Ruthless Knitting

I have (finally!) finished all the knitting on the Kinari cardigan, and this morning I figured out how I want to do the button closures. I extend my deep appreciation to Ysolda, who has posted a very good tutorial with photos on how to make sewn button loops. I modified her instructions to make this hybrid creation.

Now all I have to do is sew down most of the hem, add the six button loops, sew on the buttons, sew down the rest of the hem, and block. The end is near!

I printed out slips for each person who expressed an interest in the leftover Tokyo and Jaggerspun yarn this morning, put them in David’s Halfdome hat, and mixed them around. David got to choose the winning slip. And the winner is . . .

Nicole’s comment read, "I’d love a chance to win the yarn because I think the colours would be perfect for my brother’s fiancee (and I think I could come up with something nice to make for her)." Sounds like a good (and generous) reason to me!

Send me your address, Nicole (to ruthlessknitting at gmail dot com), and I’ll ship off the yarn to you.

Pattern: My own
Size: 32″ bust, 13″ to underarm on body, 5" sleeve length, 7" sleeve opening
Yarn: Interlacements Tokyo (50 percent merino wool, 50 percent silk; 500 yds per 100 g skein), color Taiga; Jaggerspun Zephyr Wool-Silk 2-18 Lace Weight (50 percent Chinese tussah silk, 50 percent fine merino wool; 630 yds per 2 oz), color Basil, held double
Yardage: About 475 yards of Tokyo and 650 yds of Zephyr
Source: Interlacements Yarns; Sarah’s Yarns 
Needles: US 4 (3.5 mm) Knit Picks Harmony circular needles
Gauge: 24 sts and 36 rows = 4″ in pattern
Notes: This project began with the yarn, which I bought through a Yahoo wholesale group a few years ago. Since that time, I have discovered that I am far more interested in knitting garments in solid and semi-solid yarns than in variegated ones, which left me with a bit of a dilemma regarding how to use up the thousand yards of wool/silk in my possession. My plan when I bought the yarn was to make a shawl, but that impulse faded fast. Later, I had the idea of using the Tokyo combined with some matching solid-colored Zephyr to make a baseball-shirt-style sweater with three-quarter-length sleeves — a sort of soft, warm, refined throwback to the popular baseball t-shirts of my youth. I still think that would have been kind of cute, but I sat on the idea long enough that I grew bored with it.

In search of another plan, I discovered wave and box stitch in Barbara Walker’s second treasury of knitting patterns, swatched it, and became smitten. In the book, this pattern is shown in high-contrast yarns, but I love how using two similar colors results in a fabric that seems to have a cellular structure but doesn’t give away the secrets of its construction without close scrutiny. The pattern breaks up the variegation but retains all the interesting color play; it manages to be colorful without, I think, being garish.

I decided to pair wave and box stitch with bands of garter stitch at all the edges of the top. This idea came straight out of Maggie Righetti’s Sweater Design in Plain English, which was also the source of my notion to try out the garment shape she calls a "T-topper." The planning from that point forward was quick and simple: I drew a sketch and a diagram and jotted down about three lines of instructions in my notebook. Then all I had to do was knit, block, and seam.

Since the T-topper shape is something of a throwback to the 1980s (and I am not the kind of gal to wear legwarmers), I wasn’t altogether sure how the finished garment would look on me. It turns out that it’s a pretty flattering cut — and I realized belatedly that I actually have a similarly constructed shirt in my closet that I’ve been wearing to dressy functions for about six years. Duh.

Creating the Tokyo top was simple and pleasurable, and I am so enamored of the result that I intend to write up the pattern and make it available alongside my other free designs in the near future.

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Other posts about the Tokyo top:

• In which I swatch Tokyo for the first time
• In which I swatch Zephyr and outline my baseball sweater plan
• In which I discover wave and box stitch
• In which I cast on
• In which I knit the front
• In which I block the front

I wrote a long post earlier that I lost by accident. Then I went downstairs to run on the treadmill only to discover that the DVD of Heroes I just got from Netflix is the exact same DVD of Heroes that I finished watching and returned last week. Feeling a little cursed, I decided to take the blog in a whole new direction.

But first, a quick knitting status report: I finished up the Tokyo top on Sunday morning and wove in all the ends. It’s fab. I’ll try to take pictures and get a finished object post up sometime in the next few days. Meanwhile, you may have noticed a new sweater project listed over there on the sidebar. It may be the first sweater in a new sweater collection. I’m actually not quite done yet with the Ruthless Knitting Fall/Winter 2007 collection, but I need some time to plan the (rather complicated) sixth and final sweater. And before I knit a stitch on it or on the new collection, I’m going to finish up the second Bird in Hand mitten, which I should have made in December.

Let me delay my revelation still further to point you in the direction of Whatifknits. Sarah-Hope is having a raffle for her one-year blogiversary to benefit animal welfare and protection groups. She’s giving away some fabulous prizes, including a beautiful hand-knit Swallowtail Shawl. Have a peek at her website for details.

So. I was thinking today about websites that I enjoy, and I really do love the ones that include some cooking. Faith of The Knitting Cook posts recipes often, and so does Ysolda, and DesiKnitter. I love to cook, but I don’t particularly like reading about cooking at any length, so I am always pleased when cooking guest stars on knitting blogs. Perhaps five parts knitting + one part cooking = the perfect blog?

In order to investigate this possibility further, I give you a tortilla recipe. I’ve only been making tortillas for a few months, but I am a total convert. Fresh tortillas are relatively easy to make (particularly if you are someone who makes bread regularly), they taste fantastic, they don’t contain any of the freakish ingredients that appear in Azteca "tortillas" and other store brands, and the leftovers make killer huevos rancheros. The recipe I use is from Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian, which is my favorite cookbook.

Wheat Tortillas

2 c. all-purpose flour [I use King Arthur bread flour]

1/2 tsp. salt

2 Tbsp. vegetable oil (I use olive oil)

warm water

Sift the flour and salt into a bowl. [I am actually too lazy to sift.] Add the oil and rub it into the flour as evenly as possible. Begin to add very warm water slowly, gathering the dough into a ball. You will need about 1/2 cup or a bit more. Knead the ball for about 10 minutes. [Don't skimp on this part. It's the only difficult part of the whole recipe.] Now divide it into 8 even portions and make 8 balls from them. Flatten the balls into patties. Put the patties on a large platter or baking tray and cover with a dampened towel or plastic wrap. Set aside for 30 minutes or more.

Set a cast-iron frying pan or griddle on medium-high heat. Allow it to heat up.

Take a ball of dough and dust it lightly in flour. Now roll it out into a 7-inch round on a floured surface. Lift up the tortilla and slap it back and forth between your palms to shake off the extra flour. [I don't do this, since there is never any excess flour on mine by this point.] Slap the tortilla onto the hot griddle. Let it cook for 45 seconds. It will puff up. Turn it over and cook the second side for another 35 to 45 seconds. Put the cooked tortilla on a plate and cover it with a towel or another upturned plate. Make all the tortillas this way, making sure to wipe off the cast-iron pan with a paper towel after each tortilla is made. [I never wipe off the pan.] If it takes you a while to roll out the next tortilla, turn the heat under the cast-iron pan down to low while you roll it and then turn it up again. [You can easily roll out each tortilla while the previous tortilla cooks.]

I cook the leftover tortillas in a skillet with a little olive oil and whatever toppings I want. You can also reheat them in the oven.

I finished the first half of the Tokyo top on Friday and got it blocked. As the end approached, I grew increasingly concerned about the size: I had calculated that the top was going to grow quite a bit when I blocked it, since that’s what my swatches had done, but the finished piece was so small that I became convinced it was too small. I even came up with a plan to add side panels to make it larger. But then when I blocked it, it grew a lot, and it came out just the right size. 

Sometimes, it’s hard to trust the voice of experience. 

Here’s what it looked like when I draped it across my torso and took a picture of myself in my dimly-lit yellow guest bathroom.

I think I’m on the right track. The only bad news — and it seems like bad only to me, I suppose — is that this is taking a lot less yarn than I would have thought, so I will have a full ball of Tokyo left when I finish it. I like this yarn a lot, but when I’m done with this top, I’m done with the yarn. I don’t want to have to make something else with it. I feel a contest coming on!

Oh, and I upgraded Wordpress over the weekend. There’s a bug that’s giving me some trouble, but I think everything is working now. Let me know if you see any problems. Sigh.

I duplicate-stitched like a mad thing over the weekend, and Sunday night I managed to finish the Fana pullover. I felt pretty lukewarm about this sweater right up until I started putting the snowflakes on it, and then I started to love it. Now that it’s done and I’ve been wearing it for three days straight, I’ve decided that it’s a real winner. It’s warm, it’s comfortable, it fits well, and it looks how I wanted it to look. What’s not to like?

Pattern: My own, based on the traditional Norwegian Fana cardigan in Priscilla Gibson-Roberts’s Knitting in the Old Way
Size: 38″ bust, 13″ to underarm on body, 16″ shoulder to shoulder, 19.5″ to underarm on sleeve, 8.5″ armscye
Yarn: ShibuiKnits Izu (55 percent mohair, 45 percent merino wool; 245 yds per 4 oz skein), two skeins each of Strawberry, Wasabi, and Ivory. This yarn is discontinued.
Yardage: About 1,350 yards
Source: Knit/Purl, Portland, OR
Needles: US 6 (4 mm) for body and sleeves; US 5 (3.75 mm) for ribbing
Gauge: 23.5 sts and 27 rows = 4″ in pattern
Notes: I started this project intending to knit a traditional Fana cardigan following Priscilla Gibson-Roberts’s Knitting in the Old Way, which includes percentage-system-style proportions and directions for a number of different traditional constructions, as well as descriptions and drawings of dozens of traditional garments accompanied by charts and guidelines for making your own. The book is a great resource, and when I started looking through it, I was charmed by the Fana cardigan, which I thought would be a good way to combine the three colors of Izu yarn I had in my stash. Once I got underway, however, I decided that the yarn wasn’t entirely suitable for the traditional Fana style — the I-cord edging in particular just didn’t look right — and I also realized that while there were certain elements of the traditional Fana cardigan that I liked a great deal, there were others that wouldn’t suit my personal sense of style. So I came up with this modified version, which suits me just fine.

I followed Gibson-Roberts’s instructions for a shaped-steek pullover, which is knit in the round from the bottom up to the armpits. At that point, some stitches are bound off for the underarm, steeks are cast on for both armholes (and, in my case, for the henley neckline), and the sweater is worked in the round up to the shoulders, with decreases at the armholes for the first 1.5″ or so. This results in an armhole shape that is the same as that used for set-in sleeves. Over the last 3/4″, I worked back and forth rather than in the round in order to add shoulder shaping to the front and back. Then I sewed and cut the steeks, seamed the shoulders together, and picked up and knit the arms downward in the round.

The resulting sleeve cap is a sort of hybrid of a set-in sleeve and a drop-shoulder sleeve: the sleeve itself has no shaping at the top, which allows you to work color patterns without interruption, but the armhole into which the sleeve is knit is shaped. Before blocking, the sweater bunched quite a lot under the arms, and I really didn’t like that. Now that the sleeves are blocked, it bunches somewhat less and in a way that doesn’t disturb the pattern as much. Still, I’m not sure I’ll be doing shaped steeks again.

The only real drama with this project was the result of a yarn shortage. I initially had about 1,200 yards of DK-weight yarn, which is cutting it close for a pullover in my size. Since I knit the sweater in the round from the bottom up, I was able to determine as I knit that I was not going to have enough of the red and green yarn to do the entire sweater in the striped pattern. This was okay, because I had been toying with the idea of doing the shoulders and sleeve tops with snowflakes — a design element of the traditional Fana cardigan. Implementing that plan required a second ball of white yarn, which I was able to order from Knit/Purl. (I believe that the owner of Knit/Purl is also the person who launched ShibuiKnits. Izu was a ShibuiKnits prototype that was discontinued and replaced with ShibuiKnits Merino Kid. The remaining unsold stock of Izu yarn is still being sold at Knit/Purl as a store-brand yarn, it seems.)

I split my remaining yarn in half before knitting the sleeves, so I was able to keep an eye on how much I had left as I worked my way down to the cuffs. It turned out that I had enough red, but not enough green, to do the cuffs, so red they are. I was initially really unhappy with this outcome, because I didn’t like how the red and green cuffs clashed when I had my arms down at my sides. The effect was a little too Children’s Toy Primary Colors for me. When I added the snowflakes, however, I decided to put green ones on the body and red ones on the sleeves. This had the effect of matching the snowflakes to the cuffs on both the body and the sleeves, thus creating a nice balance that neutralizes the effect that made me so unhappy.

I duplicate-stitched the snowflakes last, which turned out to be a good decision, because I had so very little yarn remaining that I needed to conserve it and plan those snowflakes carefully. The red snowflakes on the sleeves are slightly smaller than the green ones on the body, which saved me a bit of yarn and allowed them to fit into the available space. After I finished the final green snowflake, I was left with about 2″ of green yarn to weave in. I did better with the red: I had about 18″ left when I finished the red snowflakes. It was tight, folks, but I made it.

I could have stretched the yarn supply further had I made this sweater more close-fitting, as I normally do, but I was convinced that this construction and pattern would look best if it was just a bit oversized, so I built in about 3″ of positive ease. I’m glad that I did, because the fit seems just right, and I think a tighter sweater would have been less comfortable and less flattering.

I found the buttons for this sweater at As Cute as Button. They are pewter, which is traditional for Fana cardigans, and they’re about 5/8″ in diameter. I only had to order two sets of buttons this time to get it right — the first ones were too small. Unfortunately, the buttonholes are a bit gappy. I haven’t had this problem before, maybe because my earlier buttonholes were all done in garter stitch, rather than ribbed, bands. I’m planning to reinforce the edges with buttonhole stitch, which I hope will solve the problem.

This is the fourth sweater in my planned Fall/Winter 2007 design collection. If you look back at the original set of swatches, you’ll see that I was going to use this yarn in a slipped-stitch pattern. The sweater you see here is a far cry from the one I had planned, but going with the flow is part of the fun of designing your own sweaters!

Earlier posts about this sweater are here, here, here, and here. Oh, and the hat in the pictures is hand-knit, but not by me. My grandma made it for me a long time ago.

I had hoped to be finished with my Fana pullover by now, but the week kind of got away from me. I had a bunch of meetings to go to, and I started reading a book that totally sucked me in, so I didn’t get too much knitting done. I did manage to complete the first sleeve by last Sunday, and I have about three-quarters of the second sleeve done, so that the sweater currently looks like this:

The ivory yarn that came from Knit/Purl last Friday is a perfect match for the yarn I was already using (same dye lot and everything), which was a great relief. Judging by how much yarn is left here at the end of sleeve 2, I am barely going to have enough of the colors to finish the sweater, and if I hadn’t managed to get that second ball of ivory yarn, I would have been sunk.

Now I just have to finish the sleeve, knit both cuffs (probably in the strawberry color with a green edge), pick up and knit the placket (probably in white with a strawberry-colored edge), duplicate-stitch a snowflake pattern on the shoulders and at the top of the arms (in both colors), sew down all the steeks on the inside, weave in my ends, sew on the buttons, and I’ll be all set.

Hmm. That list didn’t sound as long in my head as it does now that I’ve typed it out. Maybe I won’t finish it this weekend after all.

Earlier in the week, I did manage to get a fair bit of knitting done on the T-topper while sitting through meetings. (Fana is too bulky and awkward to travel well.) The front piece is now about 10.5 inches long. It’s narrower than I would like, but I think it will block to size. I didn’t want to make the pieces too big, because I’d like this top to fit closely, and the silk content of the yarn will cause it to have less memory than 100 percent wool would have.

I feel some distaste for the word “T-topper,” so I think I’ll call this project the “Tokyo top,” after the Interlacements Tokyo I’m using.

Here’s another close-up of the stitch pattern, which I love beyond reason.

Meanwhile, I have been daydreaming about my next next project — which is to say, the project I will start after I finish the Fana pullover and the Tokyo top. I can hardly wait to get going. I’m going to use this.

I managed to finish the body of the Fana pullover on Tuesday, and yesterday I blocked it and sewed and cut the steeks.

I was a little nervous about this stage, and not just because it involved cutting my knitting. No, I was nervous because I had come up with a plan for wasting the least possible amount of yarn on the neckline by doing decreases in the steek. In developing this plan, I made reference to neither my own experiences nor trusty knitting books. I just sorta flew by the seat of my pants. Then, shortly before it was time to cut the steeks, I started to doubt that the plan was going to work out. The steek was frighteningly bulgy, and it distorted the rows all around it. I began to wonder if, when I cut the steek, the bulgy, distorted part would just . . . sit there . . . rather than opening up into the shape of a crewneck. The stakes were high, since if my logic was faulty, 7″ worth of sweater would be ruined — a blow from which the trusty Fana pullover, already short on yarn, was unlikely to recover.

I subjected David to a long explanation of my steek logic, complete with numerous hasty sketches, near the end of which he said, “I still don’t understand the purpose of a steek.” (I maybe could have explained a little more slowly and clearly.) Eventually, I filled him in enough that he was able to agree that my steek reasoning was probably — but not definitely — sound. With this meager reassurance, I plowed ahead. Thankfully, everything came out fine.

After the picture up there was taken, I picked up stitches around one armhole in white and knit the first three rows, but then my progress lurched to a halt. A few days earlier, when it had become clear that I was definitely going to run out of yarn, I ordered some white ShibuiKnits Merino Kid from Knit/Purl as a substitute for the white Izu. On Tuesday I learned, to my great disappointment, that not only does Knit/Purl not have white Merino Kid, white Merino Kid does not actually exist. That it, it is not produced by ShibuiKnits, and it was only listed on the Knit/Purl website by accident.

This news came as something of a disappointment. It turns out, however, that Knit/Purl has something even better: they have the discontinued ShibuiKnits Izu itself, in just the ivory color I need. So now I am waiting for it to arrive before I work on the sleeves, since there’s a small chance that the dye lots will not match and I will want to blend the two whites together over both sleeves to minimize any color discontinuity.

While I wait, I have yet another sweater to work on. Or, more properly speaking, a shirt. Believe it or not, this will be the fifth design in my Fall/Winter 2007 collection. For this top, I’m combining Zephyr’s laceweight wool/silk with Interlacements Tokyo, another 50/50 wool/silk, in the Wave and Box Stitch pattern, like so:

I’m going to make a simple boatneck T-topper* in two pieces knit from the bottom up, with garter stitch borders on the bottom, on the short-sleeve edges, and at the neck. I’ve done about 3″, and the teensy, curly strip of knitting looks promising.

I’ve never knit a T-topper before, and I can’t be sure it will be a flattering style, but even if it turns out to be a disaster, it will be a very soft and very colorful disaster.

–

*I can’t find a picture of a T-topper on the Internet, and I’m not sure if the term is widespread or something that Maggie Righetti made up. I got it from her fabulous reference Sweater Design in Plain English. Basically, a T-topper is a T-shirt constructed in two pieces, front and back identical. Each piece looks like a capital T, with the trunk of the T for the body and the top of the T for the arms. The sleeves end up being dropped a bit off the shoulders and are perhaps a teensy bit dolman-ish in that bunchy-under-the-arms way. I think it’s the sort of thing that Janet on Three’s Company would have worn. So, yeah, wish me luck with that.

The Fana pullover grew by leaps and bounds over the weekend.

At first, I wasn’t sure how I managed to knit so much in so short a time, and my previous faith that knitting in pieces is just as fast as knitting in the round was somewhat shaken. Then I came to my senses and realized that the primary reason that I produced such a large amount of sweater over the weekend is that I’m probably going to run out of yarn before this is all over. Truly, nothing spices up a sweater project like impending doom. Particularly when the yarn in question is no longer being produced.

That I’ve grown increasingly fond of the sweater as it has grown larger only heightens the drama. Who could resist this tidy, stripey, cheerful fabric?

Hoping for good news, I spent at least an hour on Saturday doing various calculations in an attempt to figure out with some degree of accuracy (a) how many stitches will be in the finished sweater and (b) how many stitches I am getting from each ball of yarn. As best I can tell, I either will or will not run out of yarn before I’m finished. Betting types would be wise to place their money on “will.”

Having come to this conclusion, I went right back to knitting the sweater. I had just got to part where I set up the armhole and henley steeks, and I was too enthralled to let a little thing like math deter me.

But don’t worry. I’m not the type to work without a safety net. I’ve figured out that the yarn I’m using for this sweater, ShibuiKnits’s discontinued Izu, has in fact been replaced by another ShibuiKnits yarn called Merino Kid that is basically the same yarn but with kid mohair and merino instead of regular mohair and less distinguished wool. It may not be a perfect match, but I think it will do in a pinch, particularly if I confine it to the cuffs and collar. So I’ve ordered one more ball of white yarn, and I’ve formulated a plan that will, I hope, enable me to finish the sweater without compromising my plan for the design. Cross your fingers for me, will you?

I’m back from a few days in Mount Shasta, California, where I did some cross-country skiing, and from nearly a week in Klamath Falls, Oregon, where my parents live. I love Klamath Falls. How can you not love a place that looks like this in the winter?

I finished the last of the Christmas stockings before I left, sewed on the bells, and was rewarded with the lovely sight of all of the stockings hung up by the chimney at my parents’ house. And it’s quite a chimney — see?

I didn’t get much knitting done while I was away, but I did manage to make some quick fingerless gloves for David to match his Halfdome hat. He wears the hat around the house in the winter to compensate for the cruelly low temperature at which our thermostat is set, but his hands are always cold. The pattern is called Jacoby, and it’s free from Berrocco. These gloves are so stretchy, I think they’d fit just about any adult hands. I used leftover fingering-weight yarn and US size 3 needles.

My dad is a glass artist who is as obsessed with fusing glass in his kiln as I am with knitting. For Christmas, he made me two cards of glass buttons. I’ve been having fun imagining what kind of sweaters I should knit for them. I’m thinking of a white wool cardigan that buttons only at the top for these red and white buttons — something kind of swingy and modern and not too flashy.

The red and purple buttons are a little trickier, but I have a notion to make a purple (tweedy?) sweater that is double-breasted so that the six buttons can be displayed at chest level in two vertical lines. I haven’t done any sketching for either sweater yet, but I’ll get to it. There are still some sweaters in the queue that I already have yarn for, so I don’t want to buy any more until I’ve more or less used that up.

Meanwhile, I started a new sweater over the holidays. I’m using Shibuiknits Izu, a wool/mohair blend that apparently doesn’t exist anymore. As I hinted at the end of my last post, I was inspired by Priscilla Gibson-Roberts’s fabulous Knitting in the Old Way to make a Fana cardigan, which is a traditional regional style from Norway. (If you don’t have Knitting in the Old Way and you have the slightest interest in design, you really ought to buy it. It’s an impressive reference book, packed full of inspiration and ideas.) A traditional Fana cardigan would have looked something like this:

After making a swatch, however, I concluded that the braided bottom edge and I-cord borders weren’t going to work in this yarn. Then I realized that as much as I like the drawing of the Fana cardigan in the book, I’m not likely to wear a cardigan in this style. I cast on instead for a Fana pullover, knit the checkerboard bottom band, and decided that I didn’t like that, either. The part of the Fana cardigan that really caught my eye to begin with was the striped pattern, so that’s the part I ultimately decided to keep, with plain ribbing at the bottom. I’ve managed to knit about eight inches of the body so far.

My plan now is to make a henley pullover with pewter buttons, but the plan is rather malleable, as I’m not sure yet how far the yarn is going to go. I have two balls of the strawberry color and two of the wasabi, for about a thousand yards altogether of the main colors and another two hundred fifty of the white. I may need to rip out the green ribbing and figure out some other way to do the edging that won’t roll but will either use up less yarn (if I run short of both colors) or distribute the two colors equally (if I run out of the green). Only time will tell.