This morning Doug and I went out for a walk and came upon a field of poppies:
These were blooming wild, and bursting with colour, a lovely pop of red. It reminded me that two years ago yesterday, we came upon a field of gorgeous pale pink poppies, which I blogged about it this post.
Red or pink, wild or cultivated, there’s something magical about a field of poppies.
Remember the Dyemonds tee? The last time I wrote about it was in this post from March 27th, and I had gotten this far:
I had been zipping along on this, and was also writing about how intuitive the pattern was, and how fast it was going. And then… I decided to knit the sleeves. Cue ominous music: Dum-da-dum-dum! This is where things got dicey.
I decided to knit the sleeves at this point for two reasons. First, if one doesn’t save the sleeves for last, one gets all of the messy (or boring) stuff done first, and then sails on to the end of the sweater. Second, I wanted to try to match the colours of the sleeves (more or less) to the body. Due to the nature of the Spincycle yarn (long colour shifts and extreme differences from skein to skein), I wanted to do this early on while I still had enough yarn to do a proper match instead of getting to the end and finding that the only yarn remaining didn’t allow me to match up the sleeves. As an example of the colour matching problem, see here my two remaining skeins of the yarn:
So, I put the sleeve stitches on my trusty DPNs (double pointed needles), picked up the stitches under the arm, and tried to knit the first row. I tried to knit the first row for about 3 hours, pulling it out and starting again, and reading the instructions over and over and over again. I basically hit a conceptual wall. It was a case of Death by Sleeve. I ended up throwing the project into the naughty corner, and proceeded to finish Doug’s beautiful Ursula waistcoat, and knit the Tin Roof tee, before I gave myself a strict talking to, and dragged out the Dyemonds tee for a second attempt at the sleeves. And voila!
Two sleeves! They fit nicely too:
There are two types of problems with the sleeves. The first is conceptual. I had a hard time with the instructions. I am pretty sure this is my fault and not the designer’s, but I really struggled. She utilises two markers: a BOR (beginning of row) and a BOC (beginning of chart), something which I think ended up confusing me. Mostly, however, the problem is that the patterns don’t match at the underarm of the sleeve (which is a natural effect of the pattern and the way that sleeves work), but I couldn’t get my head around it. And, of course, no one ever shows you photos of these things. So, in case you plan to knit one of these, here is a photo of the underpart of the sleeve:
The pattern doesn’t match along the inside seam of the arm, which makes sense because you are decreasing in order to make the sleeve fit. But it also doesn’t match on either side of the underarm, in other words the stitches which you pick up at the underarm, do not flow from the already established pattern of the sweater body. Of course, the pattern does flow from the already established pattern on all of the visible parts of the sleeve, just not at the underarm and inner sleeve. To see this, look at the below photo of the sleeve from the front. The green stitch marker is the same one from the photo above, so it helps you visualise the pattern placing.
See how gorgeous this part of the sleeve is? The pattern integrates beautifully. That’s because all of the messiness is hidden away and never gets seen unless you walk around with your arms above your head, and point to the offending bit saying “Look! It doesn’t match!” For some reason, however, I really had trouble with conceptualising the way the pattern behaved at the underarm. Once I figured it out with the first sleeve, I no longer had this issue on the second sleeve. That, however, brings me to the second problem with the sleeves: doing stranded knitting on double pointed needles is really fiddly and hard to do. This was equally as fiddly on the second sleeve as on the first. So, once I got my head around what I had to do to knit the pattern, I had to get my fingers to sort out what they had to do to actually knit the damn thing! I am telling you, this really was death by sleeve and came close to being frogged. Now, all I have left is easy knitting. So I am hoping that the rest of this tee will move along at a jaunty pace.
The colours in this look very different depending on the light and it’s difficult to capture. Sometimes the oranges and yellows pop and it looks very warm, and sometimes the reds and pinks pop and it is more cool. This photo is pushing the exposure a bit but I like it:
If you are wondering about the results of the poll from earlier in the week, I will report back soon. I think I’ve figured out which sweater kit I will ask for, and am now thinking about colour. I hope you had a lovely weekend!
I won a prize!
I entered a prize competition to celebrate Linda Marveng’s 8th year anniversary of her Ravelry group. And I won first prize! I am super excited.
The first prize is a kit for the yarn to make one of four sweater designs by Linda. I get to choose the pattern and the colour of the yarn, which is being supplied by Hillesvåg Ullvarefabrikk. (If you are interested in the colours available, please check out the links in Linda’s blog post about the competition.) The four patterns are:
Yaelle:
Bubala:
Caravay:
Neva:
I am about 75% certain which pattern I will choose, but I thought it might be fun to see what you think, so here is a poll:
I am excited about this prize for a number of reasons. First, I won a prize! That is cool! I was having a super bad day yesterday so it was really nice to find this out at the end of the day. Second, I am really interested in trying this new (to me) yarn. Third, these are fantastic patterns and I really look forward to knitting one of these beauties. And last, I have been watching Linda’s design career for a number of years now and continue to be impressed with the quality and originality of her work. I featured one of her designs, Cable Round Sweater, in a Pattern Radar post from August 2014, another design, the gorgeous Kathe Cardigan, in a Pattern Radar post from August 2016, and a third design, Cahal, in my February 2018 Pattern Radar post.
A nice summery linen top just in time for summer; how often do I manage that? Usually I suffer from seasonal displacement with my knitting, but this one is timed rather well.
I liked this pattern, Tin Roof by yamagara (Bernice Lim), as soon as I saw it. What I liked most was that it was a pattern that was made to be fooled around with – not enough of one colour? No worries! Want it longer, shorter, wider, narrower? Customisation is easy!
And best of all, it allowed me to use up some yarn in deep stash. I purchased a bunch of skeins of Quince & Co Sparrow years ago when I saw them sitting in a pretty basket in Loop London. The colours appealed to me so much and the linen was really crisp and sharp. I then discovered that I really didn’t like knitting with Sparrow – for various reasons, but mostly because the knitted fabric torques a lot – and it sat in my stash for years. I thought that the mechanics of this pattern would minimise torque, so I dove in and cast on.
The main body of the top is knitted in two pieces – from side-to-side starting at the sleeves and working towards the middle. I cast on 81 stitches for the sleeve caps (as for the size 48), and then cast on 42 stitches each side for the back and front (thus 15 stitches more than called for in the pattern on each side). If you are neither very tiny nor want to show lots of skin, make sure you cast on more than the pattern calls for! I then knit 32 rows for each of the six stripes, thus ending up with a size 46, giving about 3.5″ of ease.
The pattern has some pretty features – I especially like the line of cables that goes across the shoulders. It also has a good drape and a cool, high neckline (nice when the sun is shining if you burn like me). These shapings are integrated in a very easy manner, so there is no finishing required at the neck or sleeves.
I tried knitting the bottom part of the sweater as in the pattern (reverse stockinette, followed by ribbing) but I really didn’t like the way it looked (I blogged about it here, with photos). So, I ripped it out, and re-knit it in stockinette with the right side facing out. I also decided that I didn’t like the ribbing at the hips – so I put in a turned hem. I knitted down to the length I wanted, purled a row (the turn row), knitted 7 more rows and then bound off. I then turned up the hem and sewed it in place. I think it gives it a nice, neat edge, and I am hoping that the weight of it will help keep the torqueing to a minimum.
I also repeated the six colours of the block stripes in this bottom section – two rows of each and off-set so as not to be symmetrical. I like this (although it significantly increased the number of ends I had to weave in last night).
It’s a quiet, grey Sunday here, but yesterday was glorious and has renewed my faith in June. I plan to spend the rest of the day wrestling some very problematic sleeves into shape (more on that next week). Take care!
