10.24.07
Posted in Finished Objects, Works in Progress at 8:43 pm by Rachel
Thank you all for your incredibly enthusiastic responses to my Lotus Blossom Tank! You made me so happy that it caused me to post yet another bonus issue of Lickety Knit Monthly.
I have never really been what you could call an early adopter, fashion-wise. In fact, I am probably better characterized as a complete non-adopter at best, and a tragically late adopter at worst. I don’t want to go into lots of embarrassing examples, but suffice it to say that I began pegging my pants in 1992. (Is this back in, now that the 80s are back in?) (Or are the 80s not actually back in, but I’m just picking up on them now for the first time, in my late-adopter style?)
Anyway, this trait generally extends to my knitting, which means I rarely knit anything that people haven’t seen several dozen times before. But when Minty sent me her pattern for her recently designed Roman Earflap Hat and asked me to proofread it (UPDATED: here is the direct link to the pattern, and here is its Ravelry page), I was seized by two things. Okay, three. Actually, no, just two. (I probably should have deleted that moment of self-doubt rather than just leaving my thought process right on the screen, but I think it probably makes me seem more nuanced and compelling if I reveal some inner conflict; otherwise you might be tempted to think that this is just a plain old post about a knit hat.) The first thing (remember, half a paragraph ago, the two things?) was a total adoration of the hat itself. The second thing was the realization that I could be the FIRST PERSON IN THE ENTIRE KNOWN UNIVERSE to knit this hat (after the designer). Years of being made fun of because I was finally curling my bangs straight up a full three years after everyone else had stopped suddenly gave rise to a burning desire to do something first. So I knit this hat.
Isn’t it so cute? I am not a pompom kind of girl in the slightest (partly for looks, and partly because, when handmade, they seem such a precarious proposition), but I make a giant exception for this hat. Without the pompoms, this hat doesn’t really work. I originally thought maybe I’d leave them off, but take it from me, that would have been a mistake. Without pompoms, this hat is a sad and ill-fitting assemblage of knotted wool. With pompoms: a total party for your head! (Don’t ask me how adding pompoms improves the fit, it just does.)
I knit the hat pretty much exactly as written in the pattern, except I used a sport-weight yarn to get the stitch gauge Minty did, which resulted in a wildly different row gauge, so I knit for an inch or so longer than called for in the pattern before beginning the decreases. The yarn is Sheep Shop Yarn Company “Sheep 3,” a two-ply yarn that is 30 percent silk and 70 percent wool. I like it very much. (Most of my family should now be thinking “What’s the matter with bootblacking?” in reference to an oft-cited line from an old favorite TV show, but the rest of you needn’t trouble yourselves with it.)
Please everyone, knit this hat, because until you do, I’m actually still just the last person to have done so–making it no different from every other fashion choice I’ve ever made.
In progress now: the Cable Down Raglan by Stefanie Japel from the spring 2007 Interweave Knits. I swear this is actually where I am with the sweater, and I’m not just trying to find reasons to get my rack on the internet. This photo is purely for informational purposes.
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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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