Knitting & Crocheting Glossary: F

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fabric stiffener: A liquid medium that you apply to a worked piece during blocking, which dries invisible and makes your fabric rigid.

faggot: A kind of knitted lace pattern composed of nothing but the simplest lace-making unit — a yarn over followed (or preceded) by a decrease.

Fair Isle: Knitting technique, also called stranding, that involves color patterns using more than one color in a row. You can work with two strands of yarn, carrying them along the back of your work, and picking up and dropping them as needed.

fancy stitch; lacet: A filet crochet stitch that looks somewhat like a V and is worked across five stitches or the width of two spaces.

fasten off: To cut the yarn in a crocheted piece and then draw it through a loop on the crochet hook at the end of the design or the end of that particular yarn's use in the design.

felt: To transform knitting or crochetwork into a dense, sturdy fabric by running the finished piece through the washing machine.

filet crochet: A crochet technique that imitates a 17th-century form of lace worked on mesh netting stretched across a frame, which has evolved into a series of blocks and spaces that form a design.

fleece: Wool from a sheep or similar animal.

float: The strand on the wrong side of loose stitches that connects those stitches.

floss: A soft, loosely twisted thread or yarn used in embroidery.

flp: A crochet stitch pattern abbreviation for front loop only.

foll: A crochet or knitting stitch pattern abbreviation meaning follows or following.

foundation chain: A series of chain stitches that creates your first row of crochet.

fringe: A border or trimming of cords or threads, hanging loose or tied in bunches.

front cross: To knit or crochet stitches at an angle on the front (or right) side of a fabric, producing a pattern in which the stitches overlap.

front post; FP: A type of crochet stitch in which you insert your hook around the post of a stitch that's one or more rows below the current row, creating raised patterns on the surface of the fabric facing you.