Monthly Archives: January 2014

Pattern Bombardment Syndrome

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Disease:  Pattern Bombardment Syndrome

Causes:
too many patterns
daily releases
internet facilitation
saturation
only so many unique things can be done with yarn and two needles

Symptoms:
Like a virus (or bipolar disorder), the disease cycles – between being completely overwhelmed with all of the fabulousness of hundreds of great patterns and wanting to knit everything, and feeling completely underwhelmed and thinking “seen that, done that”; these up-down-up-down swings can cause emotional distress.

Symptoms of Pattern Bombardment Syndrome can range from mild to severe.  Learn to recognize early warning signs:

  • spending hours on Ravelry, knitting blogs and other on-line knitting-related sites, aimlessly surfing through patterns in an increasingly apathetic manner
  • looking at a new release (say of BT or Twist Collection) and needing to sit on your hands to keep from buying 20 patterns when deep down you know that you will at the most possibly knit one of them
  • losing your knitting mojo
  • looking at a pattern and immediately calling to mind ten other patterns which are very nearly the same
  • realizing that you are subconsciously tracking which patterns make it to the top of Ravelry’s “Hot right now” page and how long they stay there for
  • catching yourself drooling while looking at knitting sites
  • spending time analyzing the effect of social media savviness on why one pattern will succeed wildly when another will not
  • waking up at 3am to see if the new spring edition of [insert online knitting mag here] has just been released; and then checking it again at 4am
  • becoming a designer fan girl
  • becoming increasingly annoyed at designer-fan-girl-dom
  • being unable to pick a new project because you have 700 items in your queue

Treatment:

  • put down the laptop and go for a walk
  • stop putting patterns in your queue
  • better yet, get rid of your queue
  • limit your time on knitting sites
  • spend more time knitting and less time thinking, talking, reading about knitting
  • spend more time doing things completely unrelated to knitting
  • stop being obsessive
  • think carefully about what you want to knit and don’t be a slavish trend follower
  • re-position yourself on the product knitter-process knitter continuum; it’s OK to shift towards one end or the other at different points in your knitting life
  • remind yourself that knitting is supposed to be fun; it’s not a competitive sport
  • design your own patterns or knit without one

Sun on Soumak

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8

Yesterday the sun was shining as we were leaving home for work so I grabbed my half-finished Soumak and asked Doug to take some photos in the sunshine.

3-IMG_8125Wow!  Can you see why I love this so much?  This is designed by Lisa Richardson for Rowan 54 and called the Soumak Scarf Wrap.  It is knit in ten colours of Rowan Fine Tweed.  Regular readers will note that I’ve made some progress since the last time I mentioned it here.

2-IMG_8130One of the especially cool things about this project is how different it looks in different lights.  I walked just a few feet away, so that I was no longer in the direct sun and this is what happened:

5-IMG_8123In the sunshine it is the warm orange and orange-tones that leap out at you; in the shade it is the cool blue and blue-tones.  Isn’t it fabulous?  Lisa Richardson, you are a colour genius!

Here are some closeups.  In the shade:

4-IMG_8122In the sun:

1-IMG_8131This makes me so happy!

Musing on fusing

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I’ve been asking for advice the past few weeks about how to finish the project I’ve been knitting for my daughter Leah.  To review for any new visitors, I have knit a rectangular panel, which measures about 13×41 inches, which has the inscription from the One Ring of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings knitted into it.  I used Quince & Co Chickadee wool, knit it in the round with stranded knitting and steeked it.  Here is a photo of the steeked and blocked piece:

12-20131228_134013My plan is to make this into the front of a pillow.  Its current shape is too long and narrow, so I would build it up on the top and the bottom and aim for a finished size of about 25×40 inches once sewn together.  I bought some beautiful silk fabric to make the back with (and also a border across top and bottom).  Since finishing the knitted portion I have been having second thoughts about whether using a silk fabric backing is a good idea, or whether I should knit the back.  I sought advice from various friends in Vancouver (where I spent my Christmas holiday) and I also asked for advice in my last post.

Both my friend Teresa (who was serendipitously also visiting Vancouver for the holidays) and my blogging friend Ann (who responded to the blog post) suggested using fusible interfacing to stiffen the fabric.  I believe this intervention was intended irregardless of whether I ended up using a knitted or silk cloth back.  Both of them felt that the knitted piece would be too flimsy to hold up in the pillow and should be reinforced.

Well, this has set me to musing about fusing, so to speak.  Here is my concern:  I knit this by stranding.  This means that there is always one strand of yarn being carried across the back of the work.  Because I intended this to be a pillow, and thus the back would not be seen, I was also not meticulous about the length of the floats, which I varied quite a bit, and are sometimes quite long.   I can’t take a photo of the back now, because I am ensconsed in business school for the weekend (I am writing this after a full day of micro-economic theory).  Here is a photo of me cutting the steek, however, in which a portion of the back is visible:

07-20131226162014I am wondering whether the fusing will fuse, not to the knitting itself but rather only to the floats that are stranded across the back.  Furthermore, as you can see in the top photo, there are two lines of text, and in between is about twelve rows or so of plain purple knitting in which I didn’t strand the yellow (there are also similar portions on the top and bottom of the panel).  These areas looked quite different from the stranded ones pre-blocking with a slightly different gauge, causing some puckering, and also a smoother texture, as you can see in the below photo which was taken pre-steeking.

03-20131226155810

In addition to wondering how the fusing will interact with the stranded fabric, I am worried that it will interact differently with the unstranded portions thus once again highlighting the distinctions between the stranded and unstranded portions that I managed to hide with a good blocking.

If anyone has experience using fusible facing on a stranded knitting project, I would love to hear from you.  Also, to Lora, thank you for your lovely comments on my last post.  I really do love the silk fabric I bought for the pillow back, and my main concern about using it is my lack of confidence and experience in sewing.  I will definitely take your advice and consult a professional seamstress before I make any decisions.

Well, I will stop musing about fusing now, and go back to musing about the Income Elasticity of Demand.  Sigh….

Rite of passage – the steek

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In the end, after all my worries, steeking turned out to be rather anticlimactic. For those who haven’t been following, I have been knitting a birthday project for my daughter, Leah, which is a panel with the transcription from the One Ring (from The Lord of the Rings) knitted into it:5-20131219_102204I am knitting it in the round using two-handed stranded knitting with transcription charts provided for free on Ravelry by Diana Stafford.  In the above photo, taken a few weeks ago, the fabric on the left is intended to be used as a backing for the pillow (more on that below).

I used the method provided by Kate Davies in her wonderful steeking tutorial, which involves using a crochet reinforcement.  First, I crocheted up one side of the cut line (using a brown yarn for the reinforcing):

01-20131226134628Then, I turned the piece around and crocheted back up the other side of the cut line.

02-20131226155635

Here is the piece with the reinforcing done, just before cutting:

03-20131226155810I must confess here to a few minutes of panic at this point.  I wavered between the part of me who had faith in Kate’s directions and in the thousands of knitters calmly steeking garments for centuries, and the part of me convinced that the reinforcements wouldn’t hold and that the whole thing would unravel.  Emma, while in the midst of a terrible flu, provided both photographic services and calm advice (“Just cut the damn thing already, so that I can go to bed!”)

The two rows of crochet lean away from each other and when pulled slightly apart, reveal a line of ladders which are the bits actually cut.  OK, here goes nothing:

05-2013122616134506-2013122616141707-20131226162014It was fairly dark and rainy in Vancouver that day so the photos are not so great, but perhaps you can tell how intensely I was concentrating on the task:

08-20131226162058And, voila, steek done!  And not a hint of unravelling:

09-20131226162148I then popped this baby into a sink and gave it a good soak, pressed it between layers of towels and stomped on it, stretched it out, pinned it and let it dry, and still not a hint of unravelling.  Ain’t steeking grand!

And, behold, the blocked piece:

12-20131228_134013Isn’t it just fabulous?  I really love this.

It is worth every bit of trouble it took to knit.  (Mostly, just that it demands you pay attention to what you are doing.  It is not a TV knit.)  Here is a small portion of one page of the chart:

04-20131226160717There are 6 full-size pages.  You can see that I annotated all of the background areas by counting out the number of stitches in advance.  It still took lots of concentration to knit.

Unfortunately, it was at this point that problems set in.  My initial plan was to use the fabric to both make the pillow slightly wider (by sewing long strips above and below the knitted piece) and then to back it.  The blocked knitted piece measures about 13″x41″ (which makes it pretty long for a pillow; definitely not a standard size).  I had planned on aiming for a completed pillow size of about 25″x40″.  I am not a seamstress and have little sewing experience.  I was on holiday in Vancouver, and my sewing machine back home in England, so I had hoped to borrow both a sewing machine and some sewing expertise.  I talked to a number of people who had more knowledge of sewing than I do, and each of them thought that sewing the knitted fabric to the silk fabric would not be an easy task, and that the different tensions between them would lead to problems with pulling and stretching.  Each of them had the same advice:  knit the pillow back.  As Teresa put it: “You know how to knit.  You feel comfortable knitting.  Sewing this makes you uncomfortable. Stick with what you are good at.”

I have lots of extra yarn, plenty to knit the pillow back (of course, the extra yarn was at home in England).  In the end, I decided to stew on the matter for a bit.  This means that Leah did not get her birthday present.   I brought it back home with me, and am now busily debating how I should finish it.  Should I risk sewing these two fabrics together?  Should I consult a seamstress and pay to have a professional do it?  Should I admit that the different tensions will likely lead to the knitted side stretching over time even if I can solve the sewing problem?  Or should I just knit the back?  And if I do that, how should I do it?  Should I still knit panels to make it wider? (13″x40″ is too long and narrow.)  Should I knit a border panel?  And how to fasten it?  Zipper, buttons, envelope closing?  Too many questions, lots of indecision on my part.  (I would welcome advice.)

In the meantime, back here in the UK, it is stormy and rainy and flooding all over the place.  I have b-school this weekend, so very little knitting is likely to occur over the next week (or blogging for that matter).  I hope that all of my UK readers stay dry, and all in North America keep warm this week.

PS – I asked Doug for advice on what to name this post.  This is what he came up with:

  • Steek with me, baby!
  • Steeky fingers
  • It’s better than a poke in the eye with a sharp steek
  • Jose Jalapeno with a steek  (with apologies to Jeff Dunham)
  • Steek figures
  • Steek to your guns
  • Steek it to the man!
  • How to steek to a New Year’s Resolution
  • Just cut the damn thing already, so that I can go to bed!

Why do I bother to ask?