Ruthless Knitting

Thanks for all your kind comments on Otto the Turkey! He did a good job acting as our Thanksgiving centerpiece, and I left him to live with our host, my sister-in-law Amy, who seems quite fond of him. I’ve been working on the pattern and hope to have it posted by the weekend.

Yesterday, I managed to get Lucie’s stocking finished and blocked.

The stocking came out quite well in all respects but one — it’s huge! I’m not quite sure what happened. Strike that. I know exactly what happened, I just don’t know why. It’s clear that my gauge was off, since the stocking is larger than it ought to be. But I made this stocking last year for David, and I used the same needles and yarn this time, and yet it came out much larger. Two explanations occur to me:

(1) I knit more loosely on Stocking Number 2. This is a reasonable explanation, as I knit David’s stocking as a secret Christmas gift last year in short bursts in my office, always fearful that he would come home suddenly and discover me working on it. The tension could have made my gauge tighter.

(2) I actually used smaller needles last time. This is also a distinct possibility. I wrote in my knitting journal last year that I used size 8 needles for this pattern, but I followed that note with a significant notation: “(?).” This tell-tale question mark casts some serious doubt on the trustworthiness of my records. When I cast on this time around, I was quite confident that I remembered using a very specific and unique pair of size 8 needles to knit David’s stocking, but as the stocking got larger and larger and larger, I began to doubt the accuracy of my memory.

Either way, I figure it’s okay that the stocking is very large, because Lucie is the oldest and currently only grandchild, and she gets more presents than anyone else anyway. Kids today need bigger stockings, right? I will press on with the other two stockings, but I will try size 7 needles for the next one.

Since I first posted about this stocking a few weeks ago, I’ve received e-mails from three separate people who tell me that members of their family have versions of the same pattern knit by mothers and grandmothers decades ago. All of them wanted to knit stockings of their own to match. Unfortunately, the pattern is no longer available. It was once part of a kit by Bernat called Santa Claus Stocking Pak, and all I have is a photocopy of my own grandmother’s very bedraggled personal copy. Bernat, take note: the public demands that you reissue this pattern! (And I demand that the reissued pattern have larger charts.)

Edited to add: I got permission from Bernat yesterday to make the pattern available on my site! I’ll have that posted in a few days.

While we were in Indiana for Thanksgiving, I continued plugging away on the back of the herringbone sweater, and this morning I finally made it to the armhole shaping. I’m hoping to have the back finished by the weekend, at which point I will only have one piece to go. And the seaming up. And perhaps elbow patches.

Sorry for the less-than-inspirational picture. The sweater is not at its most inspirational stage, though I’m still more or less enjoying the project, and I do hold out hope that it will be done before Christmas — though there is the small matter of those other two stockings to knit, so we’ll see.

Have a great holiday, and travel safely if you’re traveling! Pattern to come in a week or two.

TURKEY BUTT!

Okay, that was juvenile. But it was also accurate — that is a turkey butt! You see, yesterday I was seized by the urge to knit a Thanksgiving turkey. When I conducted a rapid online search, I could not find a turkey pattern that matched my own mental picture of what a knitted turkey ought to look like. Though I only had a little time left before bed when the Turkey Craze seized me, I would not be deterred, so I picked out some yarns (all leftovers) and formulated a plan. I told David before falling asleep last night, “All you have to do to get me out of bed in the morning is say ‘turkey.’” That turned out to be pretty well true: as soon as I was just awake enough this morning to remember the turkey, I shot out of bed and made a beeline for my knitting chair. The picture shows how far I got in about an hour of knitting — half a body. Tonight I hope to finish the other half, and maybe the head, too, if I’m lucky.

If the turkey comes out well, I’ll post the pattern here for public consumption. Meanwhile, if any of you folks are crazy enough to want to knit a turkey for your Thanksgiving table along with me, just start following the Sheldon pattern line for line, only use chunky-weight yarn and size 10.5 needles or whatever size seems to work. The body will eventually be felted a bit, but not too much, so the fabric can be slightly holey but shouldn’t be totally loose and open. When you get to the part where the body on Sheldon is at 42 stitches and the instructions say to work even, instead you should keep going with the increase rounds on every other row until you have 60 stitches, and then work even for 8 rows instead of 4. (If anyone actually does decide to knit this along with me, let me know in the comments, and I’ll keep posting instructional updates; otherwise, I’ll assume that I’m on my own here.)

Incidentally, the universe approves of my turkey fixation. My evidence? On my run this morning, I saw six turkeys by a small pond. They looked cold and kind of menacing, and I see turkeys often when I run, but still, Turkeys! On my run! It must be a sign of something.

Before being seized with Turkey Madness, I did finish the second sleeve for my herringbone sweater. I even cast on for the back and knit the first five rows or so, but then my wrist said “Enough with the metal needles already!” and I decided to give it a rest for a few days. I am pleased with what I have so far.

Also, I’m close to the end of Lucie’s Christmas stocking. I’m going to have to buy more yarn before I can start a second one.

Now I have to get back to work, because if I get enough work done, I can take a break and knit on my turkey. I am a woman obsessed.

The second sleeve for the herringbone sweater progresses slowly. Meanwhile, my mom sent me some buttons from Portland that she thought might work out for the Middlebury cardigan, and they are just the thing. Mom saves the day again!

Pattern: My own
Size: 37″ bust, 13″ to underarm on body, 13″ shoulder to shoulder, 16″ to underarm on sleeve, 9″ armscye
Yarn: Laughing Tree Farm 2 Ply (60 percent mohair, 40 percent merino wool; 212 yds per 4 oz skein), three skeins of Chocolate and one each of Military Green and Honey
Yardage: About 900 yards — a bit less than I would have expected
Source: Vermont Beads and Fibers, Middlebury, Vermont
Needles: US 5 bamboo straight needles for body; US 4 bamboo circular needle for ribbing, button bands, and collar
Gauge: About 19 sts and 32 rows = 4″ in furrows pattern
Notes: Oh man, I love this sweater. It’s really warm and comfortable, but at the same time it’s rather sharp and tailored looking, which I think is the result of the nice frame for the color pattern that the solid-colored bands of ribbing, button bands, and sleeves create.

I call this my “Middlebury cardigan” because I got the yarn for it in Middlebury, Vermont, at the end of a bicycle vacation with my family this summer. (Come to think of it, my mom bought me the yarn as well as the buttons, so perhaps I ought to give her sponsorship credit.) The yarn was raised, dyed, and — I think — spun at Laughing Tree Farm in Vermont. Wearing the cardigan reminds me of my vacation and also makes me feel like a Vermonter: for whatever reason, it looks to me like the sort of thing one would wear to the Burlington farmer’s market on a Saturday morning. So that makes me happy.

For the most part, creating this sweater was fairly straightforward, but I did encounter a few challenges along the way. First, I chose a color pattern that pulls in vertically, which made it difficult to tell how long and how wide to knit the pieces so they’d settle out to the length and width I wanted. I used my swatch and a blocked front piece to figure this out, and it ended up not being a problem. I think the deep ribbing at the bottom, the bands, and the stockinette sleeves all help to stabilize the length.

While I was knitting the sleeves, I was a little nervous that I had settled on an upper arm width that was going to be narrower than I wanted given the slight looseness of the body (which has 2-3″ of positive ease) and the slightly oversized armholes (9″ deep). One day while I was jogging, I started thinking about whether there was a way to fix this problem without ripping back by picking up stitches along the sleeve edges and knitting for an inch or so before binding off. Then it occurred to me that I could make my sleeve insert into a design feature by using it to echo the pattern on the body. I was so enamored of this idea that I ended up trying it, even though it turned out that I didn’t really need the extra sleeve width after all. I knit the sleeves to the desired length to the underarm, picked up and knit in the color pattern along both edges, and later grafted the two new edges together in the middle. You can see the result here:

I’m tickled with how the inset carries the pattern onto the sleeves, and I’m thinking about other potential applications of the technique in future designs.

At the end, there was some button trauma. The main color I used here is called “Chocolate,” which would imply “brown,” but in most lights the sweater looks quite unmistakeably purple. I was looking for brown-purple buttons, but just about all the purple buttons out there seem to be more blue-purple. I did order some lovely buttons from Earthenwood Studio, but they didn’t end up being glazed dark enough to suit my purposes. I will hang onto them and try to design a different sweater to showcase them in the future. The buttons that my mom found aren’t the perfect color match, but they don’t compete with the sweater, and they’re just right in size and shape. The only problem is that she bought seven, and I need eight, and none of my e-mails to the button vendor are going through. Still, I figure that even one button shy of the full complement, I can call this sweater “finished,” since I’m finally able to wear it.

See how I tried to make that exciting? I fear that it won’t work. I spent nine days knitting a sleeve, and now the sleeve is done, and it’s about as exciting as you would expect. It came out exactly the size I intended for it to come out. I am fond of it. That’s about all there is to say about that.

Here’s my pretty sleeve:

And here’s the sleeve with the cuff flipped up, so you can see the contrast color on the hem (which is called “chokecherry heather”):

The color in both pictures is fairly accurate, which is to say that sometimes the yarn looks brown, and sometimes it looks gray. It is both at once, which pleases me.

Next up: another sleeve. I know! It would be more interesting if I were going to knit, say, the back next, but I might need to order more yarn, and to figure out whether I do, I need to know exactly how much the sleeves are going to consume before I move on to the back.

Because I’m knitting the herringbone sweater on tiny metal needles, I have to make sure that I don’t spend too much time in any given day working on it. I grip the needles pretty hard when I knit, and with metal ones, this can make my right wrist hurt if I’m not careful. Thus, I have another project cooking on the side: I’ve started a Christmas stocking for my niece, Lucie. This is the same Christmas stocking that I knit last year for David –

– only it says “Lucie” on top. It’s knit flat from the top down, and I’ve managed to make it to the row just before the Santa heads begin.

I’m making this stocking for sentimental reasons. Almost everyone in my family has the same Christmas stocking, all of them knit by my grandma when we were younger — one for Mom, one for Dad, one for each of my brothers, one for me, a pair for my aunt and uncle, one for each of my cousins, and so on. I want all the newer additions to the family to have matching stockings of their own, so after I finish Lucie’s, I’m planning to do one for her mother, my sister-in-law Bethany, and then another for my other sister-in-law, Angelyn. I’m hoping that the three stockings will take me just about as long as the sweater, so that I’ll always have something to work on when my wrists need a break, and by the time Christmas rolls around, I’ll have a new sweater to wear and three gifts to distribute. Is that a plan or what?