Happy New Year! This year has sure gotten off to a rocky start. (This post, I imagine you will be happy to hear, is all about knitting, and not about the rocky start.)
I had a big work project due this past week, and with the stress of it hanging over my head, not to mention the very long hours of work involved, I had precious little time for knitting over the break. It’s so sad, too, because I usually get a lot of knitting done during the Christmas/New Year break, and often start some new projects at that time. However, I have managed to make some progress on Doug’s vest.
What you might not get from the above photo is the sheer amount of angst, and winging it, that went into the last 6 inches or so of this project. It is my first time knitting a steeked garment, so I really have no set concept in my head about how it all works once you reach the armhole stage, much less any muscle memory to call on. I am really knitting on instinct here.
I am using Kate Davies Ursula Cardigan as the basis for this project. However, the pattern is for a woman’s cardigan, and I am knitting a man’s waistcoat, so I am creating all of the shaping as I go. It is really rather nerve-wracking. Here you can see how I cast off at the armholes, and created a steek for the armscythes:
The questions I have been battling with are: how many stitches to cast off at the underarm? How many to bind off as I shape the armscythe? How much of a slope do I need? When do I start the decreases at the neck? How deep should the v-neck be? How many sets of decreases to make? At what interval? How wide do the shoulders need to be? Do I need more steeks at the shoulders/back? How do I put in some shoulder shaping? And all of this is in addition to the fact that I will have to CUT THE STEEKS eventually and not have a heart attack.
I am a scribbler: I write down everything. I have been scribbling little drawings of vests and calculations everywhere – no piece of paper is safe.
I find this example especially funny because this piece of paper also contains scribbles from a class I was teaching. I teach executive MBA students. In the bottom right hand corner of the lower page are some questions I scribbled down during a class. A student was speaking, and these are questions I wrote down to ask her. It says: “What is it that you still need to learn? What does skill look like?” Hmm…I was trying to get my students to reflect, but at the moment it also sounds like a good reflection for me, and very relevant to the subject of this post. I’m going to let these questions percolate around for a bit. Maybe I’ll come up with some interesting answers.
While I am still not sure how my calculations will work for the finished garment, I think it is starting to look okay. Below is a photo where I have folded up the partially knitted garment along the steek lines, so that you can see the right front with the armscythe on the left of the photo and the neckline decreases on the right.
I am reassured by the fact that it looks reasonably similar to the right front of a v-neck garment, rather than, for example, like a sleeve. And while I have fretted tons about how deep to make the armholes, they look reasonably like armholes:
Keep knitting everyone. (Or whatever else it is that keeps you sane and happy.) Coming soon: the steek!
