01.02.08
Posted in Finished Objects, Year of Sweaters at 5:16 pm by Rachel
Unless you’re going to to hold me to a technicality concerning the buying and sewing on of buttons, on New Year’s Eve I finished one last sweater for the Year of Sweaters!
Pattern: Henley Perfected, from the winter 2007 issue of Interweave Knits, smallest size.
Yarn: Debbie Bliss Baby Cashmerino, somewhere between 8 and 9 balls, I’m guessing.
Needles: Size 3 Addi Turbos and size 4 Knitpicks Options
Began: November 11, 2007
Finished: December 31, 2007
Notes: Okay, here’s the thing. I have some notes, but not many. What I do have many of is photos. This sweater loves the camera. (Or perhaps more accurately, I love this sweater and, apparently, taking pictures of myself.) So I have three choices: 1) limit the number of photos so it’s commensurate with the amount of text I have, 2) make the post very photo-heavy because I can’t choose, or 3) put up lots of photos but generate virtually content-less text just to fill up space and make it look balanced. Longtime readers of my blog know that I am a fervent adherent of option three. As a New Year’s resolution, however, I am going to attempt to limit pointless prattle and just stick with the essentials. At the end of the post we can review how I did.
I know I say this after every project, but this is my favorite sweater I’ve ever made. I loved the pattern the instant I laid eyes on it. (Oddly, that’s not always the reason I’ve chosen patterns in the past. For example, although I loved knitting the Cable-Down Raglan, it’s not the sort of thing I would ever pick out at the store. It just happened to call for the right amount of the right weight of yarn and offer some of the knitting elements I happened to be in the mood for (cables and no seaming).) Not so with the Henley Perfected. I did not simply want to knit this sweater; I wanted to have this sweater.
When I realized that I could reclaim the yarn from my rejected Gatsby Girl Pullover, there was nothing to stop me from casting on almost immediately. Incidentally, therein lay one of the few frustrations in an otherwise smooth-sailing project. I frogged the half-finished Gatsby Girl, carefully skeined and washed the yarn to remove the kinks, hung it to dry, and wound it into balls. That was all it took for it to start fraying in several places. Any time I had to reknit a portion of the Henley Perfected, I threw away the yarn I’d frogged because I didn’t think it would hold up well to another round of knitting. Fortunately I had enough yarn to do that, but it does make me worried about the long-term durability of this sweater. I’m afraid this one is also destined for a vacuum-sealed bag in a climate controlled, air-tight chamber. Appealing though it may be in many ways, I think I may have used DB Cashmerino for the last time.
Other than that, I had few problems. The pattern was very clearly written and I can’t think of any changes I made at all. My only general criticisms of the finished garment are that the sleeves are a little too short and the bust is a little too tight (I usually go for a decent amount of negative ease because handknits stretch so much over time and I’d rather they not be baggy, but I forgot that with buttons running down the front, a too-tight fit can create the impression that the wearer is about to bust out, if you know what I mean. I don’t think the effect is scandalously extreme here, but an extra inch of circumference probably would have been better.)
The buttons, by the way, are from JoAnn Fabrics, which I must say continues to impress me with its button selection. (Support your local small businesses everyone! Do not do as I do!)
Finally, the one complaint I have about the actual pattern itself is that the stockinette button bands, unsurprisingly, have a pretty serious curling tendency. I appalled the knitting gods by spraying them with starch and ironing them through a pillowcase, which helped a lot, but I think someone more ambitious than I could probably come up with a pattern edit that eliminated the problem at the source. Although do you think it’s just cognitive dissonance if I say that the curling is kind of growing on me?
(This photo, by the way, is in black and white because the color cast was crappy. This violates my strict belief that bad photos cannot be made into good or artsy photos just by turning them black and white; in fact, the lack of contrast here makes this a pretty lousy black and white photo, too. For some reason I like the composition, though (plus I had some fun playing with the Picnik editing tools in Flickr — oops, too much vingetting), so here it is anyway, along with an earful of my opinions on photo editing.)
Ladies and gentlemen, thus endeth my year of thweaters. It was neither an abysmal failure nor a resounding success. You’d think that I might have learned a lesson about the hazards of year-long knitting themes, but I’m already weighing my options for 2008. My year-in-review and year-ahead post is forthcoming. That’s right, you can hardly wait.
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Let’s see, how did I do with not prattling on vacuously just to fill space? Well, I’ve certainly posted much longer things than this in the past. On the other hand, you probably didn’t need all that nonsense about my opinions on black and white photos. Or even really any of this nonsense about my pratting tendencies (ooh, meta prattle!). All in all, I’d say I merit nothing better than a C-minus on my short-lived resolution.
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12.09.07
Posted in Finished Objects, Year of Sweaters at 9:21 pm by Rachel
Thank you all for your wonderful comments on my Cable-Down Raglan! It has been lovingly folded up for permanent storage in an acid-free, museum-quality box to protect it from moths, pills, snags, stains, light, friction, and bombardment from overly aggressive molecules. I so rarely make anything that allows me to hold my head up high and declare myself a solidly intermediate knitter that when I do, I need to do everything I can to preserve it.
So, in my last few posts I have lamented my pitiful showing during what was supposed to be the Year of Sweaters. And it’s true, I have only made one adult sweater from start to finish so far during 2007, though I am optimistic that I will double that number to two by December 31. (You can guess what kind of rockin’ New Year’s Eve I’m setting myself up for with that goal.)
In all my self-berating for failing to adequately dedicate myself to the simplest of challenges, I had sort of forgotten about the multiple baby sweaters that I knit this year. I’m not saying baby sweaters “count” as much as adult sweaters, but at least they’re in the spirit of the Year of Sweaters. But two of the three little items below have been languishing in my knitting bag for several months, and the third was gifted long ago, each failing to seem interesting enough to blog. As a trio, however, perhaps they are worthy of taking up space on the internet. (I know there’s a strong tradition of self-imposed quality control on internet content, and I certainly wouldn’t want to violate that.) So here they are, in no particular order:
Pattern: Kai Cable Sweater from Natural Knits for Babies and Moms by Louisa Harding
Yarn: Rowan All-Seasons Cotton, color 191
Notes: I made this sweater once before, in the same yarn. I have all the same things to say about it that I did last time, and since most of you probably don’t re-read all my blog posts once a week just to keep them fresh in your minds, I could probably get away with repeating those same insightful comments without anyone noticing. My moral compass points to “not entirely kosher” on that idea, though (I’m assuming here that moral compasses have something other than north and south on them, because that wouldn’t be terribly useful, outside of the rare morally uncertain navigational scenario). So if you’re interested in what I think of the pattern (adorable!) and the yarn (mostly wonderful!), go read my old post. (And if you’re not interested, I’ve just saved you valuable blog-reading time. You’re welcome.)
One thing I did very slightly differently this time is the neckline. The neckline section of the pattern is written pretty terribly, and as far as I can tell it wants you to knit the cable split in front (seen here, and a nice pattern detail, in my opinion), plus an opening at the side of the neck, presumably to allow the sweater to go over the baby’s head more easily. Well, I thought that looked pretty lousy, and last time I reknit the neckline to have the second opening in the back. Not loving how that looked either, I decided that I cared more about the baby’s vanity than the baby’s comfort (why no, I have no children of my own, why do you ask?), so I just left the neckline intact except for the cable split. I did try to bind off loosely — I’m not a total child-hating monster.
Pattern: Milan Jacket from Natural Knits for Babies and Moms by Louisa Harding
Yarn: Cascade 220, exactly two full skeins, colorway 9429
Notes: This is the third pattern (for a total of four sweaters) I have knit from this book, which most knitters will recognize as a rare and nearly holy occurrence (and there are still others I hope to knit!). Unfortunately, it took me until after I was finished with the fourth sweater to diagnose a consistent problem with the patterns: the armholes are (in my opinion) too small. This is such an easy problem to fix that I should have been able to nail it down a lot sooner, but instead I spent rather a lot of time thinking, “Boy, the armholes on all these sweaters seem so constricting. I wonder why that could be? If only there were some way I could figure out what’s causing this. Oh well!”
Anyway, armhole size aside, I am fairly happy with how this sweater came out. However, the one problem with “classic” baby sweaters (the kind I generally prefer, as opposed to bobbles and fiddly intarsia barnyard animals and what have you) is that there is a fine line between “classic” and “dullsville.” This sweater was probably on the wrong side of that line when I stumbled upon these adorable bumblebee buttons at Jo-Ann Fabrics when I was looking for standard toggles. I think that they would run the risk of being overly cutesy if the rest of the sweater weren’t fairly conservative; as it is, I think they add a sense of whimsy that was definitely lacking. (My one gripe with the buttons was that they came with instructions that they should not be allowed to get wet, nor should they be subjected to dry cleaning. Seriously??? I hope the eventual recipient of this sweater loves it enough to be willing to give it careful sponge baths, because I can think of no other way to clean it that wouldn’t offend the buttons.)
Pattern: Child’s Placket-Neck Pullover from Last Minute Knitted Gifts by Joelle Hoverson
Yarn: Knitpicks Swish Superwash, which I think I recall was nice enough to work with, although the red bled like crazy when I (hand) washed the finished sweater.
Notes: Speaking of sweaters I’ve made before, I’ve, well, made this sweater before. At least twice. That’s because it’s a great, quick sweater that can usually be made to work with whatever yarn you have on hand (provided you are flexible about the sizing, or, like me, happily clueless about the standard dimensions of babies at different ages).
This is another sweater that was dramatically improved by the addition of cute buttons. This bothers me a little, because I can put hours of work into creating a sweater stitch by loving stitch, but it’s only when you slap on the store-bought novelty buttons that the damn thing looks remotely cute.
While I really like making baby sweaters, I so rarely get to see them in action. And let’s face it: baby sweaters just aren’t nearly as cute when they are unoccupied by babies. I’ve tried various ways to get around the shortage of live babies in my life (including awkward arm’s-length hand modeling and the use of wholly unsuitable stand-ins). Happily, the recipient of this one (my friend Josh) sent me a whole series of photos of his little girl modeling it, and in fact told me that she would likely be wearing it in their family Christmas card photo. This is a tremendous honor for me: never before has my knitwear been featured prominently in such a high-profile publication. I expect that the back of the card will contain the following credit: “Skylar’s wardrobe made possible in part by Lickety Knit Apparel — fine clothiers since 2003.”
Pretty adorable, right? (I do actually mean the baby, as knitting-centric as I may be.) I expect my blog hits to go way up once that Christmas card starts hitting people’s mailboxes.
So there you have it: three baby sweaters. Year of Sweaters. It all comes together. Woo.
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11.18.07
Posted in Finished Objects, General, Year of Sweaters at 1:15 am by Rachel
Welcome to the November 2007 issue of Lickety Knit Monthly! Don’t forget to lock in your 2008 subscription soon to guarantee yourself the lowest rates. [Disclaimer: Lickety Knit Inc. cannot guarantee a full year of issues. Subscription fees are non-refundable.]
Our cover story this month: the first adult sweater from my Year of Sweaters!
Pattern: Cable-Down Raglan by Stephanie Japel from the Spring 2007 Interweave Knits, second-smallest size
Yarn: Rowan Silk Wool DK, colorway “Greenwood,” just over 7 balls (only 785 yards!)
Notes: I looked like an imbecile in every one of the several dozens photos that I made Matt take. For about 10 low-self-esteem minutes I declared that this was the only one I liked and was willing to post. In the end I chilled out a little and just decided to go heavy on the headless shots. I have talked before about how uncomfortable it makes me to put pictures of myself on the blog because I feel as though I might be perceived as self-absorbed, but when it comes right down to it, I’m terribly vain and I can’t bear to post pictures in which I look as though I just ate a bug or emerged from solitary confinement or got collagen injections to my whole face or got attacked by bats. All of which I managed to convey in my photos today.
Oh, you wanted notes on the sweater, not on me and my appearance? Fine. My mistake. Here we go, then: I am mostly very pleased with this sweater. The top-down construction was really easy, leaving the intricate cables as the only challenge (and even they were pretty easily memorized). It knit up amazingly quickly: Casting on for the swatch through unpinning the finished sweater from the blocking board took just 29 days. Best of all, it is entirely wearable, which I’ve attempted to demonstrate with these action shots. It fits, it’s comfortable, and it’s practical.
Unsurprisingly, given the content and the manufacturer, the yarn was great. It knit up evenly, it has that lovely silky sheen, and it can be worn right against the skin. I bought it for 25 percent off at a LYS Superbowl Sale last February, which helped make the steepish price a little less painful.
A couple drawbacks to the pattern: first, the long cable repeats made it a little difficult to customize the length of the sleeves and body, assuming you don’t want to end abruptly in the middle of a cable. And because the two cable designs are, oddly, not the same length (30 rows and 28 rows), it’s difficult to get them to end at the same time at the hem unless you’re willing for the sweater to be a floor-length ballgown. I stressed out about this a lot, ultimately choosing to knit the first 6 rows of a new repeat of the main cable while finishing a repeat of the auxiliary cables, though if I weren’t too proud to admit it, I think I’d say that in the end maybe it doesn’t matter as much as I thought it did.
Second, too much purling. I know I’m not the only one who would rather scrub grout than purl for long stretches. I didn’t entirely realize what I was getting into until it was too late to turn back, however, and in the end I’m glad I’m persevered. That’s not to say I won’t avoid purling on DPNs ever again; if there is a knitter out there who can do so without getting ladders, I don’t want to know about it because my fragile knitting self-esteem depends on believing that it simply isn’t possible. I tugged and cajoled and gave stern looks, all to no avail.
So what did I do? Well, let’s just say this post article wouldn’t be complete without an ode to blocking. Dearest blocking, does a knitter have a better friend in all the world than you? I admit that I doubted you: I looked at all the flaws of my finished and unblocked sweater and I thought, this is insurmountable. The uneven stitch columns in the purling, the asstastically uneven cables, the absence of drape, the too-short sleeves, the bad hair it gave me when I wore it…I really thought you’d met your match.
Never again will I doubt you. You are my savior, blocking, and you deserve to have a religion founded upon your miraculous works.
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What other goodies do we have in this issue of Lickety Knit? How about the announcement of the winner of the contest from my last post? “Whaaa?” you all say. “A contest?? I don’t remember a contest!” That’s right, you don’t. Because I am introducing a new contest concept into the knitblogosphere that I expect will catch on like wildfire: the secret contest. A contest in which the blog author decides on the parameters, does not share them with his or her readers, and then surprises and delights everyone with the simultaneous announcement of the contest, the prize, and the winner. I figure I stand to win a lot more prizes this way, given my poor track record at actually jumping through the hoops required to enter most blog contests (you know, like posting a comment before a stated deadline — who comes up with these draconian rules???), but it is not for myself that I propose this new style of contest. It is for…well, okay, it’s for me.
Anyway, the winner of my inaugural secret contest is: Specs! Specs correctly identified the source of my very obscure reference in my last post to a 1997 episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 called “Prince of Space.” I had thought about having an official contest, but I realized that the quote I referenced was easily Googleable, so I decided that if anyone identified it anyway, I’d give that person a prize. Therefore, Specs, you have won two skeins of Koigu PPPM sock yarn in the color of your choice! Congratulations! Email me to let me know your choice and your shipping address.
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I want to belatedly thank all the wonderful people who nominated me as a Rockin’ Girl Blogger over the last several months. The fact that I have not acknowledged this or nominated any RGBs of my own clearly makes me a Jackass Girl Blogger. Seeing as that particular meme is long past, I think I will not try to make amends now, but please accept a free yearlong subscription to Lickety Knit as a token of my sincere thanks for nominating me. (That came out a lot more sarcastically than I meant it to. I really did appreciate being singled out, especially since I clearly don’t deserve it!)
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Coming up in the December issue*: progress on my new project, the Henley Perfected sweater from the Winter 2007 Interweave Knits. I am reclaiming the yarn (Debbie Bliss Baby Cashmerino) from the now-despised Gatsby Girl Pullover. What do you think? Can I really make two adult sweaters before the Year of Sweaters is out? (And by adult, I just mean grown-up sized, notwithstanding everyone’s tasteful catcalls provoked by my knockers in my last post.) (Sorry, Dad, for bringing that up again.)
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
*Yes, I will eventually give up this joke, but seeing as I can’t think of any new ones right now, I figured I’d try to eke a little more out of this one.
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10.08.07
Posted in Finished Objects, Year of Sweaters at 1:51 pm by Rachel
No no, stop pinching yourself and cleaning your glasses incredulously: you really are seeing a new blog post from me within an ice age of the last one. I’d tell you that I’m turning over a new leaf in terms of my posting frequency, but I’m totally not — I just happen to have finished something, and it’s amazing how actually having something to show can affect a person’s blogging motivation. I should try that more often. Note to self: to generate knitblog content, try knitting.
To tie up a couple loose ends first, though, I was interested to see that many of you were divided in your feelings about the truce among Minty, Rachel Sr., and me. For those of you who delight in others’ drama and misfortune, take solace in the fact that the relationship between us is very volatile, and you never know when our shaky armistice could give way. As I inevitably re-enter a knitting (a.k.a. blog-content) drought, I’ll be watching Minty very closely for a wrong move that I could exploit as a thrilling plot twist on my blog.
In other drama (or lack thereof), my co-worker has not yet followed through on his daily threats to expose me as a depraved shower-knitter, though he did suggest that routinely posting flattering photos of him on my blog might help continue to stay his hand. (Why, I’d be happy to do that, Cory…if only I could find any photos of you that could reasonably be called flattering.) Bizarrely, I’ve discovered that Rachel Sr. and Cory have something in common: As two of the very few readers of this blog who don’t really know much about knitting (though Rachel Sr. likes to fake it by talking confidently about things being knit in “circle-8 stitch,” a technique that exists, formless, only in her imagination), they both happen to have zeroed in on “frogging” as the one term they recognize and understand. So now I have two friends whose efforts to talk to me about my current knitting project — no matter its state or its quality — consist only of “why don’t you frog it?” Can I just tell you how great that is for a knitter’s morale?
That actually makes for a good segue into my finished object details, because I was a real perfectionist with this project. I frogged portions of it several times over in an effort to get the fit right (and to achieve a level of evenness in the stitches that did not suggest that the fabric had been masticated, digested, and expelled by woodland creatures — the unfortunate and unblockable effect achieved by reknitting with yarn that I had previously frogged). In the end, I think all the frogging was worth it.
Pattern: Lotus Blossom Tank from the summer 2006 Interweave Knits
Yarn: Di.Ve’ Cotone Egitto (I know, I don’t know what any of those words mean either), six and one-third balls, including one ball that had to be thrown away because it was unusable after having been frogged once.
Needles: Knitpicks Options circulars, sizes 5 and 6
Began: August 18; Finished: September 30
Notes: Many, unusually for me. I’m not sure why I immediately liked this pattern when I first saw it, given that it manages to be terrifically unflattering on both models in the magazine (a problem that isn’t helped at all by the truly crappy photography — see here and here, and sorry about the small images). Too short, too boxy, ugly gaping neckline. And if I, a person whose utter lack of natural fashion sensibility would make even those nice people from What Not to Wear want to rend their carefully chosen garments, could diagnose those problems with this pattern, then I knew they really must be big enough issues that I’d have to do something about them (as opposed to my normal course of action, which is to commit to the lengthy and often expensive process of providing the knitting world with solid confirmation of the existence of the problems by knitting them exactly as written).
The first fix was easy: I knit five repeats of the lace pattern instead of four. The next step was to create an actual waist, because the original “waist” didn’t provide any shaping and didn’t fall under the bust but sort of across it, which I didn’t care for. So I decreased about twice as many stitches as the pattern said to, knit the garter ridges and a few rows of stockinette (this is knitting from bottom to top, just to orient you) and then did three quick sets of paired increases on each side to finish the shaping. (In the original pattern, there is a bit of decreasing after the lace, but that’s it.) Then I knit for four inches before the armhole, rather than the three called for, to lengthen the torso and create an empire waist.
It is worth noting that, aside from the part where I decreased down further than instructed and then increased back up, I had the proper number of stitches on my needles for the smallest size. However, my washed-and-blocked gauge was 6 stitches per inch rather than the 5.5 stitches per inch called for in the pattern, so the overall sizing was a few inches smaller in circumference. This turned out to be key in making the top actually fit as opposed to just hang; if my gauge had been spot-on, I would have had to cast on fewer stitches for the whole thing. This was a lucky mistake and not part of a series of clever gauge calculations. The fact that my tendency toward inexactness is very occasionally rewarded reinforces this bad habits and causes problems — and subsequent pity parties on my blog — with 90 percent of my projects.
The only other changes I made were 1) to add one set of decreases and finish the front neckline with a needle one size smaller, which prevented it from gapping, 2) to make the armholes about a half-inch shorter, and in retrospect I wish I’d made them a full inch shorter, as I have a short torso — you can see in this photo (and also this one here) how the fit in the back and armholes is not as trim as it could be, and 3) to futz with the neck edging, which as written creates an odd disconnected flap (because part of the edging is knit right onto the main body, and part of it is picked up later; I sort of picked up extra stitches to connect the two sections, so instead of it looking like total ass, I managed to get it looking only like partial ass — call me some kind of knitting prodigy).
The yarn is discontinued and, as far as I can tell, was never widely distributed (based on the fact that it exists in only 10 projects or stashes over in Ravelry). I bought it at the WEBS tent sale a couple years ago — with this project in mind, amazingly. It is 100 percent mercerized cotton, and it has a rather beautiful sheen to it. (The color, by the way, is perhaps the most accurate in the photo to the left.) Its biggest problem is the fact that it has 11 plies — that seems insane to me for a sport-weight yarn. And if you snag one, you’d better believe that errant ply is going to taunt you forever, resisting all your efforts to smooth or block or curse it back into place. Fortunately, the fact that I only paid $15 for the bag of 10 balls really brings out my forgiving nature. What can I say, cheapness is a balm to this classy girl’s soul.
So there you have my first finished adult garment since…holy crap, since Green Gable back in April. That’s humiliating, given that this year was supposed to be the Year of Sweaters. Since I haven’t even made an actual sweater from start to finish yet this year (not counting baby sweaters), and since my knitting plate is now almost completely clear, I am committing myself to that next. The problem is what to knit. I have 1100 yards of beautiful Rowan Silk Wool DK that I’d like to use. Guess I’ll go spend the day browsing patterns on Ravelry…or lazily hoping that a helpful commenter will just think of something brilliant for me.
As always, thanks to Matt for his unwavering willingness to serve as my own personal paparazzi on demand.
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06.20.07
Posted in Finished Objects, Year of Sweaters at 8:08 pm by Rachel
In spite of all my whining about my lack of knitting, it turns out I kind of forgot that somewhere in the madness of the last few weeks I actually cranked out three baby sweaters. Minty would scold me if I posted all of them at once, though, so here’s the first.
Pattern: Jo Jo Basic Crew Sweater from Natural Knits for Babies and Moms by Louisa Harding, size 6 months.
Yarn: Plymouth Dreambaby in colorways 125 and 127
Notes: This is an easy and classic pattern — my favorite kind for baby sweaters. Given that it is from Natural Knits for Babies and Moms — a book full of lovely organic cotton yarns — I felt a bit like I was paving over a meadow with a parking lot when I selected an acrylic yarn. But since the sweater was to be a gift, easy care was a top priority. It is the first time I’ve ever made anything with 100 percent acrylic, and while neither the process nor the result could be characterized as painful, I admit that I just don’t feel as fond of this sweater as I might if it were a lovely wool or cotton.
I selected this pattern and yarn colors with the idea that they would be gender neutral — the intended recipient was an unborn baby whose sex was not known. Early on I became worried that the green was actually (to the eyes of someone very attuned to these things) a little on the girly side, but when I finished the sweater, I had changed my mind: the stripes made it decidedly boyish (again, if you are someone who gives a significant damn about these things — I am not, but the sweater wasn’t for me).
In the end, I decided to give my friend a store-bought gift instead (cute baby sweatpants and a t-shirt from our shared alma mater). Partly because of the lack of gender neutrality of the finished sweater, but also partly because her shower had 70 guests, and she was compelled to open her gifts at breakneck speed, and I just knew that I would feel bad for my handknit sweater to be opened, cooed over for about eight seconds, and set aside with the giant pile of onesies (not as a result of any inconsiderateness on my friend’s part, but just because of the nature of the occasion). I don’t knit for the accolades, but I do like to enjoy the actual gift-giving moment as a point of connection with the person for whom I’ve made the gift. Call me selfish.
I made no modifications to this sweater, but if I knit it again, I’d make the sleeves wider at the armhole; once seamed onto the body with mattress stitch, the armholes felt a little constricting. Am I doing something wrong that my mattress stitch seams have no give at all? I don’t see how they could, but on the other hand, it’s sort of too bad that they don’t. Any tips or tricks that others use?
Random thing about me #2: I went swimming in my wedding dress. (Some of you may recall that I committed to doing the seven random things meme over the course of seven blog posts.)
I bring this up because last week there was an article in the New York Times about the new “trash the dress” trend, in which brides have their photographers take pictures of them doing decidedly non-standard things in their wedding gowns. Given that I will never, ever again be ahead of the curve on anything that appears in the fashion section of the Times, I had to jump on this opportunity to say “I did it first!” In September 2004, to be exact.
Speaking of doing things first, this post subject has highlighted a hazard of the two-blog household: who gets dibs on posting something like this, something to which we both have equal claim? In this case, Matt beat me to it, but he graciously agreed I could steal his material as long as I linked back to him with credit for having the idea first. He’s got more photos over on his post anyway.
This post is tragically unfunny. I guess I can’t find anything humorous in acrylic baby sweaters. You understand.
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04.22.07
Posted in Finished Objects, Year of Sweaters at 8:11 pm by Rachel
Believe it or not, my life is not all social melodrama; I do actually have time to get a little knitting done between threats and brawls. A very little, though: this is my busiest quarter at work, plus I have taken on a very large freelance job that is eating up most of my previously free time. Therefore, any time I’m knitting is time I really ought to be doing something else, so I usually only get in a row or two before succumbing to the guilt.
Okay, now I’ve given you my excuse for why it took me three months to finish Green Gable (which, as Matt correctly if somewhat repetitively points out, and likely will again in the comments if I do not acknowledge it here, is not at all green). I picked this project for my Grand Cayman knitting, since it’s very easy, knit in worsted weight yarn (so it goes quickly) and not too large. I brought it on vacation very concerned that I would finish it too soon and be stuck without knitting for the rest of the trip. I needn’t have worried.
The sweater is all the things I said — easy, small, quick — and that may have been the root of the problem: I just never was excited by it, especially once I (quickly) got past the lace panel at the neckline. I know that sometimes miles of stockinette are just the thing for a knitter, depending on the circumstances, but for some reason this was never anything but boring to me.
I have only a couple of complaints about this pattern. The main one can be seen above: the neckline curls in back and bows out in front, as anyone who has ever knit anything ever would realize that it would, as it is knit in stockinette (the lace, of course, is stockinette-based). It did block out to some extent, but I know that it will become more pronounced as time-since-blocking increases. I started this pattern thinking that for sure that it would call for some edging to be added after the fact, but it doesn’t, and I’m thinking maybe someday I’ll pick up the stitches around the neckline and see if I can come up with something that doesn’t look awful to fix the problem. The only other issue I have with the pattern is that I think the increases and decreases in the waist shaping are backwards, creating less of a shapely slimming illusion and more of a roly-poly look. That is, the decreases coming down from the top angle toward the back, and the increases coming back out for the hips angle toward the front. I’m not explaining this well, but if anyone else knits this pattern, I recommend that you reverse the right-leaning and left-leaning increases and decreases, unless you want to emphasize, for example, the number of coconut macaroons you might or might not have eaten this month. (Note: it is entirely possible that I got the pattern backwards, which can happen when you knit a quarter of a round every two weeks, so read the pattern carefully before taking my advice.)
Other than that, I am happy with this FO. It is flattering and comfortable and something I could wear to work. I also think it is a pretty good boob shirt, which wasn’t intentional, but I’ll take it.
The yarn is Knitpicks Main Line (75 percent cotton, 25 percent wool) in Red Velvet Cake. It is a perfectly acceptable yarn — nothing fancy or showy or particularly memorable, but inexpensive and — importantly — not at all scratchy against my skin. The red did bleed a lot when washed, which is a drawback but not terribly unexpected. I’m not sure how it’ll hold up over time — it fuzzed pretty readily while I was knitting it. If I weren’t making a real effort to swear off Knitpicks, I’d probably use it again, but I doubt it’ll ever become an enduring favorite.
Okay, that’s enough about that. Freed from the yoke of Green Gable, I have started/resumed work on several other knitting projects, which I will detail at great length on this very blog at some future date. I’ll leave you with a scandalous teaser: I am knitting a lovely pattern out of the lovely Natural Knits for Babies and Moms — a book that emphasizes lovely organic and wholesome yarns — out of acrylic microfiber and nylon. I know, I’m appalled too.
Finally, a non-knitting-related link of interest: Matt just sent me these predictions, printed in The Ladies Home Journal in 1900, about what life would be like in the year 2000. Some are way off the mark, some are surprisingly accurate, and most of them are touchingly optimistic. They’re pretty fun to read.
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02.10.07
Posted in Finished Objects, Year of Sweaters at 9:51 pm by Rachel
This is going to be a long one, folks. Get yourselves a cup of tea and settle in with some stockinette. Auntie Lickety Knit is going to take you on a sweater adventure!
Our story begins in May 2006. I was just coming off a couple of sweater successes (Tubey, Starsky), and I was eager to embark upon my next project. I had long been promising Matt a hand-knit sweater (and he had always responded with a wary look and a non-committal “huh!”), so I decided it was time to make good on my promises. I headed off to the WEBS tent sale with Theresa with Matt’s specifications about color (”I don’t know, maybe brown?”) and style (”uuhhhh…”) in mind, and I came home with two satisfyingly discounted bags of Debbie Bliss Wool Cotton in a pleasing chocolate color.
If you’re like me and you wish that when you went to the movies you could just watch an hour and a half of people having nice lives without the inevitable badness and conflict coming along to disrupt their happiness, you’ll want to stop reading now.
The first sign that I was about to be plunged into eight months of sweater hell came the evening I got home from WEBS, when I discovered that the wonderful yarn I’d purchased had apparently spent a fair amount of its life in direct sunlight, causing it to be substantially faded everywhere except under the label. This did not make for a pretty fabric when knit up. I spent a full day sulking about my wasted yarn purchase until I realized that only the outer layer of each ball of yarn would have suffered this discoloration; if I pulled off the first layer of yarn, the rest of the ball would be fine. Whew! That was almost bad! Back on track. Let’s cast on.
I cast on for this sweater many times. The pattern is a 5×1 seeded rib (every other row all knit). Hoping this was enough to prevent the hem from rolling, I started with that. The hem rolled. So I started again and knit the first inch or so with regular, non-seeded rib. The hem rolled. As I knew Matt’s preference was for a sweater without a ribbed hem, I decided to try a technique that was new to me: a knitted hem. Figuring out how this worked (from a process standpoint) took two tries. Thinking I was finally on my way, I knitted about 3 inches and realized that the hem was kind of flaring. It occurred to me that I probably should have knit the underside of the hem on smaller needles. Thirty seconds of internet research confirmed this. Frog frog frog. Okay, I’m boring you now, so I’ll skip detailing the other mistakes (except to say one involved twisting the stitches when joining to work in the round, and the other had to do with inexplicably casting on 40 too few stitches and not realizing it for way too long), but you get the idea.
Fast forward several months (you know you love someone when you’re willing to knit him a sweater with sport-weight yarn, plus there were other projects that were feeling a wee bit less cursed) and I was ready to knit the sleeves. Trust me when I say there were at least as many do-overs on the first sleeve as there were on the body, all of them coming down to the fact that my gauge on DPNs was apparently a full stitch per inch tighter than on circular needles, which caused me to knit a too-narrow sleeve about five hundred thousand times over.
I finally, finally got it right. I knit the second sleeve before I could forget what I’d done on the first. I joined the sleeves to the body and got ready to knit the raglan decreases. All was well. I figured the worst was over. I had many hours of pleasant, mindless knitting ahead of me during which I could decide how I wanted to knit the neck. I was actually going to make Matt a sweater. All was well. I was…wait. Is it just me? Is it a trick of the light? Or is Matt’s sweater two completely different colors?
Yep. The bags of yarn were two different dye lots. Nothing on which to blame this except the rapturous insanity that can come over a person (namely me) at a tent sale.
Well, I couldn’t simply stop knitting the sweater. I pressed on, figuring I’d just overdye the whole thing at the end. I clung to this solution, kept knitting, and then, suddenly, to my genuine surprise, I was finished! That’s the great thing about seamless sweaters (especially when you weave in ends as you go, as I do): when you’re finished knitting, they’re done. I summoned Matt and eagerly forced the sweater upon him, white-knuckled as he tried it on. Damn. It was just a little too small for him in every dimension. (It was just a little too large for me in every dimension or I might have just concluded that I’d actually knit myself a sweater.)
I knew from swatching that the yarn would bloom a bit, width-wise, but I was mostly worried about the length of the sleeves and the body. Still a little bit high from the excitement of (it seemed for a brief moment) finishing, I quickly jumped to a solution. I’m sure I was a bit wild-eyed as I took scissors to my carefully constructed hems, intending to knit some additional length and then create a new hem. Huh. Too bad you can’t do that with a ribbed pattern.
Given that I couldn’t stomach the idea knitting a new hem from the bottom up and then grafting it to the exposed stitches at the bottom of the original sweater (and, quite frankly, I am probably not a good enough knitter to do this), I was back to the one design element I’d tried to avoid from the beginning: ribbed cuffs and hem. I have a feeling that as Matt held me, trying to console me as sobs wracked my body after I’d realized the damage I’d done by cutting up his sweater, in that moment he learned to love ribbing.
When I finished the ribbing, I reached the final step: overdyeing the entire sweater. I stirred the damn thing in a pot of boiling RIT dye for 30 minutes. I was hesitant to do this because I was quite fearful that the process would finally, irreversibly ruin the garment on this last step. Good news: it didn’t! Bad news: it made absolutely no discernible difference whatsoever in the sweater’s coloration. Matt assures me that he can’t even see the different colors and that he’ll wear it anyway, so I told myself I’d done all I could and left it at that. (Quite frankly, I was long past ready to declare this sweater finished, so I probably would have accepted the result if the sweater had come out hot pink. Matt would have accepted it too, at that point — I think he had become a little scared of me when it came to anything having to do with the sweater.)
Which brings us to:
Finished Object: Matt’s Sweater
Pattern: My own, more or less
Yarn: Debbie Bliss Wool Cotton in two shades of brown
Notes: I had originally intended to knit the Adirondack Pullover from The Garter Belt — I bought the pattern with the intention of doing so — but the yarn called for in the pattern knits to a gauge of 5 stitches/inch, and I was getting 6.5 stitches/inch with the yarn I’d bought. I decided to knit a sweater that would look more or less like the Adirondack Pullover using the guidelines in The Knitter’s Handy Book of Sweater Patterns. I changed the style of the neck a bit, modeling mine on the one on Leo from Knitty. This turned out to be a lucky decision, because it incorporates a little 1×1 ribbing, which wound up making the 1×1 ribbing that I had to add at the cuffs and hem look a little less random.
I’ve said this before (in fact, I’ve said almost every single thing in this post at some time or another in my earlier posts, so it’s probably silly to start apologizing now), but Debbie Bliss Wool Cotton is indestructible. I cast on and frogged many times over, I stuffed the project into a dozen different bags to cart it around over the last eight months. I left it on the couch and people sat on it. The cats slept on it. Finally, I boiled it for 30 minutes and then ran it through the washing machine three straight times to get the excess dye out (or possibly all the dye, based on the results). I swear the yarn just keeps looking better and better. It doesn’t show even a hint of wear. I highly recommend this (discontinued) yarn. Just make sure you’re getting all one color.
So, what’s next? Apparently, based on some of the comments to my last post, I should consider learning to play the tambourine. As for knitting challenges, I have the Gastby Girl Pullover already on the needles (just barely). I want to make the Nantucket Jacket and the Premiere Pullover from recent issues of Interweave Knits. I even have plans for my next sweater for Matt. Yup. (You know how women say that after childbirth the memory of the pain quickly fades and it isn’t long until it seems like a good idea to do it all over again?)
As I encountered frustration after frustration with his sweater, Matt kept asking me incredulously why I persisted with something that was clearly causing me so much misery. I don’t really think I could put the reason into words. But if you were me, and you could see Matt across from you on the couch right now, where he has fallen asleep cradling his drowsy kitty in his arms, wearing the sweater you made him, you’d know why.
I could be wrong, but I think it must have something to do with love.
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01.13.07
Posted in Finished Objects, Year of Sweaters at 5:43 pm by Rachel
Pattern: The Kai Cable Sweater from Louisa Harding’s Natural Knits for Babies and Moms (one of the better baby knits books I’ve seen in a long time).
Yarn: Rowan All-Seasons Cotton, color 729
Needles: My new Knitpicks Options, sizes 8 and 9.
Notes: Say hello to my first finished object of 2007! Actually, I finished the whole thing in 2006 except the last bit of seaming, which I finished on New Year’s Day, but I’m going to go ahead and credit it to 2007 anyway.
This is practically my ideal baby sweater pattern. Not fussy and overly precious (I love baby clothes that look like mini versions of grown-up clothes), all one color (multi-colored knitting generally makes me not like knitting), and simple but not boring. In fact, I was so pleased with how this came out that I briefly considered keeping it for my non-offsprung self rather than sending it to my dear friend who is actually having a baby. In the end I managed to make myself part with it, but you can bet I’ll be making this pattern again. I already have yarn to make one for a co-worker(’s baby), and I’m sure I’ll have the same separation trauma from that one.
This is my new favorite color for baby clothes when you don’t know whether the baby is a boy or a girl. I try to avoid greens and yellows because I know that “not finding out” parents get an awful lot of things in those colors, but most people seem to feel that most other colors are gender assigned. This red brick color seems totally gender-neutral to me, though, without being green, yellow, or bland.
All-Seasons Cotton is a very nice yarn (and it machine washed and dried beautifully in spite of the high-maintenance instructions on the label), and I enjoyed working with it aside from the standard problem I always get with cotton yarn, which is that the finished fabric looks as though I knit each individual stitch with a different size needle. The unevenness doesn’t bother me so much in baby clothes, though — it just adds to the whimsy. (Please don’t disagree with me on this point in the comments; my self-deception is a fragile house of cards.)
The pattern was fairly well written except for the collar. Even now I have no idea how Ms. Harding really wanted me to knit it. It seemed as though she wanted an opening on the side in addition to the opening in the front where the cables split, maybe? I didn’t care for that, though, so I made the opening in the back and attached a little button and loop (not very well) as an afterthought. Also, she declined to indicate on what specific row of the cable pattern the knitter should divide for the neck, but then the instructions for the collar (and the continuation of the cable) were specific as to what row should be the cable row without regard for when the knitter might have cabled last. I’m probably not explaining this very well, but while it’s an easy thing for a moderately experienced knitter to recognize and work around, it’s a shortcoming of the pattern that could definitely trip up a newer knitter.
One thing I did like about the pattern, which I will probably do for all baby sweaters from now on, is a sort of simple hybrid between cap sleeves and drop-shoulder sleeves, which is created by binding off a few stitches at the beginning of the armholes and then sewing the sleeves into that (photo here). I have no interest in creating a fitted sleeve cap for a baby, but this little tweak does allow for a slightly better fit with minimum effort.
The only other thing that detracted at all from a very enjoyable knit was the fact that I could tell early on that I would be cutting it very close with the yarn. The photo above shows the sum total of the yarn remaining when I was finished. Yecatsml describes that situation as “racing your yarn to the finish,” which is exactly what it feels like. Fortunately I won this race, but by only by about a foot and a half.
I have one other FO, but it’s small enough that it doesn’t merit its own blog post. This little newborn hat is made out of some leftover Knitpicks Shine Sport (I always worry about unexpected wool allergies). It is being modeled by an absolutely hideous lawn statuette that was given to a friend of ours for Christmas from his parents, which he promptly and unabashedly and evilly regifted to us. (You can see it in all its unfortunate glory here. Thanks, Ed!) We’re trying to figure out what the heck we’re going to do with it (a sledgehammer to his treacly little form seems just a tiny bit too vicious), but in the meantime I was pleased to discover that it does a nice job of modeling baby hats.
Thanks for all the advice about my Grand Cayman knitting! I was beginning to come to terms with the idea that my only option was to knit socks when a number of people recommended making a short-sleeved sweater in a cotton yarn. Perfect! I have acquired both yarn and pattern for Green Gable, and I can’t wait to get started! Thank you for always coming through for me, Internets!
Only 5 days until I’m knitting right here:
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