BRIOCHE KNITTING is
one of those glorious
techniques that looks
amazingly professional yet
is pretty straightforward
to knit - once you get
to grips with the special
terminology and process.
The fabric produced is soft, airy, squidgy,
incredibly warm and light, yet not too
bulky. One-colour brioche is immensely
satisfying, and with two-colour brioche
you can create elegantly meandering ribs
of colour that are so satisfying to knit.
Although some designers incorporate
brioche stitch into garments, some of the
best patterns we have seen use innovative
stitch patterns to create amazing effects on
shawls, scarves and other accessories.Brioche’s beginnings
The roots of brioche knitting aren’t very
clear. It first appeared in publications by
Miss Frances Lambert in the early 1840s,
including My Knitting Book from 1843,
which you can read in a digital version onthe Gutenberg.org website. Miss Lambert
talks about ‘a Brioche’, a kind of cushion
that resembles the French sweet bread that
we know today, which is probably where
the name for this technique stems from.
According to Mary Thomas’ Book of
Knitting Pattern s it was also know has
Shawl Stitch, Oriental Rib Stitch, and Point
Angleterre (English Stitch) – in some parts
of Europe it is still known as English Rib.
The knitting luminary, Elizabeth
Zimmermann, described it as Prime Rib.
Brioche knitting gives you a ribbed fabric
by only working every other stitch on each
row and slipping the others with a
yarnover in the case of one-colour brioche.
In two-colour brioche, you knit a stitch
and then slip the next stitch with a
yarnover in your first colour. Then you
make a second pass, where you slip the
knitted stitch with a yarnover and purl the
stitch that you slipped in the previous row
together with its companion yarnover. It is
the knitting or purling of the yarnovers
with their stitches that create the bulky
softness of this fabric.Expert advice
Over the years there developed many
different abbreviations for how to achieve
different brioche stitches, but it wasn’t
until 2010, with the publication of Nancy
Marchant’s Knitting Brioche, that the
terms became more standardised. Nancy
championed the ‘barks’ and ‘burps’ that
we know today (brk or ‘bark’ is Brioche
knit, and brp or ‘burp’ is Brioche purl).
Nancy explains that in her research
she found brioche knitting was used
across Northern Europe, and she herself
was taught by friends in the Netherlands
who had four different methods of creating
the same stitch. Her hard work has made
this wonderful technique more accessible
to knitters of all levels.
When working brioche, you will need
to carefully check your tension and, if you
aren’t starting with a rib, make sure you
use a very elastic cast-on and cast-off to
accommodate the stretchy nature of the
fabric you are producing. Nancy’s excellent
book covers these in detail.The beauty
of Brioche
Juliet Bernard explores
the story of brioche
knitting, and speaks with
leading designers working
with this technique
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The Knitter 55 Issue 149