Ruthless Knitting

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.

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*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?

I’m back from a few days in Mount Shasta, California, where I did some cross-country skiing, and from nearly a week in Klamath Falls, Oregon, where my parents live. I love Klamath Falls. How can you not love a place that looks like this in the winter?

I finished the last of the Christmas stockings before I left, sewed on the bells, and was rewarded with the lovely sight of all of the stockings hung up by the chimney at my parents’ house. And it’s quite a chimney — see?

I didn’t get much knitting done while I was away, but I did manage to make some quick fingerless gloves for David to match his Halfdome hat. He wears the hat around the house in the winter to compensate for the cruelly low temperature at which our thermostat is set, but his hands are always cold. The pattern is called Jacoby, and it’s free from Berrocco. These gloves are so stretchy, I think they’d fit just about any adult hands. I used leftover fingering-weight yarn and US size 3 needles.

My dad is a glass artist who is as obsessed with fusing glass in his kiln as I am with knitting. For Christmas, he made me two cards of glass buttons. I’ve been having fun imagining what kind of sweaters I should knit for them. I’m thinking of a white wool cardigan that buttons only at the top for these red and white buttons — something kind of swingy and modern and not too flashy.

The red and purple buttons are a little trickier, but I have a notion to make a purple (tweedy?) sweater that is double-breasted so that the six buttons can be displayed at chest level in two vertical lines. I haven’t done any sketching for either sweater yet, but I’ll get to it. There are still some sweaters in the queue that I already have yarn for, so I don’t want to buy any more until I’ve more or less used that up.

Meanwhile, I started a new sweater over the holidays. I’m using Shibuiknits Izu, a wool/mohair blend that apparently doesn’t exist anymore. As I hinted at the end of my last post, I was inspired by Priscilla Gibson-Roberts’s fabulous Knitting in the Old Way to make a Fana cardigan, which is a traditional regional style from Norway. (If you don’t have Knitting in the Old Way and you have the slightest interest in design, you really ought to buy it. It’s an impressive reference book, packed full of inspiration and ideas.) A traditional Fana cardigan would have looked something like this:

After making a swatch, however, I concluded that the braided bottom edge and I-cord borders weren’t going to work in this yarn. Then I realized that as much as I like the drawing of the Fana cardigan in the book, I’m not likely to wear a cardigan in this style. I cast on instead for a Fana pullover, knit the checkerboard bottom band, and decided that I didn’t like that, either. The part of the Fana cardigan that really caught my eye to begin with was the striped pattern, so that’s the part I ultimately decided to keep, with plain ribbing at the bottom. I’ve managed to knit about eight inches of the body so far.

My plan now is to make a henley pullover with pewter buttons, but the plan is rather malleable, as I’m not sure yet how far the yarn is going to go. I have two balls of the strawberry color and two of the wasabi, for about a thousand yards altogether of the main colors and another two hundred fifty of the white. I may need to rip out the green ribbing and figure out some other way to do the edging that won’t roll but will either use up less yarn (if I run short of both colors) or distribute the two colors equally (if I run out of the green). Only time will tell.

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.

Let the seaming begin! I have the distinct impression that the sleeve caps are going to give me fits.