This is the February Scarf, designed by Beth Weaver, that I am knitting for Leah. I made Leah pose for this just as she got off the bus from a week-long ski trip to the Italian Alps. Literally. She hadn’t even walked in the door yet. Not only had she just spent a week skiing all day long every day, but then she had stayed up all night, on a bus, with 50 other girls and a bunch of teachers driving from Italy to the UK. (That’s right – they don’t fly them to Italy; they take a bus.) So, this photo is designed only to show off the length of this almost-finished project and not to be a particularly stylish photo of either scarf or daughter.
Since the Scarf isn’t blocked yet, it is hard to see how lovely it is from the above photo, so here is a close-up so you can see how great it’s going to look:
I have about 8 inches or so left to knit and then I am done. As you can see, it is pretty long, and will be even more so when it’s been blocked. The funny thing is, the pattern is written for 6 skeins of Quince & Co Osprey wool. I am knitting it with just 5 skeins, so you can imagine how long it is supposed to be. I think 5 skeins is plenty long enough.
So, that is the almost-finished. Here is the barely-started:
Oh, be still my heart! Isn’t it beautiful! This is the beginning of a sleeve of the Exeter jacket, designed by Michele Wang, in Brooklyn Tweed Shelter.
So, which one do you think I want to be knitting today? The almost-finished, with at most 3 hours of knitting remaining:
Or the barely-started, with about 3,729 hours of knitting remaining?
I finished knitting my Venetian Audrey sweater this week. Unfortunately, since Emma now lives half way around the world from me (and since no one else around here could possibly fit into one of Emma’s sweaters) it will have to go unmodelled at present.
This is a shame because this is definitely one of those sweaters that you have to see on to appreciate. I am going to stick it in a box and mail it to Emma and she has promised to photograph it and post up some modelled shots once she receives it. The pattern is Audrey, by Kim Hargreaves, but as I have explained in previous posts I have substantially reworked the pattern to both make it smaller and to knit it in the round. The yarn is the fabulous Madelinetosh Tosh DK, in the colour called Venetian, which is very hard to photograph. The light today wasn’t the best for capturing it as these photos make it look more purple than it is. The colour is actually like that of deep, dark, perfectly ripe cherries; absolutely delicious and rich and a very deep pink shot through with black.
There are some great shaping details, which can be tricky to execute in the ribbing, but have a big payoff. In the above photo, you can see the shaping in the bust increases on the bodice and also the great detailing on the raglan sleeve and body shaping.
Now for some technical details. If these don’t interest you, skip down to the next photo.
I had to do a lot of fooling around with the pattern to get the ribbing to work out right when I joined the sleeves to start the yoke, and also to get the raglan shaping right. For the body, I cast off 6 stitches each side of the side markers; the crucial factor was that I wanted to end up with one purl stitch on each side of the back and front. I also wanted this for the sleeves (that is, a single purl on either side after the bind off) but realized that to do this, I would either need to cast off too few or too many stitches on the sleeves, so that they wouldn’t match up with the body when it came time to graft the underarms. I had worried before (and commented on the fact previously on the blog) that perhaps I had made the sleeves too narrow. However, when making the sleeve increases, I was cognizant of wanting to end up with the K2P2 ribbing intact all the way around the sleeve, which meant that I had to make increases in groups of 4. I had made 8 increases, which didn’t seem quite enough, but 12 seemed too many.
When it came time to join the yoke, however, I realized that I had not accounted for the bound off stitches under the arm. In order to bind off roughly the same as I had for the body (six each side of center, or 12 at each armhole), and still end up with a single purl on each side, I needed to have made more sleeve increases. So, I ripped out 6 inches from each sleeve, and reknit them, adding two more sets of increases for a total of 10 sets (63 stitches). I was then able to bind off the center stitch, plus 5 to each side, making a total of 11 stitches bound off for each sleeve. Note that this had the side effect of solving the issue of the sleeves being too tight, by adding an additional 4 stitches to each sleeve. Then I joined the sleeves to the body, placing a marker at each join, so that there were four markers, showing the positions of the raglan lines. Since both the body pieces and the sleeves were edged with a single purl stitch, once they were combined, I had a beautiful K2P2 all the way around.
I then made the raglan shaping as follows:
Row 1: * sl marker, P1,K2, P1, P2tog, work in rib as established to 6 stitches before marker, P2tog tbl, P1, K2, P1 *, repeat from * to * three times. (This makes a decrease on each side of each raglan, offset by 4 stitches.)
Row 2: work all stitches as set
I worked these two rows 8 times, and then four times making the decreases only on the sleeve edge of the raglan edges. This left me with 160 stitches.
Aren’t those raglan shapings beautiful? The lace is knit separately in a long strip. It is a garter stitch lace pattern with an alternating stitch count (which accounts for the gently scalloped edges). It has a 12 row repeat. I found that one pattern repeat of the lace, when slightly stretched, fit across 8 stitches of the ribbed yoke, also slightly stretched. Since I had 160 stitches around the yoke after the raglan shaping, the math worked out perfectly! I made 20 repeats of the lace pattern. The only finishing required was to sew the lace around the bodice, and sew the stitches under the arm. And voila!
The only remaining question is whether to block it. I am thinking no – I don’t normally block ribbing, and as this whole sweater is ribbed, I’m not sure it needs a block. I think that I shall just lightly steam the lace, pack it in a box, and ship it to Emma.
Yesterday, I thought that I would do some swatching for my new sweater. I am going to knit the lovely pattern, Exeter, designed by Michele Wang:
copyright Jared Flood/ Brooklyn Tweed
I am going to use the same yarn and colour as in the pattern, Shelter by Brooklyn Tweed in Fossil. You can probably tell by the title of the post that there is a joke (of sorts) involved here. First, I will explain what a swatch is and why you need it, then I will provide a set-up and the punchline.
Part 1: The swatch
Now, we all know that in order to get a sweater that fits, you have to have the right gauge. The sweater is designed to a particular gauge – that is, it is designed so that x number of stitches and x number of rows measure out to a given size. Traditionally gauges are given for a square measuring 4″ (10cm). Exeter is designed for a gauge of 20×28; this means that a 4″ square section of fabric will have 20 stitches across and 28 rows. Normally a gauge will be given for stockinette stitch, but might be given in a pattern stitch. Gauge is nearly always determined based on a washed and blocked sample.
Since different knitters knit with different tensions, the only way to make sure your sweater fits as the designer intended is to knit up a sample (called a swatch) on a particular size knitting needle, then wash and block it, let it dry and measure it carefully. If your gauge is too narrow (ie, more stitches or rows than called for) then you must knit another swatch with a larger size needle (ie, a needle with a bigger width). If your gauge is too wide (ie, less stitches or rows than called for) than you must try again with a smaller sized needle. Each of these measurements must be taken on a swatch that has been washed and blocked and dried.
An experienced knitter will be able to adjust a pattern even if their gauge is not quite right. Also, sometimes, you might hit the stitch gauge but not the row gauge (this happens to me all the time). Then, you have to make a judgement as to which is the more important one to get right (which depends on the pattern) and make adjustments as you knit. These kinds of manipulations are tricky, and take both experience and math skills. Obviously, the best solution is to match the given gauge as carefully as possible; then, you can follow the directions as written. (Note that you may still need to adjust the pattern – for example, the sleeves should fit you, and therefore you need to knit to your arm length. However, hitting the right gauge will save you lots of headaches.)
Part 2: The set-up
Now we come to an interesting problem. Sometimes, you need to knit quite a few swatches before you hit the right gauge. Notice that the most important element of the swatch is to identify it with the needle size it was knit with. While the swatch is on your needle, it is easy to tell what needle size the swatch represents. Once you take it off the needle, the problems begin. Let’s say that you end up knitting 4 swatches, one each with a US size 4,5,6, and 7. Now, you throw them all in the basin, soak them, blot them between towels, block them, let them air dry and then carefully measure. And you’re in luck – one of them exactly matches the gauge! Yes! But which one was it? Is this the swatch you knit with the size 5 needle? Or, perhaps, you somehow mixed them up in the process….
I cannot tell you how many times I have knit a swatch and then come back to it and can’t remember what size needle I knit it on. This is especially problematic if you come back to swatches weeks or months after they were made, or when you have multiple swatches of the same yarn. I tried attaching notes to the samples with safety pins, but this solution isn’t the best either. Notes get lost; they must be removed when washing. Many times, I am forced to re-knit a swatch just to be absolutely certain. (Of course, as with many things, keeping very careful notes is best; many knitters record all of their swatch measurements on Ravelry on their project page. Unfortunately, I am often too caught up in the moment to do so; I am convinced I will remember everything and record it later, which is generally a bad idea.)
Now, when one is faced with a knitting dilemma, the answer can usually be found on Ravelry. A few months ago, I was reading a thread in which a knitter was addressing this very problem. She said that she had been taught a great tip by the knitting designer Ysolda Teague. Ysolda told her to knit the needle size into the swatch. Let’s say that you were knitting a swatch in stockinette stitch. You knit a series of purl bumps into a corner of the swatch – one bump for each size. (Separate them out with a knit stich in between to make them easy to count.) Thus, if you are swatching with a size 5 needle, you will knit 5 purl bumps into the right side of the fabric. You will then know exactly what size needle you knit the swatch with, no matter how much time has gone by or how many swatches you’ve knit. (Please note that you need to be consistent with units – either use US sizes or metric sizes consistently. If using metric sizes, you can use a purl bump for each mm, and a yarn over for each 1/4 mm; thus, a 3.5mm needle would need three purl bumps followed by two yarn overs.) Wow! A system! A pretty clever system at that!
I knit the first swatch for Exeter using a US size 7 needle. I carefully (and very smugly) knit a series of seven purl bumps in one corner of the swatch. Even before washing it, I could tell tell that I would need to try a larger needle, so I went to my box of needles to pull out a size 8 needle to knit the next swatch. I was feeling very pleased with myself and my new system. Never again would I be stuck not knowing which swatch was knit with which needle.
Part 3: The punch line
I use circular knitting needles almost exclusively. Unlike straight needles, which usually have the needle size printed on the cap, for the majority of circular needles the only way to tell the size of the needle is to use a needle gauge. A needle gauge is a tool which has labelled holes in it of different sizes. A size 6 needle will fit into the hole marked size 6, but will not fit into the hole marked size 5. I am always losing my needle gauges. They are never where I need them to be. My solution is to have lots of them. I try to always keep one in the box with my circular needles, and one in the box with my DPNs, and one in my knitting notions kit, and one in each project bag. I opened up the box with my circular needles, reached for the needle gauge and found a size 8 needle. I grabbed both the needle and the gauge and ran upstairs to knit.
I then started knitting my second swatch, very smugly knitting 8 purl bumps into a corner of the swatch. Now for some unknown reason, I picked up the needle I had used to knit the size 7 swatch, and idly inserted it into the needle gauge I had just carried upstairs. But, horror of horrors, it was not a size 7 needle but a size 6! Oh no, I couldn’t have made such a basic mistake; I was sure of it. So, I tried the needle in the first needle gauge and it was a size 7. No, this could not be! The very same needle registered as a size 6 on one gauge and a size 7 on another! I frantically ran around the house collecting needle gauges. I found five (though I’m sure there are others scattered around):
The top two are ancient Susan Bates gauges with US measurements, the third one is a Boye gauge (also US), followed by a Tailorform gauge from Canada (with metric needle sizes and centimeters on one side, and US and Canadian knitting needle sizes and inches on the other), and the bottom one is a KnitPro gauge with both metric and US measurements. The needle that I used for the swatch is the blue one in the right hand corner below:
This is an ancient needle, you can see that the blue enamel is wearing off. I have no idea how old it is or which make it is. However, this needle registers as a size 6 on the top three needle gauges and a size 7 on the bottom two. Could it be that the US -produced needle gauges use slightly different measurements? To check, I grabbed the needle on the top left of the photo. This is a fairly new HiyaHiya interchangeable needle, which is still clearly stamped “US size 7, 4.5mm”. I checked this needle against all of the gauges and it clearly registers as a 7 on all of the gauges. So, perhaps this is a problem with the blue needle. It is old, and possible worn. I decided to check another new needle, the interchangeable KnitPro needle tip on the bottom left. It registers as a size 6 on all of the gauges, except the Boye gauge, on which it is a size 5. This divides the gauges along a different line than the blue needle. Now, I start to pull my hair out.
Clearly, THE JOKE IS ON ME! Here I am, smug as can be because I have found a fool-proof solution to figuring out which swatch was knit on which size needle. But, it turns out, I have no idea which needle is which in the first place! My seven purl bumps on the bottom of the swatch are rendered meaningless.
As an afterward: I poured this whole sorry tale out to Doug. His solution: he went online and ordered me a micrometer, a precision instrument for measuring the diameter of a round object. I throw myself on the mercy of the engineers.
My two great hobbies in life are knitting and reading (probably not in that order). When I heard that Nikol Lohr had written a book called “Literary Knits: 30 patterns inspired by favorite books”, I knew I would like it. Nikol is the designer of the Carnaby Skirt, which I blogged about here. Carnaby is an excellent pattern. I probably would have bought Nikol’s book even without it’s literary references. Then, I began to read some reviews and see some of the designs, and this went right to the top of my must-buy list.
If you follow these sorts of things, you can hardly not have noticed some of the most-talked about designs from the book. The Daisy Cloche, which Nikol wears on the cover, is one of them. Designed, of course, for Daisy from The Great Gatsby, it is not only fabulous but also completely Daisy, if you know what I mean. Other designs, which I’ve seen discussed all over Ravelry and the internet, include the Lyra Hood (from The Golden Compass), the Elizabeth Bennet Summer Blouse (Pride and Prejudice), the Gregor Sweater (The Metamorphosis), and the Edmund Crown (The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe). These are all amazing, in particular Lyra’s Hood and Gregor’s sweater (the latter which can only be described as Kafka-esque). I don’t want to post photos of every pattern here. Please, go see them. (Here is a Ravelry link to the book, which includes photos of all the patterns; or run a search for the pattern on the internet.) Better yet, buy the book.
For this post, I wanted to focus on a few designs in the book that had a particular resonance for me, and which I hadn’t seen discussed as much in other forums. When I saw this photo, of the Meme Shawl, I promptly ordered the book:
I’m not even that much of a shawl person; but I love this shawl. Even more I love its inspiration. Nikol based this on a memory from One Hundred Years of Solitude. She writes “I very distinctly remembered Remedios the Beauty ascending through a hole in the bathroom roof after her bath, surrounded and carried off by a cloud of yellow butterflies.” She was then surprised, on re-reading the book, to realize that this memory is false: she had somehow combined a number of beautiful images from the book in her mind, and created this visual memory. Before I switched to linguistics, I was a Latin American Area Studies major at Barnard College, and I spent a few years awash in magical realism. Nikol writes: “I’ve unravelled my misrememberance to produce an airy butterfly eyelet shawl.” I think her description of how she unwittingly combined bits of the story and created a visual memory, and then used it to design this shawl, is a homage to the whole concept of magical realism. I love it. Not only that, but the shawl is lovely.
Another design which really struck my fancy is also a shawl, but is completely different in its style. This is the Jane Eyre Shawl:
I love this. And I love it in a totally different way from the Meme Shawl. This shawl is plain. It is plain in a way that is distinctly beautiful, just like Shaker furniture is beautiful. It has great shaping details around the shoulders, based on Faroese designs, and a pretty lace pattern, but the thing that makes it beautiful is its simplicity. This shawl is for lovers of wool; real wool, unadorned, undyed. It is practical, warm, strong, and has endurance. Where the Meme shawl is ethereal, the Jane Eyre shawl is earthy.
One of my absolute favorite characters in literature is Anne Shirley. I spent countless hours as a child curled up with Anne, and many years later, I spent countless hours curled up with Emma and Leah, reading her adventures out loud. When I told Leah that there was a design in this book based on the dress Matthew gave Anne, her first comment was “You mean the brown one with the puffed sleeves?” No lover of Anne could forget that dress. Nikol has made it into a top (which could easily be converted into a dress by most any knitter of adequate skill).
And, of course, when you are knitting it for your own Anne, you should include the ribbons:
The men’s sweaters included in the volume are really interesting, and out of the ordinary. I especially like the sweater she designed for Ishmael. It is a fairly typical fisherman’s sweater, as befits the famous whaler, but it is knit in Malabrigos Rios, an astoundingly soft, fluffy, luxurious wool, in a brilliant colour:
It also has very cool and unusual shaping details in the shoulders, which you can just make out in the photo above. I love the model as well, who does not resemble the ubiquitous male sweater model.
I will end by showing the Sydney Carton Cowl from a Tale of Two Cities.
I will admit that, by simply looking at this photo, you might not think this cowl to be particularly fabulous. However, just like Madame Defarge’s knitting, this cowl is knitted with a secret code. Nikol has created a knitted version of Morse code, and then knitted a message into the cowl. She has included two versions – with evocative quotes for Madame Defarge and for Sydney Carton. The former says “Madame Defarge knitted with nimble fingers and steady eyebrows and saw nothing.” I am enough of a nerd to think this is completely awesome. I love this!
I have never met Nikol Lohr and am unlikely ever to do so. But this book makes me think I’d like her. If you are like me, and the first thing you want to do when entering someone’s house is to look at their bookshelves, you’d probably get a kick out of this book too.
bazinga – 1. A catchy phrase to accompany your clever pranks. As popularized by Sheldon Cooper (The Big Bang Theory). 2. A short post highlighting something that Emma and Kelly think is freaking fabulous.
I love flashmobs. Today, I came across a link to a knitting flashmob:
I defy you to look at it and not smile. The accompanying text on youtube says, in part:
“Since 1955, Loes Veenstra has knitted over 550 sweaters and stored them in her home on the 2nd Carnissestraat in Rotterdam. The sweaters have never been worn. Until today. […] Loes and the fruit of her decades of knitting were ‘discovered’ by Museum Rotterdam. The museum has put her sweaters on display as part of the exhibition ´Over leven in Carnisse´ (Life in Carnisse), on show until January 18, 2013 in Gemaal op Zuid (Pretorialaan 141, Rotterdam).”
The text also contains links to the exhibition and a book about Loes’ sweaters.
Everyone in the flashmob is wearing one of her handknitted, never-before-worn sweaters. It is a gallery of styles from the past decades (yes! I remember the 80s!) shown off in style and good cheer.
