Prime Time Knitter

No Quick Fix

There are mistakes that make you feel like a fool, and there are mistakes that make you feel like a fool but teach you something. 

I’ve now picked out the rows with the wrong yarn dominance on Mara’s sleeve, and I’m back on track with the sleeve knitting. This was a mistake that made me feel like a fool and taught me nothing. Well, not exactly nothing. It should have taught me to read my notes, but I know this kind of error will persist as long as I can hold a pair of knitting needles. I suppose it is the knitting gods way of keeping me from getting too big for my britches.

There was another mistake a while back that did teach me something about fixing errors in stranded knitting. Despite the care I had taken to check my work each night and the following morning, slapping myself on the back for achieving near perfection, I spotted a stitch that was the wrong color:

How could I have made such a mistake and missed it entirely? How could I have knit so many rows before noticing? I suppose everything I know from watching cop shows on TV is right: Eyewitness accounts aren’t reliable.

This error was in the center back, and so I imagined people staring at it behind my back, where it would act as a beacon attracting their attention.  The morning after the discovery, I played the “can-you-find-the-mistake?” game with DH.  He responded with a “no-not-again” look on his face, and he said he couldn’t find it—but he always says that. Or what’s worse, he will point to something that is perfectly fine on my knitting and suggest that I rip, just to keep me in practice. DS was also given this test on Mara’s back and he stared blankly at the knitting, unable to figure out what I was so insistent was a glaring mistake.

I appear to have split the plies on the salmon yarn, and knit it instead of the red.  I’m guessing that when I measured my work, a few stitches fell off the needle, and I didn’t put them back carefully. But I could not leave this as is.

My first response was to do the knitting equivalent of sweeping it under the rug—duplicate stitch.  And this did work to disguise the errant stitch when I tried it. But that didn’t really make me happy because the mistake would always be there. I wondered about dropping down stitches to fix the mistake, just as I would for one color knitting.  But this raised the specter of having to tink back dozens of rows should the operation go awry.

I spent some time searching to see if there were any bloggers who fixed dropped stitches in stranded knitting, and there were a few encouraging bits of advice.  So I decided to practice on my swatch by deliberately dropping a stitch and then picking it up.  If it didn’t work, I’d only have a messed-up swatch.

It turns out that dropping stitches in stranded knitting is not as horrible as it might seem.  The yarn is sticky, and you have to pick out the stitches above the mistake with some force.  This is what a column of intentionally dropped stitches is like.

After practicing, I marked the row I wanted to drop on Mara’s back.

 

Using a crochet hook and some care, I was able to knit the stitch in red and then pick up the stitches over the correction.

When blocked, this fix will be invisible. It is only a bit more difficult than duplicate stitch, and it gives a much better result.

 

Into the Woulds

Every year at this time, I flirt with the resolutions that afflict so many knitters: 12 sweaters, 52 pairs of socks, 13 whatevers in 2013.  But if growing old has taught me anything, it is that by this time next year I won’t have a fraction of those items.  It is tempting, as I look at my boxes of stash yarn, to think that 12 of them might be empty at this time next year.  That would certainly ease my conscience when I get to fiber festivals or yarn stores, but I know it won’t happen (not the fiber fairs—the FOs).

So rather than resolutions, I’m thinking of things I would like to knit.  In one case, the decision has been made for me.  Our knitting group had a Secret Santa, and my present, which still has me gasping with delight, was this yarn from Chameleon Colorworks:

I have yet to knit a circular shawl, and I have more than 1800 yards of this heavenly stuff. I have looked at Evenstar many times, but the yardage of my stash lace yarn is insufficient. I think that Evenstar will be this summer’s project. 

But less fanciful projects on the “I would like to finish them list” is the Helena baby sweater.  I’m up to the front border, and I did some diving in my button stash and found these vintage buttons. They more than likely belonged to my mother—note the 60¢ price.  The pattern calls for knitted tie closures, but in this soft yarn, I think they would pill and fray, so I’m adding buttons.  The end is near on this one, so it is close to being my first 2013 FO.

I know that knitting top-down, in the round, is the method of choice for most knitters, but after knitting sweaters in the round for most of this year, I found myself longing to do something flat that would require purling and seaming.  I also needed something to knit in my knitting group that I could not possibly screw up. (Fair Isle it turns out is far too challenging for group knitting—at least for me.) So I started my own design using Beaverslide Drygood’s McTaggart Tweed in nightshade and a motif with a 4-row repeat (and two of those rows are stockinette). 

The yarn is surprisingly soft for a tweed and very enjoyable to knit with.  The back is done, as are most of the two sleeves.  The hang-up on this one is that I wanted slanted pockets on the front.  Not only do I want them to slant, but I want the pocket inside to be plain stockinette to avoid extra bulk over my stomach (which has sufficient bulk of its own to require no added help).  So I’m knitting the rest of the sleeves in public for now, and I started wrestling with the pockets during fleeting periods of quiet at home.  I also haven’t quite decided on the collar and whether I want a zipped front or buttons.  It is possible it will have a belt.  This one is evolving as I go along—and it could be my 2013 Rhinebeck sweater.

And then there is Mara.  Mara and I have been on a trial separation for about five weeks, but I think I’m ready to reconcile. I got exasperated with her, and me, when I messed up the yarn dominance on the light blue motif. Despite meticulously writing down on the chart which hand holds which color, for a third time when knitting this motif, I didn’t read my notes.  Some rows after holding the yarn incorrectly, I found myself wondering why the colors just didn’t look right.  I have the last of four incorrect rows to tink out, and then I can resume. 

There is still a lot to do on this one—knitting sleeve #2, steeking and finishing the neck edge, and then weaving in ends and tacking down the insides of the steeks. If I keep at it, I might have it done before the weather warms up.  And I would like to knit another stranded sweater this year.

As far as more things that I would like to knit in 2013, there are more one-color sweaters, socks, a couple of scarves, and one or two hats.  But for now, I’m not looking past my current WIPs.

Happy New Year to all.

 

Unlaced

In the verbal tug of war in which DH accuses me of being stubborn, whereas I insist I am tenacious, I’m beginning to think that he is right.  We’re about to face our fourth heat wave of the summer (it feels like the end of August to me now, not mid-July) and I’m still knitting away on Mara. This project is so captivating that I’m willing to brave sweaty hands and a wool body tube in my lap rather than break out the lace yarn and needles for my summer knitting.

Mara’s body tube is about 60 percent finished, and the aspect of it that is captivating me is the shaping for the armhole and V neck.

I haven’t been progressing very quickly, which is one reason there haven’t been many posts about my work.  I would like to post after every session: Hey, I haven’t screwed up yet or show a “I-didn’t-screw-up-o-meter.”  That would be boring—so the posting pace on my progress will be intermittent.  But I have been deliberate in working on each row and checking the pattern.  Slow is much better than ripping, which I’ve learned from experience on this project.  The only way I can fix something, without making things worse, is to tink back each stitch.  That takes entire evenings for just one round. 

The pattern gives no charting for the decreases, and it would be very easy (for me at least) to mess up the alignment of the patterns.   I thought about copying the chart and marking the decreases, but I really did not have enough experience with Fair Isle knitting to think that I could do this accurately.  I’ve used markers only for the large blue-green motif, and I left them in for the red zigzag and smaller light blue-green-purple motif.  This gives me some help in confirming that I’m correct in the middle of the fronts and back, but not along the decreased edges.  For that, I’ve been threading waste yarn to verify the positioning.

The V looks a bit wonky in this photo because the yarn changes aren’t always exactly in the middle of the front steek, but the V is correct.

I also wasn’t sure how the armhole would work out, but it is rather like a giant opening for a mitten thumb.  The live stitches will be picked up for the underarm, and the part cast on above them is the armhole steek—to be stitched on a sewing machine and cut open.

Another aspect of the body tube where Alice Starmore leaves you on your own is in the direction of the armhole decreases.  She explicitly notes how to decrease at the front edge of the V.  So I decided to have the armhole decreases point toward the armhole—a completely arbitrary decision, but they do look better this way to my eye.

The decreasing for the last several rows has required a lot of concentration.  The armhole decreases are every other row, and the neck-edge decreases are every third row.  I wrote the rows out on graph paper, indicating where the decreases go.  It will get easier after the next row, because I’m done with the armhole shaping and only continue on the V.

Once the body tube is done, the pattern asks you to cut the armhole steek, pick up stitches, and knit to the cuff.  But I may pause to block the tube so I can get a good measure of the sleeve length.  The sleeve requires full patterns, and I want to be sure that there are no rude surprises when I go from the shoulder to the cuff.

So for now, I’m holed up in AC pretending that fall is around the corner, and that is likely to continue.

 

Too Hot to Handle?

Today is the day I can decide whether it is possible to press on with Mara over the summer.  The first heatwave is hours away, with the promise of near 100° heat for a couple of days.  It is already sultry.

I’m really gung-ho on knitting on.  I reached the V of the cardigan front, and I did my first decreasing in stranded knitting.  I know this doesn’t look like much, but figuring out where I was on the chart and actually getting these right is a milestone:

The V starts at the markers and moves upward along the edge of the steek.

The next Mara challenge is to shape, “at the same time,” the armholes.  Mara has a slightly shaped armhole, and it starts now—and the neck shaping continues.  I definitely will have to pause my audiobook as I prepare the armhole steek, but I hope I can sketch out on a copy of the chart just what the decreases will look like.  Then, if my hands aren’t hot and sweaty, it will be onto the upper part of the body tube.

To be fair about the heat, so long as Con Edison cooperates, I’ll be running the AC and it should be 78° with some additional fans going.  This is not going to be an iffy day in the low 80s where I mumble to Ed about whether we should turn on the AC or not. 

The warm and wet spring has given me something I’ve never been able to grow successfully before: garlic.  I’ve gotten some, and I have usually harvested it July, but this year, I really have a haul to be proud of--weeks ahead of schedule.  There are 90 heads of garlic now curing in my garage (and I hope it stays cool enough in there over the next few days).  It is really a treat to go into the garage—the smell of the garlic can knock you over.  I just stand there breathing it in.

I suspect I’ll need a case of breath mints before long, but I have plans to use most of it and store what I can. 

Over the cool weekend, I did what I could to prepare the garden for the heat.  Everything is looking great now (and weeded, I might add proudly, and mulched).  The beets, which are a few weeks from harvest, are on the lower left, covered with shade cloth.  The tomatoes in the rows after that have flowers—even the main season tomatoes.  I don’t recall being this far along in my potential tomato harvest for years.  The garlic rows were replanted with summer squash and eggplant (covered, until they flower, to keep the squash vine borers off the squash and flea beetles off the eggplant).  Carrots are in the row after that, with the straw mulch.  The next thing to eat will be the broccoli (our first tonight) in the covered rows on the lower right.  The covers did keep the cabbage loopers off.  The pole beans are growing, as are the onions.  The remaining right-side rows are more eggplant (also covered) and two rows of peppers.  So if everything works out, I can use that garlic in some spicy ratatouille.

 

Growing Pleasures and Pains

At the end of last week I contemplated all the truly productive things I could do over a three-day weekend—most of which would contribute to the cleanliness and order of the interior of my house. Those thoughts didn’t even last a New York minute before I tossed them aside in favor of working in my vegetable garden and starting the V-neck on Mara. The garden needed the most attention, which I could give it starting first thing in the morning, with afternoons and evenings set aside for knitting.

I’m now certain there’s no such thing as a typical growing season.  This year, like years past, I start out with sketches on graph paper of what I will grow in each row.  There is a page for spring, another for summer, and a third for fall.  Because March was like May and April was like early March, things got very complicated. (And I might add, the house got very messy as I had to drag my transplants indoors from my deck because the nights were too cool to leave them out.) In addition, March was dry, but late April and the last few weeks have seen tremendous deluges—the most recent was on Friday, when I’m certain I got nearly 4 inches of rain in a single storm.  So now the plans are nearly worthless, and I’m pretending that summer is here—at least for the gardening.

At the end of last week, after a few rainstorms, my garden looked like this.  Weeds were everywhere, and we nearly exhausted the spinach (the empty-ish rows on the left).

Now, three days later, I have tomatoes, with interplanted lettuce, where the spinach grew (the cages are on the left).  There’s a new bean tower on the right, which I seeded today, replacing some mustard greens. Also, most of the rows are nearly weed free.

The row covers are protecting broccoli from cabbage moth larvae and beets and chard from leaf miners.

This week it is on to gorging on lettuce:

and chard:

My salads have been a wonderful mix of mustard greens, lettuce, beet greens, and radishes.

The problem I have now is that there is really plenty of time for eating lettuce, but the plants intended to replace the lettuce have grown apace.  And it is warm enough to plant them. It breaks my heart to pull the lettuce before its time, but there’s no choice but to do that. Here’s my flat of peppers, just waiting for its chance (which it will get next weekend) to join the tomatoes. 

Luckily for the chard, my eggplant transplants aren’t ready yet, and so they’ll remain for at least another week—although I interplant my eggplant with filet beans, and I just could put them in next weekend too.

One of the fun things about the garden is discovering the little extras that I can’t get from buying vegetables in the supermarket, or even the small farmer’s market in my locality.  Last week, I tried my first herbal vinegar of the year, using chive flowers.  The “instructions” for this variety of herb vinegar in most sources are to simply fill a sterile jar about half full with the chive blossoms, add the vinegar, and put the jar in a cool place.

This is what it looks like after 5 days, and I’ll give it a try toward the end of this week. 

 

The other neat little extra is our garlic scape pesto, which is part of tonight’s dinner.  There are probably enough scapes on their way for another batch at the end of this week. 

I’ve not been so nimble in adjusting my plans for “summer” knitting.  I really don’t want to acknowledge that summer could disrupt my knitting with wool.  I have been barreling along on Mara. The body tube is growing, I made it through the first repeat without any mistakes.  I have not been as lucky since then.  There was a tinked out row for a mistake in the pattern, and now I’m making a major correction.  Despite all the work I did to figure out what the yarn dominance ought to be, I somehow messed it up.  I’ve gone four rows with the yarns in the wrong hands.  So tonight I’ll be tinking two (or possibly four) 333-stitch rows, so I can then take a stab at getting it right.

 

And here I thought I’d be up to the shaping for the V-neck.  Well, I don’t have to worry about the pressure of having it done in time for the cold weather.  I’ll have months of happy knitting, and the way things have gone this week, I’ll need every minute of that time for this future FO.

 

A Cooling-Off Period

I’m really tired of starting every post with excuses for why I haven’t posted, and so I won’t.  But some of the things that were higher up on my to-do list are done—at least to some extent—and at least some excuses are history.

One major task over the last few months was getting my new Mac up and running. 

Yes, yes, I know how easy it is to switch from one Mac to another, but with my Macs, as in almost every other aspect of my life, I tend to accumulate stuff that should be tossed and I tend to let disorder reign.  So when I get a new computer, I use it as an “opportunity,” not only to update my software and learn how to use it, but to delete files I no longer need, prune my photos, toss old email, and otherwise make it into a lean and mean machine.  I’m always surprised at how many little things make the conversion from one machine to another drag on and on.  There are the obvious problems, such as learning what Microsoft has in store when it has a new release of Word.  But there are the unexpected problems, such as the simultaneous demise of both my printers, necessitating researching, buying, and installing a new one. And I’m now on iCloud—after following the advice to back up all my email (another Sunday down the tubes) before making the switch. I thought it would be impossible to love a new Mac even more than my old one, but this 27-inch baby is truly wonderful. (You can see that the Luddite in me decided to stick with the wired mouse and old-fashioned, extended keyboard.)

The unusually warm March weather moved my garden up on the to-do list.  In most years, we’d just be tripping on transplants that are crowded before any window with decent light and only be begining to get them planted.  Because March was so warm, I was able to start spinach earlier than I ever did before, and we’re now harvesting it for wonderful salads.

The spinach will be followed by the Swiss chard in a week or so.

The very warm and dry March got me thinking that I’d need to have my head examined for not rushing out with tomatoes and peppers.  But April cooled off to the extent that we even had nights with some frost, and so my decision to get in all my spring vegetables turned out to be a good one.  Right now, everything I wanted to plant is planted (and weeded!).  On the right part of the photo, I have three rows of broccoli, two rows of onions, a row of chard, and rows of lettuce and greens.  On the left, there are beets, the two spinach rows, garlic, and herbs. 

The tomato, pepper, eggplant, and basil seedlings (which will replace the spinach, chard, and lettuce) have been spending evenings indoors. Ed and I spent some of today installing the soaker hoses that are shown between the rows in the photo—so I’m ready for a rainy week.

And a new task on my to-do list is to use the chive flowers, once the buds burst, to make chive vinegar.  I threw a bunch of tarragon into a jar of white vinegar last year, and it ended up being delicious.  This year, I’m going to make a more concerted effort to make herb vinegars and see how things turn out.  The chives flowers are supposed to turn the vinegar pink and give it a garlicky taste.  I’ll report back soon.

But knitting has proved the most challenging in the hot and then cool again weather.  I’m really smitten with Mara, to the extent that I want to keep knitting it until it is done—even through the summer heat.  Now that is an easy statement to make now that the weather has been cool and knitting it has been a delight. I keep recalling that in my youth I spent summers knitting heavy sweaters without a care about the temperature.  I hope I’m not turning into one of those old people who keep harking back to the good-old days, but I don’t remember being as uncomfortable knitting with heavy wool in the 60s and 70s as I have in past years.  I’m almost psyched up to keep going just to prove that I’m young at heart (if nothing else).

This has been more engrossing that anything else that is supposedly “on the needles,” and I love seeing how the colors play out.  I hope my enthusiasm doesn’t wane once I finish all the different motifs in the design, but I’m enjoying this project so much that I’m practicing project monogamy.

I’ll parade some of the neglected WIPs in future posts, but for now this one is “Mara-velous.”

Testing, Testing

Finishing Sirdal got me on a roll with my stranded knitting projects.  I wanted nothing more than to cast on for Mara, but I did have the foresight (not to mention the anxiety about starting something this complex) to swatch.  The swatch I knit to check the gauge just wasn’t enough.  All it told me was that I needed size 2.5 mm Addis (U.S. 1) to get the 8 stitches per inch.  (Before you gasp at the idea of my knitting this sweater in such small needles, consider that I’m a loose knitter.  The pattern itself calls for size 3 mm, and going down two needle sizes is not unusual for me.)

I did not want to attempt casting on until I tried a swatch of corrugated ribbing—something I’d never done before. 

The pattern tells you to knit the buttonband flat, and I’ve seen recommendations for knitting the body ribbing flat and joining into rounds on the first knitted row.  So I began to knit flat, only to realize that with all the color changes, there were strands of yarn hanging off each end.  My mental image of a nice smooth edge to the ribbing was replaced by the reality of as many ends to weave in as there would be if I steeked.  And if I steeked, there would be some extra stitches to overcast neatly, leaving a much better edge at the cardigan front.  So after knitting about an inch of the ribbing flat, I switched to knitting it in the “round.”  By that I mean that I knit only on the right side and cut the yarn when I finished the row, starting again on the right side for the next round. 

The second thing I learned was that going down a size (to 0s) for the ribbing was a mistake.  The ribbing would be too tight.  I get the ribbing gauge, strange as it seems, with the same size needles as the body—2.5 mm.  The reason is that the purls do pull in.  I’m doing my combined knitting purls, by scooping the purl, rather than a Continental purl.  For me this makes a nicer column, but the purl is tighter.

Once I got the ribbing down pat, I proceeded to knit a bit of the first red-natural-salmon motif.  It did not look like the picture on the cover of the hardcover edition.  The red zigzags (bottom of swatch) were too heavy. 

So at this point, I went back to my sources describing yarn dominance, and I really wasn’t sure what hand should hold the various colors.  There was only one way to check—by swatching every motif.  There are only three, so this isn’t as complicated as it might seem.

Once I did this, I could see at once that I needed to hold the red yarn in my right hand, and the salmon/natural in my left.  That is how I held the yarn for the top motif of the two red ones in the swatch, and it looks much better.

The smaller green-blue-purple motif is a bit more subtle, and difficult to see on the swatch photo.  I split the motif in half, and knit the bottom with the light blues in my left hand and the dark blue, green, and purple in my right.  This makes the background a bit brighter, and it makes the motif look a bit sharper.

The top motif looked surprisingly different as I tested its color dominance.  The bottom looks washed out, but the top, knit with the background blues in my right hand and the plum, dark green and deep aqua in my left.

So now that I’ve duly written all these down in my project notebook, and I have the washed and blocked swatch to look at, Mara is officially on the needles.

Funny Business

Over the years, I’ve edited books written by professors in a lot of different academic disciplines, and although I try to eschew stereotypes, in my experience the physicists and economists tend to have the best senses of humor, and the chemists and accountants do not.  There are some notable exceptions to my view.  Among accountants, Bob Newhart is a standout for his dry wit, and I did work with an accounting duo who persisted in replacing the “Ms.” in my mailing address with “the lovely and talented.”  (Not quite hilarious, but considering the other accountants I worked with, it had a bit of charm.) Nonetheless, I recall only one accounting joke and it came to mind as I began to swatch for Mara.

This is the cardigan that graced the cover of Alice Starmore’s hard cover Book of Fair Isle Knitting, but, to my disappointment, was not included as a pattern in it.  I hunted down the pattern for vest version in an old Workbasket magazine, which provided me with the chart and the names of the yarns used.  When I heard that some of the yarns were being discontinued, I collected all of them, plus a lot of extras.  Here’s the color card I made up:

And as Sirdal was drying on my wooly board, I started to swatch and recalled the joke.  Now, although I think I have a good sense of humor, I lack the timing to tell a really good joke.  So bear with me a bit.  The joke starts when a business owner is interviewing accountants and poses the question: How much is 2 + 2?  The first candidate says 4 and is rejected.  I’ll cut to the chase and get to the punchline.  The successful candidate answers the question by saying: It is anything you want it to be.   This is exactly how I view my first attempt at swatching for Mara:

The stitches per inch range from 6 to the desired 8. So I know exactly zip about how many stitches to cast on for the actual sweater.  The gauge is supposed to be 8 stitches and 8 rows to an inch, and if I hold the yarn tightly, that is what I get. (I actually get 7.69 stitches per inch.) You can see that when I started the gauge was much looser, and I was able to tighten up significantly.  Can I manage to do this for an entire sweater?  The answer better be yes, or I’ll end up with something gigantic.

The swatch points out another problem that is keeping my itchy fingers from casting on: Yarn dominance. Although the bottom red motif looks good, the red is overwhelming the lighter colors in the top version (with the correct gauge).  In knitting the top panel, I followed Ann Feitelson’s advice from The Art of Fair Isle Knitting, and I put the background (lighter) yarn in my left hand and the red in my right.  So, if I consider the lighter yarn to be the background, this plan isn’t working for me.

So what’s a new Fair Isle knitter to do?  The only answer I can come up with is swatch again.  I also am new to corrugated ribbing, so next up for me is yet another swatch with the ribbing and another try at the three motifs. Perhaps then I’ll figure out why something funny is going on.