Ruthless Knitting

Since my last post, I cast on and knit four inches of an Endpaper Mitt in brown and green, decided it was too muddy looking (as well as too small), and frogged it.

I then cast on and knit four inches of a Monkey sock in some lovely Interlacements Tiny Toes, decided it was too big, and frogged it. I had swatched carefully for both of these patterns, but neither swatch turned out to be accurate, probably because the swatches were too small.

Last night, wanting to knit something plain so I could read and knit at the same time, I began the all-stockinette back of a sweater in camel-colored Nashua Creative Focus Worsted. This morning, I knit another few inches, decided that it was coming out too small, and frogged back to the ribbing.

Then I got to thinking of a sock I knit in December, the Moccasin Sock from Elizabeth Zimmerman’s Knitter’s Almanac. There’s a bit of a story to this sock. In my immediate family, we had a name draw for Christmas, and I got my husband’s name. I know, that should be against the rules, but I accepted the pick and decided I wanted to knit David some black socks that he could wear to work. Now, David has big feet — size 12 — and I had not previously made socks for him. I decided to knit him the Moccasin Socks because they are re-footable, and I liked the idea that if he wore holes in the socks in the future, I could take off the soles and knit new ones on. (Full disclosure: I also disliked the idea of having to knit more than one pair of size 12 socks.)

My plan became complicated because David didn’t know that I had his name, and I wanted the socks to be a surprise. So I told him that I got my brother Austin’s name and that I was going to knit some socks for Austin — a not altogether improbable scenario, since I had already made Austin socks for his birthday in August. I also knew that if no one seemed to have drawn David’s name, he might get suspicious, so I had my other brother, James, pretend to have David’s name and ask him what he wanted for Christmas.

Meanwhile, I was hauling ass on this sock. I must have knit the thing in two or three days, which is really fast for me. I asked David to try it on, since it was way too big for me and “his feet were closer in size to Austin’s” (or so I told him), and it fit okay. While he was trying it on, however, he innocently commented that it was a nice sock but that he “didn’t think hand-knit socks were for him.” Oh.

Rather than knit him a pair of socks he didn’t want, I abandoned the project and made him a Christmas stocking instead (which you can see here). Then, lest the sock go to waste, I had my dad — who had professed his desire for more pairs of handknit socks — try it on. It was a little loose for him in the leg and too long in the toe, but he claimed to want it anyway, so I promised to rip out the toe (which meant ripping out and reknitting the whole sole and the toe), size it down for him, and knit a mate for it.

Returning to the present: in my frenzy of knitting things and then ripping them apart in the past few days, I remembered the sock and decided that I didn’t want to knit it again, since the finished pair wouldn’t fit my dad very well anyway. Instead, I ripped it out this morning.

Before I ripped it out, though, I took pictures of it so that I could document its short life, and while I was taking pictures I told David what I was doing. We agreed that I had been engaged over the past few days in knitting as performance art. Rather than creating garments, I’d been focusing my energy on knitting pieces of things — a partial mitten, a single sock, and a bit of sock ribbing and leg — and giving them brief life and a small audience prior to destroying them. Knitting as performance art might be compared to sand painting, but with yarn: you meticulously create something intricate and (almost) perfect, take a good long look at it, and then erase it.

I like this concept. It makes the frogging easier to bear.

So, without further ado, I present to you the art piece I call “The Elizabeth Zimmerman Moccasin Sock.”

Pattern: Moccasin Sock from Elizabeth Zimmerman’s Knitter’s Almanac
Yarn: Knit Picks Gloss* in black; Stahl Wolle Socka Color in 9128, blue tones; black reinforcement thread
Yardage: just under 1 skein of Gloss; partial skein of Socka
Yarn Source: Knit Picks; my Aunt Cathy
Needles: ? Perhaps Knit Picks classic circulars in size 1
Gauge: 9 stitches per inch in Gloss; 7.25 stitches per inch in Socka
Modifications: (1) Zimmerman describes making this sock over 44 stitches, but I wanted to use fingering weight sock yarn, so I rejiggered the pattern and knit it over 86 stitches. Rather than do K2, P2 ribbing, I knit the top in garter rib, which looks great but turned out to be too inelastic for my purposes. Also, I think I had too many stitches in the top part of the sock, even for my husband’s generous calves. (2) Zimmerman says to knit the foot until it is 8 inches from the beginning of the instep, then to join nylon thread and knit another inch before beginning the toe shaping. The problem is that she never says in the pattern how long the entire foot is supposed to be, so it’s difficult to determine when you’re adapting the pattern whether you should go with that 8 inches or make the foot longer or shorter, especially since it’s obvious that some part of the toe is meant to wrap underneath the sock, but not how much of it. Turns out that it was not very much, and I should have stuck with her 8 inches, but I figured that my husband’s feet are unusually long so I didn’t begin the reinforcement thread until I hit 9.5 inches. This made very long socks.

Incidentally, I rounded out my performance of this sock by frogging the sole and deciding, after partially frogging the foot, that the Gloss was not holding up to frogging well — the plies, I observed, were coming unplied. I threw the rest of the sock in the garbage. After leaving it in the garbage about an hour, I had lunch, dumped some crumbs on it from the countertop, contemplated it, and realized that those weren’t the plies coming unplied, that was the Gloss separating from the reinforcement thread, which I had forgotten all about. I retrieved the sock from the garbage can, brushed the crumbs off, and frogged it, too. I think this final “scene” only added to the interest and creativity of my performance of the Moccasin Sock.

I’m not sure I can top this one.

–

*A note to anyone interested in the Knit Picks Gloss: though the label says to wash garments knit with this yarn by hand, I put the sock through the washing machine. Not only did it come out looking great, with no change to the gauge, but it continued to look great after being frogged — that accident with the reinforcement thread notwithstanding. I’m not going to tell you to machine wash this yarn, but I know what I’m going to do with mine.

I spent a great deal of yesterday finishing up the secret project , and oh! how lovely it turned out. I will look forward to unveiling it when I can.

In the meantime, I don’t have a lot to show for myself. On Friday, my package arrived from Knit/Purl, and I set about swatching. I first swatched the Sea Silk for the Swallowtail Shawl pattern (Fall 06 Interweave Knits; see a photo here). I was a little underwhelmed by the Sea Silk at first because the skein had all these teeny whitish pills on it that made it look slightly shopworn, but I Googled “sea silk pills” and found that the indomitable Clara Parkes of Knitter’s Review fame had noticed the same thing in her skein and found it not to be a problem. The yarn was redeemed for me when I knit the swatch, which came out very nicely, if a little small. I will have to try again with a larger needle (I used a size 4), though I’m a bit worried about running out of yarn. I guess I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Next, I swatched for Cookie’s Red Herring socks with my new Nature’s Palette yarn. The Indian Paintbrush turned out to be a different shade of red than I had expected (more blue undertones than orange), but I like how it combines with the Dark Teal. I found the Nature’s Palette rougher than I anticipated, but only because I’d read somewhere that it was Koigu-like. I think that person must have meant that it’s sproingy like Koigu, not that it’s as soft as Koigu. It’s not at all unpleasantly rough, though, and I liked working with it. These are going to be excellent socks. I swatched on size 2 needles, but the yarn bloomed enough that I’ll probably go down to size 1 for the project. I was glad about this, because I’d rather knit socks on 1s than on 2s.

Speaking of colors, apologies for the color quality of today’s pictures. The light in the living room when I took these was interesting but not especially friendly for accurate photography, and thus none of the colors are particularly true.

At any rate, having swatched my new yarn and then having finished my secret project, I was ready to start something new. Though I’d been itching to work on the Endpaper Mitts, the itch disappeared long enough for me to flirt with beginning my next sweater project, which involves some beautiful Artfibers Golden Siam that my parents bought for me in San Francisco. I have two colors, one a deep blueberry (color 37) and the other a sort of cocoa brown (color 38). There’s enough of the dark blue for a sweater and slightly less of the brown, so I’ve been envisioning a blue and brown sweater set — something classy that I can wear to holiday parties. I’ve sketched the blue sweater in a variety of incarnations, and I’ve also built up quite a little pile of swatches for the project.

I started with the plain stockinette swatch and then began imagining some lace — not an entirely lace sweater, but a mainly stockinette sweater with small vertical panels of lace in it. I swatched the two lace patterns on the bottom and decided they were both too fussy for this yarn, but I really liked the lace pattern on the top right, which I think is called Shell Lace and is from Barbara Walker’s first Treasury of Knitting Patterns.

Later, I got to thinking that the cardigan should fasten only at the top, and then I realized I needed some kind of plan to keep the fronts stable so they wouldn’t roll. Last night, I found the Daisy Stitch, also from Barbara Walker’s first collection. It’s on the top left in the picture. I liked how that looked, so I did the drawing and math for a cardigan that had one repeat of the lace on each side of the front and was otherwise stockinette except for a 1.5″ daisy stitch band. When I cast on this morning, however, I felt only lukewarm about how the design was shaping up, and when I somehow lost 4 stitches (where did they go?) and had to tink five or six rows (the tedium!), I drew two conclusions. One was that this yarn, lovely as it is, does not like to be frogged, so perhaps I shouldn’t make something with it that’s likely to involve a lot of frogging. The other, related conclusion was that this yarn was going to get fairly fuzzy fairly quickly, likely obscuring anything fancy. After ripping out the swatch, I decided that I was going in the wrong direction and that what I really needed was a stockinette cardigan with Daisy Stitch bands.

That’s the direction I’m going to go with it next, but I don’t have quite the head of steam up that I did last night, so I may put the yarn away for a bit and get on with my Endpaper Mitts. We shall see.

I’ve been working on a secret project this past week — well, not that secret, just a secret from the person I’m going to give it to, who may or may not check this blog, so I can’t post about it until I’ve given it away. Which could be weeks from now. Rest assured that the project is coming along swimmingly, some pieces are blocking as we speak, and I hope to wrap it up in three or four days.

Meanwhile, I have been easily distracted. Yesterday in particular, I sat doing work and my mind kept wandering off to the million things I wanted to knit right then even though I was working, not knitting, so the point was moot.

I try to be, and for the most part am, a fairly monogamous knitter. Sometimes, I give way to temptation and begin a new project — or two or three new projects — before I have finished the one I’m working on, but it tends to knock me a little off-balance to be trying to finish more than one thing at a time. As I work on one project-in-progress, my mind keeps casting about frantically to the other thing, screaming helpfully “BUT WHAT ABOUT THE SOCKS?! WHEN WILL YOU FINISH THE SOCKS?!” I don’t enjoy this mental berating, and so I try to confine myself to one project while allowing small distractions, according to these self-imposed rules:

(1) If I am knitting something that takes a long time, like a sweater, I’m allowed to do a small project, like a hat, between finishing pieces of the sweater.

(2) I am allowed to knit a swatch or two for a future project whenever I want to after the yarn for that project is purchased — usually more or less immediately.

Which brings me to today’s knitting content: the swatches I knit for Eunny Jang’s Endpaper Mitts.

I bought four balls of Knit Picks Palette to knit two pairs of these mitts, though as you can see from the swatch on the bottom left I also briefly abandoned the Palette to try out some Mountain Colors Bearfoot in one. (And oh how it bled! And I kind of knew it would but did nothing to prevent it!) It’s been an interesting exercise in color doing these four swatches, and I could do about a million more except I’ve experimented enough to figure out my gauge and I’m ready to get going on the mitts as soon as my current project is complete.

An aside: This is my first time using the Palette, and I like it more than various comments on the Internet led me to expect I would. Not that I can recall the source or exact nature of any of those comments — I just had a vaguely negative impression. Is anyone else extremely tempted to buy the “Palette sampler” every time they look at the Knit Picks site? I always think, “Oh, how great it would be to have all 30 colors!” Followed immediately by “Oh my God, I do not want 30 more balls of yarn!”

Anyway, I’m thinking I’ll start with a pair in the light gray and some dark green Mountain Colors Bearfoot I have in the stash, and then I’ll probably do the other pair in brown and pink. Or light gray and brown. We’ll see.

With the Endpaper Mitt swatching taken care of, I should have been pleasantly anticipating doing further work toward the completion of my secret project, or at least looking forward to starting the mitts afterward. Instead, I started thinking of creating thumbless baby mittens in the Fair Isle pattern from the mitts to give to a particularly adorable baby of my acquaintance. I was ready to cast on for them right that second, but I held steady. And then I cast on and soon after abandoned an afghan square in Thorn Stitch (from the second Barbara Walker stitch treasury). And then I ordered some yarn: a skein of Handmaiden Sea Silk in Sangria for a lacy shawl, two skeins of Hand Jive Nature’s Palette sock yarn (one in Dark Teal, one in Indian Paintbrush) for a pair of Red Herring socks, and the Icosa Ball pattern (to be made with stash yarn), all from Knit-Purl in Portland.

Because, you know, I needed more projects.

Good grief.

The story begins with a bag of yarn that I bought on eBay. This was about a year ago, and I was in a heady phase of daily eBay yarn auction perusal. In retrospect, this phase had its advantages, as I learned a lot about different types of yarn and how they were valued. I also managed, by allowing my inner cheapskate to regularly trounce my inner fantasy shopper, not to buy too much — just some Green Mountain Spinnery Mountain Mohair that I got for a song and a bag of Andes yarn by Elizabeth Austen.

I think that the day I ordered the Andes I was feeling a bit deprived, and I was therefore unable to resist acquiring these ten skeins of yarn, for which I had no particular plan. I liked the way the yarn looked in the skein, half pinkish red and half bluish purple, and I wanted it for my own.

Once I had paid for it, I spent several anxious days waiting for its arrival and Googling variations of “Andes yarn knitting blog Austen” to try to determine if I had made a stupid purchase or a good one. Clearly, I had managed to get a bargain — but what were other Internet-savvy knitters making with this Andes yarn? What did they think of it? What did it mean that the yarn was frequently called “good for felting”? Did that translate “scratchy and not good for much of anything but felting”? My suspicion was heightened by the fact that I managed to find very few blog posts about the Andes yarn. I found one about a wine cozy made of Andes that had pooled terribly, and I began to fret. Maybe the fact that it was a half-and-half yarn, not quite variegated but far from solid, was actually a detriment. Maybe no one was buying it because no one could figure out what to knit with it. Maybe I had made an impulsive mistake.

When the yarn at last arrived, I was fairly happy with how it looked until I knit a swatch. In the swatch, the pink was so PINK, the blue so BLUE, and the predictable switching from color to color as across the rows was just . . . blah. It seemed too garish yet too boring, and it was just not me. The only promising thing about my swatch was the garter stitch edging. See, I’m one of those people who not only faithfully knits swatches (one of my favorite things about knitting) but also puts little garter stitch borders around the swatches so they’re pretty and easy to measure. The border looked pretty good, because the pink and blue kind of mixed together in those bumpy garter rows. This got me thinking that stockinette was not the way to go here. I needed to mix things up a little.

My next thought, some days later, was that I should make spirals with this yarn. Yes! I had a vision of an afghan made up of squares that were knit from the center out in a spiral, so that the pink and blue would alternate unpredictably and swirl around. Even better, the squares would have garter stitch edges, maximizing their attractiveness. I was very excited about this idea until I actually made a spiral swatch. Not only was it tedious, but the result was, again, just blah. I abandoned the spiral plan.

Then I forgot to consider what the yarn wanted to be and started thinking about what kind of sweater I wanted to have. Ribbing! I wanted a ribbed sweater with saddle shoulders.

I made a big swatch with the Andes yarn of 2 x 2 rib, 1 x 1 rib, 3 x 2 rib, twisted rib, and some other combinations. I didn’t like any of them. I abandoned the ribbed sweater.

At this point, I was getting discouraged. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the yarn. Okay, I definitely didn’t love the yarn, but I at least had tepid feelings of affection toward it. I just couldn’t figure out anything to knit with it that seemed actually worth knitting.

So I put the Andes away for a while. Sometimes when I’m between knitting projects or just bored with my current project, I knit an afghan square from Barbara Walker’s Learn-to-Knit Afghan Book using the Green Mountain Spinnery yarn from eBay. I just flip through Walker’s book until I see a square that strikes my fancy, choose one or two colors that seem nice, and knit away. One day, I made the Rose Fabric square in two shades of purple.

I liked it, and I thought to myself, “I wonder how that Andes yarn would look if I tried this stitch with it? Wouldn’t the blue and pink kind of pop in little roses, and wouldn’t the stitch break up some of the boring color changes?” So I hauled out my practice ball of Andes and gave it a shot, and lo and behold, it looked pretty super. Inspired, I drew a sketch of another sweater.

It’s hard for me to recall the details of this ill-conceived plan, but the fact that I drew this crude sketch in pen is pehaps an indication of both my enthusiasm and my failure to think things through. Excited, I tried to knit a miniature version of the sweater to determine if my plan would work. “Disaster” does not begin to describe the outcome of this experiment. I put the yarn away again.

Fast-forward to December. I was finishing up a few projects, and I needed a new one to take with me to my parents’ house for Christmas. I wanted to make myself a sweater with yarn from my stash. I especially wanted to make a particular sweater that I had just dreamed up: a V-neck in camel-colored Nashua Creative Focus with argyle patterning on one side of the front. Instead, I forced myself to take along the Andes yarn, since it was the oldest sweater quantity of yarn in my stash, and I reasoned that if I didn’t use it soon, I would never use it, and then I would feel guilty about it until the day I died. I can be that way about the yarn stash. I hauled four balls of Andes yarn to Oregon.

Apparently forgetting the lesson of the mini-sweater experiment, I again fell into trying to make that Andes yarn into what I wanted instead of into what it wanted to be. I had a vision of a big, slouchy sweater, like Starsky without the cabling. But I didn’t have enough yarn for that — 10 balls of light worsted might have been enough (about 1,600 yards), but I’d used one up and given one away, so I only had 8. Then I started thinking about a dense, textured, fitted little jacket with a short stand-up collar. I tried out a couple different stitch patterns with this jacket in mind and found one I liked: Star Tweed from Barbara Walker’s first Treasury of Knitting Patterns (p. 67). It made a nice firm fabric with interesting diagonal dotted lines (made by slipping stitches) stretching across the right side. I was envisioning a jacket with diagonals going in opposite directions, rising up to the right on the left front and up to the left on the right front, with a back composed of two vertical panels with diagonals moving in opposite directions. This was going to be great.

For some reason, I assumed that I could get the diagonal created by Walker’s pattern instructions to move in the opposite direction if I just turned the finished fabric panel upside down. When I tried to show my mother how it would work, it didn’t. The diagonal went the same direction whether the fabric was right-side up or upside down. I still cannot quite fathom why this is the case, but no manipulation of the swatch could force the diagonals to change direction. Undaunted, I rewrote the pattern so that the diagonals were formed on the wrong side but showed up on the right side and moved off obediently in the opposite direction. This worked, but for some reason the diagonals were not at the same angle when I formed them from the wrong side. They were much closer to horizontal. I had to give up and admit that the Andes yarn would never be a snazzy diagonal jacket.

While I was working on the diagonal swatch, my dad wandered over, picked up the Rose Fabric swatch I had made many months earlier, and asked, “What’s wrong with this one?” What was wrong with it, indeed? I scrapped the jacket and started over. I would make a pullover sweater in Rose Stitch. The yarn changing from pink to blue would give the sweater all the interest and texture it needed without being too boring. I began sketching again.

I decided that the sweater would have a ribbed shawl collar and deep ribbing at the cuffs and waist. But I didn’t want to do the ribbing in the Andes yarn, because I didn’t like how the Andes yarn looked in ribbing. I needed an accent yarn. I found two balls of Dale Falk in a lovely dark navy blue (shade 2587) at Webster’s in Ashland, Oregon, and snapped them up. (Falk is technically a DK, but the Andes is a very thin worsted, and the two seem about the same thickness.)

And so I began knitting. Rose stitch spreads a lot horizontally and, it turns out, uses very little yarn. I alternated between two balls of the Andes as I knit the back to minimize the pooling. While I suppose I could have eliminated the pooling and flashing altogther by cutting the yarn at the edge and carefully offsetting the two balls so that they never caused the colors to line up for more than two rows, I decided that I needed to let the yarn be what it was and embrace the pooling. When I had finished with the back, I had a lot of yarn left in those first two balls. So I knit the front. Still some yarn left. I didn’t run out of those two balls until I’d finished half of the first sleeve. The whole sweater used less than four balls of the Andes yarn. You know what that means? I HAVE FOUR AND A HALF BALLS OF THIS YARN LEFT. Is this some kind of Andes yarn curse?

By and large, I’m happy with how the sweater came out. Yes, I could have made it a little larger. But I wasn’t entirely committed to it while I knit it, so I let some things slide. Also, I was never able to figure out the anatomy of the rose stitch, though I did try, and I therefore found it hard to correct my errors without ripping back. I could not fix a dropped stitch a few rows down with my handy crochet hook — and I did try. A few times, I noticed an incorrect stitch that I had missed and decided to just leave it there rather than rip back. Don’t tell anyone. They barely show.

In any event, here she is:

Pattern: My own
Yarn: Elizabeth Austen Andes in color 01 (blue/pink); Dale of Norway Falk in color 2587 (navy)
Yardage: about 550 yards of Andes; 232 yards of Falk
Yarn Source: random eBay seller; Websters of Ashland, OR
Needles: US 7 bamboo straights; US 6 for ribbing
Gauge: about 20 stitches and 30 rows over 4 inches, unstretched; 32″ chest
Modifications: –

As for those other four and a half balls of yarn, I came up with the perfect solution: I overdyed them. The Andes yarn is now a lovely, saturated sapphire. I think I’m in love.

This is my test post. Soon, I will write my first post about the Andes yarn sweater. That day has not yet come, since I’m not quite done with the sweater yet. Meanwhile, I’ll be working out the kinks around here to get ready to launch.

Here is a picture, just for kicks. This is a cashmere scarf I made for a friend using one skein of Artyarns Cashmere 5. I used the Turkish Stitch from Barbara Walker’s first stitch dictionary (p. 185) over 26 stitches. This yarn is divinely soft but unusual, in that it appears in the skein to be laceweight cashmere but is in fact five strands of laceweight cashmere held together (not spun together, just side by side), so that it knits up on larger needles. I used a US9 for this scarf, I think, but would have used a 10.5 if I had one handy. This was my first foray into “faggoting,” which Walker calls “lace reduced to its two bare essentials: (1) a yarn-over stitch and (2) a decrease.” Though I think it needs a new name, I love the result. The end product has a wonderful depth and squishiness, as if it were double knitting. Also, in a strange but pleasing twist of fate, the pink blobs randomly distributed in the skein formed a shadowy diamond pattern over the whole scarf. I have another skein of this magic yarn in a different color and am still trying to decide if I’ll make myself one of these little scarves or perhaps a hat.