02.16.07
Posted in General at 10:14 am by Rachel
I hope you all enjoyed a lovely Valentine’s Day. Valentine’s Day is not a major event in the Lickety Knit household, and I admit that I didn’t remember it at all until I received a cute Valentine e-card from Isabelle and a lovely snail mail Valentine from Minty. Then of course there were all your blogs celebrating the day with toffee and cream puffs and handcrafted valentines and such. It seems the world really does love Valentine’s Day.
Matt and I, however, don’t pay Valentine’s Day much attention. We’re fairly revoltingly demonstrative without the encouragement of Hallmark, and to ratchet that affection up for any reason would probably land us firmly in the realm of unseemly. We do have one beloved tradition, though: on the day after Valentine’s Day, we pick up a newly discounted box of candy from the drugstore, settle in on the couch armed with a highlighter apiece, and take turns staking our claims on each piece of candy by color coding the candy map. This activity requires considerable concentration and strategy. You have to go for the most hotly contested chocolates first, even if they are not your very favorites, because if your adversary beloved would never pick the caramels anyway, why waste your turn on them until the late stages of the battle? But of course that does leave you with a major vulnerability: if you inadvertently take what your partner feels is too many of the “good ones,” you might find your prized caramels snatched out from under you in retaliation. It’s pretty intense. Once everything is divvied up, however, you can relax and eat your chocolates at your leisure, knowing that yours are yours, rather than eating 24 of them in one evening just to make sure that you don’t lose out on the best ones. Ah, romantic love.
To ensure this post has some modicum of knitting content, here is the Valentine I got for Matt this year. Generally we don’t go out of our way to exchange cards, but I found this card at Patternworks last summer and knew it would be worth holding on to for the occasion. If any of you happen to feel that this design might possibly have some relevance in your own lives, I’ve put a photo of the info on the back of the card here so you can seek it out someplace. I’ve only ever seen it at Patternworks, but I’m sure it exists elsewhere. There’s actually a whole line of cards by this artist, and believe me when I say she gets us.
Unrelatedly, thank you to everyone who commented on Matt’s sweater in my last post. You set a new comment record for me, surpassing the response I received last summer when I drastically cut my hair and saw fit to wail about it at length on my blog. Apparently blog readers love high drama.
Anyway, I really appreciate all your positive comments, because even once the sweater was finished I was having a hard time believing it was actually wearable. I’d grown so used to the idea that it was going to be a hideous, ill-fitting embarrassment that it took 60+ comments to convince me otherwise. So thanks, blog friends!
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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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02.04.07
Posted in Yarn and Tools at 6:46 pm by Rachel
First of all, my apologies to everyone who hated me in my last post. I would have hated me too. I was totally a jerk to rub it in that I was in the balmy tropics and the rest of y’all, quite frankly, weren’t. But maybe it will lessen your hatred to know that a) that was my first trip of that type ever, and will be my only for quite some time, I would imagine, and b) the week at the hotel was an engagement present given to Matt and me by his father. Matt and I were engaged in the late summer of 2002. It took us 4.5 years to use the gift. So by the time we finally made it to the Caribbean, we had accumulated nearly a half-decade of anticipation, and we wanted to shout our excitement from the rooftops. In modern terms, that means posting a large, boastful photo to one’s blog.
We had a fantastic time, and if you wanted to see some snapshots, you could see them here, though I am not entirely sure why you would. I did not get a huge amount of knitting done, unsurprisingly, but I did knit about one-third of Green Gable and approximately one sock on the plane rides and layovers.
It’s back to regular life, though, and to look on the bright side, that means I’m no longer nearly so constrained in what I can knit. (No, I’m not even convincing myself that that’s adequate consolation for having left the 82-degree sunshine, but I’m trying.) No, really, knitting flexibility is a good thing, because the last couple weeks have brought a shockingly large stash expansion to my home. This weekend was the excellent Superbowl Sale up at Ewe’ll Love It in Nashua, New Hampshire, my all-time favorite LYS. It had been my intention to show admirable restraint at the sale, limiting myself to enough yarn for one adult sweater. However, my mom and I learned while we were there that the shop is really struggling to stay afloat, and the owner (a wonderful woman who has created a beautiful yarn store that deserves to succeed) is terribly sad about it. Well, all of a sudden buying lots of yarn seemed positively altruistic, and you can bet I rose to the occasion and did my good deed with a happy heart. (I will be mentioning this in my interview at the Pearly Gates.) I mean, I didn’t go crazy, but I definitely loosened the purse strings a bit. (And if any of you ever find yourselves within spitting distance of Nashua, I urge you to do the same.)
Those of you who hang on my every word (admit it!) will recall that this year I have resolved to knit primarily sweaters. It’s time to start carrying out this plan, because I now have five sweaters’ worth of yarn in my stash, by far an all-time high for me:
From left to right, that’s 11 balls of Rowan Wool Cotton, 6 skeins of Cascade 220, 12 balls of Rowan Silk Wool (which I’ve been coveting ever since I read Laura’s review of it), 10 balls of Debbie Bliss Baby Cashmerino (previously acquired for the Gatsby Girl Pullover, just barely begun), and 10 balls of DiVe Cotone Egitta (a previously acquired mercerized cotton I got at the WEBS tent sale last year). Think I can knit my way through all that yarn this year? I’m eager to try.
Those of you who hang on my every word will also recall that part of my knitting resolution was that stash could only be acquired for sweaters, and that any non-sweater items had to be knit from my existing stash. I did well at the sale by not giving into the temptation to buy single beautiful skeins for mittens and hats and such. Unfortunately, there is one category of non-sweater yarn for which, a mere one month into my year-long resolution, I have not done quite so well.
Not one month ago I was declaring on this blog that I was sick of knitting socks. I was readying my application for readmission to the Apathetic Sock Knitters Club. I thought nothing of resolving not to buy any non-sweater yarn this year, including sock yarn. Well, I don’t know what happened. Maybe it was the realization that no other project works as well on the bus. Maybe it was the realization that my feet were damn cold. Maybe it was the continuing effectiveness of Theresa’s and Carry’s longstanding subliminal campaign to break my anti-sock spirit. Whatever it was, not only have I returned to sock knitting with gusto, but I’ve branched out into non-stockinette socks. Laura, I give up. I’ll never again try to convince you that I’m still an apathetic sock knitter. You’ll have to soldier on without me. I’m sorry.
The sock yarn pictured is Regia Silk, Cherry Tree Hill Supersock (the wound ball), Mountain Colors Bearfoot (the skein lying in front), and Trekking XXL, a birthday gift from my mom along with the new Interweave Press book of some of their magazine’s most popular sock patterns from over the years.
My betrayal of Laura is even less forgivable because it coincided with her sending me a lovely package of yarn after I won her blogiversary contest. I particularly appreciate these stash additions because my hands are tied by my resolution (which, with a new sock yarn exemption, I’m going to attempt to keep) when it comes to buying small quantities of yarn. I will turn to these babies this year when I need a quick fix of a hat or similar. I’d thank her profusely, but I’m sure she stopped reading in disgust after the previous paragraph and went to take me off her Bloglines.
I’d better wrap this up and go start knitting off my newly expanded stash. Sorry this was so long and not even particularly interesting. I’ll make up for it with my next post, which will be a riveting epic about how I sort of conquered my white whale at last. A hint: you can see my white whale somewhere in this photo, which shows Matt’s band, Ten Years Too Late, displaying my sock yarn during a rehearsal (they’re good sports and they follow instructions surprisingly unquestioningly).
By the way, thank you all so much for your good wishes for Annie! She seems to be doing as well as can possibly be expected. From a recent email: “I have already accumulated ELEVEN colorful wigs, a pair of purple sparkle sunglasses with velvet polkadots, and a rubber headpiece with green snakes like Medusa! For my headshaving party/ceremony, I got a bottle of champagne and wore my new (fake) snakeskin pants.” I’m not giving us all any real credit for her good spirits, but I know that the good vibes from the blogosphere couldn’t have hurt.
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