Ruthless Knitting

Thanks for all your enthusiastic comments about Slim! It’s wonderful to get positive feedback from other knitters.

I’ve been busy working through a list of things I wanted to get done before we leave town on December 24. In addition to baking and mailing fifteen pound cakes, among other things, I have finally finished writing up the pattern for Florence, and it is now available for free via the Designs page on the sidebar.

I’ve been trying to finish writing this pattern for months, but every time I sat down to work on it I became daunted by the task and gave up. I was originally attempting to offer four sizes, but then I decided to shift tactics and instead write up both instructions for the size of the original (34″ bust) and instructions for creating a custom tunic in any size. If you’ve ever written a multi-size pattern before, you’ll have an idea of what a monumental task that is. Yesterday, I abandoned that plan upon finally realizing two things. First, Florence is made in a Habu yarn, and like most Habu garments, it is stretchy, drapey, and highly transformable in size. Habu patterns, in other words, are almost always written in only one size for a reason. I have concluded that the 34″ size I made will probably fit a really wide range of bodies, including busts up to 42″ or so, and that anyone with a considerably larger bust, as well as anyone who wants to modify the length or the shaping, can darn well figure it out themselves. This realization freed me from having to do any additional calculations, which was quite a relief. So the pattern is finished at last. Have at it.

Meanwhile, I sent an e-mail off to Bernat a few weeks ago to let them know that I was noticing a lot of interest in the vintage Santa Claus stocking pattern that I had been knitting for my family members, and I asked whether the stocking was still copyrighted. I didn’t get a clear answer to that question, but I did get permission from Bernat to reprint the pattern here. Thus, there is now a link on the sidebar to the Vintage Santa Stocking Pattern. I’ve finished two of the three I pledged to make this year, and the third one is 95 percent done. I just have to knit about eight rounds of toe, weave in a boatload of ends, buy and attach some jingle bells, and I’m good to go.

I would have finished the stockings considerably sooner if I hadn’t grown bored with Stocking the Third, purchased Kate Gilbert’s Bird in Hand mitten pattern, picked up yarn for it at Monterey Yarn (my local yarn shop), and knit the first mitten in an enraptured state of perfect enjoyment. It’s a wonderful pattern. The thumb gave me a little trouble, and I had to do it twice, so I don’t have a picture yet of the fetching little bird, but you can see that the mitten itself is quite something:

I am making these for my lovely friend Anne for her birthday. She has tiny little hands, so I used DK weight instead of worsted (Jaeger Matchmaker Merino DK, for those of you who care). This mitten is just a tad snug on me, so I’m hoping it will fit Anne just right.

In just a few days we leave for vacation in Oregon, where we will ski and relax and knit and read and cook and talk and play cards and generally have a grand old time. I’m not sure whether I’ll update while I’m away, but I intend to start a new sweater while I’m gone. Should you desire a spoiler, I’ll leave you with two words: Fana cardigan.

See you on the flip side!

Pattern: My own
Size: 35″ bust, 14.5″ to underarm on body, 14″ shoulder to shoulder, 18″ to underarm on sleeve, 8″ armscye
Yarn: Beaverslide Dry Goods Light Sportweight (90 percent Beaverslide merino wool, 10 percent kid mohair; 440 yds per 4 oz hank), three skeins of Mink Heather and one skein of Chokecherry Heather
Yardage: About 1,500 yards
Source: Beaverslide Dry Goods, Dupuyer, MT
Needles: US 2.5 (3.25 mm) metal Classic Circulars from Knit Picks for sleeves, back, hems, and neckline; US 4 bamboo straights for patterned portion of front
Gauge: 27 sts and 42 rows = 4″ for solid portions; 29 sts and 32 rows = 4″ for herringbone portion
Notes: Isn’t it wonderful when a project works out the way you intended it to, with a few happy improvisations along the way? After about seven weeks of dedicated effort, Slim is finished, and I am very, very pleased with it. I have positive associations with herringbone that go back many years, but I believe that this is the first herringbone-patterned garment I’ve ever owned (with the exception of my Red Herring socks, of course). Since I’ve also designed an argyle sweater, I figure all I need to fill out my menswear-inspired collection is houndstooth and plaid sweaters — and since the notion of knitting in both patterns definitely intrigues me, don’t be surprised if you see them popping up in future designs!

I really enjoyed working with Beaverslide yarn for this project. The light sportweight is thin enough that knitting this took longer to finish than any sweater I’ve made so far, but I was rewarded with a fabric that is light, dense, warm, and beautiful. The colors are rich and complex, changing character with the light, and the yarn fluffs up nicely when blocked. I will certainly be trying out other Beaverslide yarns in the future.

There were some inherent design challenges to working with this yarn, the most significant of which was that I couldn’t manage a ribbing in it that looked halfway decent or would hold its shape (though I’ll admit that I was unwilling to try using size 1 needles, which may have done the trick). Instead of ribbing the cuffs and edgings, I decided to hem the sweater, using chokecherry in stockinette underneath and mink heather in heel stitch on top. The idea was to give the hems the appearance of being ribbed without actually ribbing them. This worked out beautifully, and the hems give the sweater some character it might not have had with plain ribbed edgings. Had the yarn been any heavier, they would have been too bulky, but in sportweight they are just right.

Using the chokecherry underneath and working a purled turning row also gave me a thin line of chokecherry purl bumps peeking out at the wrist and along the bottom of the sweater, which I just love. I decided to echo that line at the neck by working two stitches at each edge of the V-neck in chokecherry. Once I had picked up along the edge stitch to knit in the collar, I was left with a line of chokecherry one stitch wide along the entire V-neck, which creates a nice frame for the face.

The sleeves and back have a subtle vertical stripe, which I accomplished by slipping every sixth stitch on the right side. These vertical lines echo the herringbone pattern on the front and are at about the same spacing. I took this vertical slipped-stitch detailing from a design idea that I had last year and ultimately decided not to pursue. It was gratifying to be able to incorporate it into another project, and I think it works here to give the plain parts of the sweater some visual interest without making them too busy or putting them in competition with the front.

One design idea that I abandoned at the eleventh hour was to make up elbow patches in the chokecherry color and sew them on. I had thought originally that these would add some interest to the sleeves, reinforce the fabric at the elbows (where I feared it would be thin and wear through), and go along nicely with the overall look of the sweater. Once I gave the matter further thought, though, I decided that the elbow patches might look too rough and handmade, taking away from the simple elegance of the design. I also determined that the fabric of the sleeves had more strength than I had initially believed it would, so elbow patches are probably unnecessary. An online search for knitting patterns with knitted elbow patches didn’t turn up any that looked remotely acceptable to me, which was enough to convince me that jettisoning the elbow patches was the right decision.

I did encounter a few problems at the finishing stage. The sleeves came out too short — shorter than I had planned them to be by about a half inch, and what I had planned was itself too short — but I blocked them about an inch and a half longer, and now they’re perfect. I also had trouble seaming the sleeve caps in, since I had to deal with two different gauges (back and front) while trying to ease in a little extra width evenly across the whole cap.

Technical note: I’m not sure why my sleeve caps tend to come out too large, since I always carefully check various reference sources and plan them meticulously. I suppose it could be related to the fact that there are still some aspects of sleeve caps that I find mysterious, chief among them the fact that the stair-step bind-offs that precede the bind-off of the final flat area across the top don’t appear to be figured into the overall length of the sleeve cap (at least, not in Maggie Righetti’s book or in the Ann Budd sweater book). Yet when you go to seam in the sleeve, there they are, ready to eat up a whole bunch of stitches and then force you to figure out how to ease in the difference somehow over the rest of the cap. Or am I the only one who has this problem?

At any rate, next time I’m going to try making my sleeve caps a bit shorter than the reference books say they ought to be in order to account for those stair-step bind-offs. Maybe that will magically do the trick. For this project, I did manage to get the first cap seamed in nicely on the fourth try, and the second cap only took one try. Blocking took away a few puckers that concerned me, and now all is well with the sleeves.

I’m wearing the sweater as I type this, and I’m pleased to report that Slim is warm and cozy. I imagine I’ll be getting a lot of wear out of it this winter, as it’s perfect for our cold house. And with a collared shirt underneath and dress pants, it ought to be fine for parties, too — at least, the sort of parties I go to.

Other posts about Slim are here, here, here, here, here, and here. This is the third sweater in my Fall/Winter 2007 “collection.” The first was Frances, and the second was Middlebury.

I’ve finished the back of the herringbone sweater. That makes three pieces down and one piece to go. Here they are all laid out:

It’s a funny sort of accomplishment, finishing the third piece of a sweater. It’s satisfying, but it’s also something of a letdown, since you can’t do much of anything with three pieces of a sweater except fold them into a neat little pile and get going on the fourth piece.

That swatch on the top of the pile was yesterday’s project. In order to decide which needles to use for the front of the sweater, which will be entirely herringbone, I had to try out four different sizes.

After consulting with David, I accepted his recommendation and settled on the second one from the top, for which I used US size 4 needles. The width of each column of herringbone should match the width between slipped-stitch columns on the arms and back. At least, that’s the plan.

After working on this sweater for a little over a month, I’ve decided to call it “Slim,” both in reference to the slimming vertical lines and in honor of Florence’s beau-turned-husband.* Normally, I would be feeling antsy to move on to something new, but I’ve been unusually faithful to Slim. I guess that, like Florence, I’m in this for the long haul.

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*If you have no idea what I’m talking about, check out the Adventures of Florence category over there on the sidebar –>.

I’m back from Vermont, where David and I had a smashing time with my family. There was a lot of this kind of thing:

and of this kind of thing:

What with all the beautiful scenery, the old homes and churches and barns, the great riding, the steep climbing and descending, the rain and wind, and the occasional map-reading error, the trip was a challenging and exhausting adventure. Luckily, this is my idea of the perfect vacation.

Contest results

Thanks so much for all your contest entries and kind comments about Florence! It was fun to come home and read them all. Interestingly, while I was away, a lively sizing discussion got going over at Knitting Daily. I haven’t had a chance to read all the comments there yet, but there is an interesting survey of bust sizes, as well as the potential for a more thorough sizing survey in the future. I’ll be keeping my eye out for that.

Meanwhile, this morning, I put all the names of the people who entered my contest in my favorite camping hat . . .

. . . and picked the winner!

Mel, you’ve got a Kpixie gift certificate and a custom pattern coming your way — the former rather more quickly than the latter, to be sure.

It is funny that Mel won my contest, because I came home to discover that I won her contest while I was away. Life is strange and wonderful sometimes.

Even if we hadn’t won one another’s contests, I would have wanted to write about Mel in this post anyway, because she just had her first pattern published — the beautiful Summer Sky in this month’s MagKnits. I am not normally someone who wears short sweaters, but the details on this sweater are so lovely and perfect that I’ve been toying with knitting it since I first saw the design. Bravo, Mel!

Knitting update

Bicycling and knitting do not go together, unfortunately, so all I managed to get done during my vacation was about two-thirds of the leg of my second Nine-to-Five Sock. Before I left, however, I knit most of a Ribbed Lace Bolero for my niece Lucy, and I finished all but the weaving of the ends this morning. It’s been a fun knit — I’ll post about it within the next day or two.

Accolades

Last but not least, both Mel and Emilee have nominated me as a Rockin’ Girl Blogger, which was awfully nice of them. I have a strange aversion to buttons, as well as a strong left-wing-liberal-arts-college-education distaste for the word “girl” as applied to any woman past puberty, but I wholeheartedly appreciate the sentiment nonetheless. Thanks, Mel and Emilee!

Souvenirs

I posted this without remembering that I have one more picture to show you — my souvenir yarn! I found these at Vermont Beads and Fibers in Middlebury, Vermont. They are from Laughing Tree Farm in Monkton, Vermont, which raises angora goats. The yarn, a mohair/wool blend, is spun and dyed at the farm. I already have a sweater planned!

Florence is finished, and she’s just lovely! We had our ups and downs, to be sure, but I’m glad that I persisted.

Thanks to David for the pictures. He has the patience of a saint!

Pattern: Florence, my own pattern
Size: 34″ bust, 32″ waist, 44″ at hips. 23.5″ total length, 4″ sleeve to underarm, 20″ sleeve at widest point.
Yarn: Habu Cotton Gima A-174, 1/8.5 (100 percent cotton, 265 yards per 1 oz. skein), color 23
Yardage: 3.5 skeins
Source: Kpixie
Needles: US5 bamboo straights and US4 bamboo circular (24″)
Gauge: 22.5 stitches and 32 rows = 4″ in stockinette stitch
Notes: This project began when the Design Workshop I belong to had a “linen stitch challenge,” for which we all tried to think of ways to incorporate linen stitch in a knitting design. This led to the creation of the Linen-Stitch Baby Tanks, Nicole’s linen-stitch heel on her Nine-to-Five Socks, and a fantastic design by Mel that will appear soon in MagKnits. It also inspired me to come up with a scheme for a summery top in Habu Cotton Gima that would have linen stitch edgings. Once I bought the yarn for the top and began swatching, however, I quickly figured out that linen stitch was not going to work. I set about trying to come up with another plan. Many swatches later, I decided to copy my favorite summer T-shirt. Here’s a sketch of what I was aiming for:

My plan worked about as well as such plans normally do — some elements of the original design are still present in the finished product, others didn’t work out, and still others I deliberately changed along the way. I scrapped the original sleeves, for example, once I saw how light and floaty the top was going to be, because it seemed to me that longer, floatier sleeves would work better with the design.

I’m calling this top “Florence” in honor of the Florence whose diary I recently featured here. You can read about her, and about the stages of knitting this project, in the Adventures of Florence category. I can’t say whether or not Florence would have worn a garment like this, or would have liked it, or even whether she was a knitter — but I can say that wearing this top will always make me think of her fondly.

And Now For a Contest!

I would very much like to write up the pattern for Florence and make it available for free to anyone who would like to knit it. This will be easy enough to do for the size I actually made, but I find it challenging to size patterns up and down for others. Sizing guidelines only take me so far; at a certain point, I have trouble trusting that the measurements I’m using for bodies other than my own are going to fit a real human person. Here’s where you come in: I’d like to collect some measurements from different bodies, and a contest seems like a good way to go about it. If you’d like to enter, all you have to do is answer, to the best of your ability, four questions in the comments, as follows:

(1) What size bust do you usually make for a knitted garment (assuming no positive or negative ease)?
(2) What size is your waist?
(3) What is the best-fitting knitted garment you have made, and what did you like about the construction?
(4) When you knit a garment or purchase a ready-made garment from the store, what do you usually have to alter or avoid?
Additional comments/observations about your personal sizing dilemmas are welcome.

If you’ve never knit a garment but would still like to participate, you can do so by measuring your best-fitting existing sweater or other garment. Just to be fair, here are my answers:

(1) 34″ bust.
(2) About 30-31″.
(3) Jess by Anna Bell. I made it with several inches of negative ease (rather accidentally), but it’s very stretchy, and the fit is quite flattering.
(4) In knitted garments, I often make the armholes shallower and the arms shorter. I have to avoid any bust-shaping in a ready-made garment; I don’t have the bust to fill it out.
I am basically a fairly easy size to fit — which might explain why I have trouble figuring out how to fit garments for other people.

I’m going to keep the contest open until August 12, when I get back from vacation. At that point, I’ll randomy choose the name of a winner, who will recieve a gift certificate to Kpixie that will allow them to purchase enough Habu Cotton Gima to make their own Florence top. (Of course, the winner may choose to buy something else with the gift certificate. That’s between them and Kpixie.) I will also write a version of the pattern sized to fit the winner.

I’m off to Vermont to ride my bicycle around the Green Mountains with my husband, my parents, and one of my brothers. Have fun with those measuring tapes!

Is it possible to take an interesting picture of a sleeve? I am not so sure. Here are two attempts:

“Frances” is what I’m calling this sweater now. I gave up on “Wine-Dark Sea Pullover.” Too flowery for me, and too many words. I have reverted instead to my friend Rebecca’s suggestion that I call all the pieces in my 2007 collection by the names of people from Florence’s diary. Frances, you may recall, was Florence’s twin sister. Though this sweater is by no means a twin of the Florence top-in-progress, it does have certain qualities that I associate with the name Frances: it’s pretty in an elegant, understated way, and it’s not too fussy. I like it.

That’s all the knitting progress I’ve got to show for myself, as I spent last Saturday, Sunday, and Monday on a bicycle trip without any knitting. David and I headed out from our house to Door County, camping overnight in Egg Harbor and then in Peninsula State Park. We rode about 180 miles in 3 days (mostly days 1 and 3, with hiking on day 2). It was our kind of fun, and an early anniversary present to ourselves. We’ve been married four years today.

Here’s the only decent picture I managed to take on the trip: David is riding out onto a little pier purely for the photo opportunity. You can see the trailer behind him in which he’s dragging all his stuff.

Now that the sleeve is finished, I’m going to return to Florence. I’ve had a long enough break that I’m excited to wrap it up and wear it!

Oh, and I’m on Ravelry as of yesterday. My username is “Ruthless.” Look me up if you’re on there, too.