Ruthless Knitting

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.