Seasonal Knitting Disorder

Posted on March 28, 2012 by knitigatingcircumstances

Last weekend the weather was gorgeous here in the UK. The skies were clear and sunny, the weather was warm (about 20C where I live which is pretty good for March), and both Saturday and Sunday were completely lovely. This does not happen here all too often, and when it does, we take advantage of it. My way of taking advantage was to spend the weekend sitting in my back garden in the sunshine knitting.

I am now working on the very end of the Brick pullover for Doug. Since it is knit in one piece, and I have only a few inches of the second sleeve still to knit, and since it is a man’s pullover and thus not insubstantial, this means that I had a whopping big pile of wool in my lap while sitting out on this lovely spring day. And plenty of time to ponder about the injustice of seasonal knitting disorder.

Here are the symptoms. As the fall starts and the weather turns cold, the humble knitter starts to dream of warm wooly jumpers, fireplaces, hot chocolate, snow days when work just happens to get cancelled so you must sit and knit…. (As an aside, have you every noticed that the American term “sweater” can substitute for the British “jumper” in most places, but not in the term “warm wooly jumpers”?) You search for the perfect, toasty warm, winter pattern, buy lots of lovely pure wool, cast on and start to knit. This is exactly how I started my Brick pullover, in November. And what happens? Now it is spring, the weather is gorgeous, and in a few days I will have finished knitting Doug a sweater which he won’t be able to wear for six months because of a seasonal mismatch.

Never fear, I think. I shall have this wool off the needles this week, and will cast on for a cardigan or such, in some fingering weight linen or silk blend, and will be able to knit out in the garden or sitting at the beach, with just a light spill of breezy, summery yarn on my lap. And what will happen then? I’ll tell you what will happen: In November, just in time for winter, I will have a beautiful fingering weight summer cardigan all finished and ready to wear!

Of course, the obvious solution to this dilemma is to knit faster. When I began knitting Brick I clearly intended that Doug would be able to wear it all winter. I am always very unrealistic when starting a project, thinking that it will just fly off the needles, and forgetting that life tends to get in the way of knitting. If I were to be more practical, I could take two alternative approaches. First, I could knit summer things in the winter, and winter things in the summer, so that I could wear my lovely knits straight off the needles. But that would mean that huge pile of wool on my lap while knitting at the beach, a very silly concept. Worse, it would mean curling up in front of the fire in the winter with a little bit of silk nothingness on the needles. This misses the point that wool is like winter comfort food. Second, I could just accept that I am always knitting for the following season. I could knit a beautiful coat, knowing that when I finished, I would wrap it up in tissue paper and put it away for a season before wearing it. This approach has few downsides, except the rather big one of not letting me indulge in instant gratification.

Knowing me, I think I will continue to follow the optimist’s route. I will keep imagining that I can whip my current sweater out in no time and be wearing it before you can say Seasonal Knitting Disorder. And as Doug has wisely pointed out to me, there is another solution to this dilemma: the holiday. Travel to a tropical clime in the middle of winter, or go hiking in the Alps in the summer, and you can wear that project right off the needles!

PS – Nikol Lohr, the designer of the Carnaby skirt, put up a post yesterday here in which she discusses Emma’s styling of the skirt as both skirt and cape (or capelet as she puts it). For those of you who have come to this site from Nikol’s blog, welcome! For the rest of you, you should check out her blog, The Thrifty Knitter. Nikol blogs about knitting, spinning, designing, sheep and other assorted animals, and life at the Harveyville Project – a rural workshop, creative residence & retreat.

It’s Super Carnaby!

Posted on March 21, 2012 by knitigatingcircumstances

This is the third entry in my occasional series, Wearability Wednesday, in which I look back at a knitted item and see whether and how it gets worn. This time last year I knit a very cute skirt for Emma, using the Carnaby pattern, designed by Nikol Lohr, and published here by Knitty. Carnaby is such a great pattern – easy, stylish, fresh and wearable. Over 500 knitters on Ravelry have knit Carnaby, and unlike many other skirt patterns I have seen, it looks really good on most people. People have knit it in brights and in neutrals, in tweeds, and in variegated yarns; they have knit it in many lengths from super short to knee length.

The pattern is easily adaptable; it is knit side-to-side, so you establish the length right away and then knit until the waist fits properly. I made this one without any modifications, but I used a slightly tighter gauge so that the finished skirt would be 15″ long instead of 17″. This slightly shorter length looks great. Emma really rocks this skirt (as someone commented on my ravelry project page). She wears it often and dresses it both up and down. I particularly like the way she wears it at the office; teamed with a sweater and a classy tailored jacket, it looks young and fashionable, but still appropriate for work.

I took this shot at the university a few months ago, while Emma was hard at work preparing for an event. Emma complains that the lighting was bad and the photos were not to her usual standard, but I wanted to show you the skirt on an actual working day. It is functional and pretty, and can be individualized quite a bit.

This was the first project I knit using Cascade 220 wool. This is an incredibly popular wool. I would call it a “workhouse wool”; it is not a luxury product, but a good, basic wool yarn that comes in many colours and is super reliable. It is washable, wears well, doesn’t pill, has a tight spin and consistent colour, shows off textured patterns like cables, and is priced very affordably. For a skirt, which gets perhaps more wear and tear than a pullover, it is an exceptional choice. I am, perhaps, a bit of a yarn snob, but found this wool to be exceptionally good quality. I used it to make my Leavenwick cardigan and will certainly knit with it again in future.

Emma has been wearing this skirt for a year and shows no sign of stopping. I am thinking of making one for myself, a bit longer of course, perhaps in black. As an example of the versatility of this pattern, and the creativity of my daughter, last week Emma came bounding down the stairs dressed like this:

Of course, I had to grab my camera and take a few shots.

So, in a nod to Superman, is it a skirt?

Is it a cape?

No, it’s Super Carnaby!

Best method for weaving in ends

Posted on March 18, 2012 by knitigatingcircumstances

There has been no time for anything but work around here lately. No time for knitting, no time for taking photos, and most definitely no time for blogging. Since we are gearing up for an Easter holiday, however, I will not complain any further about the work load. I have been steadily, if very slowly, progressing on Brick. I will most certainly finish it just in time for the weather to warm up so that Doug won’t be able to wear it till the fall. Today I want to show you a brilliant design feature of Brick: the best method ever for weaving in ends – don’t do it! Here is a photo of the bottom ribbed band (before hemming):

The stitches were picked up along the bottom edge of the sweater and knit down in rib. The purl ridge that you can see halfway through is the turn line; the band is folded over on the turn line and hemmed down. Here is a photo of the reverse side (I have folded up the bottom to expose the reverse side):

See all the ends? Trust me, there are a lot of them. Normally, they would all be individually woven in, a painstaking process. But herein lies the beauty of a hemmed waistband. The ends will be knotted together and cut off shortish, and then:

the waistband will be folded over and hemmed, thereby trapping all of the ends to the inside of the waistband. No ends to weave in!

Now, for any of you readers who are thinking of making Brick for yourself and are reading this to gleam some tips, I make a small technical diversion regarding the sleeves. The pattern, though a little difficult to get the hang of at first, is pretty straightforward. I did find, however, that the instructions for the sleeve caps were really opaque (perhaps even wrong). I had to redo the first one. My advice: ignore the pattern and just knit the sleeve cap. Here is what you must do. The sleeve caps are knit back and forth in a modified rib – knit one row, and k2 p2 on the next row. The sleeve caps are made with short rows – you work 13 stitches past the middle and wrap and turn, then work 13 stitches past the middle in the other direction and wrap and turn, then repeat short rows, adding three stitches each time each side until you have made a total of nine wraps each side of center. Trust yourself instead of the pattern – keep the two center stitches as a knit rib (k2 on RS, p2 on WS), wrap and turn at the right spots, and then use your eye to keep the pattern as set. When I tried to follow Hanne’s directions I made a mess of things, but if I just knit it intuitively, keeping the pattern as established, it all worked out fine. Plus, I didn’t bother to pick up the wraps and knit them together with the wrapped stitch. The wraps didn’t show and it wasn’t necessary.

Two other sleeve tips: I thought the sleeves were too wide at the top, so I changed the decreases to add more at the top part of the sleeve. Then, I thought that they narrowed too much at the cuff so I made fewer increases all together. This is what I did (for the size medium): I decreased every 4th row 9 times, then every 6th row 19 times till I had 72 stitches (instead of the 68 in the pattern), then worked to desired length before cuff. The other modification (which I think reflected an error in the pattern) is that for the decrease rows in the sleeve, I started with a K2 and ended with a K2tbl. This ends the technical digression.

On another note: It just might have been the case that I was stranded with nothing to do earlier this week, having left my Brick pullover at home.

And, it might just have happened, that as a stroke of fate, I had a skein of Madtosh Pashmina in Flashdance, the appropriate size needle, and a pattern for Leah’s sweater, somehow tucked in my bag.

In which case, as you might imagine, it would have been a crime not to cheat on Brick (just a little bit) and cast on this purple beauty.

Shhh! Don’t tell Doug!

It looks store-bought!

Posted on March 4, 2012 by knitigatingcircumstances

I was browsing through Ravelry the other day, on one of the forums I follow regularly, and saw the following quote: “This is quite possibly my most impressive knit……Of all the things I’ve made, I think this is one that most looks store-bought.” This was accompanying a project photo of a lovely cardigan knitted by a very accomplished young knitter. She has many dozens of beautiful knitted projects on her project page including lots of perfectly fitted sweaters, made wth great artistry and skill.

I have many times been complimented on my knitting by someone saying “It looks just like store-bought!” It is clear this is meant to be high praise; inherent in this statement is the assumption that handknit garments are poor cousins to their manufactured counterparts. A hand knit garment is assumed to be ill-fitting and poorly made, perhaps with wonky stitches and novelty yarn. If you are wearing a handknit sweater, this line of thinking goes, you either can’t afford a proper sweater, or have to appease a knitting relative, probably an elderly, style-challenged granny.

I find that the more I think about this statement, the more it bothers me. Let’s start by considering the idea that if it fits properly, it can’t be made by hand. This, besides being untrue, is very obviously counter-intuitive. Clothing manufacturers knit to standard sizes. These standards are set periodically, and change slowly over time as people’s bodies change. However, they are determined based on averaging over large populations of people. When you buy a sweater, it is sized according to the bust measurement; it is somehow assumed that the sleeve length, body length, waist, armhole depth, shoulder width, etc, are predicated upon the bust measurement. A manufactured sweater with a 32″ bust will be built with shorter sleeves than a sweater with a 48″ bust, because the 32″ bust is categorized as size small and the 48″ bust as size large (or extra large). Just look around you to see the fallacy of this. People aren’t built this way. For every person who can buy clothes that fit perfectly right off the rack, there are two who can’t. Emma has a hard time finding sweaters that fit in her shoulders and bust that are long enough in the sleeve. Two women may have identical bust and waist measurements, but one may be high waisted and one low waisted; the same sweater will not fit them both properly.

When a sweater is knit by hand, it can be tailored specifically to the person who will wear it. I take measurements constantly when knitting a sweater by hand. First, I take very exact measurements of the person, lots of them. I took a knitting class with Shirley Paden once and she handed out a measurement chart to be filled in when knitting a sweater for someone; it contained 17 separate measurements you needed to properly fit a sweater. (If you are interested, these charts are included in her excellent book, Knitwear Design Workshop: A comprehensive guide to handknits.) Then, I take many measurements of gauge. I measure gauge over all of the different stitches used in the sweater, and I take these pre- and post wet blocking and drying. Finally, I measure constantly while knitting. If the sweater is knit top down and can be tried on, I put it on the body every 2 inches or so, and consider it carefully; does it fit properly? If not, I rip and revise. If it can’t be tried on, I am fanatical abut measuring each piece frequently. When, I am done, I know it will fit. Of course, sometimes I still screw up – I am not happy with the fit of my Levenwick sweater for instance. On the whole, however, a sweater designed and hand knit for an individual will fit better than any off-the-rack piece – the same as a hand-tailored suit from a Saville Row tailor will beat any off-the-rack suit.

The comments I have made about fit apply equally well to the knitted fabric. Hand knitting does not imply that the stitches will be sloppy and uneven, and machine knitting does not guarantee a good fabric. Finishing is an area that can distinguish a hand knit, but once again, not necessarily. I am frequently appalled by the quality of finishing in manufactured knitwear. Finishing is a skill – a good hand knitter will learn excellent finishing skills. In fact, many couture knits are knit by machine but finished by hand. A couture knitwear designer knows that hand finishing, when done well, gives a much more professional look to a garment.

That said, let me say that I have seen many totally horrendous hand knit sweaters; some are truly cringe-worthy. However, this is most certainly true of storebought goods as well. I have seen tons of poorly made and poorly fitting sweaters on sale in shops. In fact, many of them seem to be made to last for only a season before they fall apart. (I think many people now expect this of their purchased clothing; when was the last time you didn’t have to resew the buttons on a new coat?) My Jill Sander sweater, on the other hand, is perfect, fits like a glove and will last for decades. My point? Both hand knit and manufactured clothing can range from the hideous to the sublime. So why do we persist with these underlying assumptions that hand knit is bad and machine knit is good?

I am particularly frustrated by the anecdote I started this post with. When a non-knitter compliments me by comparing my work to storebought, I can brush it off to ignorance of the craft. When an accomplished knitter says the same of her own handiwork, I feel that we have some way to go ourselves, as knitters, to value our skills and artisanship. (I am sure that this particular knitter was not trying to start a philosophical debate on the value of artisanship; her comments simply reflect a general societal bias – it is that bias I object to.)

As a final comment, let me say that completely apart from the quality of a garment and the skill which the knitter brings to it, a hand knit garment is made with affection, it is a gift from the heart. We all appreciate the difference between buying someone a box of cookies, and lovingly hand chopping chocolate, and beating the sugar and butter to make a batch of home made cookies. In this regard, a hand knit sweater is like a chocolate chip cookie, warm and gooey right out of the oven. Enjoy!