Ruthless Knitting

Remember back when I told you that I was working on a Secret Design Project, and I hinted that it had something to do with this picture?

I can finally tell you what I was going on about. Way back in the spring, I was commissioned by Knit Picks to develop a set of special “shells” for Sheldon that they could sell on their website. They also asked me to rework the pattern so that it could be knit in Shine Worsted as well as Shine Sport (which is the yarn I used for the original pattern). And so I did that, and Super Sheldon was born. He looks just like Sheldon, only bigger.

Okay, this is where the pig comes in. In my middle school art class, we were required to make these clay pigs. Everyone’s pig followed essentially the same template, but we were supposed to customize our pigs so that every pig had a different outfit reflecting its unique character. There were basketball-playing pigs, ballerina pigs, and so forth. My pig, for reasons that I don’t remember, was dressed up as the Easter Bunny. No, really — see its little bonnet with bunny ears? And the eggs? And the Easter basket?

I saw my bunny pig while visiting my mom’s house at Christmas, and it gave me the idea to dress Sheldon up as other animals. Voila!

Knit Picks is selling the patterns and yarn together as a kit here. They also have some interviews with me and a very adorable photo gallery of the various animals in their natural habitats.

Which one is your favorite? I am very fond of the bat.

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Update: Knit Picks informs me that they have sold out of all the kits and will not be producing more. They will be releasing the individual patterns as free patterns starting soon (Feb. 2009), and they’ll have all of them released by spring.

Pattern: Basic top-down V-neck raglan sweater, à la Barbara Walker’s Knitting from the Top

Size: Maybe 9-12 mo.? 21″ chest, 6″ length to underarm, 4.5″ sleeves to underarm, 3.5″ V-neck depth

Yarn: Harrisville Designs New England Shetland (100 percent wool; 197 yds per skein), poppy and white

Yardage: 1 skein poppy; two-thirds skein white

Source: Yarns by Design, Neenah, WI

Needles: US size 3 (3.25 mm) metal circular and bamboo double-pointed needles

Gauge: 26 sts and 40 rows = 4″ in Stockinette stitch

Notes: I think this may be the first time I’ve made a V-neck cardigan, and I am struck by how thoroughly the V-neck transforms a simple cardigan into a prepster’s dream garment. The whole time I was knitting it, I kept feeling as though it needed a varsity letter or some pockets, just to complete the look. So cute!

This Harrisville Designs yarn makes a nice rustic fabric that I think will work well for an outer layer. Their colors are really saturated and fabulous. The poppy I used here looks like a red with orange in it in the pictures, but in real life it looks much more like an orange with red in it. At some point, I’d like to make an adult sweater with the worsted-weight Harrisville yarn. Something simple, like Elizabeth Zimmerman’s modified saddle-shoulder design, would really show off the color and wear well forever.

I think this is the last of the baby sweaters for a while — I’ve got adult sweaters on the brain again! Before too long, I’ll post an update about my progress on Neiman, which I’m making for a friend of mine. I finally finished the body up to the armpits and am feeling fresh interest as I begin the sleeves.

Leona would like you to know that she has a new hat.

I keep telling her that the hat is for the baby, but she counters with, "Only if the baby is a girl. If it’s a boy, I get to keep it."

I have to admit, she does look awfully fetching in it.

Pattern: My own (made up as I went along)

Size: Newborn-ish

Yarn: Froelich Wolle Special Blauband (80 percent wool, 20 percent nylon; 210 m per 50 g), 2021 (off-white); Interlacements Tiny Toes (100 percent superwash merino; 185 yds per 50 g), reds plus

Yardage: 1 skein Froelich Wolle; about half a skein of Tiny Toes

Source: Yarn swap with my friend Alison, who got it from a thrift shop; Interlacements

Needles: US 4 (3.5 mm) bamboo double-points

Gauge: About 6.5 stitches and 8 rows = 1"

Notes: This hat was one of those spur-of-the-moment projects that nonetheless had a long gestation. I’ve been thinking about ways to incorporate the Swedish Weave technique into projects for quite some time, but while I have produced a swatch and an inch and a half of an elaborate adult hat (temporarily abandoned), this is the first actual project I have knit that uses the stitch.

I encountered Swedish Weave in one of the first two Barbara Walker treasuries (can’t recall which one). It is actually not even a stitch so much as it’s a technique, and even calling it a technique is a bit of a stretch, since it is dead simple. To work Swedish Weave, you knit your background color in stockinette stitch, and you float your contrast color alternately in front of and behind the knit stitch, creating a dashed line across the front of the knit fabric (and across the back, too, for that matter). If you follow the same front-and-back sequence on every row, you can line the floats up in columns, but Walker suggests that you stagger them, which is what I’ve done here in sets of three rows.

My goal for this hat was to show off the pretty colors of my Interlacements yarn on a plain white backdrop, and I feel that I’ve succeeded: Swedish Weave is a great technique for making it look like you’ve done something complicated with a handpainted yarn when in fact all that you’ve done is flicked it back and forth in front of your working needle as you went around.

I achieved the somewhat puffy shape of the hat by knitting a garter-stitch band, increasing by about 10 percent in the first row above the band, increasing again a few rows later, and increasing a third time, at which point I thought I had enough stitches on the needles. Then I knit straight up for a while until I started to run out of white yarn, finally decreasing on the same stitch every other row until I had just a few stitches left to pull into the inside. To tell the truth, I put all those increases in because I was afraid the hat would be too small without them. I was pleasantly surprised to realize that the outcome would be a lovely onion-shaped hat with a vaguely Continental air about it.

I figure that even if the baby is a girl, she’ll only be able to wear this hat for a single winter, and then I will return it to Leona, who really deserves something rakish after all her years of faithful, bald service.