Ruthless Knitting

Thanks for all your enthusiastic comments about Slim! It’s wonderful to get positive feedback from other knitters.

I’ve been busy working through a list of things I wanted to get done before we leave town on December 24. In addition to baking and mailing fifteen pound cakes, among other things, I have finally finished writing up the pattern for Florence, and it is now available for free via the Designs page on the sidebar.

I’ve been trying to finish writing this pattern for months, but every time I sat down to work on it I became daunted by the task and gave up. I was originally attempting to offer four sizes, but then I decided to shift tactics and instead write up both instructions for the size of the original (34″ bust) and instructions for creating a custom tunic in any size. If you’ve ever written a multi-size pattern before, you’ll have an idea of what a monumental task that is. Yesterday, I abandoned that plan upon finally realizing two things. First, Florence is made in a Habu yarn, and like most Habu garments, it is stretchy, drapey, and highly transformable in size. Habu patterns, in other words, are almost always written in only one size for a reason. I have concluded that the 34″ size I made will probably fit a really wide range of bodies, including busts up to 42″ or so, and that anyone with a considerably larger bust, as well as anyone who wants to modify the length or the shaping, can darn well figure it out themselves. This realization freed me from having to do any additional calculations, which was quite a relief. So the pattern is finished at last. Have at it.

Meanwhile, I sent an e-mail off to Bernat a few weeks ago to let them know that I was noticing a lot of interest in the vintage Santa Claus stocking pattern that I had been knitting for my family members, and I asked whether the stocking was still copyrighted. I didn’t get a clear answer to that question, but I did get permission from Bernat to reprint the pattern here. Thus, there is now a link on the sidebar to the Vintage Santa Stocking Pattern. I’ve finished two of the three I pledged to make this year, and the third one is 95 percent done. I just have to knit about eight rounds of toe, weave in a boatload of ends, buy and attach some jingle bells, and I’m good to go.

I would have finished the stockings considerably sooner if I hadn’t grown bored with Stocking the Third, purchased Kate Gilbert’s Bird in Hand mitten pattern, picked up yarn for it at Monterey Yarn (my local yarn shop), and knit the first mitten in an enraptured state of perfect enjoyment. It’s a wonderful pattern. The thumb gave me a little trouble, and I had to do it twice, so I don’t have a picture yet of the fetching little bird, but you can see that the mitten itself is quite something:

I am making these for my lovely friend Anne for her birthday. She has tiny little hands, so I used DK weight instead of worsted (Jaeger Matchmaker Merino DK, for those of you who care). This mitten is just a tad snug on me, so I’m hoping it will fit Anne just right.

In just a few days we leave for vacation in Oregon, where we will ski and relax and knit and read and cook and talk and play cards and generally have a grand old time. I’m not sure whether I’ll update while I’m away, but I intend to start a new sweater while I’m gone. Should you desire a spoiler, I’ll leave you with two words: Fana cardigan.

See you on the flip side!

Pattern: My own
Size: 35″ bust, 14.5″ to underarm on body, 14″ shoulder to shoulder, 18″ to underarm on sleeve, 8″ armscye
Yarn: Beaverslide Dry Goods Light Sportweight (90 percent Beaverslide merino wool, 10 percent kid mohair; 440 yds per 4 oz hank), three skeins of Mink Heather and one skein of Chokecherry Heather
Yardage: About 1,500 yards
Source: Beaverslide Dry Goods, Dupuyer, MT
Needles: US 2.5 (3.25 mm) metal Classic Circulars from Knit Picks for sleeves, back, hems, and neckline; US 4 bamboo straights for patterned portion of front
Gauge: 27 sts and 42 rows = 4″ for solid portions; 29 sts and 32 rows = 4″ for herringbone portion
Notes: Isn’t it wonderful when a project works out the way you intended it to, with a few happy improvisations along the way? After about seven weeks of dedicated effort, Slim is finished, and I am very, very pleased with it. I have positive associations with herringbone that go back many years, but I believe that this is the first herringbone-patterned garment I’ve ever owned (with the exception of my Red Herring socks, of course). Since I’ve also designed an argyle sweater, I figure all I need to fill out my menswear-inspired collection is houndstooth and plaid sweaters — and since the notion of knitting in both patterns definitely intrigues me, don’t be surprised if you see them popping up in future designs!

I really enjoyed working with Beaverslide yarn for this project. The light sportweight is thin enough that knitting this took longer to finish than any sweater I’ve made so far, but I was rewarded with a fabric that is light, dense, warm, and beautiful. The colors are rich and complex, changing character with the light, and the yarn fluffs up nicely when blocked. I will certainly be trying out other Beaverslide yarns in the future.

There were some inherent design challenges to working with this yarn, the most significant of which was that I couldn’t manage a ribbing in it that looked halfway decent or would hold its shape (though I’ll admit that I was unwilling to try using size 1 needles, which may have done the trick). Instead of ribbing the cuffs and edgings, I decided to hem the sweater, using chokecherry in stockinette underneath and mink heather in heel stitch on top. The idea was to give the hems the appearance of being ribbed without actually ribbing them. This worked out beautifully, and the hems give the sweater some character it might not have had with plain ribbed edgings. Had the yarn been any heavier, they would have been too bulky, but in sportweight they are just right.

Using the chokecherry underneath and working a purled turning row also gave me a thin line of chokecherry purl bumps peeking out at the wrist and along the bottom of the sweater, which I just love. I decided to echo that line at the neck by working two stitches at each edge of the V-neck in chokecherry. Once I had picked up along the edge stitch to knit in the collar, I was left with a line of chokecherry one stitch wide along the entire V-neck, which creates a nice frame for the face.

The sleeves and back have a subtle vertical stripe, which I accomplished by slipping every sixth stitch on the right side. These vertical lines echo the herringbone pattern on the front and are at about the same spacing. I took this vertical slipped-stitch detailing from a design idea that I had last year and ultimately decided not to pursue. It was gratifying to be able to incorporate it into another project, and I think it works here to give the plain parts of the sweater some visual interest without making them too busy or putting them in competition with the front.

One design idea that I abandoned at the eleventh hour was to make up elbow patches in the chokecherry color and sew them on. I had thought originally that these would add some interest to the sleeves, reinforce the fabric at the elbows (where I feared it would be thin and wear through), and go along nicely with the overall look of the sweater. Once I gave the matter further thought, though, I decided that the elbow patches might look too rough and handmade, taking away from the simple elegance of the design. I also determined that the fabric of the sleeves had more strength than I had initially believed it would, so elbow patches are probably unnecessary. An online search for knitting patterns with knitted elbow patches didn’t turn up any that looked remotely acceptable to me, which was enough to convince me that jettisoning the elbow patches was the right decision.

I did encounter a few problems at the finishing stage. The sleeves came out too short — shorter than I had planned them to be by about a half inch, and what I had planned was itself too short — but I blocked them about an inch and a half longer, and now they’re perfect. I also had trouble seaming the sleeve caps in, since I had to deal with two different gauges (back and front) while trying to ease in a little extra width evenly across the whole cap.

Technical note: I’m not sure why my sleeve caps tend to come out too large, since I always carefully check various reference sources and plan them meticulously. I suppose it could be related to the fact that there are still some aspects of sleeve caps that I find mysterious, chief among them the fact that the stair-step bind-offs that precede the bind-off of the final flat area across the top don’t appear to be figured into the overall length of the sleeve cap (at least, not in Maggie Righetti’s book or in the Ann Budd sweater book). Yet when you go to seam in the sleeve, there they are, ready to eat up a whole bunch of stitches and then force you to figure out how to ease in the difference somehow over the rest of the cap. Or am I the only one who has this problem?

At any rate, next time I’m going to try making my sleeve caps a bit shorter than the reference books say they ought to be in order to account for those stair-step bind-offs. Maybe that will magically do the trick. For this project, I did manage to get the first cap seamed in nicely on the fourth try, and the second cap only took one try. Blocking took away a few puckers that concerned me, and now all is well with the sleeves.

I’m wearing the sweater as I type this, and I’m pleased to report that Slim is warm and cozy. I imagine I’ll be getting a lot of wear out of it this winter, as it’s perfect for our cold house. And with a collared shirt underneath and dress pants, it ought to be fine for parties, too — at least, the sort of parties I go to.

Other posts about Slim are here, here, here, here, here, and here. This is the third sweater in my Fall/Winter 2007 “collection.” The first was Frances, and the second was Middlebury.

Let the seaming begin! I have the distinct impression that the sleeve caps are going to give me fits.

The Otto the Turkey pattern is now available for free download! Just click on the link in the previous sentence, which goes directly to the 1.5 MB PDF file, or get there via the Designs link on the sidebar. Enjoy!

I’ve finished the back of the herringbone sweater. That makes three pieces down and one piece to go. Here they are all laid out:

It’s a funny sort of accomplishment, finishing the third piece of a sweater. It’s satisfying, but it’s also something of a letdown, since you can’t do much of anything with three pieces of a sweater except fold them into a neat little pile and get going on the fourth piece.

That swatch on the top of the pile was yesterday’s project. In order to decide which needles to use for the front of the sweater, which will be entirely herringbone, I had to try out four different sizes.

After consulting with David, I accepted his recommendation and settled on the second one from the top, for which I used US size 4 needles. The width of each column of herringbone should match the width between slipped-stitch columns on the arms and back. At least, that’s the plan.

After working on this sweater for a little over a month, I’ve decided to call it “Slim,” both in reference to the slimming vertical lines and in honor of Florence’s beau-turned-husband.* Normally, I would be feeling antsy to move on to something new, but I’ve been unusually faithful to Slim. I guess that, like Florence, I’m in this for the long haul.

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*If you have no idea what I’m talking about, check out the Adventures of Florence category over there on the sidebar –>.