitting with this project (Mosaic knitting is basically slipping stitches in various patterns.)

This is about to go in the bath and be blocked, then seamed, to create the finished object. Keep your eyes peeled for an update!

And then finally, I learned to knit a single I-cord during the Modern Daily Knitting (MDK) Summer Camp held last Friday. This was pretty amazing; if you’ve never taken a class with them, I highly recommend it! Lorilee Beltman taught us all sorts of tricks using her Sinkmates Suite dishcloths, which use I-cord and various stitch techniques to create beautiful dishcloths. I generally hate working with cotton yarn, but the Rowan Handknit Cotton we used for this class is great!

I’m addicted, I’m just going to admit it. So far I’ve knit one basic, one striped, and I’m about to start a mosaic one. The other great thing about these patterns is that they help me master a technique that’s stifled me—picking up stitches from a cast-off edge. I’m really bad at this! But I get lots of practice while I knit these dishcloths, and this will definitely come in handy for future projects, especially cardigans that have a shawl collar!

In the non I-cor world, I’m also working on a blanket for a friend’s little boy, and there’s another MDK online class coming up in August where I’ll be knitting a cowl that looks scrumptious.

Have you ever fallen in love with a certain type of technique, recipe, or music, and then just couldn’t stop doing it? :) Tell me about it!