The Clap

I'm late jumping on the clapotis bandwagon, but I've finally done it. For those of you not in the knit-know, the clapotis is a scarf/shawl/wrap thing. It's all French and stuff. Last winter, our rotation student, who is a fellow knitter (but I didn't know it then), had a really interesting scarf, and I wanted to ask her where she got it, and if it was hand-made.... so I could make one of my own... but I never did. Then I joined ravelry, and found that everyone and their mother has made a clapotis.

So I finally decided I needed one, too. I bought some Atacama yarn, which is a super soft handpainted alpaca, and it's a delight to work with. Then I cast on.

Now, the clap has a lot of weird stitches, and everything is in knitting code, so it can be confusing. For example: one row is composed of k1 (knit 1, that's very common), k tbl (um... knit through back loop? perhaps- I wasn't sure.) As you can see in the website, there are columns of ladders (yarn that just goes straight across and doesn't have that knit stitch look- you can see what I mean on the bottom of the clapotis pattern page). So when I cast on and worked for a little bit on the increasing rows, I had this:
And there are no ladders and I wasn't sure k tbl was what I thought it was.

Then I went a bit further, and I discovered that I was indeed doing it right, and the ladders are caused by purposely dropping a stitch! oooh clever! k tbl go on either side of that dropped stitch, basically so the one dropped stitch keeps in its own column, and doesn't cause the stitches on either side of it to unravel- k tbl causes a twisted stitch that sort of locks into place. So I go on. And on and on, and I'm so thrilled with this. I'm going to have to knit another for my mom, if only for the sake of using this pattern and yarn again.
Note over there on the right all the ladders from the dropped stitches. As I saw in roton R's scarf, it curls up in a really neat way once it's all done- I'll post a photo once this is finished, which might be a while- I'm making it fairly long, at least 4'.