Ruthless Knitting

I’ve been knitting away on my Middlebury sweater, which you may recall temporarily stumped me a while back with its tendency to scrunch up on the needles. I needed to figure out whether it would hold a lengthwise blocking or whether I had to make it longer to compensate for its desire to be scrunched up, which would have meant ripping out the piece I was knitting and starting over with fewer stitches. Well, I finished and blocked one side of the front, and it looks like it will hold the length just fine when it’s draped on my body. Here’s a picture that shows what it looks like when you hold it up in the air:

It would have been a better picture if I had turned the knitting around, as what you’re actually looking at here is the back. Whoops.

And here’s my progress so far — one side of the front (again shown backwards) and about two-thirds of the length to the armholes on the back.

I’m still enjoying the project, though it occasionally occurs to me that I have a long way to go, and I’m not sure how long my love will hold out. Let’s just hope nothing better comes along.

Meanwhile, the other day, I was skimming back through the Yarn Harlot’s Knitting Rules and I came across a statement about how she always keeps her swatches and maybe some day she’ll sew them up into a blanket. (I’m paraphrasing; I don’t remember what she actually wrote.) It crossed my mind that maybe my swatches could be a blanket, so I laid them all out on the bed.

It was a lot of fun to look at all of my swatches again, but . . .

. . . I think they’d make one ugly blanket.

What do you do with a single skein of cashmere when you don’t want wrist warmers or an ear warmer or a lacy scarf or a neckwarmer, and when it’s variegated so that some stitch patterns just won’t look right? What do you do when it’s been in your stash since January, and it was a luxury so you’d like to use it, but you’re not sure how? What do you do when you try to make a hat with it doubled up and it’s just not enough yarn, so you make a hat with it stranded single and it’s still not enough yarn?

I made a tassled baby hat in garter stitch.

Pattern: Cast on 33 stitches. Knit in garter stitch until you’re about out of yarn or it seems long enough. Fold in half and seam up the sides. Make and secure tassles.
Size: Newborn-ish — about 12″ circumference, but stretchy.
Yarn: Artyarns Cashmere 5 (100% cashmere; 102 yds. per 50 g. skein)
Yardage: About 85-90 yards.
Source: Circle of Yarns in Klamath Falls, OR
Needles: US 6 Denise circular needles
Gauge: About 5 stitches per inch?
Notes: So what if moms of newborns don’t want to hand wash cashmere? The hat is so cute that it’s worth it. And that’s all I have to say about that.

As you can see, Frances is fini! My self-imposed knitting ban has turned into more of an “Okay, you can knit, but not too much” rule. In the same way that during a drought you can’t wash your car, but you can still take a shower, I figured eight rows per seam was okay, especially since I had to sew down the hem in between, which hardly counts.

Pattern: I call it Frances. It’s just a top-down raglan knit following the basic recipe in Barbara Walker’s Knitting from the Top, with various customizations.
Size: 35″ bust, 31″ waist, 40″ at hip, 15″ from hem to underarm, 14.5″ from wrist to underarm, 14″ sleeve width, 10.5″ long raglan seam (measured on diagonal). Pre-blocking, it was 33″ bust, 30″ waist, 22″ total length, 12.5″ from hem to underarm, 15.5″ from wrist to underarm.
Yarn: Artfibers Golden Siam (100% tussah silk; 165 yds. per 50 g. skein), colors 37 and 38
Yardage: About 1,350 yards, divided 4.5 skeins of color 37 and 4 of color 38. (I swatched a lot with color 37.)
Source: Artfibers. This yarn was a gift from my parents, purchased while they were visiting San Francisco.
Needles: US 7 Denise circular needles; size 5 for neckband
Gauge: About 18.5 stitches and 27 rows = 4″ in stockinette stitch in the round
Notes: I really enjoyed this project from beginning to end. Something about changing colors every eight rows really keeps things moving along, even when the rows are those endless 200-stitch body rows that you have to endure when knitting in one piece from the top down. I also thoroughly enjoyed working with the Golden Siam, which manages to be soft, interestingly slubby, shiny, and enjoyably fuzzy without being even remotely over the top. The deep, saturated blue and brown continued to please me throughout the knitting. I know blue and brown are “in” right now, but I’m not afraid that my love for the sweater will be ephemeral, because these rich shades are so nicely balanced that they really do look perfect together.

If you’ve been following the saga around these parts (and one more link here for good measure), you know that the sweater grew quite a bit when I wet blocked it. I knew that it would grow, and I wanted it to get a little bigger. I also know that many people don’t wet block silk for this very reason. But my thinking was that sooner or later I’d have to wash it, so I might as well find out what was going to happen right at the outset. I had to cut three stripes off each sleeve to bring them back to the right length, but as best I can tell, the growth is more or less finished now. I wore the sweater around the house all day last Friday, and it didn’t show any signs of getting bigger.

If I had it to do over, I would probably have knit the sweater in pieces, or at the very least knit the sleeves flat and seamed them at the end. This would have given the sweater more structure and probably would have prevented a lot of the growth. Still, the final product is pretty much all I’d hoped it would be — a comfortable, informal tunic in silk yarn that makes it both warm and special.

This is the first finished sweater in my planned Fall/Winter collection. (All my swatches for the collection are pictured here.) So far, so good!

It’s been about a week since I blocked Frances, and this is all I have managed to do so far toward remedying the sleeve situation:

To tell the truth, I also got most of one sleeve rehemmed, but then I realized that I’d forgotten to decrease in the first row of the hem, so I’ll have to rip it out and do it over. Sometime.

I’ve been rather scattered in the knitting department lately, drawn to lots of different ideas but not too interested in tackling anything that requires any sort of commitment. All my progress has been swatch-sized; in the past week or so, I’ve swatched for four different projects. For a while, I considered this unworthy material for blogging, but then I enjoyed Desi Knitter’s post about her swatches so much that I thought I’d go ahead and write about what I’d been knitting.

My first swatch, a bodice design for Gryphon, has to remain unphotographed until its debut, but it’s coming along better than any of the others. I’m writing up the pattern for the person who will wear it, and then later I’ll write it up for all the sizes.

Meanwhile, I also started one of the fronts for the cardigan I’d like to make with the yarn I bought in Vermont. I got this far –

– before I stalled out. See how I’m stretching the piece here? That’s how I like it, with the stripes between the ridges showing. That’s also the correct width for one front piece. But when I let go, the fabric snaps back into a much shorter and wider shape. I have to figure out how much lengthwise blocking this yarn and this stitch pattern will take and hold on to. In other words, can I stretch it to my desired length and count on it to stay there, or will it gradually get shorter and shorter as I wear it until I have several more inches of positive ease than I want, as well as ribbing at my belly button?

It’s occurred to me that maybe the thing to do is to knit the back in matching two-row stripes, but without the garter ridges. If I do that and then seam the cardigan together, the fronts should remain the same length as the back, since they’ll be quite firmly attached at the seams. With that plan, the big question becomes what the row gauge will be for the back, and if I stretch the front to match it, how wide is the front piece then, and do I like how it looks? I have thus far been completely uninterested in discovering the answers to these questions, so the Middlebury cardigan has been placed in a Ziploc bag until the urge strikes to resolve the mystery.

Last week, I also came up with this swatch as a possible plan for some Silky Wool that I bought in the recent Webs sale.

The idea here is to knit a cardigan with this cabled ribbing at the bottom, one cabled rib traveling up each side next to the button band, and a reverse stockinette backdrop. It would have short, tight-fitting sleeves. I’m not sure whether the stitch pattern pops enough on the swatch, though, and I fear the pattern will just disappear, in which case I probably shouldn’t bother with fancy cables. Sometimes I like this swatch, and sometimes I don’t. It’s hanging out in a drawer now. (Cyn of the Half-Assed Knit Blog bought what appears to be the same color and had the same problems with it, so I guess it’s not just me.)

Finally, there is this, which I worked on yesterday:

For many months, I had planned to use these two yarns to make a baseball-shirt-style sweater, with solid green sleeves and a variegated body. But the longer I thought about it, the less I wanted to knit such a sweater, so for a few days I’ve been idly considering what else I might be able to do with these two yarns. I turned over the problem in my mind at yoga today and came up with a plan for a stranded design that I tried out when I got home and immediately abandoned — the colors here are far too close even for subtle colorwork designs to show up.

Then I saw this stitch pattern in Barbara Walker’s second treasury, swatched it, and am rather delighted with the result. In her book, the two colors are sharply contrasting dark and light, and the blocks really pop out against the stripey background. There’s a similar version of the pattern, which is called Wave and Box Stitch, shown in this picture at Knittingfool.com. In my version, the two yarns blend together so much that the pattern just allows the solid green to mute the variegation and frame it, which I like. (For comparison’s sake, there’s a picture of the two yarns by themselves in this post.) I’m thinking of knitting a pullover with this pattern used for the body. I’ll have to figure out the sleeves later; I don’t have enough of the Zephyr for sleeves, but I could probably buy more if I wanted to.

One reason for my drifting about from swatch to swatch, which I’m reluctant to admit even to myself, is that my right forearm has been showing signs of a repetitive strain injury. I don’t actually think it’s from knitting — I think it’s from mousing at a bad angle at my desk, where I do mouse-intensive editing work all day — but the knitting surely doesn’t help. David installed a keyboard tray on my desk, and I am endeavoring to improve my ergonomics and use more keyboard shortcuts. Unfortunately, I’ve also resolved that I need to cut out knitting for at least a few days. Hopefully, by the time I post again, I’ll be quite recovered and we can pretend this never happened.

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P.S. If you have yarn in your stash that you don’t intend to use and are looking for somewhere to send it, Steph of Who Needs Gauge? could use donations for the knitting club she runs at her school. I took the opportunity to divest myself of a dozen balls of cream-colored wool that my aunt send me to use in finishing the Thelma sweater. And should this process make you reflect about your stash itself, wondering what you want to have and how much and why, I’d point you toward an interesting post at Mishka Knits on this subject that didn’t, in my opinion, get the attention it deserved.

Sometimes, it takes two pictures to replace a thousand words

As I feared, Frances’s sleeves are too long now. Way, way too long. But I am not excessively sad about it — otherwise, the sweater looks pretty good. It’s longer and wider and drapier than it was when I finished knitting it, and there’s a little bit of a batwing thing going on when I raise my arms, and it’s possible that every time I wear the sweater it will stretch until it finally reaches the floor, but I’m only willing to worry about one problem at a time. I’m going to shorten the arms, and then I’m going to wait until it’s cold enough to wear a silk sweater, at which time I’ll reevaluate the situation.

Here’s a quickie FO picture taken with the self-timer that expresses my general laissez-faire attitude about the whole thing. How can you complain about a beautiful stripey silk sweater, even if the sleeves are a bit on the long side?

I’ll take some more pictures once I get the sleeves in shape.

And now for something completely different

In more heartening news, Christine has translated the Sheldon pattern into French. Trés magnifique! I wish I understood French well enough to read it, but all I can manage after a year of eighth-grade French and another year of grad school French for Reading (which should be called “just enough French so that you could conceivably translate a French document badly with the help of two dictionaries”) is the occasional mispronounced phrase. My apologies, France. Regardless of my deficiencies, I am pleased that French-speaking knitters will now have access to the pattern.

I finished up Frances over the long weekend. I didn’t think the last bits would go so quickly, but somehow I managed to fit in quite a bit of knitting while also cleaning and painting the garage floor with David, mountain biking, cleaning all the floors in the house, doing the touch-up painting in the basement, going to the farmer’s market with David on our bikes, and so on.

Once I finished the knitting, it took me three days to get all the ends woven in. Two ends per stripe x lots of stripes = eleventy million ends. But this morning I managed to finish them and to get the sweater blocked. I’m a little worried about how much it grew in blocking — not from the yarn blooming but just from the weight of the wet yarn, despite how careful I was not to let it stretch out. I wanted some growth in most of the dimensions so that the sweater would be a bit looser-fitting, and that seems to have worked out, but I didn’t count on so much growth in the sleeve length. I may have to rip out the last stripe on each sleeve and create a new hem one stripe earlier. We shall see. Meanwhile, here’s a peek at what Frances looked like prior to blocking:

With that finished, I’ve been swatching the yarn I got in Vermont for what might be my next project. I had a plan for this yarn, but once I saw how it knit up, I changed it. Now I’m considering a cardigan with a stripey, textured front and back (as shown in the stripey, textured swatch) and plain purple sleeves, with ribbed bands. Whether I’ll begin that soon or work on swatches for another sweater has not yet been revealed to me.

Oh, and I finally got around yesterday to adding a baby picture to my random things post. In case you missed it, here I am in my two-year-old glory: