America's Test... Knitting Studio

Hi Everyone,

I've recently slid back into cooking - simple dinners mostly and heavy on the crockpot rotation. 

In the beginning, not really knowing where to start, I decided to go to the experts: America's Test Kitchen. They have a fabulous website, based on their philosophy of exhaustively researching and comprehensively testing a very wide selection of recipes. Need to make a great banana bread? They've got you covered with their deep dive into ALL things banana bread. They have baked and baked and tested out all of the banana bread recipes they could find. Walnuts or no? Honey or sugar? How many mushy bananas? They did it all. And the result: Best Banana Bread. And you better believe that it truly is, darn it! I can attest to that.

I love this organization and their credo so much that I've always thought that it could be a fantastic concept to apply to knitting.

Bear with me...

If you Google "Mattress Stitch", what do you come up with? Tens (or hundreds?) of videos and written explanations of this technique. All varying slightly from each other. Some have special tips. Others have tried and tested rules. All are a little bit different. But which one should you choose???

Who really knows in the moment? How can you determine where to spend your time? In truth, while you're in the middle (or at the end) of a project, all you really want to know is: What is the BEST (prettiest, neatest, easiest...) way to execute the Mattress Stitch??? NOW. Period. No fooling around. No one wants to sift through a seemingly endless supply of information. No time for that when a sweater needs to be finished.

So.... what if a group of knitters took it upon themselves to crowdsource all of the Mattress Stitch instructions out there - meticulously gathered them (from YouTube mostly??), then executed them all while testing them out for ALL of the qualities above and then came up with THE Mattress Stitch video/instruction manual? Who wouldn't love that? If you were diligent in your testing procedures, you would become known as the definitive source on Mattress Stitch. Then, emboldened, you could apply this process to all kinds of knitting techniques! Even expand it to knitting tools, accessories, books, patterns.

Wrap it up by publishing it all on a website called THE Ultimate Guide to Knitting... or something like that. Of course, a book would follow...

It would be a best seller, right?

Who's game?

xo

Knit House