First off, Russ asks, who or what would wear a Moebius strip? It turns out that if you knit them with a relatively large circumference, they make interesting scarves (think women's dress scarves, not winter scarves). Also, if the circumference is smaller, they could work as winter scarves/hats. That's what I'm trying to make: a neck muffler that can double as a hat.

Moebius knitting is done on circular needles. A circular needle is nothing more than two needles connected by a cord:



Moebius needles are a lot longer, though; the connecting cord on mine is 47" long.

Here's what the project looks like at the moment:




The orange bit at the top, amidst all the green, is a stitch marker. It indicates the point at which I began. (Stitch markers are always used in circular knitting because the farther you go from the beginning, the harder it becomes to tell when you begin a new row.)

You can see the point where the surface "flips" if you follow the bottom edge in the direction of the arrow here:




Now here's an interesting thing about a Moebius strip: Just as it only has one side, it also only has one edge. When the arrow starts, you're following the green edge along the bottom of the knitting, but if you trace that edge with your finger, you will see that when it "flips," it becomes the TOP edge, and you follow it right along the top to the stitch holder and the needles, and then back around to the bottom again, at the flip. My mental image of this at the moment is that I'm really knitting the edge of a spiral. How the spiral becomes a surface eludes me, though.

So, in order to go around the knitting - to start at the stitch holder and go completely around - you end up adding stitches on what looks like both edges (but of course there's really only one edge). To illustrate: I started with a variegated brown yarn, and I added six rows of green yarn - but I only changed yarns ONCE, despite the fact that it looks like there are TWO green stripes.

So essentially you knit from the INSIDE OUT. (This is hard to fathom.) Here's a picture to help you think about this:



See that thread in the middle? That's where I began the project. This means that as I continue to knit, the two loops made by the needle (I'm knitting on one circular needle, looped around once) will actually get farther apart from each other, as the knitting grows from the inside out.

Also note that the top of the knitting looks like it's the "right side" and the bottom looks like it's the "wrong side." Although with a knitted garment (or a paper Moebius strip) you can move the "flip" around, it turns out that the "flip" actually occurs at a very specific place in the knitting: Halfway through the stitches on the needle. (This makes complete sense when you think about it.)

It's not yet clear to me what this means in terms of knitting patterns into the yarn, as I have started with the Simplest of All Moebius Strips.

I'm going to switch back to the variegated brown yarn now . . . I'll post more pix as the project grows.