Centered Single Decrease: a better name for Bunny Ears

I’ve changed my mind about using the “bunny ears” name for that set of stitch techniques. Woolly Wormhead wrote a really good twitter thread about how technique names that don’t describe the technique they refer to are inaccessible for a variety of people. I prefer descriptive names myself!

I realized this morning that when I first unvented the decrease, I thought of it as a centered single decrease (CSD), so that would be a good name. Because I always like to check that something is a distinctive abbreviation, I did a web search for CSD knitting. Much to my pleasure, it turns out that it is already in use for the exact decrease I have in mind. So that’s all right.

I’ll be writing a new explanatory post for how to do it, as the old illustrations seem to have gone missing.

For a long time I was using 3-to-2 decrease for bunny ears back because it was the only one of that technique I’d used. I only switched over to bunny ears because it looked like it was becoming a standard. Now that I have four variations of the technique I use in my work, plus some 3-to-2 decreases with mini cables, it’s not going to be feasible for me to go back to 3-to-2 decrease.

Bunny ears is somewhat descriptive if you look at one version of the decrease and see a rabbit, but that’s not so useful as something that describes how it’s made, or something about its purpose. It also doesn’t help for the version where the center stitch goes to the back, which looks nothing like a rabbit. Nor is it useful for the two versions with yarnovers in the middle.

Centered single decrease doesn’t describe how it’s made, but it does describe its purpose, and contrasts its shape with the right-leaning knit 2 together and various left-leaning single decreases (slip 1—knit 1—pass slipped stitch over, ssk, and so on).

More next week with a new set of instructions! Also I need to figure out how to fix old blog posts efficiently.