Clothesline Knitting or Filled I-cord

Recently I thought about how to make low-priced purse handles. I wanted to make them from the same yarn that I will use for my purse but I didn’t want to have a simple I-cord because I’m always knitting very loose and the cord gets much to flexible for a purse handle.

Then I thought about the Clothesline Crochet and thought that this must be possible with knitting, too.
It is ;-))

Note: If you don’t know how to knit an I-cord you can find instructions in my Actinia entry in the English tutorial under ‘I-cord’.

That’s what you do:
I choose a thick ready-made cord to cover with knitting.
The number of stitches to cast-on depends on the size of the cord, the yarn and the needles (try it!), in this case I used five stitches.

So, cast-on the stitches, lay the inner cord in (see photo) and knit the first stitch over the inner cord.
The inner cord will be trapped in the stitch.

Then knit simply the rest of the stitches, lay the inner cord a little beside (see photo).

In the next row lay the inner cord again over the left needle to the right of the thread just as in the first photo, knit the first stitch over the inner cord and knit then the other stitches.

Knit in the same way until you reach the desired length.

Somewhere (and I really don’t remember, where) I saw a tutorial where they glued on hairbands to make the purse handles.
I thought that I should be able to knit around the hairbands just as I knitted the inner cord, but it didn’t work.
What however worked was knitting an I-cord and threading the hairband into, so that the hairband is covered and I even have threads to sew the handles onto the purse.

Links:
Here at unikatissima:
Tutorial on how to knit an I-cord in the English tutorial in the Actinia entry under ‘I-cord’