Ruthless Knitting

We live in Wisconsin, and it has been a cold and snowy February. This weekend, we got about a foot of snow in two separate waves. Isn’t it pretty?

We keep the thermostat set at a decidedly conservative 60 degrees — down to 57 at night — so it’s quite chilly in the house in the mornings. David often wears a jacket and a hat around for the first few hours after he wakes up, and he asked me to make him a hat that wouldn’t cover his ears. (He was always wearing his favorite stocking cap pushed up above his ears, and that just looks silly.) He figured I could make it in doubled-up sock yarn, which wouldn’t take too long and would be soft. He’s clever, my husband.

I rediscovered the Halfdome pattern on Knitty, and David agreed it was just the thing. After I swatched in Knit Picks Gloss, Stahl Wolle Socka, and Henry’s Attic Kona Superwash in a light gray — with the plan to use the Socka or the Kona for the trim and the Gloss for the main part of the hat — David asked if I could make the top in four wedges alternating between blue and black and then use the gray yarn for the brim. Done and done.

Pattern: Halfdome by Jesse Loesberg, Knitty Summer 2006
Size: 21″ circumference, about 7.5″ from crown to brim (brim unrolled)
Yarn: Knit Picks Gloss in black; Stahl Wolle Socka Color in 9128, blue tones; Henry’s Attic Kona Superwash Fingering dyed light gray
Yardage: less than 1 ball of each
Yarn Source: Knit Picks, my aunt Cathy, and Catnip Yarns, respectively
Needles: bamboo straights in size 5 for crown; size 3 dpns for rolled brim
Gauge: 5 stitches per inch in Gloss, about 5.5 stitches per inch in Socka
Notes/Modifications: I was worried that I would make this hat the wrong size for David’s head, so I modified the pattern to knit from the top down so that I would have less to rip out if I got it all wrong. At David’s request, I also changed the crown from a solid color to four sections of two colors connected intarsia-style. I cast on 10 stitches (3 black, 2 blue, 2 black, 3 blue), increased every other row (at first only four times per row, then eight times per row once there were enough stitches), continued increasing until I had 133 stitches on the needles, knit straight to the brim, and changed to smaller needles for the remainder. I put the hat on waste yarn twice to have David try it on, which was a good idea because it turned out he didn’t need as much length as the pattern called for (perhaps because the increases took up more length in my version than the decreases called for in the pattern?). The only thing I’m not entirely happy with is the very top, which is a bit pointier than I would like. David doesn’t mind.

These three yarns are all so nice and make such a lovely hat that I’m considering doing another one or two. I have a Dulaan contribution that I need to finish up.

Buster is done, and it’s the best thing I’ve ever knit.

Buster required a lot of do-overs. I knit the back, ripped the top few rows and shortened the back, knit the front, knit one sleeve, seamed it in, unseamed it, ripped out and reknit the top half of the sleeve, ripped the top few rows and lengthened the back, ripped the top few rows and lengthened the front, knit the second sleeve, seamed it in, seamed in the other sleeve, ripped out the first sleeve and seamed it in again, finished all the seaming, knit in a 1×1 rib neckband, ripped it out, knit a 2 x 2 rib neckband with a center stitch, ripped it out, knit a 2 x 2 rib neckband with no center stitch, ripped it out, knit a 2 x 2 crossover neckband, and finally removed and reknit the cuffs. Along the way, I blocked most of the pieces of the sweater three times.

You could say that I was committed to getting Buster right. And you know what? It was totally worth it.

One thing this project taught me was that I know enough now to know when something I’ve knit didn’t come out right. The challenge for me is to accept it and then do what it takes to fix it, especially when I’ve already invested a lot of time in the wrong thing. David helps me with this. When I showed him the first iteration of the neckband, which I suspected was all wrong but then decided was maybe okay when I tried it on, he said, “It doesn’t look as polished as the rest of the sweater.” I was disappointed, but I knew he was right. I ripped it out. I had to try four different styles of V-neck before I found one that looked just so with the rest of the sweater.

This two-steps-forward, one-step-back process is, I’m coming to understand, the only way to achieve excellence when you design your own sweaters. In fact, it’s probably the only way to achieve excellence in knitting, since you have to get gauge just right and make adjustments and corrections even when you knit other people’s patterns. It is, of course, frustrating as hell when you just want it to be finished. I’m trying to learn to master the impulse to race to the finish, since in the long run it really doesn’t matter whether a sweater takes me one month or two to knit. In the long run, it only matters that I get it right.

Pattern: Buster, my own design
Size: 37″ chest, 14″ to underarm, 8″ underarm depth and V-neck depth, 15.5″ from wrist to underarm
Yarn: Nashua Creative Focus Worsted in camel, brilliant blue, harvest, and copper
Yardage: 4.5 balls camel; half a ball of copper; less than half a ball of the rest
Yarn Source: Monterey Yarn in Green Bay and Iris Fine Yarns in Appleton, WI
Needles: bamboo straights in size 6 for body; size 6 circular for neckband; size 5 dpns for sleeve cuffs
Gauge: 19.5 stitches and 31 rows over 4 inches in stockinette
Notes: Though I love Buster dearly, there are a few things I would do differently were I to knit it again:

(1) I would add a little bit of waist shaping.
(2) I would do short rows for the shoulder shaping and sleeve cap shaping rather than binding off stitches.
(3) I would deal differently with the places in the pattern where two lines of gold come together at the center of an X and then move apart again.
(4) I might reconsider the yarn choice. My design process began with the inspiration from television and then stalled until I saw these colors — the brilliant blue and copper — sitting on the shelf at Monterey Yarn. The colors became essential to my vision of the sweater, and I don’t think I could have replicated them in another yarn. Since Nashua Creative Focus is a single ply and fairly loosely spun, however, I expect this sweater will get pretty pilly, which I prefer to avoid if I can.

All of these are fairly minor problems in the grand scheme of things, and they don’t hamper my enjoyment of the sweater. They’re just things I’ll keep in mind as I move on to the next design.

References: Other posts about Buster are here and here, with a little bit here.

The first thing I ever knit was a sweater.

Well, okay, I practiced casting on, knitting and purling, and then frogging for a few days before I began the sweater. But the first knitted object I made was a sweater. Why not start with something smaller and less complicated? My reasoning was simple: What I wanted to have was a sweater, so why knit something else? I figured that if I tried to make my own sweater, I’d learn a lot of new skills, and if it didn’t work out, I could always rip it back and start over. Sound reasoning, right?

I used really great yarn for the project, which I selected at the wonderful Webster’s in Ashland, Oregon: Rowan’s Yorkshire Tweed Chunky in Pecan. More or less following a pattern in The Yarn Girls’ Guide to Simple Knits for a basic roll-neck, and using size 10.5 needles, I completed the sweater fairly quickly. For a first project, it came out very well. It fit my body, looked like a sweater, lacked gaping holes, and could be worn out in public. Here I am modeling it just after I completed it:

At first, I wore this sweater a lot. So much, in fact, that David felt it was necessary to impose a rule: the sweater could not be worn for more than two consecutive days. And he was right to do so. The rule was necessary to keep me from living in the sweater until it had to be cut off my body. In part, I wore it because I was proud of it, but mostly I put it on day after day because it was very warm and extremely comfortable, and I didn’t leave the apartment much anyway.

This was a few years ago. Last winter, the sweater got worn a little, but not nearly as often as it had the first year. And this year, I found that I wore it hardly at all. I was beginning to focus more on what was wrong with the sweater than what I liked about it.

The sweater’s flaws were few, but what they lacked in number they made up for in glaring obviousness:

1. It was too short.

2. It was too wide.

The picture above makes the sweater look cuter than it actually was, because I had just pressed the hell out of the bottom edge. It was supposed to be a rolled-up hem, and it eventually rolled to make the whole sweater about an inch shorter — and unevenly, so that it was shortest in the middle of the front.

Notice how I’m using the past tense? That’s because I have just finished transforming my first sweater into this:

I had been thinking for a while of ripping out the whole sweater and reknitting it. It seemed it would be a bit disrespectful to my first FO to treat it that way, but I knew I’d enjoy the new sweater more, and I didn’t want to waste the lovely Rowan yarn on something I was no longer interested in wearing. After some reflection, however, it occurred to me that maybe rather than reknit the sweater, I ought to transform it into a cardigan. This would preserve the original knitted pieces (more or less), which seemed more respectful, but would hopefully also turn the sweater into something I wanted to wear again.

I had already accomplished a similar transformation of my second-ever sweater, this one in Rowan Felted Tweed in ginger. I had some typical newbie knitter gauge issues with this sweater, and it came out much larger than I wanted, but still rather lovely — except for the button bands, which were a disaster. I worried at the time that I would somehow screw up knitted button bands with knit-in buttonholes and thought that I would get a much more professional result if I sewed on grosgrain ribbon and did machine-knit buttonholes. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find very good directions anywhere about how to do this, and I didn’t take into account that the act of sewing would stretch out the front of the sweater. I ended up with button bands that were noticeably longer than the front of the sweater, and when I tried to block them back to the right length, the ribbon on the inside buckled, making the button bands lumpy and uneven on the front.

To make matters worse, I chose some wonderful green glass buttons for the sweater before I ever picked out the yarn, and I remained committed to them even though they didn’t really work with the color or style of the finished object. I ended up with this:

Several months ago, I decided to fix the Felted Tweed sweater as best I could by picking up and knitting new button bands and a new collar several inches outside the current ones, turning the excess fabric to the inside and cutting it off, and adding new buttons. The sweater was reborn as this:

Much better, right? And not just because my hair is slightly more presentable. (And no, I didn’t pose in the same place and wear the same shirt underneath over a year later on purpose. I just like that spot. And that shirt.)

With this success under my belt, I felt confident tackling a do-over of the Yorkshire Tweed sweater, and I’m very happy with the result. It’s far from perfect, but it’s definitely more wearable than it once was. It’s no longer too short, it’s only slightly too wide, and it has cute buttons and a floppy collar. While I’m not about to start wearing it all over town — the downside of the sweater knit with chunky yarn being that it tends to make one look chunky — it’s definitely been restored to a more high-profile place in my wardrobe. I feel that I’ve given my first sweater a new lease on life.

I considered posting a tutorial on how to turn a flawed sweater into a better one, but I wasn’t sure it would be much use. (Do other people have early sweaters that could use a face-lift, or was that just me?) Also, I didn’t take enough pictures to do a proper tutorial. Instead, I give you this.

Turning an Old Sweater into a New Cardigan in Ten Easy Steps

1. Remove the existing collar.

2. Find the center of the front and mark it with safety pins.

3. Decide how much fabric to either side of the center you want to remove and mark the cutting lines with safety pins. Keep in mind that the button bands you’ll be knitting on will take up some additional space, so unless you want the sweater to be wider, you’ll need to remove at least the width of a single button band. You can remove additional fabric to bring in the sweater’s silhouette a bit, but be careful in deciding how much, because if you take off too much, you’ll bring the armholes and side seams too far toward the front, screwing up the fit. It works for me to try the sweater on and decide while wearing it where the new button bands ought to go.

4. If you want to add ribbing or a decorative edging to lengthen the sweater, pick up the stitches and knit it on. You’ll pick up your first stitch one or two stitches in toward the center from where you intend to knit on the new button band, and you’ll likewise pick up your last stitch one or two stitches past where the other button band will go.

5. Cut up the center of the front.

6. Pick up and knit your collar and button bands. You can pick up stitches all the way up one side, around the collar, and down the other side and knit a round collar and button bands all in one go. Elizabeth Zimmerman describes how to do this in the Knitter’s Almanac, though her description is pretty spare. Or you can pick up and knit one button band, pick up and knit the other button band, and do the collar separately. This is the way to go if you want to have a more complicated collar. Some cardigan collars are knit upward from the body before the button bands are knit on, and some are added afterward. Make sure you know which you want before you begin either the button bands or the collar.

7. Working a stitch and a half or two stitches out from where you’ve picked up the button bands on each side, machine- or hand-sew a vertical line through each stitch in a column. Cut off the excess fabric outside of the sewing line. If you like, you can hand-sew ribbon over this edge, tacking it down to the inside of the sweater. I haven’t bothered.

8. If you want new cuffs, figure out how much of the old sleeves you want to keep, snip a stitch and unravel around, put the new stitches on your needles, and knit new cuffs downward.

9. Block.

10. Sew on buttons.

Voila! You’re done.

P.S. If any of you are concerned that I haven’t posted about Project Buster in a while, fear not: I’ve started seaming. We should have a finished object in a day or two.

Pattern: Old World Jester Booties by Gryphon Perkins from Interweave Knits, Winter 2006 (available only through Interweave’s website), smallest size.
Yarn: Nashua Creative Focus Worsted in Brilliant Blue and Harvest
Yardage: Not very much
Yarn Source: Iris Fine Yarns in Appleton, Wisc.
Needles: Knit Picks Classic Circular in size 2 (3.00 mm.), Addi Turbo in size 3.00 mm., and bamboo dpns in size 3.00 mm.
Gauge: Didn’t bother to check
Modifications/Comments: Now that these are finished, I’m quite fond of them. All the little jingle bells that I painstakingly sewed on with invisible thread make quiet tinkling sounds when you move the booties around, and they’re just so darn cute I can hardly stand it. I can imagine a tiny baby in these booties, just old enough to be kicking, finding the colors and noises that result to be highly entertaining.

I wish that I had enjoyed making these booties as much as I enjoy having them finished, but unfortunately they were kind of a death march. This was not at all the designer’s fault — the pattern is easy and quite clever, and it should be a breeze for any intermediate knitter. The problem was the combination of yarn and needles that I employed. The bootie pattern calls for a 2.75 mm. straight needle, with 2.75 mm. double-pointed needles to be used for the I-cord dangly bits. I don’t have any straight needles smaller than a size 4, but I do have metal circular needles from Knit Picks in 3.00 mm., so I used those for the first bootie. I also substituted for the yarn, since I thought my blue and orange Nashua leftovers from the Buster sweater would be just the thing color-wise. The problem is that when you combine single-ply, lightly spun worsted with sharp, tiny metal needles, the result is splitty, fiddly knitting hell. And it makes your wrists hurt. I actually enjoyed the I-cord part of the pattern best because I could use my bamboo dpns, which worked like a charm. For the second bootie, I remembered that I had a set of Addis in a 3.00 mm., so I used them instead. They worked out better, but they still made my wrists hurt, and they were pretty much worthless for the p2togtbl maneuver.

If I were to make these again, I’d find a way to do it on bamboo needles. But in any case they only took a few hours to make, and all is forgiven when I gaze upon the cuteness of the booties.

I received Stefanie Japel’s new book, Fitted Knits: Twenty-Five Designs for the Fashionable Knitter, in the mail today (an Amazon.com preorder), and I’m very impressed with it. I ordered it because I generally like Stefanie’s sweater designs — though her aesthetic is sometimes too funky for me — and I wanted to add a book to my collection that had some specific instructions about shaping patterns to fit.

Fitted Knits is beautifully designed and laid out, and the number of patterns (twenty-five) seems generous. There’s a lot of lovely knitting to look at here, and a nice variety of pretty, wearable garments. I saw several things that I would be happy to add to my wardrobe, and there are interesting ideas behind some of the patterns that don’t quite suit me.

Here are a few of my favorites. You can click to get a better view, but these are quickie pictures, so don’t expect much by way of quality.

I was a little disappointed only in my hope of finding extensive instructions about fitting. Don’t get me wrong: Stefanie describes how to modify her patterns, provides great schematics, and breaks her instructions up into yoke, body, and peplum (where it applies) so that you can see where to modify. All of this is great. Because she knits all of her garments in one piece from the top down, however, there are no instructions here that would be helpful in designing or modifying garments knit in pieces from the bottom up. This is not really a criticism of Stefanie’s book, of course; it just means I’ll have to keep looking for the reference I’m lacking. Her “reference library” at the back of the book provides some good leads.

The patterns in Fitted Knits cover a range from easy to more complicated, from quick knits to more intricate ones, and from inexpensive to pricey yarn. There’s also an excellent variety of color in the book (and some smart patterns that use variegated yarns). I suspect there’s something for everyone here. I’m certainly pleased to have added Fitted Knits to my collection.

1. First things first, we have a sleeve:

It’s not much to look at, I know. Joanna’s comment on my last entry got me seriously considering doing patterning on the sleeves to match the patterning on the body, but after giving it some thought and drawing a sketch, I decided that I’d prefer the less busy look of all-camel sleeves, even if they are a bit plain to knit and to look at. This knit up pretty quickly, and I think I got the size right on the first try — though I won’t know for sure until I do the seaming. It’s possible that I’ll need to rip out the cap and add an inch to the length. We shall see once it’s dry.

2. With one sleeve under my belt, I felt free to work on other projects, among them transforming my first ever finished object into something more to my liking. Stay tuned for updates later this week–and possibly a tutorial. Here’s a sneak peek:

3. Last night, I attended a talk on Villa Louis in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, which has recently been restored and is chock full of reproduction Arts and Crafts designs of the 1880s and 1890s, including many wallpapers and textiles by William Morris. I found the wallpaper designs to be inspirational and am contemplating a few possible knitting projects incorporating them. I’ve ordered up a book so I can do some research. Isn’t this lovely?

Edited to add: I removed the wallpaper image, because people kept using it without saving their own copy and I got tired of the bandwidth hogging.

That’s all I’ve got today. Have a happy Monday!

–

Edited to add:
The sleeve seamed in beautifully, but when I tried it on I realized it was too short and that the armscye needs to be longer, too. I suspected both of these things might turn out to be problems, but it’s hard to tell how sleeves will fit for sure before they’re set in. I’ve already added some length to the back and ripped the sleeve out to where I need to add more length. Now I just have to do that, reknit the cap, rip back and reknit another inch on the front, and try seaming it together again. This is turning out to be sort of a two steps forward, one step back project!

Yesterday morning, I finished the front of my Buster sweater. Before breakfast today, I wove in the last of the ends. This is how many ends were involved in the front:

But I’m not sure even that picture is sufficient testament to how messy it was to knit this piece. This is what the front usually looked like when I wasn’t working on it and when the ends were in good order:

All the trouble was totally worth the result, however. This morning, I quickly reknit the top of the back (where it was too long and I’d used the defective yarn) and basted the two pieces together to try it on. I was worried that the ribbing on the bottom would be too tight, that the body would be bigger around than I wanted, and that the 15 inches I knit prior to beginning the armhole shaping would make the sweater too long, so imagine my relief when I discovered that it fits! I practically danced around the house in my pajama pants and slippers, I was so delighted.

This victory was somewhat hard-won, since I had to rip back and reknit about 4 inches of the back and 5 or 6 inches of the front. The problems with the front were the result of my failure to plan–I should have charted the whole front of the sweater from the beginning, but I was too lazy, and I thought I knew what I was going to do with the V-neck shaping. I did not. Ripping out sticky single-ply yarn knit in intarsia is not fun, and I have now officially learned my lesson: when you’re doing a patterned sweater, plan the whole front before knitting it. Got it.

After breakfast, I soaked and blocked both pieces, and now they look like this.

Sleeve Island lies ahead.

In other news, I e-mailed Nashua last weekend to let them know about the defective yarn, and I heard back from their marketing director on Monday morning before business hours even began on the East Coast. She apologized for the problem, located another ball of the same color and lot in the warehouse, and sent it to me by priority mail the same day, all free of charge. Furthermore, she asked if I would return a sample of the defective yarn so their spinner could take a look at it, and she thanked me for letting her know about the defect in the yarn while the project was still active so that Nashua had a chance to rectify the situation. I couldn’t be happier with this outcome or more pleased with the stellar customer service. Nashua is a class act.

P.S. My spring IK just arrived with the mail, so I can look at it over lunch. Whee!

I wanted plain stockinette, and I got it, by golly. Since mid-week, I have read Harry Potter (books five and six — I had fallen behind!) and knit the back of a sweater, which is now finished and blocked, though the armholes are too long. Also, there’s a section near the top where the yarn, a single-ply, became mysteriously thinner, as though half the ply were missing. I knit with it anyway, which, you know, duh. It looks bad, and I’m going to have to rip it out. All told, though, I only have to rip and reknit about four inches. Also, I have to find the band from that ball of yarn so I can alert the Nashua people to its defectiveness.

Meanwhile, having caught up with Harry Potter and declared to David my prediction of what will happen at the end of the final installment, I was ready to begin the front of the sweater, which is far more interesting than the back. I give you the first six inches or so of the sweater I am calling “Buster”:

The Buster sweater is named after the Buster character on the TV show “Arrested Development,” who often wears argyle. On one episode, he wore this wonderful argyle sweater that was patterned only on one side of the front. That was my inspiration for this design, though I’ve come a long way from the original.

The intarsia is going pretty well so far. My technique is more or less my own invention, though I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it’s a normal one, since it works pretty well. (Note to self: read a book on intarsia sometime.) I try not to be too picky about keeping all the dangly bits on the back in order or fixing the lumpy stitches on the front, since I know that it will all get fixed in time.

Because I know that you are curious, here is the back side. Please note that this is what the strands look like when they are not tangled; they tend to look far worse than this most of the time.

You can see in the picture above that I made a chart, but once I got a few rows in I didn’t need to do more than glance at it occasionally, since the pattern is very predictable. I am hoping to get a few more diamonds done this weekend, but my shoulder is a little achy from all the knitting and I should probably take a break or get something going on smaller needles.