Prime Time Knitter

Making Co-Neck-Tions

Thora’s neck edge is so fascinating that I thought it was worth a blog post of its own.  Also, the instructions are not particularly intuitive, and I hope anyone knitting Thora, who finds this part of the pattern unclear, can benefit from these photos.  I have looked for similar pictures on other projects I’ve knitted, and I’ve found bloggers who posted close-ups like these.  I’m thankful for their help, and in the spirit of Thanksgiving, I’d like to do the same thing.

When you knit the fronts, the pattern asks you to put 5 stitches at the neck edge on a holder.  When you knit the sleeves, it asks you to put 4 stitches at the top of the saddle on another holder.  To start the neck edge, you pick up the 5 neck edge stitches

and then knit them (p1, k4—or k4, p1—depending on which side you’re on) until you reach the second group of picked up stitches.  It is neater to start knitting the stitches from the attachment side of the border so you can hide the tail when tidying the ends.

 

Once you've knit enough to fit across the saddle, you pick up the second group of stitches knit across all 9 stitches in the pattern for the back neck edge.  These are knit until the strip reaches the center back.  Here it is on the right front:

I’ve finished both sides of the neck edge, and tonight I’ll be grafting them together and (probably) crocheting them to the neck edge.  I’m favoring the row of single crochet, if it looks good, because it will provide a less stretchy, firmer edge. 

I’m departing a little from the pattern instructions, which ask you to bind off each side and have a seam at the center back.  This pattern is so elegant in its styling that this instruction seems surprising.  Why have a seam when an invisible graft will do?

The rest of the finishing is more of the garden variety—side seams and buttons.  But being so close to the finish line, I don’t think I’ll falter here.  So I know what I’ll be doing as I wait for Thanksgiving dinner to cook. 

Enjoy your Thanksgiving.

Rhine Beckons

Lest you think I’ve sunk to a new low with this blog title, please be advised that Ed thought of it.  I suspect he came up with it in self-defense, because I have talked of nothing but Rhinebeck all week, and he is really eager to see me drive off into the sunrise on Saturday for a day of peace and quiet.  He has already filled the car up with gas.

It is hard to justify new yarn purchases on the heels of my return from Stitches East—and after organizing my stash in preparation for the photos I plan to include when I’m officially a member of Ravelry (only 3000+ people are ahead of me now!).  My “to-knit” list is huge.  But I have been mulling my Rhinebeck purchases all week, and trying to show some intelligence and restraint.

So, what do I have in mind?  This is probably my sixth visit to Rhinebeck.  I was overwhelmed on my first visit, and I don’t recall buying much more than small amounts of yarn for scarves and socks.  On subsequent visits, I continued to buy small amounts of yarn to try out, eventually making larger purchases by contacting the vendor after the festival.  Sometimes I only take the vendor’s information and buy color cards so I can buy yarn later. And so my strategy has evolved into arming myself with some idea of a likely project and going to the booths I’ve targeted.  I also leave myself open to surprises—vendors who have something different from past years or vendors who I’ve somehow overlooked in the past.  This is how I discovered the beautiful Brooks Farm Acero, and a beautiful yarn of llama two years ago.

My strategy for this year is to head to the Botanical Shades booth first.  There is no website for this yarn, but I did buy the color cards in past years and I’ve been obsessed by the colors of this naturally-dyed yarn for several years.  There is a sweater in an old Knitter’s (Fall 1999, one of their best issues, which also has the Thora sweater I’ll be knitting soon) that would show off this yarn nicely.

I was similarly captivated by the yarn at Snow Star Farm (red yarn, shown at the top of the photo) in past years, and I do have stash yarn from them—and a sweater in mind. 

I might head to the Frelsi Farm booth for the Icelandic-silk lace-weight mix (not enough yardage left by time I got there last year).

And I will buy 2000 yards of some other sweater yarn for a project to be decided—or get the color cards and mull over the options when I get home.

So tune in on Sunday to see what I actually bought.

All this week, I worked on finishing Ed’s sweater, and I’m nearly there.  The seams are now turning out as neatly as I hoped, but this didn’t happen on the first try.  When I was a new knitter, I was always surprised that published patterns didn’t arrange for the ribbing to line up invisibly when you assembled your knitted pieces.  About the earliest modification to patterns that I made was to add a stitch or two to the ribbing to make it look seamless on the garment.  For 1x1 ribbing, this means leaving a knit stitch at the end of each piece so you can take ½ stitch on each side in the seam and have the appearance of a full stitch on the outside of the seam.

In the case of Ed’s sweater, I also carried this idea along the seams of the body so that there would be a row of knits going up the sides, mirroring the row of twisted knits between the cables.  [Once again, I am having an impossible time photographing this yarn so its beautiful, rich green color is even close to accurate—but you can appreciate the seam.]

Another bout of unexpected warmth has made it hard to work on this sweater for the past few days (is summer weather ever going to end?), but I think the modeling shots will be ready on Sunday or Monday.

Lining Up

After enduring the jokes about another one-armed sweater for much of Tuesday, I attached the second sleeve last night and Ed is now convinced that his sweater will indeed have two sleeves.  [Perhaps there is an ulterior motive at work.  I will leave as little time as possible before attaching the second sleeve to avoid the jokes, and his sweater is closer to completion.]

This is the trickiest part of the finishing because the center cable must line up with the shoulder seam, and the smaller cables must be arranged symmetrically on both sides of the sweater.

I had not thought far enough ahead on Monday night to realize that the cables on both sleeves must also be arranged exactly, and so I put in thread markers to be sure that the cables would make horizontal stripes on both the fronts and backs.  (The markers fell out as I got to them, and they’re not shown.)  It was slow going on the second sleeve, but the placement is perfect enough for me. 

I need to steam block these sleeve seams and I can tackle the relatively easy side and underarm seams, which I do by going from the bottom of the body to the wrist in one long seam on each side.  That will leave attaching the pocket ribbing to the front, weaving in the loose ends, and sewing on the buttons, and this will be an FO.

Although there are many ways to do almost anything in knitting, I’m always reassured when I find that a master knitter does something the way I do, particularly if it isn’t a popular technique.  Annie Modesitt made me feel good about being a combined knitter and confirmed what I always suspected about knitting this way—the stitches look incredibly even on the fabric.  I had wanted to take Jean Frost’s jacket lining course at Stitches for many years, and I was thrilled to finally get into her class.  In addition to learning how to line one of her Chanel-style jackets, she recommended using a crocheted seam for assembling the jacket pieces—for the very same reasons I like it.  It makes a firm, flexible seam that gives the garment its shape.  Her book has directions that match mine.  Another advantage is that it allows you to weave in ends easily and invisibly because you have the slip-stitch crochet seam to hide the ends.  Unless it is unavoidable, I always join ends at the edge of my work, and so the inside of my garments have no woven in “blobs”.

In the jacket-lining class I learned how to attach a silk lining to one of Jean Frost’s jackets.  I always wondered how you match the stretchiness of the knitting with the stability of a woven lining.  I’m not convinced I know everything there is to achieve this, but her instructions for the boxy Chanel-style jackets will work for me.  The knitting for many of her jackets uses stitches, such as slip stitch, that make a knitted shell that has some stability and less stretch than, say, plain stockinette.  The pieces form the pattern you use to make the lining, and you use a type of quilting to attach the lining to the knitting.  Jean told us that the description would be in a forthcoming book, and so I will not show the details until they’re available for everyone to see.  But the technique doesn’t require darts.  I intend to try it on her Devonshire jacket, and at the rate I complete my garments, the book might be out by time I’m ready to assemble the pieces.  She wore one of the jackets from the book in class, and it was beautiful.  This photo is from the Knitter’s Magazine website showing that jacket and its lining.

So now it’s on to the final finishing steps for “Ed-1”.

On the Back Burner

Liv has not passed the “do you want to wear it this way for the rest of your life?” test.  I reinforced the shoulder seam to minimize the stretching, and it doesn’t reduce the sleeve length sufficiently to have them end at my wrist.  (I don’t have many colors of this heavy embroidery thread, but this doesn’t show on the front.)

I decided that I don’t like the sleeves falling below my wrist.  And so I’ll do what I imagine many knitters feel is unthinkable—but something I have indeed done before.  I will take out the sleeves, rip the cap, reposition the decreasing for the armhole about 1 ½ inches below its current location, reknit, and attach the sleeves again.  This is a pain in the [insert your favorite body part here], and I’m not looking forward to it.  I also need to measure carefully, and we’re headed for some humid, August-like weather that the TV forecasters are beaming about.  It baffles me that whenever we have an unusual burst of warm weather in September or October, people are actually happy about it.  I yearn to be enveloped by a cold air mass.  I feel betrayed that we’re now officially in the fall, and we’re still getting temperatures in the 80s.  It’s fall, damn it.  Where is the cold weather?  So I’m not trying on Liv again until the weekend, when the weather is better and I’ve gotten calmer about making this adjustment.

In the meantime, I’ve made decent strides on finishing Ed’s sweater.  I redid the pocket ribbing so it doesn’t obliterate the cable pattern on the front.  Formerly, I had 5 rows of ribbing, and the ribbing covered half the Saxon Braid above the pocket.  Now there are 3 rows, and the Saxon Braid looks as if it flows from one motif to the next, as it does in the sections without a pocket.  I also used a “regular” bindoff.  It matches the slip-stitch selvage on the fronts, and it makes a less stretchy finish than more elegant bindoffs.

I also blocked the fronts and back so I could get an accurate location for the top of the drop sleeve, and I started knitting the sleeves.  Since I really don’t have a firm plan about how many 3x3 cables will flank the Saxon Braid going up the sleeve, I will do one sleeve at a time to minimize the amount of potential frogging.  Also, the top of the sleeve is about 20 inches across, and by time I get to the tops of both, the knitting will be come heavy and awkward.  One 20-inch-wide sleeve at a time is enough.

So despite the heat, I’ll press on with Ed’s sleeves.

 

All's Well That Ends Well

Liv is all done—except for weaving in the ends.  And this is the point where my enthusiasm for finishing wanes.  Like Sherlock Holmes between cases, the lack of a challenge induces torpor.  Unlike Sherlock, I don’t resort to narcotics to reactivate my energy.  I either leave the project at this point or somehow muddle through the dreary night of tucking the ends into the seams.  Part of this is my own doing.  Aside from some ends that must fall in inconvenient places, such as the one dangling from the slit at the center front, I always attach my yarn at the seams.  So it is an easy but boring matter to put the long ends on a wool needle and hide them invisibly.  This tedious business will take most of tonight’s knitting time to give Liv true FO status.

Occasionally I have abandoned a project just at this stage.  In one case it turned out to be lucky.  I had a scarf with only about three or four ends that weren’t woven in, and it stayed in the scarf box in my closet for years.  I subsequently needed a gift and finished off the scarf.  I didn’t feel guilty about this borderline regifting because even though I didn’t knit the scarf for the recipient, I never wore it. 

There were a few more interesting bits of finishing on Liv.   The reinforced edge that I showed in my last post was at the join of the bottom slit.  I needed to do something similar on the neck V, and overcasting didn’t look invisible.  I used a duplicate stitch on the inside, but then I made four chain stitch links on the inside of the V.  I think this tightens up the loose, stretched stitches originally at the V (photo in my prior post) and reinforces the neck edge.

Getting the ribs on the sleeves to match the shoulder seam also required concentration.  The first side aligned so perfectly, I couldn’t believe my skill luck.  The second side took six tries.

I’m happy with my choice of crocheted seams for Liv because the seams give the sweater the shape it needs and they will keep it from stretching when it is washed.  In the interests of fair disclosure, I want to point out that not everyone is as enthusiastic about crocheted seams as I am.  I did find a discussion of them in Montse Stanley’s Knitter’s Handbook (p. 255).  She claims they are not as neat as ladder stitch (her name for mattress stitch).  I disagree.  They are not as flat initially as ladder stitch, but if you are neat and take the same loop on the edge stitch consistently, they look fine.  She also says the seam is bulky, and it is certainly thicker than mattress stitch, but conscientious steam blocking (on both front and back of the seam, as the final finishing step) makes it as flat as a three-needle bindoff.  Montse then suggests using a thinner yarn for the crocheted seam, with the caveat that it will produce a weaker seam.  I’ve always used the same yarn as I knit with, and I have sweaters that are more than 30 years old that have seams as strong as the day I constructed them.  So the choice is yours.  If you do try it and don’t like it, ripping is fast and easy.

The modeling shot will have to wait for a haircut.  I don’t want my shagginess to be broadcast through cyberspace.  There seems to be one day that separates my hair from looking good to its collapse into an unmanageable mess.  And despite the countless haircuts I’ve had in my life, this day is always a surprise.  At the end of the week, DH has promised to take me to another scenic spot and take my picture (contingent, of course, on some evidence that his sweater is back on the needles).

Block-Aids

Liv has turned out to take more than two days to finish, but since I like finishing, I’m not disappointed.  The yarn is slightly fuzzy, and so selecting the right threads to crochet hasn’t gone quite as fast as a sweater knit from a yarn with a tighter twist.  So far I’ve managed only the two side seams and one underarm seam.  And the best seams—those around the armhole that are the most difficult, and most satisfactory—are still to come.

Without some of the equipment I have on hand from sewing, I think the finishing would be far more difficult.  As I’ve said before, I was surprised when I read on so many blogs how knitters dislike finishing.  For me it is the light at the end of the tunnel, the final challenge before the reward of the completed sweater.  It occurred to me that perhaps some difficulty arises because the knitter who is not also a sewer might not have some of these items in his or her arsenal.  And so I’ll show some finishing steps that I hadn’t intended to include in a post.  Two pieces of equipment that I almost feel I can't live without are my sleeve board and my tailor's ham.

For a sleeve with a narrow diameter like that on Liv, I have no idea how I’d press the sleeve seam without a sleeve board.  Here is my sleeve board with the sleeve on it.  It is not yet steamed into place because I haven’t done the other one yet and I’ll do both together before I attach them at the armhole.

This is a tailor’s ham:

I will use it later when I’m done with the armhole seam and I have to steam block it into place.  Here it is sticking out of the armhole, as I'd position it when the sleeve is attached and ready for steam blocking.

Liv required some finishing that was not described in the pattern instructions.  The V-neck and the slit at the center front will require reinforcement.  This is what the neck looks like now.  If I don’t do something at the V, it will look terrible and wear poorly.

I reinforced the slit at the center front—and blocked it on my sleeve board.

I reinforced it by taking a loose end and retracing the stitches on the inside, as you would for duplicate stitch.  I also overcast as invisibly as possible at the base of the slit.  Here is the inside.

There is no yarn tail to use at the neck edge, and I’m not exactly sure how I’ll handle the reinforcement.  I will probably do something similar, or add a short row of single crochet across the gap if it doesn’t show. 

But if you find you are having problems making your seams flat and flexible, consider a sleeveboard and a ham.  Stores with dressmaking supplies should have them, and there are online sources.

Seams Like Old Times

I can’t remember how I actually learned most of the knitting techniques I’ve used since I was a teenager.  My grandmother showed me the basic knit and purl stitch when I was about 13, and I’m guessing she also showed me the long-tail cast-on and how to close seams using single crochet.  After that, I didn’t knit much until I was 16.  I did join a “knitting club” in either 5th or 6th grade, but this simply meant going to another classroom on Friday afternoons and knitting.   There was no requirement to pick a project and finish it, and I hazily recall that all I managed to accomplish was a giant swatch.  Most of the time, I just fooled around with a friend—something I was prone to do in those days.  In fact, all through grade school, I had the dubious distinction of being the girl with the worst behavior record in my class.  Girls in the 1950s didn’t do that.  We were supposed to be quiet, docile, and charming.  By today’s standards, my infractions were tame—I talked out of turn, didn’t do the assigned work, and annoyed the people around me so they didn’t get their work done.  I was mostly bored, and when I did get into programs that had more rigorous coursework, this behavior stopped.  But back to knitting.  So there was a gap between 13 and 16, during which I didn’t knit anything.   When I resumed knitting at age 16 after buying wool for a bulky sweater that was considered cutting-edge fashion in the Bronx at that time, I had to reconstruct my knowledge from my grandmother’s lessons.  She and my mother had stopped talking to one another, and there was no one to ask.  So I bought a how-to-knit book and pressed on—and never really stopped knitting from that time on.

For a while, I considered that I misinterpreted the pictures in that how-to book.  I’m now quite sure that my grandmother taught me to knit combined style because she came from eastern Russia.  And so for years I knitted “incorrectly”—and I still do hold the yarn in an odd way, but that is a topic for another post.  Being an untaught combined knitter did make me pay attention to stitch mounts and the direction of increases and decreases, so I think I had a better sense of what you are doing when you knit than my friends who learned Continental and English style knitting and could follow instructions more easily.  But as for closing seams, I’ve never found any book that showed crocheted seams, and my grandmother was even more accomplished at crocheting than knitting.  I’m sure, then, that she must have shown me this too.  I crocheted my seams from the time I was 16 until just about five years ago, when I tried mattress stitch.  Mattress stitch worked for me on heavy sweaters for my son, and I’ve used it on other sweaters, but I really like to crochet my seams closed because it makes such a firm and neat join.

In deciding how to work on Liv’s seams, I first tried to crochet using one loop on the edge stitch.  This sometimes doesn’t produce a seam as neat as I’d like because it makes a ridge or shows a line going up the seam.  And that happened.  I then switched to mattress stitch, and the results didn’t look good.  I wanted an invisible seam, and I was getting a blobby look at the join.  It wasn’t invisible at all.

So I went back to crocheting, this time taking two threads on each side of the garment. 

This photo, which was really hard for me to shoot, has the crochet hook under two loops (a full edge stitch) on one side of the seam.

The finished seam is about as thick as a three-needle bindoff, and you do see the join, but it blocks out nicely on Silky Wool and goes neatly up the sides of the sweater.  I will reblock again when I'm done with all the seams to adjust the joins around the side increases and decreases so they're slightly straighter.

Another reason I like this style of seaming on Liv is that Silky Wool is very stretchy, and this gives the sweater some “bone structure”.  If you crochet loosely enough, the seam doesn’t pucker or pull, and it forms a firm foundation for the sweater lines.

I managed to finish just one seam last night, but the sleeves are blocked, and I should be able to finish Liv completely in two more nights of knitting.

A Joint Venture

Sometimes I think that knitting is like learning a second language.  If you learn a language early enough, you become fluent and it seems easy.  If you learn it late in life, you never speak without an accent.  For the things I learned to do early—designing simple sweaters or working with cables and lace—I’m skillful and confident.  For the things I learned to do late in my knitting life, most notably the Kitchener stitch, I’m plodding and clumsy.  And so, after two evenings and more tries than I can count (accompanied by yet more innovative combinations of x-rated words), I finally managed to join the back of Ed’s collar.

This technique requires a “double Kitchener stitch”.  Not willing to acknowledge my limitations, I plunged into this enterprise with more zeal than common sense.  But I did manage to do it, and I’ll show you how.   In describing this type of ribbing grafting, Montse Stanley says it is good for grafting single ribs worked in opposite directions, as for the button bands or collar on a sweater.  For grafting ribs going in the same direction, there is a more elegant method, shown on p. 243 of her book.

Note that these photos were taken at night with artificial light and a flash, so the color seems uneven and dull compared to the real thing.  But if you’re better at grafting than I am, you should find this easy and useful.  It does indeed make a very nice join for a ribbed shawl collar.

You need 4 DPNs.  A fifth is handy if you blunder and need to pick up dropped stitches or to smooth out a lopsided grafted stitch (ask me how I know).

Step 1: Divide the knits and purls on the ribbed collar so that the knits are on one DPN and the purls are on the other.  Note that when you turn the collar around around, both sides have knit stitches facing you.  So you will be grafting using knit stitches only.

Separate the knits and purls on both sides of the collar.

Step 2: With the inside of the collar (the side that will not show to the public) facing you on both halves of the collar, begin to graft the stitches on the two closest DPNs.

When you are done, your work will look like this.

Step 3: Turn the collar so that the outsides are facing you.  At this point, I took the yarn I used for the inside-collar Kitchener stitch and I wove it in to the grafted row on the inside.  And I did the unthinkable—I made a small knot.  I don’t ever want to take this apart to fix a raveled stitch.

Then graft the outside stitches.

When you’re done, the outside of the collar will look like this:

The collar is now completed, and I’m very pleased with the result.  Tonight it is on to the pockets, and if there’s time, to the finishing around the buttonholes.  I have two more cool knitting nights before the heat and humidity return, and it would be nice to get the front details done so I can block the body and start the sleeves.

Moving FOward

This was a good knitting weekend, but I don’t have much to show for it in actual achievements.

I decided how to complete the edge of my Shetland Triangle.  A knitter friend sent me the directions from the Victorian Lace Shawl in the free patterns section of Elann’s web site.  These similar to Evelyn Clark’s directions for the Swallowtail Shawl in IK Fall 2006.  But those directions have you binding off on the right side, whereas the Shetland Triangle has you binding off on the purl side.  And the Swallowtail instruction has you knitting the wrong side row before binding off.  I thought this might make a ridge. (If you’ve made the Swallowtail Shawl and knitted the row before the bindoff, was that the case?)  I decided to purl one more row than the Shetland Triangle suggests and then use the bindoff from Swallowtail/Victorian Lace Shawl.  This seems fine.

But I ran out of time, and so the blocking and a less blurry photo have to wait for a free morning, since I need light and about an hour to do this.

I consider this a “de facto FO”, but Ed has said it is not an FO until I block it because there is still a chance to rip.  (I smiled to myself thinking that blocking is absolutely no reason I wouldn’t rip.  If I made a bad mistake, I would still undo it.  But I can’t find anything wrong with the Shetland Triangle, and so I think that just weaving in the ends and blocking is all that is left for it.)

I also knitted to the armholes of Ed’s sweater and charted the collar, so I can knit finish the left front this week.

And I thought long and hard about my next project. I will be taking Jean Frost’s class on lining jackets at Stitches East, and so I’d like to have my own jacket done—the Devonshire jacket from her Jackets book.  But our weather is supposed to be hot for the next week, and so I thought I’d try for something more appropriate than wool at least for a while.  I think I need only about two months for Devonshire.  So I thought I’d follow in the footsteps of so many knitters who are using Silky Wool right about now.  I swatched for Elsebeth Lavold’s Liv sweater.  This is mostly reverse stockinette, and the knitting will be easy.  But the instructions and gauge are tricky.  First, there is no schematic.  Second, the sizes are less than ideal.  Small gives you a 38 ½-inch bust circumference and Medium gives you a 43 ½-inch measurement.  The tops I own that fit in a way that is similar to the picture vary between 39 and 40 inches.  Third, I’m not knitting to the gauge of 22 stitches for 4 inches using US 6 needles that the pattern requires.  On size 4s, I’m getting 19 stitches for 4 inches.  So I think I’ll swatch again on size 3s.  Also, this is very stretchy, and so I might opt for the smaller size. 

Despite the lightness of the yarn, the color and style are making me think fondly of cooler fall days.  Once we do drop out of humid 80° weather, there is a chance I can wear this, and it will be a nice sweater to have.

So tonight it is on to the second swatch and Ed’s collar.

In a Bind

I’m done with the knitting on the Shetland Triangle, but it is suspended in an inactive state until I figure out how to handle the bind-off row.  I was knitting along happily on this project last week, as my eye slowly recovered, until I completed the 14-row bottom border design.  Then I read the last couple of instructions, which have you (1) ending on a right-side row, requiring you to bind off on the purl side, and (2) merely binding off loosely.  Neither of these seemed right.

The decision to correct this was not entirely voluntary.  When I looked at my work, I noticed that my decreases did not line up in one of the bottom motifs.  I’m a kind of “slash and burn” knitter.  When I find a mistake, I rip and start over.  I’m actually in awe of those of you who can just drop down to the error, fix it, and pull the stitches back onto the needle.  I thought I’d give that a shot.  When I ripped down to the decrease row, I discovered that was where I joined a new ball of yarn, and everything fell apart.   I had to slash and burn—ripping down 6 rows and reknitting.  And so when I knitted back to row 14, I decided not to do the row that would have me end on the purl side.  So here I am:
 

I also thought that a regular bind off, no matter how loose, would not be the best choice for this edge.  And so I started looking for alternatives.  In Myrna Stahman’s book, there are instructions for what she calls the Icelandic bind off.  Anne's July 12 post showed some other good alternatives, and other members of the Lace Shawl KAL also had good advice.

I thought I had done the Icelandic bind off before, but when I checked the shawl I knit from Myrna Stahman’s book (last book on this link), I realized that there was an elegant border that saved me from dealing with this problem before.

So last night I gave the new methods a try, only to become confused.  I’ve been working extra hours to make up for my lost time at the eye doctor (with another visit today), and I was not up to the challenge after a full day's work.  I guess I’ll try to figure out how to use one of these methods by the end of the week and then block the shawl next weekend.

For now, I’ve returned to execute a problem I already solved—Ed’s sweater front.

I finished the last couple of rows on the right front and started the left.  So the left front is this week’s knitting: