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.

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 –>.

I’m back from Vermont, where David and I had a smashing time with my family. There was a lot of this kind of thing:

and of this kind of thing:

What with all the beautiful scenery, the old homes and churches and barns, the great riding, the steep climbing and descending, the rain and wind, and the occasional map-reading error, the trip was a challenging and exhausting adventure. Luckily, this is my idea of the perfect vacation.

Contest results

Thanks so much for all your contest entries and kind comments about Florence! It was fun to come home and read them all. Interestingly, while I was away, a lively sizing discussion got going over at Knitting Daily. I haven’t had a chance to read all the comments there yet, but there is an interesting survey of bust sizes, as well as the potential for a more thorough sizing survey in the future. I’ll be keeping my eye out for that.

Meanwhile, this morning, I put all the names of the people who entered my contest in my favorite camping hat . . .

. . . and picked the winner!

Mel, you’ve got a Kpixie gift certificate and a custom pattern coming your way — the former rather more quickly than the latter, to be sure.

It is funny that Mel won my contest, because I came home to discover that I won her contest while I was away. Life is strange and wonderful sometimes.

Even if we hadn’t won one another’s contests, I would have wanted to write about Mel in this post anyway, because she just had her first pattern published — the beautiful Summer Sky in this month’s MagKnits. I am not normally someone who wears short sweaters, but the details on this sweater are so lovely and perfect that I’ve been toying with knitting it since I first saw the design. Bravo, Mel!

Knitting update

Bicycling and knitting do not go together, unfortunately, so all I managed to get done during my vacation was about two-thirds of the leg of my second Nine-to-Five Sock. Before I left, however, I knit most of a Ribbed Lace Bolero for my niece Lucy, and I finished all but the weaving of the ends this morning. It’s been a fun knit — I’ll post about it within the next day or two.

Accolades

Last but not least, both Mel and Emilee have nominated me as a Rockin’ Girl Blogger, which was awfully nice of them. I have a strange aversion to buttons, as well as a strong left-wing-liberal-arts-college-education distaste for the word “girl” as applied to any woman past puberty, but I wholeheartedly appreciate the sentiment nonetheless. Thanks, Mel and Emilee!

Souvenirs

I posted this without remembering that I have one more picture to show you — my souvenir yarn! I found these at Vermont Beads and Fibers in Middlebury, Vermont. They are from Laughing Tree Farm in Monkton, Vermont, which raises angora goats. The yarn, a mohair/wool blend, is spun and dyed at the farm. I already have a sweater planned!

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?