A couple of days ago, Prudent Purl asked what nupps are. Now that I've made a few, I think I have an answer.
Nupps, my dear, are Satan's contribution to knitting.
Actually, they're kinda fun, but the Estonian Shawl calls for 5 stitch nupps which, quite frankly, seem almost impossible to extract from the needle. The nupp is a sort of bobble--a little glob of stitches that make a ball on the fabric. The way it works is this:
When you get to the place where you want to be a-nupping, you make several stitches into one. The ones I'm doing are k1, yo, k1, yo, k1 all into one stitch. So from one comes 5. That's the easy part. On the purl side (the next row) you've got to p5tog. Yikes! My needles were not up to that task, so last night I had to enlist the assistance of a smaller dpn that was very pointy to do those p5togs. Finally, I decided to take the advice of the pattern writer and just do a simplified nupp (3 stitches instead of 5), which made for a much more pleasant knitting experience.
If you'd like to learn more about nupps (and maybe even see what they look like), here are some links:
Windy City Knitting Guild provides this little online Estonian Tutorial. If you scroll down to the bottom, you'll see a knitted sample of a nupp--the little balls on the fabric.
And here's the nupp section of the shawl upclose at Chery Knits.
