Prime Time Knitter

Color Saturation

The failure of my plan to knit twelve sweaters in 2009 has not daunted me from making similarly grandiose plans for 2010.  I do intend to finish Thora (the fourth of my 2009 sweaters) and to reevaluate my WIPs, but I’d decided to depart from my usual style of one-color, cable or lace sweaters, knit in pieces to tackle new things.  In fact, 2010 will be “the year of the new” (although if the summer is miserably hot, it may be time for a lace shawl again).   

This will be my foray into stranded sweater knitting.  One thing that’s prompting this huge change in my one-color, knitted-flat-with-seams sweaters is the prospect of knitting an Alice Starmore sweater.  DH and DS got it for me for mother’s day (yes, mother’s day in 2009), and I knew it would never be one of twelve knit this year.  I have been staring at the yarn longingly since it arrived because the colors are so beautiful. 

This is the Oregon Cardigan (in Autumn), which was also featured in VK, Holiday 2007 and is available from Virtual Yarns.

I’m not that much of a knitting fool to think I can manage this as my first stranded project, and so I have decided to gradually ease up to the challenge.  I’ve had 20 balls of brick red Heilo in my stash for at least 10 years, which was intended for a project that I abandoned after swatching.  My swatch for this sweater, that looks so lovely in the picture, lacks the stitch definition shown in the picture (in fact, it looks like crap).

I bought the Heilo when Patternworks was still in Poughkeepsie and had the most fantastic after-Christmas sales—40% off on almost everything, as I recall.  So the yarn was very inexpensive for me.  (I still dream about those sales and walking through the warehouse of metal racks filled with yarn.)

So the 20 balls languished until I discovered Sirdal one late night while ogling the color sweaters on Ravelry.  

Sometime in late spring, I bought the Dale of Norway book that has the instructions and saw that all I needed was the contrast yarn.   So in preparation for starting it, I bought the necessary skeins of Heilo in natural. 

I also decided to work very traditionally on my first color sweater (no modifications except needed gauge changes), and when I discovered there were pewter Sirdal buttons, I added them to my order from Woolybaabaa (excellent service, and a great selection of Scandinavian yarns and projects).

I also don’t think that my experience with Sirdal will be enough to give me confidence for the Alice Starmore project, and so I’m going to tackle another stranded kit in my stash before that.  This will give me practice using more colors and reinforce what I’ve learned working with Sirdal.  The second stranded sweater is from a Philosopher's Wool kit (the Design Your Own Sweater), which I will try to adapt a bit so it isn’t quite so billowy. 

 

I’ll be knitting Sirdal as part of a Ravelry KAL, Knit a Norwegian, and I have until January 1 to get started.  So I’ll be swatching to decide what needles to use, studying the pattern, and doing background reading on stranded knitting.  The first step is to figure out how to get the dominant color.

Cable-Ready

My pack-rat tendencies extend beyond yarn, patterns, and knitting books to cable hooks.  [I actually find it shocking to stumble upon Ravelers who claim they do not have a stash and complete one project before buying yarn for the next.] I don’t cable without a needle, and so cable needles are essential.  When I first started knitting, there didn’t seem to be many options for cable hooks.  My first one, which I used for years and years, is this:

I believe it came in a “small” (as shown) and “large”, and since I rarely knit or cable with very heavy yarn, if I had one, it has long since disappeared.  I also have a set of Clover cable hooks that I inherited from my mother, but I have switched from hooks to the straight or wing variety, and seldom use them. 

I try to get a cable needle that matches the needle size I’m working with (to avoid cables that have a different stitch size from the rest of the knitting), and therein lies the need for many different cable needles.  And so as a public service, I’ll give you the needle sizes of all my cable needles. 

The Clovers are equivalent to 2.50 US (3 mm), 6 US (4.25 mm), and 8 (5mm) needles.

The Knit Picks cable needles are equivalent to 3 US (3.25 mm), 5 US (3.75 mm), and 10 US (6mm) needles.  I prefer the cable needles without the grooves, and although these are pretty and have nice points, they aren’t my cable needles of choice.

The Brittany Birch match 3 US (3.25 mm), 7 US (4.50 mm), and 9 (5.50 mm) needles.

 

This left me with a dilemma when I began to knit Thora.  I am using size 1s (2.50 mm) for the body and cables.  I searched everywhere for a cable that would work on such thin needles, partly for Thora and partly to cable on socks.  I found one from Inox and ordered it immediately, but it is very odd.  It is much too long to use conveniently.  The Inox cable needles come in sizes 1 US (2.50 mm) and 5 ½ US (4mm).

While knitting Thora, I had an epiphany that will probably eliminate the need for any more cable needle purchases (although I can’t imagine there are too many other cable needles out there that I don’t already own).  Why not use 4-inch dpns—or, more precisely, one 4-inch dpn?  That is indeed what I did on Thora.

I have a few pairs of Suzanne dpns, which I got in sizes that would be typical for knitting gloves and mittens.  And when I saw that Knit Picks had a whole set of Harmony 4-inch dpns, I immediately added them to my needle arsenal.  Those shown below (from top to bottom are Suzanne ebony in size 2.50 mm, Suzanne rosewood in size 3.0 mm, KnitPicks 0 US (2 mm), and KnitPicks 1 US (2.50 mm). 

The Suzanne needles aren’t that easy to find and they can be expensive.  I got mine at Patternworks, which no longer seems to have them, but WEBS has a few sizes.  I like them better than the KnitPicks because they feel more substantial and have rounder points, but the KnitPicks are very good, especially for the price.

So armed with my 4-inch dpns, I’ll be cabling away on socks as soon as Thora is done.

Measure for Measure

I've been on more of a roll with my nightly knitting since Stitches, and I've barreled through the right front. Both fronts are now on my foam pads and old towels, ready for blocking:

Here's a close up of the buttons that I had purchased when I was still knitting with the original dye lot.

They are brown-gray, and they looked better with the lighter shade of Zara.  But for now, I will use these  unless I find something when I finish the sweater that better complements the darker gray.  I like how the neck edge turned out.

Now it is time to think.  [Hum some scary music here.]  This is my first saddle sleeve, and I'm relying on the pattern instructions more than I usually do.  I recite the mantra "trust no one" when I look at pattern instructions, and I remained suspicious of the sleeve measurements.  How could every single size have an 18-inch sleeve?

I tested the measurement by putting the blocked back on my purple sweater, which has sleeves that fit perfectly, and projecting where Thora's sleeves would end:

To my astonishment, the length is perfect.  [Hum some even scarier music here.  This seems too good to be true.]

When I have knit a big piece, usually the back, I find it more accurate to work with it than the gauge swatch.  And so I used the blocked back to figure out how many cable repeats I'd need for the 18-inch sleeve.  And again, this appears to work out perfectly--15 repeats should do it.  I hope this isn't an amusing Halloween trick that the knitting gods are playing on me.  

My vertical gauge is not at all like the pattern (I get fewer rows), and I need to work out just where the instructions ask you to increase and then where I should increase to get something comparable.  So there's a bit of math in my future.  Perhaps this is where everything that seems so perfect will turn out to be less so.  But I'll sketch my version and the original version on graph paper, measure and review my calculations at least three or four times (when I get two that are the same, I'll stop), and then cast on for the left sleeve.  I'd like to hum something like "Happy Days Are Here Again" when I've figured all this out, but let's not push it.

Life's a Stitch

I’m just back from Stitches East, and my mind is racing with mental knitting.  I should be exhausted because the ice machine, adjacent to my room started to rev up at about 5:30 AM, and I could not get back to sleep.  But I’ve spent the last few hours fondling my purchases, looking at some knitting books for project ideas, and sorting through the class notes.

My classes in Japanese knitting were wonderful.  I took two with Gayle Roehm, who is an excellent teacher.  She spent Thursday afternoon working us through the intricacies of some unusual stitch maneuvers and revealing some of the not-so-obvious nuances of Japanese charts.  On Friday (all day), there was a second class in interpreting the truly amazing patterns that are in Japanese pattern magazines and books, and on line (even for free).   Here is an example of the free patterns.  Click on any picture and the links that follow and you can see the charts like those we analyzed in class.  My hope, however, is to work with the sweaters in this book, especially #5 (the stranded sweater).  If you scroll down the page to #11, you’ll see some of the kinds of stitches we worked on in the class—one student wore her completed FO of the sweater, which was sensational.

Despite being totally engrossed in the classes, I did manage to fit in some visits to the Market on the Thursday Preview and on Friday, when I almost (but not quite) forgot to eat lunch since I spent the break shopping.   Here are my stash enhancements. 

I fell in love with the yarn in the String Theory booth.  My photographic skills are not up to the task of capturing the glowing color of their DK in black tulip.  The color really is like a black tulip, much blacker than it shows up here, with more vibrant and subtle shades of purple.  Even though this is superwash, the yarn is as soft as butter and I intend to wear it next to my skin. 

I succumbed to the lure of the Green Mountain Spinnery booth, and got enough of the Maine Organic yarn for a traditional sweater, either Aran or Gansey.  This is Aran weight, and it is organic Maine wool that is processed in Vermont. 

I am hoping to go beyond my top-down, flap heel socks, which is why I’ve been adding sock yarn to my stash.   When I spotted some Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock as a show special, I could not pass it by.

And finally, to get my fix of Blue Faced Leicester, is Luster Sox from Dye Dreams.  This is superwash BFL.  You can see their other colors here.

And I can’t resist knitting notions.  After Thora, I’m planning to tackle the several stranded knitting projects, and I will definitely need highlighter tape for them.  But I also discovered something called “highlighter guides” that stick to a page by static electricity.  Both of these were from The Mannings.  The highlighter guide is great for less complicated charts than those for Fair Isle, such as the chart I needed for Thora’s big cable.

 

I restrained myself a bit in the Market because I’m looking for some interesting tweed yarn.  The yarn I’m favoring is from Beaverslide Drygoods, but I may also consider some from Harrisville.  And there are sock yarn vendors that I’ve seen on Ravelry that have some intriguing options.  But for now, I’m pleased with these purchases and eager to finish Thora so I can move on to other things.

It's Always Fair Weather

To say I was heartbroken at the thought of missing Rhinebeck this year is an understatement.  I enjoy fiber fairs so much, not only for the yarn I buy, but for the energy of the crowds, the gorgeous things visitors wear, and the chance to mingle with other knitters.  I spent a large chunk of Friday checking the hourly forecasts on weather.com and accuweather.com, watching the subtle changes in the estimates of the timing of the storm.   This morning the prediction for Rhinebeck was:

 

And so I decided to go and spend as much time as possible before the clouds started looking truly ominous.  (It still wasn’t raining in Rhinebeck at noon.)

At 7:30, with Mozart’s horn concertos fired up from my iPod through my car’s sound system, I headed off.  I arrived at the Dutchess County Fair Grounds at 9:01, and it seemed as if it was a bit less crowded than last year.  The trees weren’t as colorful as in past years, and it definitely was a lot colder, but everything else was great.

I spent less time looking at the sheep, llamas, and alpacas, but this fellow was outside the barns, attracting a crowd.

 

Although I think the number of visitors seemed down, at least at 9 AM, it still took me an hour to replenish my Socks That Rock stash.  This year I didn’t have to wait to get into the booth, but there were two lines of about 40 people each on them eager to pay.  The colors in my photo are a bit off (and it is raining now, so repeat pics aren’t possible), but I got one skein of medium weight corvid (the top skein) and two skeins of lightweight  in chestnutty (middle) and Meet Brown, Joe (bottom).  The medium weight will be for fingerless gloves, and the lightweight for socks.

As a counterpoint to these somber hues, I discovered a vendor new to me: Creatively Dyed Yarns.  Most of the yarns are variegated, but I’m a semi-solid fan. The choices were still captivating, and my selection was bronze:

I’ve visited the Buckwheat Bridge Angora booth many times in the past, and they have the most beautiful mohair.  This year I was enchanted by the lace-weight 100% Cormo (produced with solar power!).  It is more muted than it looks here, and I bought enough for a small lacy scarf.

I have trouble thinking of sweater projects at yarn fairs because I like to mull over how a particular yarn will work up before committing to 1500+ yards.  This year Green Mountain Spinnery had yarn that I hadn’t seen before:  Wonderfully Wooly.  So I bought the color cards, which also have colors of Mountain Mohair that aren’t on my current color cards (I love that yarn).  So at Stitches East I may buy a skein to play with—for a hat, perhaps, just to see how it knits up.

And I stopped at the Got Soap (gotsoap.com) for four bars of handmade soap.  The lemonilla is sensational.  My intent was to use these for presents with knitted washcloths, but I may reconsider. 

I purposely skipped over some vendors that I know will be at Stitches:  Shelridge Farms and Ellen’s Half-Pint Farm.  Rhinebeck became as crowded as ever about 11:30, and by then I spent a little more than I intended and felt tired.  And I did want to drive home before the rain, which started falling just as I was about 15 minutes from home. 

Now to play with my stash and get ready for Stitches on Thursday—it doesn’t get better than this. 

Holed Up

Why have I had so much trouble getting around to putting up blog posts?  This is a question I’ve been asking myself for a couple of weeks now, and it seemed as if there was no good answer.  But this week I figured out why—interruptions.  Here’s one example.  On Monday, I promised myself that I’d get to work at 7 AM, print out the chapters I’d need to read, and then post about my knitting progress.  But my printer had other ideas.

When things on the side panel flash, the printer is not happy.  And so I unearthed the manual and discovered I needed a new drum.  Ok, so I checked to see if Amazon had it.  And indeed it did—but for nearly $80.  The printer only cost me around $100, so this seemed as though it was a typo.  When I checked around, I found that this was really quite a good price. About an hour had elapsed by this time—so much for starting work at 7 AM.  After spending more time on the web, I discovered that the replacement printer for this model was on sale at Staples and Best Buy for only $60.  How can that be?  I can get an entirely new printer, with a toner cartridge and drum, for less than the drum for my existing, perfectly fine printer.  I wrote an irate email to Brother Printer’s customer services, and have gotten no reply.  So a day later I started composing an irate letter to the president of the Brother Printer Company criticizing their “green” policy, only to discover its head offices are in Japan.  (I will eventually write to someone, even if it is just a rant to Consumer Reports.)  And so after this, and a trip to Staples yesterday, I lost hours of work time.  I felt guilty taking time for a blog post.

But despite needing the time today to install this

and getting a truly late start on my work, I am posting anyway.  (Thank goodness I have a Mac and not a PC, or the entire day would be ruined trying to hook up a new peripheral.) Besides, we’re in the midst of a nor’easter, making it very unlikely that I will go to Rhinebeck this weekend, and I can make up the work time as I’m holed up watching the wind, heavy rain, and even, perhaps, some snow. 

Knitting has taken place despite the dearth of blog posts.  I am up to the buttonholes on Thora.  The instructions for the buttonholes leave something to be desired.  They merely say to bind off three stitches on a front row and cast on three stitches on the next purl row.  There is no indication of what row to do this on.  It is clear from the picture that the buttonholes have to go in the middle of the front cable:

Here is the chart for the cable, and the only rows that I can imagine binding off three and casting on three are rows 13 and 14, which fall in the cable repeat. 

This makes for a somewhat lopsided buttonhole, and not the centered buttonhole I thought I’d be getting.  

Still, I think I will always wear this sweater buttoned because it would lose some of its gracefulness if the fronts flapped open.  And if you look closely at the magazine picture, you can see that the button is positioned near the top of the cable, not in the center.

The hard part of Thora’s front (the Viking cable) is done, and now it is very easy to finish the right front.  I’m eager to get to the saddle sleeves because I don’t recall ever knitting a sweater with them. I'll need to block first to be sure of my row gauge, and I'll do that rain or shine.

The More the Merrier

One of the things I like about Elsebeth Lavold’s designs is their graceful lines.  I think it was Thora’s shape that attracted me initially to the project, and it is a shape used in several other of her patterns.  Here is another, from her website, that uses the flared bottom in a pullover.  And, of course, there are also the interesting cables and nice details. 

So when I finally reached the point where I had to shape Thora’s neck, I expected to have to pay attention to achieve the look in the picture:

I did not expect to have to count over and over to be sure I was doing the right thing.  Although I’ve griped about the instructions on Liv (no schematic, less than crystal clear explanations), Thora is a bit different because it was published in Knitter’s Magazine.  It does have a schematic, and it seems that the instructions are more explicit because they match the magazine’s style.  Until the neck edge, I had no problems at all.

One detail on Thora is a row of 2 stockinette columns separated by 2 reverse stockinette stitches, and the picture makes it look as if that motif will go along the neck edge and across the back neck.  But when I got to the point where the cable would disappear, I had 3 reverse stockinette stitches separating the two columns of stockinette.

The cable row uses 12 stitches.  You lose 4 of them when you end the cable and so you need to decrease by 6 more to get the 2 left for the neck edge.  Here is the instruction from Knitter’s Fall 1999, which I’ve been using instead of Knitter’s Arans and Celtics (where the pattern was reprinted), because it lays flat:

When knitting this bit, I read only the top line (which goes into the binding in the magazine), and decreased 5 times, and I did the math over and over but could not get the right amount.  I decided it was an “error” and I decreased 6 times just so things would work out.  But I had the sneaking sense that I was doing something wrong. 

The next morning, I looked in Arans and Celtics, where the instruction has different line breaks, and I could see that I had to decrease a total of 6 times.  And I felt like a total fool for not reading the entire sentence in the magazine version, although it would have helped to have a stitch count at this point so the knitter would know she was on track.

In any case, my front edge now looks like this, I'm "more" satisfied, and I’m about 20 rows away from a finished front. 

 

My challenge now is to place the decreases.  Because my row gauge differs from the row gauge in the pattern, I can’t do this evenly every 4th row as specified.  I have fewer rows, and so I’ve decided to decrease every 4th row for a bit and then every 2nd row after that.  So there is still some uncertainty ahead, but I expect a finished front tonight.

Back Again

I’ve dropped the ball with my personal juggling act, and blogging has been the greatest casualty.  When I started my blog, I hoped to post around three times a week, and I’ve fallen woefully short of that goal, even before Ed’s surgery and recovery (not yet 100% but getting there).  But although blogging has been on the back burner, knitting hasn’t.  Regularly scheduled blogging will resume. 

The replacement back on Thora is now done:

The old looks better than the new because it is blocked.  I was dodging raindrops to get these photos, and so I won’t be blocking the back #2 today. 

And I’m on to the front. 

Should I manage to knit on without screw ups  (and that is very iffy indeed), I will be back where I expected to be in July by later this week.

My hope now is to wear this at Stitches, but I’m not going to rush.  Whenever I have had what I thought was a productive evening of knitting, I saw by the dawn’s harsh light that I had made some bush-league mistake.  By now you’d think I’d know that I change from knit to purl on the double seed stitch only on the front.  But I apparently have not.  For some reason, I can see my errors only the morning after, in  daylight.  I also knitted away on the front cable, only to discover that I split the yarn in a most obvious location and one that required frogging because it was in the absolutely wrong place.  The cable crosses were above it, and when I tried to drop down to the stitch, I ended up with a horrendous mess that took an evening to fix. 

I sure hope the third time isn’t the charm on this one, because knitting this twice will be quite enough.  Once I get past the part of the front I knitted originally, I will have to think.  My vertical gauge differs from the pattern specs, and that will affect the start of the V and the button placement. 

For now I can ponder just what I’d like to mix with the old Zara dye lot, since I do plan to rip it, wash it, and use it for something else.  I think the many vendors at Rhinebeck and Stitches will be able to help me out with that problem.

The Fall Classic

I’ve been thinking about fall for most of this summer and reveling in the not-so-warm days and pleasant nights, smiling to myself when others have complained about “the summer that wasn’t”.  But however cool July and August might be, they are not fall.  Fall begins for me around my son’s birthday, which will be this weekend when he turns 25.  My mental image is taking him out as a baby in a carriage when we lived in New York City, and enjoying the bright sunshine and turning leaves in Washington Square Park.

The reason that I still think mid-September is fall is that for the past several years, Ed and I have taken a ride to one of the orchards around here that sells apples and apple-related items.  Our particular favorite is Salinger's.  We used to visit Salinger's with Will when he was little so he could get the fresh doughnuts made on the premises and the apple cider. 

The apple selection is the most impressive I’ve seen anywhere.

 And here is part of this year’s birthday haul of doughnuts.

 

Even a chocolate-lover like me makes an exception for these.  The smell of cinnamon that fills the car while driving home from the orchard is overwhelming, and Ed’s antidote for it is to eat as quickly as possible (minus the very large bite for me) some fruit-filled strudel that is also for sale.

It may seem to some that we are copping out on the true experience of apples in New York State in the fall.  The most dedicated will go to the many orchards and pick their own.  We do not.  Apple picking is one of those many things that you do with small children that sound great but turn out to be near or total disasters.  Like most parents around here, we thought picking apples would be a fun day out for a 6- or 7-year-old child.  And at that time, we packed Will into the car and drove off.  We paid our entrance fee, got our bags and picking pole, and proceeded to the trees.  At this particular pick-your-own orchard, the trees were surrounded by the lushest growth of poison ivy that I’ve ever seen.  It extended so far beyond the trees that anyone under 6 feet who wanted to get an apple would also get poison ivy.  So Will and I stood and watched Ed from a safe distance as he got one bag of apples with the picking pole, and then we took the long drive home—with one disappointed kid.  About two hours of driving for ten minutes of apple picking. 

This experience can’t hold a candle to the one that backfired on the mom of one of Will’s childhood friends.  She was the type of person who would spend rainy days with her kids making macaroni pictures (something I never knew was even possible).  She decided that Nicky and his brother should learn to look things up in the dictionary, and every time they came upon a new word, she would tell them to get the dictionary and see what it said.  One day, little Nicky was eating pumpernickel and pondered on the meaning of the name.  So his mom did what she always did—checked the dictionary.  In her version of Webster’s, its word origin is “fart of the devil”.  As you can imagine, the kids were delighted and shared this bit of knowledge with anyone within earshot.  This was the end of the dictionary lessons, and I’m sure their SAT scores suffered from this setback.

But fall will be here soon enough, and with it Rhinebeck and Stitches East—the true Fall Classics for me.  I’ve already begun my yarn-buying fantasies, which I’ll share in subsequent posts.  And, yes, knitting has been progressing.  Thora II is about up to the back armholes, but this has been photographed before.  So photos will have to wait until I’ve got something new to show.

 

It’s Déjà Vu All Over Again

I don’t like to think of myself as a creature of habit, but the truth is that when my routine is disrupted I don’t snap back very quickly.  Although Ed is doing much better, my life in August wasn’t like my life before his operation.   We had morning visits from a nurse that after the first couple were more of an annoyance than a help.  I subbed for Ed as the procurer of groceries, and he wisely shops early in the morning to get in and out of the supermarket as quickly as possible.  And so some mornings, I found myself browsing the National Enquirer headlines as I waited briefly for a free cashier.  I didn’t realize how much I missed just reading the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. 

In early August, I got my replacement Zara so that I could start knitting Thora again—this time with enough yarn in the same dye lot to finish the sweater.  In mid-August I cast on…and cast on.  It is amazing how I make the same mistakes over.  I carefully cast on what I thought was to be 184 stitches.  The first time, I got to about stitch 105 and I found a knot in the yarn.  So I cut it out and carefully cast on again.  What else can you do if the knot is on the cast on row?  Now 184 stitches is a lot for me to count at night (and this should worry you if you have college-age children, because I occasionally work on math books).  I carefully inserted markers every 20 stitches, counted between the markers a few times, and then with a deep breath started Row 1.  When I got the to end of Row 1, I had two extra stitches.  How could this happen?  So I counted my 184 stitches two more times, satisfied that it had to be the right count.  And when I finally checked the pattern, I saw that for my size, I needed only 182 stitches.  At this point, there was nothing to be done but watch some junk TV while trying to keep my blood pressure from rising.  The next night, the process was repeated.  I suppose just three tries to cast on isn’t bad. 

I then knitted happily away on the Viking cable, only to discover on about Row 20 that I had neglected to decrease every fourth row and had too many stitches.  Of course, I figured this out after knitting to the next decrease row, and so three rows had to be frogged.  I had made this mistake on first back of Thora that I knit.  I could have just fudged the decrease, but since I am going to the trouble of knitting the whole damn sweater over, it better be perfect. 

So here I am:

  

The new dye lot is actually more beautiful than the original.  It is a darker, richer gray, and I think I will like it better for this sweater. 

I still don’t quite seem to have the stamina for nightly knitting that I did a few weeks ago.  I have been watching more TV, of the not-very-demanding variety, and falling asleep in the middle of the shows.  But everything in our household has been doing better, and I’m almost up to the automatic-pilot part of the back.