Ruthless Knitting Archive

Pattern: My own, if you can call a 36-stitch brioche repeat a “pattern”
Size: 8 inches wide and 68 inches long
Yarn: Various Mountain Colors Bearfoot millends in unidentified colorways; black alpaca of unknown manufacture. Both yarns held double.
Yardage: No idea
Yarn Source: A shop in Montana; a sweater from my mother that I frogged
Needles: US size 7
Gauge: 18 stitches over 4 inches
Notes: I don’t have a whole lot to say about this one except that I’m glad it’s finished. Scarves are not my favorite thing to knit, though they are awfully nice to have.

I tried to arrange the colors from reds to blues in an order that made sense visually, which was difficult toward the middle because it wasn’t always possible to tell which color was going to predominate in a particular colorway until I began knitting it up. And I wasn’t about to rip anything out, since the only way I know how to fix a problem in brioche is to tink back to it.

I like the strong ribbed look that brioche stitch gives to the scarf, as well as the cushy texture it creates. The scarf is very long and very warm, and it will no doubt be just perfect with my puffy black coat when the depths of winter return. For now, I shall hang it in the closet to await its destiny.

In other news, I am still in finishing-things-up mode, with about 15 inches to go on Clementine and another three rounds to do on the Tedium Bathmat. I hope to have another finished object (or two?) by Monday.

Spring has sprung here in Green Bay, and I couldn’t be more pleased about it. Usually, our neighbors’ bulbs start to come up long before ours do, so when I noticed sprouts in their yards during my run yesterday, I figured that I’d still have to wait a while for anything to happen in ours. This time of year, I like to walk around the house about once a day, peering at the ground for signs of new life. I had done this the day before and found nothing, but look what was there to greet me yesterday:

They are little, but they still count.

Since the weather has taken a turn for the better and I’ve had the doors open for two days, I feel rejuvenated. I’m no longer plagued by restless late-winter dissatisfaction. I am positively bouncy. This has given me a much more patient and positive attitude toward my knitting. I have nearly finished the brioche scarf, though it seems ridiculously heavy in the now-springy weather. What possible use could I ever have for such a garment? Memories of the deep-winter temperatures fade pretty quickly from my mind, apparently.

I have also wrapped up the first half of the long-neglected Clementine Shawlette and started the second half. I even pulled out my oldest unfinished object — a cotton bathmat a la Mason-Dixon Knitting that I set aside about a year ago because I was bored with it and it hurt my wrists — and began working on it for about ten minutes every morning. I’m looking forward to finishing all three of these projects and starting a new (lightweight) sweater, but for now I am content. Thank goodness for spring.

Meanwhile, I ordered some Zephyr Wool-Silk from Sarah’s Yarns in the hope that it will work for the sleeves of the Interlacements sweater I recently described, and I couldn’t be happier with my shopping experience. Sarah’s prices on luxury yarns are unbeatable, she offers tons of shipping options, and she packed and mailed off the yarn immediately. I ordered on March 22 (in the afternoon, I think), and the yarn arrived on the 26th via the regular old U.S. Postal Service. And there was a weekend in there, people! The yarn was very nicely labeled and securely packaged to prevent its getting wet or destroyed, and Sarah included a whole bunch of color cards which will no doubt induce me to be a return customer. Sarah’s website is also excellent, with clear close-up photographs of flat and draped swatches for all the yarns. I highly recommend her shop.

As for the Zephyr — wow, is it ever nice. I swatched the laceweight held double, and it is light, bouncy, and soft as can be. It seems to be just what I was looking for.

Finally, as a potential solution to any future design dilemmas involving my attempts to counterbalance secrecy against the need to share and get input, I’ve joined Emilee and Beth in creating a private “design workshop,” which we will no doubt expand to include others in the future. I’m excited to see how that will work out.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been in an odd knitting mood, not really devoted to anything that I’m working on while simultaneously convinced that it’s not really a good idea to start something new. There are too many loose ends in my knitting life, so I want to tidy them up — except, you know, that I don’t really feel like it.

One reason I’m having this problem is that I have a few design ideas that are giving me grief. I think these are good ideas, and thus maybe I’ll want to submit them one day for publication, and therefore I shouldn’t blog about them. But that makes all the failure rather harder to put up with. The yarns are picked, the original swatches are triumphs, and then I hit a snag. I swatch and swatch until I get to the slightly bored and despairing part of the process and then I leave the projects to languish for a while.

It occurs to me that this whole deal would be easier if I could let go of the idea of publishing these not-even-in-existence-yet sweaters and just focus on creating them first. If they come out well, I can always post the patterns here for general consumption. The miniscule amounts of money I might theoretically be paid at some distant point in the future are not sufficient recompense for all the pressure I’m putting on myself to be secretive, to knit something perfect, and to do it without outside imput.

So allow me to present to you a few ideas that I’m working on.

The William Morris cardigan

Remember when I was all fired up about William Morris? (No? See this entry.) Well, I have an image in my head of a lightweight cardigan with a panel of Morris-inspired Fair Isle in the upper center of the back, plain fronts with wide Fair Isle button bands, and three-quarter sleeves that end in sewn-on Fair Isle Cuffs. This is how far I am toward its realization:

I like this panel a lot, though the design requires some tweaking. The next task is to figure out how to inset it into a plain piece of knitting created at an entirely different gauge. This step is giving me some trouble. I am not out of ideas yet, but I’m temporarily out of patience, so this has been lolling about in my drawer for a while.

The fatigue sweater

I’ve also decided that I want to create a sweater with the type of styling that I found described on the Internet as a “fatigue sweater,” or what L.L. Bean calls a “Commando Henley” (tee-hee):

My idea is to do something a bit different — I’ll lose the fabric patches, change the ribbing to a more subtle vertical pattern, make the collar shallower and wider, and add waist shaping for a more feminine look. I’m also considering doing a slightly different male version of the sweater. Here is what I have so far:

I really like both of these swatches. The Mountain Colors wool is just fantastic, with a wheaty color that I have been craving (it’s better than the picture), a really soft hand, and great stitch definition. I only bought one ball, though, and I’m not sure I’m willing to spring for enough for a whole sweater. The New England Highland yarn is much more of a crunchy traditional wool, but the color is amazing, as are all the colors in this line and its companion two-ply, New England Shetland. It would do nicely for a male version of the sweater.

I got stuck at the next step: working out the neckline. I was unable to find any patterns with the kind of neckline I wanted, so I’ve been inventing it. This is version 2.0, and there are still some hurdles to jump (aside from knitting the other side, doing the shoulder shaping on the side I have finished, and blocking it).

The biggest problem is that I’m just not sure how to finish off the edge of the neckline. If I have the slipped-stitch, buttoned portion in the middle, an angled portion up to the shoulder, and a straight portion across the back of the neck, how do I tie all those parts together without making the whole thing look too busy or bulky? The traditional fatigue sweater usually has a collar at that point, but I don’t think it will work in this design. Also, I suspect that the whole collar needs to be stockinette (with the slipped stitch edging to keep it from rolling) rather than patterned, because the patterning makes it look busy. I suppose I need to start again here. I am already fatigued.

Since I’ve reached an impasse on both of these projects, I started some other things. I have half of a brioche scarf done in black alpaca and various shades of Mountain Colors sock yarn. It’s pretty, but I had trouble getting a decent picture.

I also have a small pile of swatches — my refuge when all else seems too boring or too difficult and I won’t give myself permission to start something new.

The good news about these swatches is that they’ve done their job: they have inspired ideas for two sweaters to be made from stash yarn. I am now planning to combine the Interlacements Tokyo with some Zephyr Wool-Silk in Basil, which I ordered yesterday from Sarah’s Yarns, to create a baseball shirt-styled sweater — something very light and soft, with raglan seams, hems at the edges, and three-quarter sleeves. I think the sleeves should be solid and the body variegated.

The Golden Siam swatch is making me think of a longish tunic with a boatneck, slightly flared sleeves (possibly three-quarter), and thick brown and blue horizontal stripes. I am not sure yet if that will be a flattering and elegant garment, as I hope, or a garment that will make me look wide and lumpy.

Additional exploration is required. Stay tuned.

Thank you for all the kind comments about my essay yesterday. Moving on to cheerier subjects, I present the Puff-Sleeved Feminine Cardigan:

Pattern: Puff-Sleeved Feminine Cardigan from Fitted Knits by Stefanie Japel
Size: 34″ bust, 32″ waist, 19.5″ length, 10″ to armpit
Yarn: leftover Elizabeth Austen Andes and Araucania Nature Wool, both overdyed blue (see the full story here)
Yardage: 2.5 skeins of Andes (maybe 430 yards?); 1 skein Araucania (maybe 200 yards?)
Yarn Source: eBay; Webs
Needles: US size 4 and 6 26″ bamboo circulars
Gauge: 21 stitches and 30 rows over 4″ (but blocked to gauge)
Notes: This was a fun knit. Other than changing the yarn and making it a two-color sweater, I didn’t modify much. I think I added a few inches of length below the underarm and I might have done less waist shaping than the pattern called for — or maybe I just blocked it a bit larger at the waist, I can’t remember. I knit most of this very quickly in a bit of a fog one weekend while David was out of town and I was watching a lot of movies. I did the rest of the knitting in dribs and drabs after he returned home, then waited for my buttons to arrive to finish up. (I ordered the buttons from the Button Drawer, which is a great source for those of us whose local button selection is poor.) This is the first adult-size sweater I have knit in one piece from the top down, and though I enjoyed it, my inclination is to stick with knitting sweaters in pieces. I like to be able to measure my progress in small increments, so a one-piece sweater is a bit of a slog for me. Still, being able to figure out the sizing as you go is pretty neat.

I’m quite pleased with how this little sweater came out. The only problem is that the button band is a bit gappy, just as it is in the photo in the book. I think this is the result of how the band is constructed — namely that it’s a fairly narrow band on a fitted sweater — rather than the result of the sweater’s being too tight. At first, it didn’t really bother me, but when I saw how it looked in my pictures I decided I ought to do something about it. I have sufficient yarn to make the bands a bit wider, but I’m doubtful that will make any appreciable difference. Any suggestions? Is this just the nature of the beast?

The other way in which my cardigan differs from the one in the book’s photo is that my sleeves aren’t as puffy due to the fact that my shoulders are considerably wider than the model’s and my upper arms larger. (Like most models, she is a wee little thing.) This is fine with me, too, as I was a little worried that the sleeves would be too puffy. But if you’re thinking of knitting this sweater and you want extreme puffiness, you might consider carefully whether your shoulder and arm size requires some sizing up, which would be easy enough to execute as long as you plan ahead a bit.

I’m still not sure whether I will wear this much. I like it, but “puff-sleeved” and “feminine” are both major departures from my normal way of dressing, and I’ve also yet to determine whether there is any place for a short-sleeved wool sweater in the spectrum of Wisconsin weather. I didn’t help matters by making the sweater even more unique by doing it in two colors. The result is very pleasing to me visually, but we will have to wait and see whether it finds a place in my wardrobe.

The only other thing to note about this sweater is that it took only two and a half skeins of Andes yarn. For those of you who are keeping track, please note that this means that I have now knit two sweaters from the bag of ten skeins that I bought on eBay, I have given one skein away, and I have used one skein up on swatches. Yet I have a bit more than two skeins left. Long live the Andes yarn!

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Edited to add: I solved the button band problem to my satisfaction by adding hems. The bands still scallop a bit between the buttons, but they don’t gape open at all. The scalloping is kind of nice, since it echoes the lower edge.

For anyone interested in trying it, I largely followed the explanation for creating a hem given by Elizabeth Zimmerman in Knitting without Tears. First, I removed all the buttons. Then, using the same size needle I used for the button bands and some leftover fingering-weight yarn (to reduce the bulk), I picked up and knit along the edge of the band, putting the needle through the the half of each bound-off stitch that was closer to the inside of the sweater. On the next row, I purled across and decreased about 10 percent of the stitches by purling eight and purling two together across. On the button side, I continued in stockinette until the hem was as wide as the original button band (about eight rows) and bound off. On the buttonhole side, I continued in stockinette until I had added half the needed width (about four rows), made buttonholes directly behind the existing buttonholes — checking each as I went along to ensure they lined up — and then finished as on the other side. I hand-stitched the bound off edges down to the seams where the original buttonbands were picked up, being sure to sew through the top half of the bound-off edge stitch rather than the bottom half, since it looks neater that way. Finally, I sewed the buttons back on. I have not done anything to connect the two buttonholes in each set together, since they seem to work just fine separately.

Two years ago, I learned to knit at Christmastime, and my mom asked me if I wanted to look through the trunk of clothing my grandma made for my brothers and me when we were children. The trunk is full of treasures, all of them a little worse for the wear. There is a pink dress sized for an infant with a white yoke embroidered with tiny yellow chickens. There is a dark blue, satin-lined cabled coat for a four-year-old girl. There are matching hats with Snoopy on them, one brown and one green, knit for two little boys. My grandmother was an excellent knitter, and the clothes display her skill.

In my closet at home, I have adult-size sweaters Grandma made that I wear often. I have a green wool pullover with a gray and yellow pattern that she knit for my father — to his exacting specifications — when he was in junior high school. Many years later, he shrunk it slightly, and it has been my favorite sweater ever since. I have an orange acrylic cabled cardigan that I can remember my mother wearing on an autumn walk we took when I was very young. Every year when the leaves begin to turn, I want to find that sweater and put it on. One year for Christmas, Grandma knit six wool fisherman’s sweaters, one for each of her grandchildren. Mine she made shorter, with a V-neck, just because I asked her to. It is the sweater I reach for on the coldest winter mornings.

Grandma taught me to knit once, but it didn’t stick. These days, though, it is pretty much all I want to do. Many of my friends are having babies, and I have been knitting for them, making small, elaborate things that take me days, sometimes weeks, to complete. The babies don’t need these clothes, they probably won’t get much use out of them, and my friends don’t expect them. So why do I feel compelled to knit them? When my sister-in-law, Amy, told us that she was pregnant with twins, I immediately began making them little dresses, felted booties, and a double-sided blanket of my own design that took ages to finish. To be honest, I would prefer for Amy to remain ignorant of exactly how long it took me to make these gifts, because I think she might find it a bit ridiculous. But I didn’t make them for her, exactly. I made them for my nieces, Lilly and Ella, as I looked forward to their birth.

Ann Shayne of Mason-Dixon Knitting wrote recently about knitting a scarf for a friend. Her friend’s daughter is very sick, and in the face of Ann’s utter inability to do anything to help, she began knitting the scarf as a way of offering this woman the only thing she could give: her time. Her thoughts and her good wishes were silently worked into every stitch.*

The act of knitting for babies and children is like that: it is also an offering of time, a message of love, but with the added twist that the recipients can’t possibly understand it and maybe never will. Knitting for babies is a bit like putting a love letter in a time capsule. Lilly and Ella may never learn to knit, and they may never understand that those little dresses are a record of me thinking about them and loving them before they were born. I wore the clothes my grandma knit for me for decades without giving much thought to them.

But things are different now. My grandma has Alzheimer’s disease, and she is dying. She lives in a nursing home hundreds of miles away from me. I wish that there could have been years in which we both knit. When I visited her, I could have showed her what I was making, and she could have given me tips. But I take some small comfort in knowing that at least now that I am older, and now that I am a knitter, I get what she was doing when she knit sweater after tiny sweater for me and my brothers. Every hand-knit baby dress, every sweater in my closet was a gift of her time, her energy, her thoughts. Every one still bears her message of love.

Sometimes the only thing you can do to express your love is to spend your time, to focus your thoughts and your actions in the direction of the person you’re loving. I try to write to my grandma every week. I often tell her about what I’ve been knitting, sending her pictures of finished objects and little bits of yarn for her to touch. This week, I will tell her about my friend Anne, who called the other day to tell me that she had her baby ten weeks early. I will tell my grandmother that the baby’s name is Matthew, that he’s doing well, and that I knit him a tiny yellow hat and mailed it off as quickly as I could.

18 May 2006

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I wrote this essay last year at a time when my grandma’s illness was much on my mind. I found out last night that she died yesterday afternoon and thought it would be appropriate to post it here as a sort of tribute to a woman who was a master knitter and a wonderful and loving person to everyone lucky enough to know her.

* The entry in question is here under March 15, 2006 — which is, incidentally, the very day my twin nieces were born.

I’ve been looking forward to reading No Sheep for You since I first learned from Amy Singer’s blog that she was in the midst of writing it. I preordered it from Amazon months in advance of the publication date and have waited patiently for it to ship while many, many other people found and bought their own copies all across North America. (Sometimes Amazon is the greatest, but this was not one of those times.)

So it is with some pleasure that I announce that I have received it, I have read it, and I think No Sheep for You is a great book.

No Sheep for You is a pattern book and guide to knitting with non-wool yarns, including cotton, linen, silk, hemp, and others. It ought to be particularly helpful to people with wool allergies or sensitivities, as well as to people who do not wish to knit with wool for ethnical reasons. I am not one of those people — in fact, I am quite a big fan of wool, and I rarely venture into knitting with other types of yarn. In part, this is because I am more at home in a wool sweater and jeans than in virtually anything else, but there is more to it than that. The fact is that I haven’t seen very many patterns knit in non-wool that I wanted to make for myself, though I’ve seen plenty of beautiful ones. Something about the whole category of summer sweaters and wraps — which is usually where cotton and linen and bamboo yarns pop up in the magazines — just doesn’t suit me. So why not make up my own patterns in non-wool yarns? Since I haven’t gained much familiarity with how they behave in the course of knitting other people’s patterns, and since I’ve made some mistakes with cotton yarn (too-heavy blanket; too-heavy baby sweater), I’ve been reluctant to explore the non-wool arena.

My interest in No Sheep for You grew out of my hope that it would give me the information I needed to do so. I also hoped that it would include patterns that I liked and could use as models for my own explorations. It has met and exceeded my expectations.

The more I look at the patterns, the more I find that I like. Not only are many of them a good fit with my aesthetic, but — more important — many of them are smart, and a close examination of their construction and the designers’ choices reveals a lot of information about working with particular types of fiber.

Take Intoxicating, the mosaic-knit silk sweater, for example:

I think this sweater is really cute. I’m not sure I would wear it, but I like the details that went into its construction — the different front and back panels, the echoing of the orange from the back panel on the neckline, the lace sleeves. Even more, though, I like what the pattern and accompanying text reveals about working with silk yarn: mosaic stitch patterns help to stabilize slippery silk and make it behave more predictably. I’ve never seen much point to doing mosaic in wool (sorry, fans of mosaic knitting!), but when I see it done in shiny, bright-colored silk, it opens up new possibilities to my imagination.

There are at least nine other patterns that I like enough that I would knit them, which is quite a few more than I find in most books. I won’t post pictures here; rather, I’ll encourage you to check out the book’s page on Amazon, at Interweave, and at Knit Picks. Those three sites all have plenty of inside peeks. I couldn’t find a photo of Morrigan, the cotton Aran, but if I had, I would have posted it here: this sweater, by Jenna Wilson, is to die for. And I’m not even a big fan of cables!

At first, I was a bit disappointed with the information section at the beginning of the book, in which Singer discusses how various classes of non-wool fibers are created, their properties, and how to go about familiarizing yourself with a non-wool yarn in order to be able to design with it intelligently. I am a rather ravenous collector of information, and I think what I wanted was an encyclopedia of tips about each fiber — “Such-and-such works best when knit on the bias” and that sort of thing. I enjoyed the chapter on swatching (titled “Learn to Love Your Geeky Thing”), but I’m already a committed swatcher, so it wasn’t the godsend I was looking for. The more I think about it, though, the more I realize that the book tells me everything I need to know to start knitting and designing in non-wool fibers without getting bogged down in specific rules that would most likely be of little use. After all, new non-wool fibers are constantly being invented, blended with other fibers in new ways, and spun and plied creatively. What could one book tell me about them that would be more helpful than general guidelines about how to figure these fibers out myself?

I’m inspired by No Sheep for You to branch out a bit, to work more with hemp, linen, cotton, and their ilk and see where they take me. For some time, I’ve thought of creating a new version of a sweater I once had that my grandma knit for my mom: a cap-sleeved, short pullover in light blue cotton that I used to wear in the summer. I think I will take Singer’s advice, buy a single ball of each of several different yarns, and see what I can come up with.