Prime Time Knitter

Roses in Bloom

At last, Laela is a true FO.  I decided to steam block it so I could wear it right away and not wait the day or two it would take to dry, and even so, the yarn bloomed and the lumpiness of the stranded yoke and borders smoothed out beautifully.  Here’s the finished yoke:

 

And here’s the finished sweater:

 

And a couple of modeling shots:

 

This was a tremendously satisfying project in every way—the pattern was clear and required few changes.  The only things I did differently were the tubular bindoff for the neck edge (not specified in the pattern), the omission of a row of color A (natural) at the neck edge (to have a smooth range of color above the patterned part of the yoke), and the readjustment of the sleeve increases so that the sleeve would be narrower at the wrist and forearm.  I also repositioned the beginning of the yoke rounds so that they would fall in the back (behind my right shoulder blade).  I knitted the smaller of the two sizes, and I’m really pleased with the fit.  It is a very comfortable and very warm sweater.  It is only about 40 degrees (4 degrees C) out today, and I wore it without a jacket.  

So here are the specs:  The pattern is from The Best of Lopi.  I used Valley Yarn’s Stockbridge (the WEBS’ house brand), which is 50% wool and 50% superfine alpaca in chocolate (9 skeins), natural (2 skeins), and camel (1 skein).  This is a lovely yarn to work with, and it substitutes perfectly for Lopi-Lite.  I heartily recommend it.  I purchased Lopi-Lite once, and I found it very scratchy.  Stockbridge is as soft as a kitten. 

This sweater is knitted in the round from the bottom up, and it is the first sweater like this that I have knitted.  The one difference I’m finding with sweaters knitted in the round is that I have less control over the final fit.  When I knit flat, I find it easier to measure the pieces.  Plus, in recent years, I’ve started to block the back when it is finished and use it as a mega-swatch to check the sizing of the fronts and sleeves before I knit them and can make minor size adjustments.  Since I intend to keep knitting in the round for much of this year, I’ll be using this sweater as a model for the sizing of the others.

Sirdal, which I’ve resumed knitting in earnest, matches the body circumference almost exactly.  And I’ve taken out my Philosopher’s Wool kit to prepare the yarn for my third stranded sweater of 2010.  The original oversize pattern will require some pattern changes, and I’ll be working those out based on Laela’s measurements and those of other finished sweaters.  But for now, I’ll bask in the glow of having a sweater that I rate a 10 as my first effort in stranding.

One in a Million

Most people think that the wrath of Mother Nature caused the storm that clobbered the Northeast, but I know that the knitting gods had at least a small part to do with it.  After proclaiming that Laela would be an FO, I sat down on Thursday evening, just as we started to get some serious snow and wind, to finish the few inches of ribbing around the neck.  We had already lost our TV signal because of the wet snow that accumulated on our satellite dish, but our Tivo’ed shows kept us entertained for a couple of hours.  Our Internet connection also disappeared, so there would be no blog reading or visits to Ravelry.  Ok, I’d do that on Friday.  I intended to fire up an an audiobook and knit Laela’s neck.  I even pondered whether I should graft the underarms at night or wait for daylight.  And as I was weighing the pros and cons of grafting dark brown yarn, our power went out completely—at about 8 PM.

What is even more ironic is that we bought a snowblower in the fall, and the snows we had so far weren’t really enough to warrant pulling it out of the garage and plugging it in (yes, we decided that an electric snowblower would be sufficient for our small driveway).  On Thursday afternoon, Ed and I made short work of the few inches that had accumulated, and I was very sure that digging out would be easy.  Note to self: Electric snowblowers don’t work during power outages. 

The plunge into darkness on Thursday night was an unpleasant surprise for our birds. Addi was out of the cage at the time and began to fly around skittishly.  But Will and I rescued her using flashlights, and put the cover on the cage so the birds could go to sleep.  And after about an hour of trying to read by flashlight, I decided to go to sleep also.  A minor inconvenience, I thought, but we have natural gas for heating and cooking so we could just wait.  At some point in the middle of the night, I woke up freezing and saw that the thermostat read 57°.  Well, although our heating uses natural gas, the thermostats that control the room temperature are electric.  The cold is bad for the birds, who really should have temperatures closer to 70°.  The only thing I could think of to keep them warm was to put soup kettles of water on the stove (I can use matches to light the burners) and keep them boiling.  That is what we did for all of Friday, and during the day we got the heat up to 64°. 

So Friday was spent listening to the portable radio report of the 999,999 other families without power from Pennsylvania to Maine, shoveling what for us was a mere 18 inches of snow, and adjusting to life without heat, TV, or lights.  Here’s what I woke up to:

It continued to snow all day Friday and into Saturday.

For the evening’s entertainment, Will trashed me in Scrabble (now that he is ranked 44^th in North America this wasn’t much of a surprise) and even trouncing me in Sorry!  It clearly wasn’t my lucky day (and it was my birthday too). 

In order to keep the birds from getting even colder (and poor Larry Bird’s feet were freezing when the indoor temperature dropped into the 50s), we kept the pots of boiling water going all night, with each of us taking turns watching the stove (actually reading by flashlight or listening to iPods).  The temperature still dropped to 61°. My turn came at 3 AM on Saturday, and I made it through the backlog of Knit Picks podcasts—until about 5 AM when the power returned and the heat came on again.  We are clearly a lot better off than many in our area—some of whom aren’t expected to have power restored until Tuesday.  The birds were clearly freaked out by the ordeal, particularly because they were locked in the cage all day (as is always the case when we’re cooking) and covered up for about 11 hours, from sunset Friday to sunrise on Saturday.  But life has returned to normal.

The pause in my frenzy to finish Laela gave me the chance to reconsider the bind off, and instead of the standard method, I decided to work the tubular bindoff on 1x1 rib.  This is demonstrated clearly in Lucy Neatby’s Finesse Your Knitting, DVD 1, but she shows it for flat knitting.  The set up rows for flat knitting have you slip the knits on the first row, turn and slip the knits on the second row.  I had a hunch that I’d slip the knits for one round and slip the purls on the next, but to check, I turned to Wendy’s Toe Up Sock book.  She confirmed that hunch, and handled the tubular bindoff a bit differently—using four setup rows and dividing the stitches onto two needles.  I decided to use a hybrid method: two setup rows and dividing the rows on two needles.

This still took me forever (well, an hour and a half) to do, with much cursing.  I am truly a dunce when it comes to grafting, which is essentially what the tubular bindoff is.  But I persevered and got the neck I hoped for:

This is nice and stretchy, yet it holds its shape.  I finally got to try Laela on, and I am positively delighted with it.  The fit is perfect, and I can use it for measuring similarly shaped sweaters (raglan, saddle shoulder, and EZ’s hybrid shoulder).  But I’m not quite ready for a modeling shot.  All these ends need weaving in

 

and I’ve got to block it.  But snow is predicted again for Wednesday, and the weather isn’t warming up that fast.  This might turn out to be the most practical sweater I’ve knitted for a long time.

Three's Not a Charm

This weekend I joined the ranks of stranded knitters who hate knitting with more than two colors in a round. In principle, it doesn’t seem that difficult.  Just put the extra color in one hand and knit each color as it comes up in the design.  Since I’m a “picker,” it seemed natural to put the third color in my left hand. 

The hitch is that I don’t hold the yarn “correctly”.  Rather than loop it over my forefinger, as appears to be the standard method of Continental knitting, I thread the yarn through my thumb and forefinger.  It is likely that I developed this style when I took up knitting as a 16-year-old, without the benefit of anyone to guide me. And since I’ve been knitting successfully this way for close to 50 years, it is one habit I don’t think I can break.  Plus I do get excellent tension when knitting with one color and my fingers never get tired.  It does leave me incapable of holding two colors in my left hand at the same time.  I managed the three-color rows by picking up one color and then dropping it as it became necessary to work with the third color.   Those three diamond rounds took nearly three evenings (counting time to rip the third row because I didn’t read the chart carefully enough).  It didn’t help that the round had 192 stitches. 

 

But after finishing them, the rest of the yoke seemed like child’s play:

All that is left is to finish the neckband, graft the underarms, weave in more ends than I care to think about just now, and block.  And voilà! An FO.

Since this is the view from my front window, I think there will be enough cold weather left this winter to wear it. 

The forecasted nor’easter has just started, and it is expected to snow until late Friday. 

The Shape of Things to Come

I spent this week knitting the rose pattern at the lower part of Laela’s yoke.

Although I’m eager to get this sweater done, I have that same sense of loss that you get when you finish a wonderful book and haven’t yet started one as engrossing.  The next few motifs are basically zig-zags, and the only real challenge will be four rows where there are three colors to strand.  The roses were fun to knit.  The motif was just tricky enough to require some attention to the chart, but not terribly difficult.  In fact, I made no mistakes (at least none that I can detect now).  

The yoke in this design is not shaped like those in EZ’s instructions for yoked sweaters or in Knitting in the Old Way, where the decreases are indicated as percentages of the yoke depth.  Laela’s instructions have you knit the entire rose motif without any decreasing (a depth of about 4 inches), saving the shaping for the rows that follow—and placing the decreases between the zig-zags, where they will be the least noticeable.  I’m guessing that it probably doesn’t matter that much where you place the decreases so long as you don’t bunch them too closely, and Laela’s designer decided rightly that it was better not to break up the rose design. 

There are only 25 rows left to go, plus a couple of inches of neck ribbing, and I’ll have my FO.  There is an evening’s worth of ends to weave in and the underarms to graft, but that is trifling--or so it seems now.  The rose part of the yoke requires 288 stitches, and I think I’ll feel as if I’m speeding along as stitches disappear from the remaining 4+ inches of yoke.

Then I’ll be turning back to Sirdal.  The lice stitch pattern goes on until I reach the more complex motifs that begin again near the armholes.  This part of Sirdal is really quite easy, and I am getting the hang of both color knitting and weaving in a long float.  The knitting seems lumpy, but the color-knitting experts on Ravelry keep assuring the novices that the fabric blocks out, as it did on my swatch.  You can see that I've been successful in having matching motifs at the center front, where the button band will be.

Then it is on to consider what to do next as a companion project for Sirdal.  I think it will be an EZ raglan out of stash yarn.  I can’t bring myself to knit an entire sweater in stockinette, and I’ve been looking for a simple wide ribbing to use.  And since my interest is on the sweater construction as much as having something wearable, I also want to see just how the body meets the shoulder.  Matching the ribs will help me focus on the raglan join.  And I think I might add a bit of shape to the body by flaring out the ribs below the waistline.  So some swatching is also in store for me.

Shoulder to Shoulder

Last week, both Laela and Sirdal were at points where the knitting was repetitive and mechanical.  On Sirdal, I have a large area of lice stitches to knit before the truly interesting motif across the chest.  Laela needed its sleeves.  And so although I’ve knit a few inches of lice stitches, I shifted my focus on the sweater I voted “most likely to become a FO in the foreseeable future.”  At the end of my week of knitting I had this:

 

Laela’s sleeves reminded of all the things I hate about knitting in straight stockinette.  Aside from boredom, counting the rows is a headache for me.  Although I made careful notes, when I counted the rows on the finished sleeves, the first had three more than the second, and neither matched my count.  I think they’re both the same length now.  I counted the rows over and over, and when I got two numbers that matched, I stopped.  I use this same math technique when adding my work expenses for my tax returns.

Last night I made the sleeve adjustment, and started to attach the sleeves to the body.  Now that I’m immersed in this project, I’m pretty sure I have never made a yoked sweater before, and things have gotten a lot more interesting as I venture into untested waters.  Based on the interest factor alone, I think Laela will win out in my knitting-hour allocation for the next several nights.  (The phrasing of the last sentence is an indicator that I've spent entirely too much time reading economics books.)

I had to make some adjustments to Laela’s instructions.  I wanted the beginning of the round to fall in the back, and the pattern would have it appear in the front.  There’s only a slight jog in the color motif where rounds begin and end, but I’d rather have it in the back (where at least I can’t see it) than in the front.  My adjustment places it at my back right shoulder blade.  And despite counting over and over (my two times and it’s a match system does fail from time to time), I only had 75 stitches on one sleeve instead of 76.  I found this out after putting 14 underarm stitches on a holder, and then discovering I was one stitch short on the sleeve.  So one underarm will have just 13 stitches and I’ll fudge a bit when I graft the underarms.  This mistake does bother me, but I don’t expect many people to stare at my armpits.  If they do, it should be at their own risk.

I also adjusted the sleeve decreases as I knit—another bit of uncharacteristic behavior, since I rarely modify patterns on the fly.  If I knew what I was doing (as on a sweater knitted flat), I would have checked the decreases before I knit and sketched them out.  But I’m not familiar enough with yokes to figure out where the shoulder really is.  As I began the first sleeve, however, I could see that there were a lot of stitches bunched up along the forearm and about 4 inches of straight knitting at the top of the sleeve.  I made the increase more gradual, and spaced the increases at larger intervals.

And so, here is where I ended last night. 

The rose motif is repeated at the bottom of the yoke without any decreasing. It was fun to knit before and will be fun to knit again.  Then it will be on to the decreases for the yoke shaping.  And if I knit all of this fast enough, I might still manage to wear the sweater before it warms up. 

In a Fix

I wore my purple sweater just three times before I noticed this on the sleeve:

 

I don’t think moths are to blame for this hole.  It is more likely that I caught the sleeve on something and snagged the yarn.  I shouldn’t have worn the sweater to the gym, but it was so cold a few weeks ago and this sweater, knit from 17 balls of Aurora 8, is so warm, that I couldn’t resist the allure of the sweater’s cozy feeling.  I think it might have torn on the locker hinge. 

And, much saddened and tremendously annoyed at myself for being so careless, I thought for a couple of weeks about how best to fix it.  The hole was just about 12 rows from the bottom of the cuff.  The darning method would never make the knitting as good as if it were reknit completely.  So I decided to take off the cuff just over the hole, knit a new cuff from the ample amounts of left-over yarn I have, and graft the new cuff to the sleeve.

In principle this seems so straightforward that a child could do it.  Well, perhaps a child can, but I struggled with it all weekend.  I am not gifted when it comes to grafting.  It took me hours to close the toe of the first sock I ever knit, and it has taken many socks since then to become confident that I can graft stockinette.  I found this excellent description of grafting 2x2 ribbing, but I found the schematic in Mary Thomas’s Knitting Book to be easier to follow.  This is one of my oldest books on techniques, and it is still one of the best.  (If it isn’t in your knitting library, I encourage you to add it.)

 

So I proceeded to take off the old cuff and knit a replacement.

 

Purple is only a smidgen easier to work with than black, and I thought that I’d use contrast yarn first and then go over it, as if it were basting, with the actual purple yarn—to preserve what is left of my eyesight.  Here is where I am now:

 

When I examined it this morning, I found some mistakes that need to be fixed.  I understand what to do, and I’m vacillating between trying again and just going for it with the actual yarn.  My problems arise with the stitches that connect the knit parts of the ribbing with the columns of purl.  I do think I get it now, but my track record with grafting is a sorry one.  So this will sit for another week, awaiting a sunny weekend morning, as I decide whether I need more practice or whether I can follow most of the basted stitches and correct those that aren’t right.

On a happier note, I have been progressing nicely on Laela. 

 

The stockinette part is easy enough to barrel through while actually watching (and not merely listening to) TV.  I should probably complete the body while watching my recorded episode of “24” tomorrow night. Then it will be on to each sleeve.   I can’t wait to get to the yoke.

I also fiddled with the chart, yet again, on Sirdal to improve the location of the motifs.  But more on that in my next post, when I have a complete motif to photograph.

Everything's Coming Up Roses

It may seem as if I’ve taken a break from Sirdal, but I spent many hours over the weekend working with the chart.  I found the chart in the pattern instructions to be very confusing, and because you have to restart it at each side (where a side seam would be on a sweater that was knitted flat), I could just see the potential for mistakes and frustration down the road if I reached the center back and did not have the center stitch there.

Now I know what the side seams will look like and what part of the chart I must start at to get the center stitch in the center back.  The placement of the big motif was anything but intuitive, and my hours with Knit Visualizer should make it easier to focus on the knitting and not gnashing my teeth over chart reading.

In the meantime, I pressed on with Laela, and I’m done with the rose border along the bottom.

There are only five more rows of the stranded pattern before this sweater is in automatic pilot mode—that is, the rest of the body before the yoke that is just plain stockinette.  I had a marker malfunction on the easy one-color brown row separating the roses from the triangles.  Just as I was ending the round, my marker popped off and I just stuck it back on.  Big mistake.  Now that I’ve knit two of the camel triangle rows, I can see that the top triangles will not match the camel triangles on the bottom because I’m one stitch off.  So I’ll take out those two rows tonight, move the marker to its rightful place, and finish the border.

I’m very much enjoying the Valley Yarns Stockbridge, and this project as a whole.  There are some frustrations for me when knitting in the round that aren’t there for sweaters knitted flat, mostly to do with measuring.  I like to check right away to see that the size is good, and I’ve only been able to manage this by taking the sweater off the needles, threading waste yarn through the many stitches, and trying it on.  Laela does fit—and it was worth the trouble of doing that to know for sure—but it was more tedious than just spreading out my knitting and measuring a flat piece.

Now, however, it is time to return to Sirdal, which has had its hem reknit to the XS size and is ready for joining.

I thought all those skilled stranded knitters were nuts when they talked about how addictive stranded knitting was, but I’m falling under the spell.  When it has been time to put my knitting away, I’ve succumbed to the siren call of “one more row” just to see how the motif looks.