Ruthless Knitting Archive

Thanks for all the comments on my knitting mystery! I also got some great advice from folks on the Knittyboard. Here is what I now know:

The Afghan
The afghan is hairpin lace crochet. It was constructed of individual strips that were created using a crochet hook and a hairpin lace tool. Each strip has a knotted-looking center and fringy loops on each side. The strips were joined together by interlocking the fringy loops. On two sides of the blanket, the loopy edges of the outer strips form a finished edge. The third side is where the interlocking began, and the edge there is also finished, though it lacks loops. The final side is the side with the bobby pins, where the interlocking was completed. This is the side that must be finished to keep the blanket from unraveling. I’m still not entirely sure how to do this, but I joined a Yahoo group for hairpin lace enthusiasts, and I’ve asked for some expert advice there. It sounds like the general idea is to single crochet around all four sides using yarn in a matching or contrasting color. I still need some help with the mechanics, but I’m confident I can do this.

The Sweater
The sweater has progressed from “mystery” to “quandary.” I put all the live stitches on holders, picked apart the seams, and washed and blocked the pieces. Two things became clear to me in the process: first, the fact that one side of the front is lower than the other is no accident, nor is it the result of unraveling. Grandma definitely knit and seamed this sweater exactly how she meant to, and she seamed it to stay seamed. It was a real bitch to unpick because she was so thorough about spliiting stitches in order to keep the yarn in place. One of the Knittyboard commenters, keena, proposed that maybe the neckline was lower on one side because it was meant to scoop down and button along the top of the raglan seam. Aunt Cathy sent a few buttons along with the sweater, and these combined with the other evidence convince me that keena’s guess is right.

The second thing I figured out while blocking the sweater is why Grandma abandoned it in the first place: this was a tragedy of unmatching yarns. Both body pieces are knit in the same shade of the same yarn, but each sleeve begins with one shade of cream and then abruptly switches to another shade about six inches along. On one sleeve, this isn’t terribly noticeable because the same yarn seems to have been used, but on the other sleeve Grandma apparently tried an altogether different yarn — well, an altogether different two-ply worsted weight wool yarn — and it really stands out as being a different color and texture. I think that my earlier supposition was correct — that she had a bunch of cream wool leftover from different projects and tried to combine them. She ran out of yarn after knitting the body, so she used some different yarn that looked extremely similar in the ball. As soon as she seamed it up and had a look at it in the light of day, however, she realized it was a no go and abandoned the project. My mom said to me in an e-mail, “Thelma [my grandma] was plagued by whites that didn’t match.” Add creams to the list.

So how to rescue this sweater? I took all the cream yarns my Aunt Cathy sent, wound them into balls, knit a long swatch with ten rows of each yarn, and compared it to the sweater. I don’t think any of the yarns are exactly the same as the ones in the sweater, but there are some fairly close matches. Then I dyed the whole swatch brown to find out whether the dye would conceal the color shifts in the yarn. Unfortunately, it seemed to make the color shifts even more obvious, which rules out dyeing as a way to solve the problem.

I think the only solution is to partially or completely reknit the sleeves. The best method would probably be to reknit them completely using matching yarn. Even if they’re slightly different from the rest of the sweater in color, as long as each entire sleeve is the same color, the whole sweater should appear to match (at least in most lights). My next step is to baste the sweater pieces back together and try it on. If I’m going to reknit the sleeves, I may as well reknit them to fit me, don’t you think?

Yes, but Have You Been Knitting?
In other news, I knit some socks. These are short little bed socks knit with the yarn held double for extra warmth and speediness. They’re a very belated birthday present for my friend Anne. I used Mountain Colors Bearfoot in Flathead Cherry, size 4 dpns, and my own fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants version of Priscilla Gibson-Roberts’s dream socks pattern from Interweave Knits. Anne has tiny little feet, so these are knit over 44 stitches to produce socks that are 7 inches in circumference and about 7.5 inches long. I hope they fit.

I’ve also been working on the Clementine Shawlette, though not especially quickly, since I don’t find it very exciting knitting. I think I have seven or eight inches to go before I’m done with the first half. Can you spot the mistake? I’m ignoring it.

In more exciting news, I’m finished with the Puff-Sleeved Feminine Cardigan. Sort of. I’ve done all the knitting, and fits very nicely, but I had to order some buttons, which I’m still waiting on. Also, I’m concerned that when the buttons come and I install them, the front of the cardigan will be gappy. If that turns out to be the case, I’ll try making the button bands wider (though I don’t have very much of the green yarn left). I also have to weave in my ends and wash and block the sweater. Oh, and I have to undo the sleeve bind-off and try again, because it’s a bit tight. But we’re getting there.

Miscellany
This post is already too long, but let me leave you with a bit of non-knitting-related excitement:

This is a dictionary stand that my parents gave me for my birthday. It required some minor repairs that David did for me today, so it’s now officially in service. Libraries used to use these for dictionaries and other heavy reference books, but they’re gradually being decomissioned, and you can buy them now on eBay. This is a heavy-duty, cast iron stand with an oak (I think) top divided into two sides, each of which supports half of the book. As you flip the pages, one side will lower and the other will raise up so that the dictionary’s spine is supported. Professionally, I’m an editor of academic books, and I actually have to use the giant dictionary quite a bit, so it’s quite exciting to me to add this piece of furniture to my office. It means I don’t have to haul the dictionary off the shelf each time I need it, balance it precariously on my desk, and flip through to find the definition I need. I’ve been rescued by nineteenth-century technology.

An interesting package arrived today from my Aunt Cathy. It contains two unfinished projects begun by my grandma before she stopped knitting. The first is this cream sweater:

And the second is this afghan in browns and teal:

Ideally, I’d like to figure out how to finish both of these projects. But first I have to figure out the answers to some questions. This is where you come in.

The Sweater
Let’s start with the sweater. There’s a front, a back, and two sleeves. The sleeves are joined — more or less — to the fronts and back, but the seams are partially unraveled, and there may be a hole along one seam. (I have to investigate that further when I take the pieces apart.) There are live stitches along the front neckline, the back neckline, and both sleeves, some of them on holders and some not. The front left side of the neckline is clearly higher than the front right, which concerns me.

Along with the sweater came this pile of cream-colored yarn.

The yarns clearly do not match. When my grandma moved into a nursing home, my aunt received all of her stash yarn and patterns, as well as these unfinished projects. I am assuming that the pile of cream yarn was all with the sweater in one place, rather than picked by Aunt Cathy from among the stash. This would mean that my grandma intended to use some or all of the cream yarn to complete the sweater. Given that the creams in the sweater itself do not all match (which I tried and failed to capture on camera), I can only assume that the sweater is knit with different dyelots of the same yarn or, more likely, with several completely different cream yarns. Was this some sort of stashbuster? Grandma did make numerous fisherman-knit sweaters and could well have ended up with enough cream wool oddballs to decide to make a sweater with the leftovers.

There is no pattern accompanying the sweater, either because Grandma was making it up or because the pattern got separated at some point.

What I need to figure out is how to complete the sweater. I am fairly sure I can match the cable pattern and identify and match the lace pattern if need be. I’m also pretty confident I can lightly overdye the sweater to make up for the differences in the colors of the cream yarn. What I’m most confused by at the moment is why the front left side of the neckline would be so much lower than the front right side. How would that even have happened? Do you suppose that stitches were put on hold in the center front and then the two sides were knit separately, and one side was unraveled for some reason? That’s the only explanation I can come up with.

How to proceed? I suspect what I will do is unseam the raglan seams, wash and block all the pieces, and take a good look at them all before formulating a plan to finish the front. I would be grateful for any suggestions y’all have.

The Afghan
The afghan comes with no yarn. It seems to be nearly complete. I have never seen anything like it and am not sure it was knit. It may be elaborately knotted. It looks so regular that I almost wonder if it was machine-made, except that it is so clearly unfinished.

These bobby pins would suggest that the afghan was still in progress when it was set aside.

I’m much more out of my league with the afghan than with the sweater. Can anyone tell me how it was even constructed? Ideas?

I went to a baby shower today and delivered this gift to its recipient, so I can reveal the “secret project” from January at last:

Pattern: Starbelly Baby Sweater modified from Charles pattern in Jaeger JB29 (viewable here if you scroll down to see the white sweater at bottom), with creative input on the charting of the star and the color choice from David; Wee Willie Winkie Baby Hat, my own design; Leftovers Baby Socks pattern by Matthew Hesson-McInnis
Yarn: Henry’s Attic Kona Superwash DK dyed using Jacquard acid dyes
Yardage: about 8 oz., or 560 yards
Yarn Source: Catnip Yarns (best Henry’s Attic prices on the Internet, and great service)
Needles: US4 bamboo straights and dpns; US3 Knit Picks Classic Circular w/24″ cable for small bits
Gauge:
Observations: This is the first time I’ve used the Kona Superwash in DK weight. I tried out the fingering weight for a pair of socks for my father (see them here) and found it pleasantly soft and strong, so I decided to give the heavier weight a try. I was not disappointed. This yarn is wonderful. It’s extremely soft, particularly after the first washing, but it also has nice stitch definition. And of course, it’s superwash. I think the Kona yarns are a great option for baby’s and children’s things, particularly if, like me, you like to use a lot of color in your baby knitting — and not necessarily “traditional” colors — and if you’re willing to take what you get in the dyeing process, which in my hands usually seems to yield unexpected but pleasing results.

I really like the sweater pattern I (more or less) followed from the Jaeger baby knits book, which is full of the most lovely and detailed baby and children’s patterns I’ve yet come across. All the patterns are by Martin Storey, whose work I had never paid much attention to previously. Now I see that he’s a frequent Rowan designer and apparently something of a big deal. The basic construction of this pattern is very elegant. I particularly like the raglan seams, which are purled on either side of the join. They seamed together very smoothly and are satisfyingly tidy up close.

The pattern in the book has an elaborate crown motif across the chest that is actually worked in duplicate stitch. Here, I intended initially for the star motif to be on the chest, but ultimately it was large enough and the sweater small enough that it sort of migrated downward to become a belly star. This makes me think of Dr. Seuss and the Star Bellied Sneetch — thus I call this the “Starbelly baby set.”

After I finished the sweater, I had a lot of the dyed blue and gray yarn left, and I got it into my head that it would be nice to throw in a hat and socks. I had made these Leftovers Baby Socks once before (here), and I liked the pattern — very basic, very sensible — enough to follow it again. The Wee Willie Winkie hat was a sudden inspiration, and the longer it got, the more delighted I became with it. I did learn the hard way, however, that pompoms come apart in the washing machine.

These three items don’t exactly make a “set,” since they are likely to fit the baby at different ages. But maybe this is a good thing, as my mom pointed out. The baby can start with the hat, which is teensy, move up to the sweater next winter, and end with the socks, stretching the gift out over a longer time.

I’ve finished a hat for the Dulaan project, but it was such a quickie I’m not sure it deserves the full FO treatment. Nonetheless, here goes . . .

(Apologies for yet another picture of my head. I tried to take the hat’s picture flat, but it wasn’t very cooperative.)

Pattern: My own — a bastardized combination of EZ’s “prime rib” hat (from Knitting without Tears) and Stephanie Pearl-McPhee’s Scarf Rescue Hat (from Knitting Rules)
Size: about a 15″ circumference, but stretchy; about 8″ from crown to brim
Yarn: Knit Picks Gloss in black; Stahl Wolle Socka Color in 9128, blue tones
Yardage: less than 1 ball of each
Yarn Source: Knit Picks and my aunt Cathy
Needles: bamboo straights in size 6
Gauge: not sure
Notes/Modifications: Following Elizabeth Zimmerman’s directions for the brioche stitch hat in Knitting without Tears — with the understanding that since I was using doubled-up sock yarn, not chunky yarn, I’d end up with a much smaller hat — I cast on the required number of stitches (something like 32 or 34) and knit brioche for a while. It became clear that I wasn’t going to get a large enough hat even for an infant, so I decided to keep knitting a scarf-like strip until it was long enough to be turned sideways to make a “scarf rescue hat” a la the Yarn Harlot. I changed from black to blue whenever the mood struck me, kept knitting until I could stretch the hat around my head, bound off, mattress stitched the ends together, ran a thread through the stitches around the top, and cinched them tight. The brioche is wonderfully cushy, the yarns are soft, and the hat is nice and warm. It’s a little small for me now that I’ve run it through the washer and dryer, but it’s the perfect size for an older child or a small-headed adult.

I still have more of the blue Socka and black Gloss left, but I’m good and sick of them, so they’ve been returned to the storage tubs. I have one more Dulaan item to knit to meet my commitment of five objects, but it will just have to wait.

The brioche scarf that I was making right up until I turned it into a hat was quite lovely, and it made me think that brioche stitch is perfect for scarf knitting — cushy, flat, textured, interesting. Perhaps sometime I will make a brioche scarf.

Meanwhile, I’m on to other projects. Two, in fact.

For this pretty little number, I’m using the overdyed Andes yarn leftovers (from this sweater) and some overdyed Araucania Nature Wool from Veste Evereste (here) as an accent. I’m nearly to the underarm, and I’m enjoying the knitting so far. It’s mindless stockinette, which I can do while watching movies or reading.

For Clementine, I’m using the Handmaiden Sea Silk in Sangria that I bought from Knit/Purl. I previously swatched for the Swallowtail Shawl using this yarn (see it here), but I decided that I’d rather do the Swallowtail in some Misti Alpaca laceweight in a solid color, so the Sea Silk was freed up for this pattern. Clementine is a nice, easy lace project, and I’m having fun with it. I suspect that the shawl will be even smaller than in the published pattern when blocked, but I’m okay with it being a “scarfette” rather than a “shawlette,” since I only intend to wear it draped over a black shirt for the occasional fancy-dress affair, and it’s not like it will be needed for warmth.

That’s all I’ve got. Oh, except it’s not! If you listen to Cast On, you might want to keep an ear out for me in the next episode. It’s possible that I’ll make an appearance.