Seth

hee hee hoo hoo brace yourself

I think knitters talk about brioche the wrong way and we use the worse method to form the fabric.

Foundation

Brioche is fundamentally a tuck stitch. Honestly, when it comes to hand knitting it's basically the only one, and we can use the terms interchangeably.¹ Tuck stitches are, structurally speaking, fabrics that manipulate and incorporate multiple rows into one active row with a regular sequence. Brioche specifically is one that works one additional row into the active one. You work it by alternating brioching stitches² and regular stitches so that you're actually only working half a row each pass. Two rows of brioche is equal to one row of stockinette. In essence.

It's fundamentally a Weird stitch; yarn from one stitch is tucked around another, collapsing the fabric into something bouncier, thicker, and much squatter. It forms something like ribbing, but when you drop down, each stitch you undo reveals two strands instead of one! This is because each brioche'd stitch is working with two rows of knitting at once. And most knitters are working the wrong two rows.

Working Brioche (Common Method; sl1 brioche)

The brioche stitch you'll find everywhere, from briochestitch.com (Nancy Marchant's website, with which I have a bone to pick) to newstitchaday.com, to well, basically anywhere online is fairly standard. You can use Nancy's adorable burps (brp) and barks (brk) or just call them k2togs; they're paired with sl1yos, the more foundational action to the stitch. So post-foundation rows, you'll work brk, sl1yo, brk, sl1yo, then the next row you work sl1yo where you previously brk'd and brk what you previously sl1yo'd.

What you're doing, with those slipped/yo'd stitches, is technically working a future row. Generally, when knitting, you work one row that influences the row below it. When you purl, you're not putting a purl onto the needle, you're folding the stitch below the one on the needle into a purl. When you decrease, you overlap two stitches in the row below, leaving one on the needle. When you sl1yo, you're placing an unraveled stitch (the yo) in the current row, so the next row can combine the unraveled stitch and the one below it into one SuperStitch. This is not normal. We don't generally work a stitch in prep for the one coming; common brioche is an exception to this rule.

Working Brioche (Uncommon Method; k1below brioche [aka "Fisherman's Rib"])

The other method, which I was introduced to as brioche early in my knitting life thanks to the marvelous compendium The Principles of Knitting by June Hemmons Hiatt³, follows knitting norms a little more closely: Post foundation (which, in its case is just a row of stockinette) you simply k1below, k, k1below, k. On the next row you k the k1belows and k1below the ks. By working a k1below, you cause the stitch on the L needle to unravel and form a new stitch on the R needle through the stitch one row below, creating the exact same loop sequence as a brk'd sl1yo. You create that sequence, however, in a way that visually shows you what exactly is going on in brioche fabric. You watch as one stitch is tucked behind another, adding volume and removing height. You also work with stitches below the active row, which is consistent with other techniques. I think both these things are incredibly valuable, but especially the first fact: by seeing the fabric form, you can more easily fix that fabric later.

Understanding the Fabric is Vital

Let me be extremely clear here: whether you're working sl1 brioche or k1below brioche, you are, absolutely, fully and fundamentally with no ifs ands or buts making brioche. Furthermore, Fisherman's Rib is the same thing as brioche⁴. What really gets me is the mental trick that working sl1 brioche pulls on you: by working a row that has yet to actually be made, the knitter can easily miss the critical fact that brioche is tucking one row into another. This is a problem because when (and it is very much when) you make a mistake, you're immediately at a disadvantage: you don't know how the fabric you're making is actually made! Laddering up is tear inducing and ripping back leaves you with a confounding pile of yarn between loops to pick back up. You don't actually get why working rows in alternating colors makes vertical stripes. You're missing the why, so the how of fixing is out of reach. It's one thing to be told that each row worked is only one half a row of brioche; it's another to make the rows collapse on each other, letting you trace the route the yarn takes.

Revolution

I don't actually think sl1 brioche is wrong. While I personally think it's the weaker method and sets up a new brioche knitter for failure, I also have to admire it for a same reason I admire knitting as a whole: The method is actually pretty irrelevant; what matters is the fabric. There's a billion ways to hold your needles, a trillion ways to route the yarn; you can fight over which hand should feed the yarn for days and the end result will always be the same. You need to have consecutive loops on a stick, and those loops need to be interlocked with a set below it, but how you get there matters little. Honestly, someone out there can (and should, I'd love to read it) make an argument about how sl1 brioche is better for learning how the fabric is made because you can see your collapsed row on the needle or something along those lines. Different methods can and will click with different people.

So here's the revolution I want: I want a terminology shift away from brioche/fisherman's rib and towards sl1 brioche and k1below brioche. I want more patterns written in k1below, and I want information out there on how to transpose one method for the other. I want knitters who think less about the rote motions and more about the fabric those motions form. We're using names that obfuscate the fundamentals, and we need to pull a Hiatt and escape them for something far more descriptive in nature.

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1. I semi-regularly break down stitches for people on reddit who are asking "what's this stitch on this store-bought Thing"; I've determined you could theoretically do basically any tuck stitch I've seen by hand, but most of them are a pain because hand knitting means you have to factor in turns and working one stitch at a time and it's much easier when you can essentially knit an entire row instantly and even hook and hold multiple rows like in a commercial machine

2. yes, sorry. Not a clear word at all; I'm getting to it

3. I think I found it at the public library within a year or two of starting knitting. I checked it out and literally started reading it from cover to cover despite the fact it's intended more as reference; I was reading it snippets at a time while doing college, so I maxed out my renews, probably returned it and rechecked it more than once... Eventually my wife bought me a copy, but I don't remember if that was pre or post marriage! I actually haven't fully finished it; got a good 3/4 through. I should finish it sometime, I think!

4. this is the bone I have to pick with briochestitch.com. It separates fisherman's rib as "a member of the same family"; it notes that the fabric is the same (at least currently--I have a strong memory of it not doing this but I have no way to prove it), but says the site will focus on "the brioche sitch", i.e. her terminology and method. The two are inseparable, though! It's not a member of the same family, it's literally the same person.