Ruthless Knitting

Every now and then, I swatch something that doesn’t work out, but I want to keep a record of what I did and spread the swatch love with others. Thus, my first Swatch Feature is born!

The twin rib pattern is taken from Barbara Walker’s second stitch treasury. It’s basically a 3×3 ribbing with a garter column in the center of each set of three stitches. Like mistake rib, both sides are identical, making this pattern a nice choice for edgings whose wrong sides are likely to show. A garment or edging knit in twin rib won’t curl, but neither is it likely to lie flat. Instead, the pattern produces a softly fluted fabric.

To work twin rib, cast on a multiple of 6 stitches and then K3, P3 on the right side and K1, P1 on the wrong side. I used a size 6 needle and yarn that probably falls on the light side of DK.

While the result here is a bit fussier than what I want for the sweater I’m planning, I think twin rib would make a lovely edging for a feminine cardigan in a nice smooth yarn, perhaps combined with an all-over eyelet pattern on the body.

I finished the first half of the Tokyo top on Friday and got it blocked. As the end approached, I grew increasingly concerned about the size: I had calculated that the top was going to grow quite a bit when I blocked it, since that’s what my swatches had done, but the finished piece was so small that I became convinced it was too small. I even came up with a plan to add side panels to make it larger. But then when I blocked it, it grew a lot, and it came out just the right size. 

Sometimes, it’s hard to trust the voice of experience. 

Here’s what it looked like when I draped it across my torso and took a picture of myself in my dimly-lit yellow guest bathroom.

I think I’m on the right track. The only bad news — and it seems like bad only to me, I suppose — is that this is taking a lot less yarn than I would have thought, so I will have a full ball of Tokyo left when I finish it. I like this yarn a lot, but when I’m done with this top, I’m done with the yarn. I don’t want to have to make something else with it. I feel a contest coming on!

Oh, and I upgraded Wordpress over the weekend. There’s a bug that’s giving me some trouble, but I think everything is working now. Let me know if you see any problems. Sigh.

I duplicate-stitched like a mad thing over the weekend, and Sunday night I managed to finish the Fana pullover. I felt pretty lukewarm about this sweater right up until I started putting the snowflakes on it, and then I started to love it. Now that it’s done and I’ve been wearing it for three days straight, I’ve decided that it’s a real winner. It’s warm, it’s comfortable, it fits well, and it looks how I wanted it to look. What’s not to like?

Pattern: My own, based on the traditional Norwegian Fana cardigan in Priscilla Gibson-Roberts’s Knitting in the Old Way
Size: 38″ bust, 13″ to underarm on body, 16″ shoulder to shoulder, 19.5″ to underarm on sleeve, 8.5″ armscye
Yarn: ShibuiKnits Izu (55 percent mohair, 45 percent merino wool; 245 yds per 4 oz skein), two skeins each of Strawberry, Wasabi, and Ivory. This yarn is discontinued.
Yardage: About 1,350 yards
Source: Knit/Purl, Portland, OR
Needles: US 6 (4 mm) for body and sleeves; US 5 (3.75 mm) for ribbing
Gauge: 23.5 sts and 27 rows = 4″ in pattern
Notes: I started this project intending to knit a traditional Fana cardigan following Priscilla Gibson-Roberts’s Knitting in the Old Way, which includes percentage-system-style proportions and directions for a number of different traditional constructions, as well as descriptions and drawings of dozens of traditional garments accompanied by charts and guidelines for making your own. The book is a great resource, and when I started looking through it, I was charmed by the Fana cardigan, which I thought would be a good way to combine the three colors of Izu yarn I had in my stash. Once I got underway, however, I decided that the yarn wasn’t entirely suitable for the traditional Fana style — the I-cord edging in particular just didn’t look right — and I also realized that while there were certain elements of the traditional Fana cardigan that I liked a great deal, there were others that wouldn’t suit my personal sense of style. So I came up with this modified version, which suits me just fine.

I followed Gibson-Roberts’s instructions for a shaped-steek pullover, which is knit in the round from the bottom up to the armpits. At that point, some stitches are bound off for the underarm, steeks are cast on for both armholes (and, in my case, for the henley neckline), and the sweater is worked in the round up to the shoulders, with decreases at the armholes for the first 1.5″ or so. This results in an armhole shape that is the same as that used for set-in sleeves. Over the last 3/4″, I worked back and forth rather than in the round in order to add shoulder shaping to the front and back. Then I sewed and cut the steeks, seamed the shoulders together, and picked up and knit the arms downward in the round.

The resulting sleeve cap is a sort of hybrid of a set-in sleeve and a drop-shoulder sleeve: the sleeve itself has no shaping at the top, which allows you to work color patterns without interruption, but the armhole into which the sleeve is knit is shaped. Before blocking, the sweater bunched quite a lot under the arms, and I really didn’t like that. Now that the sleeves are blocked, it bunches somewhat less and in a way that doesn’t disturb the pattern as much. Still, I’m not sure I’ll be doing shaped steeks again.

The only real drama with this project was the result of a yarn shortage. I initially had about 1,200 yards of DK-weight yarn, which is cutting it close for a pullover in my size. Since I knit the sweater in the round from the bottom up, I was able to determine as I knit that I was not going to have enough of the red and green yarn to do the entire sweater in the striped pattern. This was okay, because I had been toying with the idea of doing the shoulders and sleeve tops with snowflakes — a design element of the traditional Fana cardigan. Implementing that plan required a second ball of white yarn, which I was able to order from Knit/Purl. (I believe that the owner of Knit/Purl is also the person who launched ShibuiKnits. Izu was a ShibuiKnits prototype that was discontinued and replaced with ShibuiKnits Merino Kid. The remaining unsold stock of Izu yarn is still being sold at Knit/Purl as a store-brand yarn, it seems.)

I split my remaining yarn in half before knitting the sleeves, so I was able to keep an eye on how much I had left as I worked my way down to the cuffs. It turned out that I had enough red, but not enough green, to do the cuffs, so red they are. I was initially really unhappy with this outcome, because I didn’t like how the red and green cuffs clashed when I had my arms down at my sides. The effect was a little too Children’s Toy Primary Colors for me. When I added the snowflakes, however, I decided to put green ones on the body and red ones on the sleeves. This had the effect of matching the snowflakes to the cuffs on both the body and the sleeves, thus creating a nice balance that neutralizes the effect that made me so unhappy.

I duplicate-stitched the snowflakes last, which turned out to be a good decision, because I had so very little yarn remaining that I needed to conserve it and plan those snowflakes carefully. The red snowflakes on the sleeves are slightly smaller than the green ones on the body, which saved me a bit of yarn and allowed them to fit into the available space. After I finished the final green snowflake, I was left with about 2″ of green yarn to weave in. I did better with the red: I had about 18″ left when I finished the red snowflakes. It was tight, folks, but I made it.

I could have stretched the yarn supply further had I made this sweater more close-fitting, as I normally do, but I was convinced that this construction and pattern would look best if it was just a bit oversized, so I built in about 3″ of positive ease. I’m glad that I did, because the fit seems just right, and I think a tighter sweater would have been less comfortable and less flattering.

I found the buttons for this sweater at As Cute as Button. They are pewter, which is traditional for Fana cardigans, and they’re about 5/8″ in diameter. I only had to order two sets of buttons this time to get it right — the first ones were too small. Unfortunately, the buttonholes are a bit gappy. I haven’t had this problem before, maybe because my earlier buttonholes were all done in garter stitch, rather than ribbed, bands. I’m planning to reinforce the edges with buttonhole stitch, which I hope will solve the problem.

This is the fourth sweater in my planned Fall/Winter 2007 design collection. If you look back at the original set of swatches, you’ll see that I was going to use this yarn in a slipped-stitch pattern. The sweater you see here is a far cry from the one I had planned, but going with the flow is part of the fun of designing your own sweaters!

Earlier posts about this sweater are here, here, here, and here. Oh, and the hat in the pictures is hand-knit, but not by me. My grandma made it for me a long time ago.

I had hoped to be finished with my Fana pullover by now, but the week kind of got away from me. I had a bunch of meetings to go to, and I started reading a book that totally sucked me in, so I didn’t get too much knitting done. I did manage to complete the first sleeve by last Sunday, and I have about three-quarters of the second sleeve done, so that the sweater currently looks like this:

The ivory yarn that came from Knit/Purl last Friday is a perfect match for the yarn I was already using (same dye lot and everything), which was a great relief. Judging by how much yarn is left here at the end of sleeve 2, I am barely going to have enough of the colors to finish the sweater, and if I hadn’t managed to get that second ball of ivory yarn, I would have been sunk.

Now I just have to finish the sleeve, knit both cuffs (probably in the strawberry color with a green edge), pick up and knit the placket (probably in white with a strawberry-colored edge), duplicate-stitch a snowflake pattern on the shoulders and at the top of the arms (in both colors), sew down all the steeks on the inside, weave in my ends, sew on the buttons, and I’ll be all set.

Hmm. That list didn’t sound as long in my head as it does now that I’ve typed it out. Maybe I won’t finish it this weekend after all.

Earlier in the week, I did manage to get a fair bit of knitting done on the T-topper while sitting through meetings. (Fana is too bulky and awkward to travel well.) The front piece is now about 10.5 inches long. It’s narrower than I would like, but I think it will block to size. I didn’t want to make the pieces too big, because I’d like this top to fit closely, and the silk content of the yarn will cause it to have less memory than 100 percent wool would have.

I feel some distaste for the word “T-topper,” so I think I’ll call this project the “Tokyo top,” after the Interlacements Tokyo I’m using.

Here’s another close-up of the stitch pattern, which I love beyond reason.

Meanwhile, I have been daydreaming about my next next project — which is to say, the project I will start after I finish the Fana pullover and the Tokyo top. I can hardly wait to get going. I’m going to use this.

I managed to finish the body of the Fana pullover on Tuesday, and yesterday I blocked it and sewed and cut the steeks.

I was a little nervous about this stage, and not just because it involved cutting my knitting. No, I was nervous because I had come up with a plan for wasting the least possible amount of yarn on the neckline by doing decreases in the steek. In developing this plan, I made reference to neither my own experiences nor trusty knitting books. I just sorta flew by the seat of my pants. Then, shortly before it was time to cut the steeks, I started to doubt that the plan was going to work out. The steek was frighteningly bulgy, and it distorted the rows all around it. I began to wonder if, when I cut the steek, the bulgy, distorted part would just . . . sit there . . . rather than opening up into the shape of a crewneck. The stakes were high, since if my logic was faulty, 7″ worth of sweater would be ruined — a blow from which the trusty Fana pullover, already short on yarn, was unlikely to recover.

I subjected David to a long explanation of my steek logic, complete with numerous hasty sketches, near the end of which he said, “I still don’t understand the purpose of a steek.” (I maybe could have explained a little more slowly and clearly.) Eventually, I filled him in enough that he was able to agree that my steek reasoning was probably — but not definitely — sound. With this meager reassurance, I plowed ahead. Thankfully, everything came out fine.

After the picture up there was taken, I picked up stitches around one armhole in white and knit the first three rows, but then my progress lurched to a halt. A few days earlier, when it had become clear that I was definitely going to run out of yarn, I ordered some white ShibuiKnits Merino Kid from Knit/Purl as a substitute for the white Izu. On Tuesday I learned, to my great disappointment, that not only does Knit/Purl not have white Merino Kid, white Merino Kid does not actually exist. That it, it is not produced by ShibuiKnits, and it was only listed on the Knit/Purl website by accident.

This news came as something of a disappointment. It turns out, however, that Knit/Purl has something even better: they have the discontinued ShibuiKnits Izu itself, in just the ivory color I need. So now I am waiting for it to arrive before I work on the sleeves, since there’s a small chance that the dye lots will not match and I will want to blend the two whites together over both sleeves to minimize any color discontinuity.

While I wait, I have yet another sweater to work on. Or, more properly speaking, a shirt. Believe it or not, this will be the fifth design in my Fall/Winter 2007 collection. For this top, I’m combining Zephyr’s laceweight wool/silk with Interlacements Tokyo, another 50/50 wool/silk, in the Wave and Box Stitch pattern, like so:

I’m going to make a simple boatneck T-topper* in two pieces knit from the bottom up, with garter stitch borders on the bottom, on the short-sleeve edges, and at the neck. I’ve done about 3″, and the teensy, curly strip of knitting looks promising.

I’ve never knit a T-topper before, and I can’t be sure it will be a flattering style, but even if it turns out to be a disaster, it will be a very soft and very colorful disaster.

–

*I can’t find a picture of a T-topper on the Internet, and I’m not sure if the term is widespread or something that Maggie Righetti made up. I got it from her fabulous reference Sweater Design in Plain English. Basically, a T-topper is a T-shirt constructed in two pieces, front and back identical. Each piece looks like a capital T, with the trunk of the T for the body and the top of the T for the arms. The sleeves end up being dropped a bit off the shoulders and are perhaps a teensy bit dolman-ish in that bunchy-under-the-arms way. I think it’s the sort of thing that Janet on Three’s Company would have worn. So, yeah, wish me luck with that.

The Fana pullover grew by leaps and bounds over the weekend.

At first, I wasn’t sure how I managed to knit so much in so short a time, and my previous faith that knitting in pieces is just as fast as knitting in the round was somewhat shaken. Then I came to my senses and realized that the primary reason that I produced such a large amount of sweater over the weekend is that I’m probably going to run out of yarn before this is all over. Truly, nothing spices up a sweater project like impending doom. Particularly when the yarn in question is no longer being produced.

That I’ve grown increasingly fond of the sweater as it has grown larger only heightens the drama. Who could resist this tidy, stripey, cheerful fabric?

Hoping for good news, I spent at least an hour on Saturday doing various calculations in an attempt to figure out with some degree of accuracy (a) how many stitches will be in the finished sweater and (b) how many stitches I am getting from each ball of yarn. As best I can tell, I either will or will not run out of yarn before I’m finished. Betting types would be wise to place their money on “will.”

Having come to this conclusion, I went right back to knitting the sweater. I had just got to part where I set up the armhole and henley steeks, and I was too enthralled to let a little thing like math deter me.

But don’t worry. I’m not the type to work without a safety net. I’ve figured out that the yarn I’m using for this sweater, ShibuiKnits’s discontinued Izu, has in fact been replaced by another ShibuiKnits yarn called Merino Kid that is basically the same yarn but with kid mohair and merino instead of regular mohair and less distinguished wool. It may not be a perfect match, but I think it will do in a pinch, particularly if I confine it to the cuffs and collar. So I’ve ordered one more ball of white yarn, and I’ve formulated a plan that will, I hope, enable me to finish the sweater without compromising my plan for the design. Cross your fingers for me, will you?