Prime Time Knitter

Finishing Touches

At long last, Liv is done. Although I’m not completely happy with the modeling shot, I am pleased with the sweater—and the redone sleeve length.

The design is lovely, but I wasn’t prepared for the many alterations I had to make and for the idiosyncrasies of Silky Wool. The yarn is very stretchy, particularly in the vertical direction, and it was very hard to adjust the pattern. In order to get gauge, I had to change the recommended size 6 and 4 (US) needles to 4s and 2s (and size 3 on the reknit sleeves).

The pattern is in Elsebeth Lavold’s Designer’s Choice Book 1, and the yarn was cinnamon (a discontinued color).

Having finished Liv, I can now turn to the Devonshire jacket. I basted the fronts, back, and collar so I could see where the armhole falls and how it is coming along. And I worked with Liv’s sleeve measurements to modify the sleeve pattern. I now have rewritten directions that will get me the sleeve I want, and that will be this week’s knitting.

After trying on the Devonshire jacket, I decided not to line it. The slip-stitch pattern is very tight, and the jacket holds its shape very well. It has to stretch a bit over my hips, and if I line it, it might not. Perhaps if I knit another pattern from Jean Frost’s Jackets book, I’ll make it shorter and do a lining.

I wasn’t quite sure how the collar would look until I basted it in place. It is a bit lopsided (and not yet blocked), but it will be fine. I like the idea of the fittings at this point in a sweater project, particularly because you can use the “real” gauge of big pieces to adjust for sleeves.

Moment of Truth

Liv’s sleeve will spend the day (and probably the night) blocking. 

Tomorrow I’ll baste it into place and check the sleeve length.  But things are looking good.  Since I have the original sleeve to use as a pattern, I tested the reknit sleeve against it.  The marker shows my desired sleeve length, and the new sleeve length seems fine. 

I unraveled eight additional rows on the partial sleeve I knit from the armhole to the wrist, and then blocked. That measure is accurate—I’m comparing blocked sleeve lengths on both old and new sleeves.  Today’s blocking is only for the cap, and that matches the original sleeve.  So here’s hoping.

I’m actually uncharacteristically optimistic that things will work out.  All signs point to an FO.  We were supposed to have a gray and rainy day, but the sky just turned blue and the sun came out.  I saw my first robin, which I hope is not just a harbinger of spring but a good omen for knitting too.

What Gives?

It was probably naïve of me to think that a simple adjustment would cure Liv’s sleeve ills, but I wasn’t prepared for this.  After removing the original sleeve, I measured carefully to determine how much to shorten (1 ½ inch).  And so, I figured out how many rows I’d need to cut and knit the new sleeve accordingly.

When I blocked the new sleeve (right), it was only about ½ inch shorter than the original (left). 

How can this be?  Clearly I’m violating the laws of physics and questioning my sanity.  Although it just doesn’t seem right, I will remove rows on this blocked sleeve to get my desired 15 ½ inches, knit the cap, and baste it into the body.  If it seems ok, then I’ll work on the other sleeve. 

I did something one is not supposed to do when I reknit the sleeve—I changed my needles.  I didn’t remember if I used Addi Turbos or Inox Mattes to knit the first pair of sleeves.  And just to be on the “safe side”, I switched to my new Knit Picks Harmony wooden needles, thinking that I’d get a slightly tighter gauge.  Here too my expectations are out of whack with reality.  I loved those needles (and immediately rushed to my computer to buy the DPN set and the circular needle set from sizes 4 to 11), but they don’t seem to tighten my gauge at all.  If anything, I might be knitting more loosely, but I think the real problem is that Silky Wool stretches like crazy.

Last week was a disappointment in making progress.  I fell back on my sock, only to realize when I started the gusset that I’d divided the pattern so it wouldn’t be symmetrical.  Yes, I ripped back. 

Although Charlene Schurch gives great instructions, I modified the pattern slightly, starting with row 6 instead of row 1 so I could get a twist row right after the ribbing.  I also probably had the pattern divided differently on my needles than the instructions specified, and so when it simply gives advice on moving a stitch from “needle 1 to needle 4”, my changes didn’t match those Charlene had in mind.  But I do understand how to divide for the heel now when I’m working a pattern stitch.  That knowledge is a useful thing.

And my experiences with Liv have caused me to rethink the red Calvin Klein sweater.  It too stretches because it is knit from Cotton Fleece.  I will block the fronts and backs before I plan the sleeve measurements.  Will this help?  Maybe a little.  Because I don’t have much to show on this sweater beyond what I’ve photographed before, I’ll show you the buttons I purchased to go with it. [The yarn color is not as “tomato red” in the picture as it is in reality.  It matches the buttons exactly.]  I think the sweater has a 1920’s feel, and I picked buttons with a Deco pattern--making me long, as I look at them, to start on Susan Duckworth’s Deco sweater.

So tonight I’ll rip back a few rows on one new sleeve for Liv and start the cap.  I hope I end up with the right measurement.  After Liv and the Cotton Fleece sweater, it is back to wool for me.  At least with wool, you know what you’ve got—well, usually.

Stockinette-Challenged

Work on Liv has finally begun to go smoothly, although I’m concerned that putting that thought into words might cause some awful thing to happen and derail my apparent progress.

I’m just over the elbows on both. 

When I knit these initially, I made another error.  This one wouldn’t have caused me to rip and reknit, but it bothered me nonetheless.  Another ravage of old age is that straight needles hurt my left pinky.  Since I knit differently from anyone I’ve ever seen (combined, with the yarn fed into the knitting through my left thumb and forefinger), I suspect this ailment arises from the way I balance the needle in my left hand.  But when I use circular needles to knit flat, I don’t seem to have this problem—and it doesn’t arise with small DPNs either.  So I rarely use my straight needles any more.

This switch didn’t cause any problems until I started knitting the reverse stockinette part of Liv’s sleeves, two at once.  I sometimes got confused and couldn’t remember which sleeve I knit—and one would get two rows while the other sat unattended.  After a time, I couldn’t say for sure if the sleeves were the same length, although they were close.  This doesn’t happen to me when I knit two sleeves at the same time on straight needles—I'm more likely to notice the sleeve that is still on the working needle.  It also doesn’t happen to me when I am knitting a pattern because I can count the pattern rows easily and know exactly where I am.  But knowing that Liv’s sleeves were uneven gnawed at the recesses of my brain.

When I decided to do them over, I tried to devise a plan that would force me to get it right.  I am using those markers to indicate which sleeve is which.  And despite the tedium, I move them from one side to the other as I complete a row, so I can pay attention to where I am.  If the marker is on the right on the public side, the sleeve hasn’t been knit.  If it is on the left, it has.  So far—perfection.

As I was knitting away on Liv, it occurred to me that I’d have nothing to do while waiting for the mammogram technician later today (for my yearly checkup).  The facility I use makes you wait while they develop the films.  The first time they called me back because the film wasn’t clear, some years ago, caused some unnecessary anxiety (I freaked out completely).  Now they check the film while you wait, and it can take a while.  Liv is not in any condition to travel, and so I started a “simple” pair of socks.  After the first pair from Charlene Schurch’s book, I thought I’d do a variation to use up my STR medium.  So I started one last night.  For me, simple is not stockinette because I find it somewhat boring and I lose count.  So I started a sock with another of the 4-stitch patterns.

I hope I don’t get hooked on this at the expense of Liv, but there will be some down time when I get to the armhole.  I want to block it at that point to see exactly how long the sleeve is.  And so there may be some sock knitting this week too.

Senior Moments

When you are young and you do something stupid, you can blame inexperience, inattention, or carelessness arising from exuberance.  But when you’re old, you are haunted by the specter of a “senior moment”. 

I turned 61 a couple of weeks ago.  This may be a fine number for home-run hitters, but it is kind of a “no-woman’s land” in the chronology of life on earth for me.  It is probably why I didn’t mention it in my blog entries before.  Ages like 29 and 41 always struck me as inaccurate.  At 29, I was more like a 30-year-old—over the nervousness of my first few jobs, settled in my work, comfortable with friends and colleagues. I was not a 20-something in mentality.  At 41, I was the mother of a young child, and so the age seemed too old for the energy and effort I needed to expend every day.  But 61 is even odder.  I’m too young to be granted the rights of senior-citizen-dom.  The half-price perks start at 62 or 65, so I have to pay my way along with the rest of you.  Yet I hear Maurice Chevalier singing in my brain, “forevermore is shorter than before*”, knowing that an end is in sight—and it has never felt that way until now.

And so every time I have any sort of lapse, I wonder if it is old age or run-of-the-mill stupidity.  (This introduction is to set you up for an almost photo-less post because I had to rip and start over yet again.)  I began Liv’s sleeves with the unrealistic hope that I could redo them in a week or so.  The first obstacle was catching a bad cold that kept me from knitting entirely from Saturday to Monday—all I wanted to do was muster enough energy to keep my work projects from falling so far behind that catching up would be impossible and sleep.  Yet I did cast on and get an inch up on the cable—at which point I couldn't fail to notice that my sleeve width at the wrist was much wider than my first set of sleeves.

I usually make a copy of a pattern and annotate it as I go along.

When I stared intently at the chart last night, I noticed a somewhat cryptic indication that I would increase every 8 rows instead of every 6, and on the chart, I had circled rows 8, 16, 24, and 32 on the left. I also penciled in “shaping”. Then I circled rows 9, 17, 25, and 33 on the right and marked them with a +. Now why had I done that?  Clearly because it is easier to increase on the right side than the wrong side.  After counting the stitches on the sides of the cable on the knitted sleeve, I saw that I originally cast on 4 on each side, and not the 9 in the pattern.  And so, to make up those stitches, I began shaping the sleeve sooner than the pattern specified.  And I remembered that I felt the sleeves would be to floppy around my thin wrists if I didn’t adjust downward.  So why didn’t I write this down?  Perhaps I thought I’d never need this information again.  This is the fact that I don’t remember.  And this is the fact that caused me to rip and reknit with fewer stitches.  So here I am, exactly in the same spot as my previous post:

I think I’m on track now, but when I do the math, I get the same number of increases as I did for a sleeve that was 1 ½ inches longer.  How can that be?  I have no idea, and so I may have to respace the increases as I knit on.  I’ll worry about that after I’m done with the cable.

*This phrase is from the song “I’m Glad I’m Not Young Any More”, from the film “Gigi”.  This is a wonderful movie, and I highly recommend it, even if characters bursting into song in the middle of a conversation strikes you as unrealistic—as does a plot that revolves around a virginal young woman’s decision to become a rich man’s mistress, in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century.  It’s worth watching it for the costumes alone, which won an Academy Award of its own.

Don't Try This at Home

My “simple” alteration of Liv’s sleeves has morphed into a major redo, but I’ve learned a lot from the exercise.

First, I learned that my crocheted seams and subsequent finishing by weaving the ends into the crocheted chain make a very firm and secure join.  And that was part of my problem.  In trying to pick out the tail from the cast on that I had neatly woven into the bottom of the sleeve, I broke it off.  Eventually the sleeve will unravel, and there isn’t much I can do about that when it happens.

Second, I learned that yarns with limited memory will stretch a lot when blocked, and if you want a precise measurement you have to be more careful than I was when I planned these sleeves.  In the memory department, Silky Wool acts more like silk than wool.

Third, I learned that letting a small mistake go uncorrected is a bad thing—at least for me.  I knit Liv’s sleeves initially at the same time on circular needles, worked flat.  There were a couple of instances where I thought I may have knit one sleeve twice and the other not at all, but I was frustrated when I counted the rows and figured an extra row or two wouldn’t matter.  It does matter.

So I decided to reknit Liv’s sleeves entirely, but this time with the proper caution.  Last night, I got as far as the bottom rows of garter stitch (on both sleeves), so it will take a week or two to reknit and reassemble. 

I tried the sweater on when it was still assembled, and decided that I had shorten by 1 ½ inches.  The original had 98 rows over the cable, and I’m using this number to adjust. There’s a marker on every 10th row over the cable.

This time, I’m going to take the sleeves off the needles at the point where you bind off for the armhole and block them to be sure the length is correct, and then I’ll knit the cap.  If the length isn’t exact, I can add or subtract the rows before the cap bindoff.

For most sweaters with long sleeves, I’ve used ribbed cuffs, and they do not demand the precision that loose cuffs do.  If there’s a little extra fabric, it just billows out over the cuff, and the 1 ½ inch excess would not have been a problem.  My entrelac sweater (a 2007 FO) worked out, but I guess that was just beginner’s luck, since it was my first attempt at entrelac. The true moral is that for a yarn or knit stitch that stretches vertically, you need to be sure to use your blocked vertical gauge for measuring.  A gauge swatch isn’t enough.  Blocking a big piece like the fronts or back gives you more accurate values.  It might be a pain for me to figure all this out for the Devonshire jacket, but it will be less of a pain than a fix like this.

Luckily I have the extra yarn, since I knew this color of Silky Wool was being discontinued, and I think I can reknit and keep my original sleeves to use as a “pattern” for this change.  And, when I’m done, I will have the sweater I want.

 

A Period of Adjustment

I’m about to embark on what seems to be an ambitious attempt to finish three sweaters. 

• The Devonshire jacket is a bona fide WIP because I really haven’t stopped working on it. 
• The red Calvin Klein sweater is a bona fide UFO because it has sat unfinished in a shopping bag for several years after I realized the sleeves were too wide. 
• Liv had a brush with “FO-dom”.  I knit all the pieces and assembled them, only to decide that the sleeves were too long. 

So the next several weeks (months?) will be devoted to getting these done, and this weekend I set myself up for the task.  But, as with any knitting task, things turned out to be much harder than I imagined.

On Devonshire, I discovered after studying the pattern that Jean Frost did not plan a traditional fitted sleeve.  Her sleeve would slope straight up from the armhole decreases, more like a raglan sleeve. I would like one that looks more like the version on the right.

[I don't have a real drawing program, and I created these in Word--exaggerating the caps and ignoring the sleeve shaping from wrist to armhole.  Please use your imagination as you examine them.]

This sent me back to the drawing boards.  I consulted some very good sources on designing fitted sleeves:

• The Vogue Knitting Ultimate Knitting Book
• Deborah Newton’s Designing Knitwear
• This Knitty.com article

The problem I’m having with Devonshire is that my gauge is not at all like the gauge in the instructions.  I’ve been knitting to the small size schematic in the width and making the sweater longer.  I've lengthened the jacket so that the bottom does not cut across my stomach in an unflattering way (calling attention to a body part that needs no emphasis), but falls somewhat lower, near my hips. So to plan the sleeves, I adjusted my gauge for the wrist circumference and divided my stitches neatly to achieve the slope from the wrist to the armhole.

The cap was more of a challenge, and I sketched this out on knitters’ graph paper (taken from the back pages of Vogue’s Ultimate Knitting Book--a very handy feature).

I wasn’t sure that I made these calculations correctly, and I wanted to check them on Liv’s sleeves.  So I spent Sunday night removing carefully Liv’s sleeves from the body:

These sleeves have the shape I want and the cap is about the size that the Devonshire cap should be, and I can use them to verify my numbers.  I’ll show the calculations when I think they’re correct.  I also need to determine how much to rip down on Liv to space the increases so the sleeves are about 2 inches shorter than they are now. 

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.

 

At Arm's Length

Liv is finished, but I don’t have time today to take it to the small local park where I want to photograph the complete sweater. 

When I tried it on, I was not completely happy with the sleeve length.  To me it seems a little long.

The reason is that the shoulder is dropping a little. 

I thought the shoulder seam would end at the edge of my shoulder, and I used that measurement to calculate the sleeve length.  I may try to reinforce the shoulder seam with some heavy cotton embroidery thread to keep it from stretching, but more likely I’ll just leave everything as is and reblock it after I wear it the first time.  The underarm seam is the right length if the shoulder ends where it is supposed to.

I spent a while last night going through recent Fall and Winter issues of Knitter’s magazine, IK, and VK, and I saw that many sleeves do end exactly where mine do.  So perhaps I’m just being too fussy.  Or perhaps I’m out of touch with current styles.

I also considered that I much prefer ribbed cuffs that do hug the wrist.  But because I can be as fickle as any other knitter, the next two sweaters I plan do not have ribbed cuffs.  Having figured out how to adapt Elsebeth Lavold’s sweaters and knit her Viking knots, I will work on Thora next.  This is my first new project for the Fall Cable 2007 KAL.

This was originally published in the out-of-print Knitter’s Fall 1999, but it is available in Arans and Celtics.

I’ll also start Jean Frost’s Devonshire jacket from her Jackets book:

Both will be in Filatura di Crosa’s Zara—gray for Thora; a combination of dark green, brown, and rust for Devonshire.

And I’ll also work on Bee Fields at the same time--for the Bee Fields KAL and for the Lace Shawl KAL.  I’m violating my “only two projects at a time” rule that I have imposed on myself this year.  (Having knitted from my stash all year, I'm about to go on yarn buying binges at Stitches East and Rhinebeck.  Knit from Your Stash 2007 is over in September, and I'm counting the days.)

But now it is on to the sleeves on Ed’s sweater.  I need to be virtuous for another week or two before throwing caution completely to the wind.

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).