Ruthless Knitting

Florence is finished, and she’s just lovely! We had our ups and downs, to be sure, but I’m glad that I persisted.

Thanks to David for the pictures. He has the patience of a saint!

Pattern: Florence, my own pattern
Size: 34″ bust, 32″ waist, 44″ at hips. 23.5″ total length, 4″ sleeve to underarm, 20″ sleeve at widest point.
Yarn: Habu Cotton Gima A-174, 1/8.5 (100 percent cotton, 265 yards per 1 oz. skein), color 23
Yardage: 3.5 skeins
Source: Kpixie
Needles: US5 bamboo straights and US4 bamboo circular (24″)
Gauge: 22.5 stitches and 32 rows = 4″ in stockinette stitch
Notes: This project began when the Design Workshop I belong to had a “linen stitch challenge,” for which we all tried to think of ways to incorporate linen stitch in a knitting design. This led to the creation of the Linen-Stitch Baby Tanks, Nicole’s linen-stitch heel on her Nine-to-Five Socks, and a fantastic design by Mel that will appear soon in MagKnits. It also inspired me to come up with a scheme for a summery top in Habu Cotton Gima that would have linen stitch edgings. Once I bought the yarn for the top and began swatching, however, I quickly figured out that linen stitch was not going to work. I set about trying to come up with another plan. Many swatches later, I decided to copy my favorite summer T-shirt. Here’s a sketch of what I was aiming for:

My plan worked about as well as such plans normally do — some elements of the original design are still present in the finished product, others didn’t work out, and still others I deliberately changed along the way. I scrapped the original sleeves, for example, once I saw how light and floaty the top was going to be, because it seemed to me that longer, floatier sleeves would work better with the design.

I’m calling this top “Florence” in honor of the Florence whose diary I recently featured here. You can read about her, and about the stages of knitting this project, in the Adventures of Florence category. I can’t say whether or not Florence would have worn a garment like this, or would have liked it, or even whether she was a knitter — but I can say that wearing this top will always make me think of her fondly.

And Now For a Contest!

I would very much like to write up the pattern for Florence and make it available for free to anyone who would like to knit it. This will be easy enough to do for the size I actually made, but I find it challenging to size patterns up and down for others. Sizing guidelines only take me so far; at a certain point, I have trouble trusting that the measurements I’m using for bodies other than my own are going to fit a real human person. Here’s where you come in: I’d like to collect some measurements from different bodies, and a contest seems like a good way to go about it. If you’d like to enter, all you have to do is answer, to the best of your ability, four questions in the comments, as follows:

(1) What size bust do you usually make for a knitted garment (assuming no positive or negative ease)?
(2) What size is your waist?
(3) What is the best-fitting knitted garment you have made, and what did you like about the construction?
(4) When you knit a garment or purchase a ready-made garment from the store, what do you usually have to alter or avoid?
Additional comments/observations about your personal sizing dilemmas are welcome.

If you’ve never knit a garment but would still like to participate, you can do so by measuring your best-fitting existing sweater or other garment. Just to be fair, here are my answers:

(1) 34″ bust.
(2) About 30-31″.
(3) Jess by Anna Bell. I made it with several inches of negative ease (rather accidentally), but it’s very stretchy, and the fit is quite flattering.
(4) In knitted garments, I often make the armholes shallower and the arms shorter. I have to avoid any bust-shaping in a ready-made garment; I don’t have the bust to fill it out.
I am basically a fairly easy size to fit — which might explain why I have trouble figuring out how to fit garments for other people.

I’m going to keep the contest open until August 12, when I get back from vacation. At that point, I’ll randomy choose the name of a winner, who will recieve a gift certificate to Kpixie that will allow them to purchase enough Habu Cotton Gima to make their own Florence top. (Of course, the winner may choose to buy something else with the gift certificate. That’s between them and Kpixie.) I will also write a version of the pattern sized to fit the winner.

I’m off to Vermont to ride my bicycle around the Green Mountains with my husband, my parents, and one of my brothers. Have fun with those measuring tapes!

Is it possible to take an interesting picture of a sleeve? I am not so sure. Here are two attempts:

“Frances” is what I’m calling this sweater now. I gave up on “Wine-Dark Sea Pullover.” Too flowery for me, and too many words. I have reverted instead to my friend Rebecca’s suggestion that I call all the pieces in my 2007 collection by the names of people from Florence’s diary. Frances, you may recall, was Florence’s twin sister. Though this sweater is by no means a twin of the Florence top-in-progress, it does have certain qualities that I associate with the name Frances: it’s pretty in an elegant, understated way, and it’s not too fussy. I like it.

That’s all the knitting progress I’ve got to show for myself, as I spent last Saturday, Sunday, and Monday on a bicycle trip without any knitting. David and I headed out from our house to Door County, camping overnight in Egg Harbor and then in Peninsula State Park. We rode about 180 miles in 3 days (mostly days 1 and 3, with hiking on day 2). It was our kind of fun, and an early anniversary present to ourselves. We’ve been married four years today.

Here’s the only decent picture I managed to take on the trip: David is riding out onto a little pier purely for the photo opportunity. You can see the trailer behind him in which he’s dragging all his stuff.

Now that the sleeve is finished, I’m going to return to Florence. I’ve had a long enough break that I’m excited to wrap it up and wear it!

Oh, and I’m on Ravelry as of yesterday. My username is “Ruthless.” Look me up if you’re on there, too.

Thank you for your many compliments on the Florence progress pictures! I ought to have finished it by now, but instead I started something altogether different.

For lack of a better name, I’m calling it my “wine-dark sea” pullover. Because of the dark blue and the wine-y brown. And because of the nautical stripes. Please humor me.

I feel some remorse about beginning a new project when I was so close to finishing Florence, but I have a number of perfectly good excuses. First, David left town for a few nights, which always rather unmoors me. I wander aimlessly about the house, eat too many cookies, watch too many bad movies, and usually start a new knitting project. It seems I can’t help myself. (Indeed, this project was born as a swatch I knit the last time David left town.)

Second, I’m going to get the new Harry Potter book soon, and I wanted a project I could knit mindlessly while reading. I’m only an inch or so away from dividing this for the sleeves, at which point I can sail along through the rest with little thought, eyes focused on the gigantic book open in my lap.

While excuses #1 and #2 are valid as far as they go, excuse #3 is perhaps the most honest: I was sick of Florence. I had spent too many days looking at pink. Too many days knitting with dental-floss-like yarn. I need to work on something different for a while — something that offers a more pleasurable tactile experience. This yarn is 100% tussah silk. It’s fitting the bill nicely.

Sooner or later, I will most likely grow tired of knitting around in circles, return to port, and take up again with my lass Florence. For now, though, I’m quite happy to be becalmed with my stripey friend here.

On Friday, I finished the back of Florence.

I finished sleeve number 1 this morning, and it looks about right, though it’s so stiff it stands straight out from my arm in a rather silly fashion. I’m sure it will be fine once I block it. On to sleeve number 2!

I have yet to wrap up my repairs on the turtle sweater, but I did create a chart for the intarsia turtle and post it on the Design page (see sidebar on the right), should anyone wish to replicate it.

Thanks for the ideas and questions about the turtle sweater. My explanation perhaps lacked clarity, but no matter, because I tried something and it seems to have worked.

Here is Leona, modeling the new and improved (but not yet put back together) version of the sweater:

What I did, after picking apart the pieces (and inadvertently making a few additional holes along the way, whoops!), was rip back about 12 rows of the back and put the live stitches back on the needle. I marked which stitches were for the shoulders. Then I counted how many stitches I had left for the back neck and compared this number to the number of stitches I had for the back of the hood to determine that I needed to increase 20 stitches if I wanted the back neck to have as many stitches as the hood at the point where they were to be joined. I increased 10 of these stitches in the first row, knit 5 rows plain, increased 10 more on the sixth row, and knit plain until the back was as tall as the front again. Finally, I separately grafted each shoulder to its mate and the back neck to the bottom of the hood.

Here’s what the back neck looks like now. I’m sure the lumpiness will mostly block out.

Leona is worried that the neck opening is “a little big” now, but I told her, “That’s Gwendolyn’s mom’s problem, honey, not ours.” As far as I’m concerned, I just have to seam the thing back together, tidy up some of those holes, and we’ll be in business. Of course, since I’ve solved the problem, I’ve lost all interest in finishing the repair. I take comfort in the fact that it won’t be sweater weather here for a while yet.

In further news of things that are pink, I’ve been making steady progress with the back of Florence.

136 rows down, 70-odd rows to go. I’ve had so much work to do lately that the steady diet of plain stockinette has been rather soothing. I have high hopes of finishing the back soon, and then I’m sure the rest will go quickly. We may just see Florence finished before July is out. And when Florence does debut, I’m going to have a contest. Get your tape measures ready!

Once upon a time, I knit a sweater with a turtle on it for little baby Gwendolyn.

I used Mission Falls 1824 Cotton, and I made up the intarsia pattern myself. When I finished it, I was a little concerned that the head opening was too small, but given that Gwen wasn’t exactly born yet, and given that I didn’t expect the sweater to fit her until she was about nine months old, I didn’t have any way to figure it out for sure. So I had Leona try it on.

As you can see, it fit Leona perfectly well, and Leona has a biggish head. “Good enough,” I thought.

Seven months later, Gwendolyn is getting bigger all the time, and she’s just about big enough for the sweater. But it doesn’t fit her, because her head is not as squishy as Leona’s. Indeed, the process of being forced to try on the sweater made her quite grumpy, and she didn’t cheer up until her mother had removed the offending garment. Obviously, something must be done.

Gwendolyn’s mom would like me to try to fix the sweater, and I am only too happy to comply, in part because it gives me an opportunity to fix a few things about it that I never liked anyway. Also, it will provide a welcome distraction from my glacial progress on the back of Florence (formerly the Habu top), which looks like this:

Why have I managed to finish so very little of Florence? Well, there is the regular business of life: I have had to attend to work, house cleaning, bike riding, jogging, yoga, grocery shopping, making dinner, lunch with Gwendolyn’s mom, and so on.

Also, I’ve been trying to work up the Buster pattern so I can submit it to the Jimmy Beans Wool contest. I thought the hard work would be over when I got the charting done, but, uh, no. It’s been pretty painful. And just when I thought I was getting somewhere (around Wednesday), I realized that I had to more or less start over. So the Buster pattern and I are not on good terms right now.

Then, yesterday, after Yarn Harlot wrote about Mystery Stole 3, I totally got sucked in to the idea of making a mystery stole. I was particularly excited about using up a skein of laceweight yarn that I bought last winter with no particular project in mind. So I signed up, only to learn that I needed a lot more laceweight yarn than I actually had. I decided to just cast on for the swatch for the project, figuring I’d sort out some kind of plan as I went along. Luckily, by the time I finished the swatch, I had come to my senses: I don’t have the yarn for a stole right now. I don’t want to make a stole right now. And I have lots of other things I would rather do. I resigned from the Mystery Stole group this morning.

(Let me add that this outcome is one of many reasons that I love to swatch. When I’m really jonesing to start something new, nine times out of ten all I have to do is knit a swatch for the new project in order to realize it will in fact be no more exciting than my current project. Then I wash the swatch, put it away, and get back to whatever I was supposed to be doing.)

Which was what, again? Oh yes, Florence. Well, instead of doing that, I took apart the baby sweater. Now it looks like this:

It is time to formulate a plan. Here is what I’ve been thinking:

(1) One thing I didn’t like about the sweater to begin with is how thick the seams are. They are probably an okay thickness for an adult garment, but they don’t work for a baby sweater. The thick seams on the sides and for the armholes were unavoidable (because I couldn’t have knit the turtle in the round), though I can perhaps improve them a bit by doing the seaming with a lighter-weight yarn. But there was no reason to seam the shoulders or hood, so this time, I’d like to graft them. This should have the bonus effect of making them stretchier, which should help the sweater fit better over Gwendolyn’s noggin.

(2) I seem to remember that the back of the hood has more stitches than the back of the neck was designed to have. I tried to solve this problem by increasing in the last few rows of the back of the sweater so that I had a one-to-one ratio of hood stitches to back neck stitches. This is why the back of the neck looks kind of wavy in the picture below.

I don’t think that increasing those stitches was a bad idea, but it didn’t help much, because then I bound them all off and ended up with an inflexible back neck anyway. I’d like to rip out a few inches of the back and reknit it so that it gradually increases in width to accommodate the hood stitches.

That brings me to (3). If I make the back bigger but leave the shoulders the same size, and if I graft the hood on, and if I graft the shoulders, do you think that will give the head opening enough ease and flexibility? Or do I need to do all of those things and make the shoulders narrower, leaving more head space? If I do that, I’ll have to rip out the whole hood, because the hood is knit onto the front, and I can’t adjust the shoulder size on the front without also ripping out the hood. That wouldn’t be the end of the world, but if I can avoid it, I will.

What do you think? Other ideas?

Thanks for all the nice comments about the final Florence post! I’m happy to have been able to provide a little closure for all of us.

Over the weekend, David and I went to Iowa for my cousin’s wedding reception and to help install a floor at my aunt’s house. The traveling gave me the time I needed to finish up the second Oriel sock for my mother. It feels good to get the first item on my list of Duty Knitting finished up.

Now all I have to do is make these a paper sleeve, and I can mail them off tomorrow. I’ve been using cardstock to print little sleeves for my gift socks. I put a picture on there, along with the name of the sock, the yarn I used, washing information, and anything else I want the recipient to know. I’ve only done this twice so far, but I’m getting good feedback. The first time I sent a pair of socks to my dad with a sleeve on it, my mom called me up to tell me how great the sleeve was. (Oh, and the intarsia socks in six colors of yarn that I dyed myself were okay, too.) When I saw my dad this weekend, I asked if he’d received the Grandma socks I sent him. He said he had, but he hadn’t taken them out of the sleeve yet, because he was still enjoying it. Lesson learned: the sleeve that takes five minutes to make may just attract more admiration than the socks that take two weeks.

Anyway, it’s nice to be finished with the Oriel socks, not least because they were meant to be a birthday present, and my mom’s birthday was more than a month ago.

Pattern: Oriel Lace Socks from Sensational Knitted Socks by Charlene Schurch
Size: 72 stitches cast on. Should be a women’s medium-large (size 9-10.5ish).
Yarn: Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock (80% superwash wool, 20% nylon) in 16ns Charcoal
Yardage: 2 skeins at 215 yds. per skein with lots of leftovers
Source: Iris Fine Yarns in Appleton, WI
Needles: 2 Knit Picks Classic Circulars in size 1 (2.5 mm.)
Gauge: 8.5 stitches per inch in stockinette
Modifications: I made the leg shorter and added 2 inches of 2×2 ribbing at the top, as per my mom’s wishes.
Notes: These socks were pleasant enough to knit. The pattern was easy to follow, and the yarn (picked out by my mother) was a good choice. I’ve seen several pairs of Oriel socks on the Internet that came out too big, but these are just right, probably because Lorna’s is a thin yarn, and also because I knit tightly.

The Oriel socks are designed to be knit from the toe up, beginning with what Schurch calls an “easy toe,” which was a new one for me. Basically, you begin by knitting a tiny rectangle and then pick up stitches along the two short sides of the rectangle to get going in a circle. Then you increase at the four corners of the rectangle until you have made a nice, round toe. I found the method to be easy enough, and I like how it looks. The heel construction is also neat: many toe-up socks have short-row heels, but Schurch has designed this sock so that you knit the bottom of the heel tightly (I used size 0 needles), turn the heel, and then begin knitting a slipped-stitch flap and the gusset at the same time. Though the flap looks rather narrow, it seems to fit okay.

I’ve had Schurch’s book for a while (and I have her new book, too), but this is the first time I’ve actually made a sock from it. I enjoyed the process and will probably turn to the book again in the future, particularly if I’m looking for a pattern to use with a nice solid or semi-solid yarn.

This was my first experience knitting with Lorna’s Laces, and I enjoyed it. The Charcoal color that my mom picked out is a variegated brown and black, but both are so dark that the sock looks almost uniformly brown once it’s knit up — more like a shaded solid than a variegated yarn. It has a bit of a sheen to it that I think is the nylon showing up; Grumperina mentioned noticing a similar sheen on some navy blue Lorna’s. The lace pattern might have shown up better in a lighter shade, but it’s also obscured because the socks are a bit big for my feet. These should look prettier on my mother’s slightly larger feet.

My baby set pattern went on sale today in Sanguine Gryphon’s Etsy shop! Here are a few of my informal shots of the cardigan and hat set, with Leona as model:

In my initial design of the pattern, I knit a prototype version of the sweater in white, pink, and brown. I called it my “neapolitan baby sweater,” and I gave it to a darling baby named Gwendolyn.

Pattern: My own. Available from Sanguine Gryphon Fiber Arts (along with Gryphon’s lovely hand-dyed yarn!).
Size: Shown in the six-month size, I believe. The chest measures 20.5 inches, and it is 9.25 inches long. The sleeves are intentionally a bit short — about 6 inches long from the shoulder.
Yarn: Prototype is knit in Brown Sheep Nature Spun worsted in N91 (Aran), with dots in Knit Picks Palette in Bark and Petal. The pattern is in Sanguine Gryphon Undertow in Tangle, Seaweed, and an unnamed color.
Yardage: Prototype: one skein (245 yards) of Nature Spun. Pattern version: 2 skeins of Undertow for sweater and hat in the six-month size. The newborn and 3-6 month sizes can be knit with a single skein.
Needles: US size 8 and 6 straights and circular, as well as US size 3 double-pointed needles
Gauge: Prototype has 5 stitches per inch. Pattern has 4.5 stitches per inch.
Notes: This was a fun pattern to create, and it worked out as I had hoped it would the first time, which was awesome. I wanted to come up with a pattern that could be knit using a single skein of Gryphon’s beautiful Undertow, so a baby sweater seemed a good choice. I also wanted to come up with a way to embellish the sweater, and I found this method of knitting circles in one of Nicky Epstein’s books. I can’t remember anything else about the design process at this point — guess I should have written this up sooner!

I wanted the cardigan to snap closed behind the circles. An earlier experience with sewing snaps directly onto my knitting taught me that knitting is too stretchy for this to work well, and thus I had to find a way to stabilize the snaps so they wouldn’t stretch out the knitting and be difficult to open. I went looking for snap tape at the local craft store, but they didn’t have any. I bought plain old ribbon instead. I cut two pieces of ribbon to approximately the right length, sewed one end under on each piece (just tacking it down), sewed on each half-snap in the right place so it would fall behind a circle (just eyeballing all of this, not actually measuring, and sewing no less than four of the pieces on upside down so that I had to do them over), basted the ribbons onto the cardigan with contrasting thread (cutting and basting down the other end of the ribbon in the process), and then sewed the ribbons down as I had basted them. All of this took an age, but I’m absurdly delighted with the result and feel very strongly that it was worth it.