Prime Time Knitter

Rain Check

I finished NaKniSweMoDo Sweater #3 over the weekend.  I had less trouble working with heavy wool than usual because the last several weeks have been cool and rainy—so rainy that I can’t remember the last full day of sunshine.   Ordinarily, I don’t welcome the start of summer, but even I have had enough of the gloom.  (According to the weather forecasters, it is already our 7^th wettest June on record—and more rain is ahead for most of this week.)  Ed is swearing that we won’t see the sun until November, and I have stopped trying to cheer him up.  Although cool, it is clammy and damp.  Armies of slugs have invaded my garden, and if my tomato plants could talk, they would implore me to move them back inside.  My summer vegetables are off to a very slow start. 

And despite the coolness, it is not really cold enough to model the sweater.  And I’m not about to go tromping around outside in the damp, unmowed grass to find a place where I can take a nice photo.  So I’ll take a rain check on the modeling shot and store this sweater for the summer.  Here, instead, is my fallback picture on a hanger and ladder:

The sweater is my adaptation of a more traditional Morehouse Farms design.  I changed the ribbing at the cuffs, bottom, and neck edge to reverse stockinette, instead of ribbing.  I replaced the drop shoulders with fitted sleeves.  Also, I shaped the sides a bit, and I added some slits at the side seams.  I designed this sweater to wear when working, and it succeeds on that score.  

If I had it to do over again, I’d probably make the back neck edge a bit higher, but I used the pattern motif as a guide to start the neck bindoff.  The bindoff begins at the end of a check.  Because this yarn is thick, I used mattress stitch for the seams instead of crocheting them, and I did feel the sense of inertia that seems to afflict many knitters when faced with finishing.  I guess I would have done better to knit in the round until the armholes, and for the sleeves.  But what’s done is done.

I used about 9 of the 11 skeins in the kit (it was cheaper to buy the kit than loose skeins), and I have already stored the excess in my box of “Morehouse leftovers”, which is a great place to look for small amounts for presents.  The remainder will be used for hats or mittens.

To both the trained and untrained eye, it looks as if I won’t manage 12 sweaters by the end of December.  I had hoped to surpass my personal best of a sweater from scratch in two months, and I’m only doing slightly better than that.  But the next project (Sweater #4), which I think will be Thora, is moving along nicely.  If I could finish it by the end of July, I’d still have a chance at 8, or even 9, sweaters for the year—and I’d be happy with that.

 

A Matter of Timing

I am not doing well juggling my knitting, gardening, work, and the ordinary tasks of everyday life.  The knitting is moving along, my garden looks wonderful, work is slow and steady, but blogging has fallen by the wayside. 

The problem is that I like to post in the morning, after taking photos with the best light for accurate color.  But that is just the time that also is best for tending my vegetables—watering before the sun gets high enough to evaporate the water before it sinks into the roots, smashing slugs with my trowel, weeding before the heat of the day, and getting the grubby things done before a shower.  Ed and I are having a hard time eating fast enough to keep up with the spinach, which I pick in the morning. 

Although the knitting is moving along, the changes in the garden are far more dramatic. The current crop (ok two rows) of lettuce has fulfilled its purpose as a natural mulch for my broccoli.  It is time to eat it and let the broccoli have the planting rows to itself. 

The basketweave sweater is progressing nicely, but not nicely enough to get me three sweaters in five months.  I’m working on my second sleeve, which is actually going very quickly now that I’ve figured out where to place the increases for the arm part and decreases for the cap.

I completed my collection of Fair Isle books (more on the reason for that in another post) with Ann Feitelson’s book and Ann Bourgeois book, intended to help me with the Philosopher’s Wool kit in my stash.  

Two other notable purchases were Cookie A’s sock book and Margaret Radcliffe’s book on color knitting, both of which deserve posts of their own.  And I’m still waiting for Wendy’s toe-up sock book, when Knit Picks restocks it. 

I am feeling a real need for knitting with tweed yarn, and I bought color cards from KnitPicks and Beaverslide Dry Goods. Both have lovely yarns that are paralyzing me with indecision.

But I need to regroup and organize my stash a bit before buying another sweater’s worth of tweed yarn, especially because I also enrolled in the two Stitches East classes on working with Japanese stitch dictionaries and patterns (and June is a tax month, so some fiscal restraint is in order to compensate for my indulgences over the last two months).  But I convinced myself that Knit Picks organic cotton for washcloths (my summer portable projects, and as sample pieces for modular knitting) would be prudent and the 16" Harmony circulars rounded out my collection of fixed and adjustable 24" and 32" circulars :

It will be another week, or even two, before I can plant my warm-weather vegetables.  We’ve had some very cool nights, and I’ve had to bring in my tomato, pepper, eggplant, zucchini, and cucumber plants, and a couple that were so cold, the flats of lettuce and Swiss chard couldn’t remain outside either.  Ed is putting the final deer-stymieing touches on the cage that will keep them from eating those plants—attaching the netting and making doors.  

The next thing I’ll do, even while he is working, is plant my pole bean seeds after I restring those towers and read up on ways to keep the squash borers away from the zucchini.  I’ll start with the row covers that I use to shield the other plants, and then try the aluminum foil approach of covering the stem.  I’m determined to join the ranks of the gardeners who have so many summer squash they don’t know what to do with them.

Getting Ripped

Stupid mistakes always sap my enthusiasm.  One reason I don’t like to knit anything too easy is that I get lulled into complacency, thinking that things are really simpler than they actually are.  I should know by now that even plain garter stitch and stockinette are susceptible to glitches that can be even more subtle to detect than some glaringly incorrect YO smack in the middle of some intricate lace or a cable twisted the wrong way.  So I did not notice a mistake in my “simple” basketweave pattern until I had proceeded for three additional repeats. 

Yes, no one will see that the vertical woven bit is one stitch off, but I will never forget that there is a mistake plastered on my chest.  So the only thing to do was frog, and now I’m just a bit past the former error, and on my way to perfection—until the next time. 

I didn’t quite lose my mojo after all this, but it did irk me so much that I put everything aside when I realize the mistake and watched the first episode of Damages. I had recorded the 13-episode season in its entirety but had not yet seen any of it.  I’ve given up a lot of TV for my goal of 12 sweaters.  And all it took was one Damages episode, and I was hooked.  Please do not tell me how it ends.  I still have two episodes to go, and then I'll get my extra knitting hour back. 

After our ridiculously hot week in late-April, I decided that I needed to plan my summer projects.  A dumb mistake might derail my enthusiasm, but I still did keep knitting, albeit at a pathetically slow pace.  Hot weather makes me do bizarre things like buy fun fur, and we can’t have that if I’m going to manage even 8 quality sweaters.  So on Mother’s Day, I rummaged through my stash for some candidates for summer projects. 

One batch of yarn I’ve had for a while is enough Cherry Tree Hill Rustic Silk (2100 yards) for a cardigan.  This yarn, now discontinued, is 80% silk and 20% wool, and it feels like nubby cotton—but somewhat more interesting, with a linen-like texture.  My challenge was to come up with something that would reduce pooling, and I swatched on Sunday using linen stitch:

The pinks seem a bit more vibrant in the photo than in reality, but I really like the stitch pattern for this yarn because it makes it look woven.  I’d like to make a simple Chanel-style jacket, possibly with some sort of trim (either knitted or crocheted) along the edges.  This yarn would be great to work with when it is too hot out for all wool. 

One reason I’m concerned about pooling is that I have another wonderfully sensual, variegated yarn in my stash.  It is a silk-merino from Ellen’s Half-Pint Farm, purchased many Rhinebecks ago.  I knit the front and back of a sweater in double seed stitch, alternating balls of yarn, and I still got pooling:

Also, I don’t much like the shape of this sweater, and so the whole thing will be frogged, washed, and balled up again for another design.  This yarn deserves something lovelier and more interesting. 

Here’s a closeup of the knitted yarn, where the color is more accurate:

I thought I might try my hand at making it into a modular sweater, along the lines of this one from an old VK:

The sweater itself is not for me.  Despite all my sessions at the gym, I don’t have the ripped abs that would allow me to bear my midriff in public—and I’ve been struggling mightily (and failing) at getting the 3 lbs I gained at Christmas to depart from my middle.  It is time to add an extra weight-training day to rectify this unhappy turn of events.  Eating less would also help.

I wondered, too, if the sweater neck would be floppy, and it is on some of the finished versions posted on Ravelry.  And the garter-stitch sleeves would probably pool.  So after I drag out all my books and magazines on knitting modules and do some swatches, I will create something with modules that is somewhat more modest.  I do like the way those modules zigzag at the bottom.  Could I manage it for a collar too?  It would certainly be worth a try.

There’s still more swatching to do for warm weather projects, but for now it is back to basketweaving.

Springing Back

I awoke to find that our early and uncharacteristic heat wave had ended, and my house was filled with blissfully cool air.  For those of you who also suffered in the last few miserably hot days, you have me to thank for this reversal of fortune.  I put our snow shovels away.  Ed, who is otherwise a no-nonsense, what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of guy, hates cold weather.  To ward off the chance of snow, he insists on keeping our snow shovels and roof rake outside the garage, near the front door, to show the snow gods that we’re always ready for them.  On the first day of spring, I suggested that we wouldn’t need the roof rake any more, and then we had a heavy dusting of snow followed by some unusually cool weather.  This meant that the shovels had to stay where they were, and I largely ignored them until Monday.  When the mercury hit 86°, I just put them, without asking, back into the garage.  And yesterday the weather broke—so there you have it.  I think there are about three days a year when no one in this household is complaining about the weather.  Ed, a native Californian, hates the winter, and I feel most energized when the temperature stays under 60°.  Clouds don’t bother me; Ed needs blazing sun.  Luckily, I control the thermostat.

But spring is back, and so is my enthusiasm for knitting with heavier yarn.  I did press on with my adaptation of the Morehouse Farm sweater, and considering the heat, I got quite far. I’ve finished the waist shaping on the back.

I love this yarn for its softness and rustic feel, and the basketweave pattern does it justice.  

I’ve been a lot more casual on the measurements for this project than I am ordinarily because I’ve been basing them on the shaping of recently knit sweaters.  The red cable-wise cashmere has a basic shape that I wanted to copy, just making the basketweave about an inch bigger in the body so it wouldn’t fit as tightly.  And that sweater shape was adapted from Liv, and so there’s a progression of shaped sweaters that is getting me to the point where I don’t have to spend hours developing a schematic.  I think I gravitated to this point unconsciously because I worked with basic patterns called slopers in sewing.  When I took sewing lessons, the first thing I did in the now defunct trade school, The French Fashion Academy, and with my private teacher, Antonio, was to create a a sloper that would be the basis for all other patterns.  It was constructed to my exact measurements, so after that, I never had to draft another bodice or skirt.  I’d trace that and then adjust it for the particular design.  It never seemed as essential to do this in knitted patterns before because my sweaters were more rectangular, but it is working out for me quite well now.

One modification that I did add to the basketweave sweater was side slits:

I thought this would add to the comfort, since I expect to wear the sweater while seated at work. The slits would allow for stretch at the bottom without pulling the knitting out of shape. I decided not to knit the body in the round because as a combined knitter I do my purls much faster and more easily than in Continental—and I’d be forced to knit Continental in the round because there’s no purl row to reset the stitch mount for me.  I also love the even, square stitches I get from combined knitting.  Seaming is not a problem for me, and I expect to assemble the pieces using mattress stitch.  The Morehouse yarn is a little thick to assemble with crocheted seams.

This sweater is moving along quickly, as it must.  If I have any hope of getting close to 12, I need this finished in three weeks.  And the recent heat has been a wake-up call for the need to really consider what I want to knit over the summer.  There are no more snow shovels to put away, and so the summer heat will be here whether I like it or not.

Hold Up and Holed Up

For the first time in a while, life completely used up my knitting time.  Work is the usual suspect, and I’ve been holed up in my office trying to finish overdue work so I can get back to a more manageable schedule.  Even though it seems as if we’re barely past Christmas and New Year’s, it finally came to my attention, even after receiving gardening catalog after garden catalog (and countless emails from those same vendors) that I did nothing to prepare for my vegetable garden.  Only after Ed went down to our basement on two consecutive mild days to begin preparing the soil for me did it sink in that I had done nothing that would enable me to start planting any time soon.  As of last week, I hadn’t ordered one packet of seeds, decided what to plant, or selected the seed-starting equipment I’d need.  Since all of my weekend time and regular workdays were devoted to actually working, this left only my evenings to peruse my seed catalogs.  This drastic turn of events made it necessary to focus solely on work and garden planning, and I stayed away from Ravelry and blogs to minimize diversions.

It took four full evenings to get through everything, but by time I was done by about midnight on Thursday, I began to fantasize about the luscious tomatoes I’d have, the succulent cucumbers, and the 15 varieties of lettuce and greens.   The gardening gods have a sense of humor that makes the knitting gods look like amateurs.  When I woke on Friday morning, my garden was covered with a dusting of snow.  So here is the official “before” picture, taken on the first day of spring.

I think I have a way to go before those I can taste those tomatoes.  Just look at those beautiful compost bins that Ed made for me last fall.  All our kitchen garbage and fall leaves are in there. 

On the knitting front, although there wasn’t much progress, I finally did achieve a swatch for the Morehouse basketweave sweater (aka Sweater #3) that will work for me.  

I added some rows of stockinette between the horizontal bands, getting a pattern that has the stitch definition of the smaller version of this motif.  My version of the basketweave is just a little smaller than the original in the Morehouse pattern.  It is not as wide, but nearly as tall.  Still, I think this will look better on me, and now I’m left with figuring out how to position it.  I’m also moving closer to a slightly shaped sweater than the boxy original.

I resumed work on Sweater #2, Arbor Rose, but there’s not much to show.  I’ll be up to the front neck edge tonight, and I need to devote some time to the neck and shoulder shaping and the sleeves.  So it’s time go swimming and get a few more work hours done, so I have some time to tackle that planning.

Basket Case

I knitted up a storm on Monday night and got up to the armholes on Sweater #2, Arbor Rose.  And for a moment it seemed as if I could finish the front by Wednesday.  If I did this, I’d have to figure out the front neck edge on a weekday night, and plan out the sleeve shape.  So I thought, if I could do something less challenging this week that contributed to my 12-sweater goal, I could save the planning for the weekend, when I had more time.  This thought bordered on the delusional because it looks as if I will have to work for most of the weekend, and if there is free time at all, it must go toward ordering seeds, or there will be no garden this summer.  

But rationality is seldom my strong suit at about 10 PM, so I decided to swatch for the Morehouse basketweave sweater on Tuesday.  A few repeats into the swatch, I could see that the pattern stitch, which comprises a 13-stitch repeat, was going to be too big for me, although it didn’t look as if it would from the picture.  I’ve been somewhat sensitive to patterns that are too big for my 5’ 3” frame after some disastrous early sewing efforts.  I soon realized at about the tender age of 20, that I should pass up fabric with huge flowers, particularly when they end up positioned over my bustline.  And although tall, slim people of Nordic descent looked terrific in the Marimekko prints that were so hot in the 1960s, I appeared to be wearing a giant lampshade.  So as I plan a garment, I always consider how it will look on me.  I want clothes to enhance my appearance, and I don’t want to be a rack on which a garment hangs.  Despite my other lapses in judgment, I knew that the size of the basketweave pattern wasn’t going to work.

I turned immediately to my stitch dictionaries and found an equivalent pattern in the new IK Harmony guides—called “large basketweave”.  So I immediately ripped the first swatch and started this pattern (the bottom one in the photo). 

When I was done, I looked at it in the mirror and thought “hah, this is it”.  In the harsh light of day, I was less happy.  When I held it up to me, the pattern was too small.  It wouldn’t show off the beauty of the yarn as much as it should in a sweater, and even plain stockinette would be better.  In a Goldilocks moment, I decided I’d look for a “basket” that was not quite as big as the original and not as small as the swatch, and I found nothing.  I did contemplate that I could use three vertical stockinette stitches instead of the four on the original and two on the swatch and see what I got.  Last night was a success.  The top swatch has only a 10-stitch repeat, and it does make a difference (I get 4 stitches to the inch).  I’ve actually been interested in tinkering with stitch patterns to change their scale, but this wasn’t the point at which I intended to run this experiment.  I plan to give this 10-stitch pattern another try, and separate the horizontal bands with another row or two of plain stockinette.

While I was rethinking the sweater design, I considered that the bound off edge on the first swatch looked better than the ribbing in the original sweater, and so I tried a few rows of reverse stockinette as a cuff and edge:

I prefer this finish to a ribbed bottom, cuff, and neck edge, I’m thinking that this sweater need not be boxy after all.  Perhaps it should have some side shaping and more fitted sleeves.  Consequently, what was supposed to have been a quick knit to get me a plush, warm sweater for next fall or winter has turned out to be a production, as usual.  The swatches are being blocked so I can work out the measurements and body shaping.  Some modification would have been necessary anyway because the pattern expects you to get 4 ½ stitches per inch and I get only 4.  But all I have managed to decide right now is that I should get back to Sweater #2 and get it done.

Time Mismanagement

I know how I lost the hour today.  I think that Benjamin Franklin was a fine fellow, but he was completely misguided in his plan to muck around with the clock.  Although I love the extra hour in the fall, the price of paying for it in the spring is too steep.  I need every hour I can get today to finish work in time that disappeared last week.  

I don’t know how last week disappeared.  It started out inauspiciously with the most snow we’ve received all year in a single storm, causing me to postpone a doctor checkup.  It would seem that all this would do would shift an obligation to another time slot, but for some reason it disrupted my plans for the week.  In addition, work I had been expecting in December arrived on Thursday, as did the short assignment I thought would fill this coming week, once I cleared out the other surprise assignment that I didn’t expect until April.  So the next few weeks—extending into April, I think—are going to be full of work conflicts and excuses about when I’ll be done with a particular task.

Knitting didn’t seem to move along more smoothly.  I had hoped to finish the Arbor Rose pullover front, and here is a boring picture showing how much “more” I managed.  

This lack of progress leaves me having to figure out the neck, and should I get so far, the sleeves on weeknights, when I know I’m mentally challenged.  And the ETA for finishing this sweater is now the third week in March, not the second.

So what to do?  Well buying yarn is always soothing, and I succumbed to one of the many excellent sales that seem to be abounding.  Morehouse Farm had an email offering 25% off on all yarns, and I couldn’t resist.  [If you are a Morehouse yarn fan too, sign up for the newsletter to get the sale notices.]  So I bought some of the natural brown heather that came in kit form for the basketweave sweater.

It was cheaper to buy the yarn in kit form than as individual skeins, and although I don’t usually buy kits, I like this sweater a lot.  The design makes the most of the hand-spun look of the yarn and shows off its texture.  It is an old-fashioned boxy sweater, but I’d wear it instead of a jacket on cool spring and fall days, so I may follow the pattern with just a small modification to the sleeves to make them a bit more fitted.  I may not have the time to work out the design for Sweater #3 this week, and so it may become Sweater #4 with the Morehouse Basketweave as a replacement—the new Sweater #3. 

Now if Franklin could have only figured out how to get an extra week by manipulating the clock, he would have been truly a great man.

A Little Off Schedule

Before I embarked on the NaKniSweMoDo KAL, I was hard pressed to finish a sweater in less than two months.  The challenge I set for myself is to get about 8 or 9 knit-from-scratch sweaters done in 2009, and perhaps with the WIPs added in, which is permissible, I may get close to 12.  And so it may seem to the untrained eye that I am hardly bettering my record, with my first sweater truly off the needles and modeled only last week.  But although I am off schedule, it isn’t by that much.

On Friday night, I finished the back of the second sweater, Arbor Rose, and wet blocked it on Saturday.

The advantage to me of blocking now is that I now have a huge piece to use as a gauge swatch, and I can abandon my 4-in x 4-in square.  This will help me plan the sleeves so I can align the sleeve pattern horizontally with the body pattern.  The blocking was a bit tricky because this is really just ribbing, and it stretched all over.  After momentary panic as the soggy mess sagged in my hands, I pushed it back into its desired size, which will allow the ribs to conform to the torso when worn.  It dried into the expected shape. 

While it was drying, I swatched for Sweater #3—a lovely name to be decided at a later date.  I chose the Aurora 8 (for the purple sweater) and the Berroco Pure Merino (the maroon) for their stitch definition, and I selected a cable pattern stitch from Barbara Walker for the third sweater that needs to pop from the reverse stockinette background.  I’ve always liked this cable, and it didn’t disappoint.

The tricky part will be figuring out how to put it into a sweater.  Unlike the stitch pattern for Arbor Rose, this will require some coaxing to get body shaping.  I will have to play with the spacing of the bottom vertical cables and come up with side panels to create the waist region.  I also haven’t decided on the edging, although I have ruled out just plain ribbing.  I will try a few rows of purl to make a curled edge before I finish the swatch and block it. 

This was a rather enjoyable puzzle to work out on the first weekend in a while that I wasn’t inundated with chores and work.  I had intended to spend it buying seeds for my vegetable garden, but I mostly caught up with laundry and bill paying, read newspapers, and stared into space, when I wasn’t thinking about Sweater #3.   

It appears that nature is also a little off schedule.  This is what it looks like from my front window.  Not an inducement to think about planting.  But definitely weather to consider bundling up in a warm sweater.

Picture This

Sometimes I think that my obsession with knitting fulfills my pack-rat-like tendencies more than my desire to work with beautiful fibers and create wearable clothes.  If I were honest, I’d include all the clippings of sweaters or sweater parts, decades of magazine back issues, and patterns I’ve bought but not knit (yet), and color cards of yarns that were discontinued years ago as part of my stash.  But since my stash fills more plastic boxes than I care to count, I cheerfully overlook the ancillaries—but sweater images are stored in the recesses of my memory, to be dragged out when appropriate.

When I thought about designing some of my own sweaters, I dug out two clippings of two men’s sweaters:

The one on the left is a recent acquisition from a catalog or magazine ad for Nautica; the one on the right is from an ancient L.L. Bean catalog.  I tried the Aurora 8 in a stitch pattern like the L.L. Bean sweater, and it didn’t appeal to me.  There is a cable like the one in the Nautica ad in the cables volume of Stitchionary, and I plan to swatch it for the burgundy Berroco Pure Merino (Sweater #3).  Since it is such a big cable, and the placement of the repeats will be important for the design, I’ll use the body of the Aurora 8 sweater (NaKniSweMoDo Sweater #2) as a guide.  Sweaters #2 and #3 will have a similar shape, but what shape should that be? 

I recalled a Kathy Zimmerman sweater from IK (spring 2008).  I like Kathy Zimmerman’s designs—although not usually cutting edge, they are more to my liking than most because they’re practical and wearable.  I wanted to figure out if my sweater should have waist shaping.  This sweater (on the right) showed me how nicely shaping would look on a cabled sweater, and the pattern gave me an excellent schematic to work from. 

But my swatch, which is really just fancy ribbing, opened up when I blocked it, and it seems as if it will be formfitting in its own right, with only modest shaping, like the sweater on the left.  That sweater is from a new book of Classic Elite sweaters, the sweaters that have graced the back covers of magazines like VK forever. Those sweaters also are attractive and wearable. 

I borrowed Classic Elite: 100 Gorgeous Designs for Every Occasion from the library, as I try to do before buying any new knitting books.  I’ve shied away from buying books of just sweater patterns because I have so many back issues of magazines with designs I like and patterns I've purchased that I haven’t yet knitted.  I also thought that this book would have old sweater patterns, since the book is a culmination of past designs.  Now that I’ve spent some time with it, it is on my wish list for book purchases.  Some of the designs are indeed boxy, but most are not, including this one that has always been a favorite (although I would want more practical cuffs).

The book has a good selection of very wearable patterns for men and children as well as for women.  The details on many of the sweaters are the real value to me now.  I’d like Sweater #2 to have a mock-T with the ribbing and cable aligning with the neck edge, as this one does:

 

And having compared the green sweater Classic Elite with Kathy Zimmerman’s design, I’ve decided to compromise on the shaping of Sweater #2 and make it less than on the purple sweater but more than on the green—so the ribbing does highlight my contours. 

Work on Sweater #1 is moving along well.  The body (front and back) should be done in a day or two, and I’ll probably get one sleeve done this week.  I won't be too far from my 12-sweater goal.