Ruthless Knitting Archive

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 –>.

The second sleeve for the herringbone sweater progresses slowly. Meanwhile, my mom sent me some buttons from Portland that she thought might work out for the Middlebury cardigan, and they are just the thing. Mom saves the day again!

Pattern: My own
Size: 37″ bust, 13″ to underarm on body, 13″ shoulder to shoulder, 16″ to underarm on sleeve, 9″ armscye
Yarn: Laughing Tree Farm 2 Ply (60 percent mohair, 40 percent merino wool; 212 yds per 4 oz skein), three skeins of Chocolate and one each of Military Green and Honey
Yardage: About 900 yards — a bit less than I would have expected
Source: Vermont Beads and Fibers, Middlebury, Vermont
Needles: US 5 bamboo straight needles for body; US 4 bamboo circular needle for ribbing, button bands, and collar
Gauge: About 19 sts and 32 rows = 4″ in furrows pattern
Notes: Oh man, I love this sweater. It’s really warm and comfortable, but at the same time it’s rather sharp and tailored looking, which I think is the result of the nice frame for the color pattern that the solid-colored bands of ribbing, button bands, and sleeves create.

I call this my “Middlebury cardigan” because I got the yarn for it in Middlebury, Vermont, at the end of a bicycle vacation with my family this summer. (Come to think of it, my mom bought me the yarn as well as the buttons, so perhaps I ought to give her sponsorship credit.) The yarn was raised, dyed, and — I think — spun at Laughing Tree Farm in Vermont. Wearing the cardigan reminds me of my vacation and also makes me feel like a Vermonter: for whatever reason, it looks to me like the sort of thing one would wear to the Burlington farmer’s market on a Saturday morning. So that makes me happy.

For the most part, creating this sweater was fairly straightforward, but I did encounter a few challenges along the way. First, I chose a color pattern that pulls in vertically, which made it difficult to tell how long and how wide to knit the pieces so they’d settle out to the length and width I wanted. I used my swatch and a blocked front piece to figure this out, and it ended up not being a problem. I think the deep ribbing at the bottom, the bands, and the stockinette sleeves all help to stabilize the length.

While I was knitting the sleeves, I was a little nervous that I had settled on an upper arm width that was going to be narrower than I wanted given the slight looseness of the body (which has 2-3″ of positive ease) and the slightly oversized armholes (9″ deep). One day while I was jogging, I started thinking about whether there was a way to fix this problem without ripping back by picking up stitches along the sleeve edges and knitting for an inch or so before binding off. Then it occurred to me that I could make my sleeve insert into a design feature by using it to echo the pattern on the body. I was so enamored of this idea that I ended up trying it, even though it turned out that I didn’t really need the extra sleeve width after all. I knit the sleeves to the desired length to the underarm, picked up and knit in the color pattern along both edges, and later grafted the two new edges together in the middle. You can see the result here:

I’m tickled with how the inset carries the pattern onto the sleeves, and I’m thinking about other potential applications of the technique in future designs.

At the end, there was some button trauma. The main color I used here is called “Chocolate,” which would imply “brown,” but in most lights the sweater looks quite unmistakeably purple. I was looking for brown-purple buttons, but just about all the purple buttons out there seem to be more blue-purple. I did order some lovely buttons from Earthenwood Studio, but they didn’t end up being glazed dark enough to suit my purposes. I will hang onto them and try to design a different sweater to showcase them in the future. The buttons that my mom found aren’t the perfect color match, but they don’t compete with the sweater, and they’re just right in size and shape. The only problem is that she bought seven, and I need eight, and none of my e-mails to the button vendor are going through. Still, I figure that even one button shy of the full complement, I can call this sweater “finished,” since I’m finally able to wear it.

See how I tried to make that exciting? I fear that it won’t work. I spent nine days knitting a sleeve, and now the sleeve is done, and it’s about as exciting as you would expect. It came out exactly the size I intended for it to come out. I am fond of it. That’s about all there is to say about that.

Here’s my pretty sleeve:

And here’s the sleeve with the cuff flipped up, so you can see the contrast color on the hem (which is called “chokecherry heather”):

The color in both pictures is fairly accurate, which is to say that sometimes the yarn looks brown, and sometimes it looks gray. It is both at once, which pleases me.

Next up: another sleeve. I know! It would be more interesting if I were going to knit, say, the back next, but I might need to order more yarn, and to figure out whether I do, I need to know exactly how much the sleeves are going to consume before I move on to the back.

Because I’m knitting the herringbone sweater on tiny metal needles, I have to make sure that I don’t spend too much time in any given day working on it. I grip the needles pretty hard when I knit, and with metal ones, this can make my right wrist hurt if I’m not careful. Thus, I have another project cooking on the side: I’ve started a Christmas stocking for my niece, Lucie. This is the same Christmas stocking that I knit last year for David –

– only it says “Lucie” on top. It’s knit flat from the top down, and I’ve managed to make it to the row just before the Santa heads begin.

I’m making this stocking for sentimental reasons. Almost everyone in my family has the same Christmas stocking, all of them knit by my grandma when we were younger — one for Mom, one for Dad, one for each of my brothers, one for me, a pair for my aunt and uncle, one for each of my cousins, and so on. I want all the newer additions to the family to have matching stockings of their own, so after I finish Lucie’s, I’m planning to do one for her mother, my sister-in-law Bethany, and then another for my other sister-in-law, Angelyn. I’m hoping that the three stockings will take me just about as long as the sweater, so that I’ll always have something to work on when my wrists need a break, and by the time Christmas rolls around, I’ll have a new sweater to wear and three gifts to distribute. Is that a plan or what?

The winner of the Ugly Slipper Contest, who will receive these beauties here . . .

. . . is Jeni!

Jeni might strike some of you as a dark horse candidate for the slippers, since she snuck her entry in at the end, and she didn’t write a poem. But Jeni was clever in ways that you may not have noticed. Her entry read: “You should give them to me because: (1.) I actually like the color combination. (2.) I also wear an 8.5, the felting will be easy. (3.) You won’t have to pay shipping, you can send them to work with David.” Do you see what she did there? She began by appealing to my vanity — I love how so many of you claimed to “like” or even “love” the slippers — and then quickly moved on to cater to my laziness and cheapness. And it worked! On Saturday morning, when I was ready to felt, I did not want to have to wait to find out the winner’s shoe size, and this alone vaulted Jeni to the top of the list. Well played, Jeni! Your slippers will be making their way to you shortly.

Here’s the obligatory pre-felting Giant Slipper Picture, with my feet for scale:

And this is how the second pair turned out:

I finished them in the nick of time — yesterday, I had to throw out my original slippers, as the holes in the sole were beginning to merge together to become a giant hole. The new slippers seem to be working out as a suitable replacement.

I’m not going to do a finished object post for the slippers, since I’ve made them before and have no observations of significance. Instead, I give you the Clif Notes version: I used Nashua Creative Focus Worsted for the ugly pair and double-stranded Andes yarn with Peace Fleece Worsted for the other pair. I used one pair of size 13 needles and figured out that I don’t need a second needle for the three-needle bind-offs on each slipper, because you can just poke the first needle through both stitches at once and bind them off. That is all.

In other news, I got the buttons I ordered for the Middlebury cardigan, but they’re all wrong. After moping around the house for a while, convinced that I am doomed never to finish that sweater, I asked Melanie of Earthenwood Studio if she could reglaze them darker, and she said she would try again on some new buttons, which I consider to be beyond the call of duty. I’ll keep you posted.

Meanwhile, I started a new sweater a few days ago — the third one in the Ruthless Knitting Fall/Winter 2007 collection, for those of you who are keeping track. Here’s my sketch:

This will be herringbone only on the front, with a slipped-stitch vertical stripe type thing on the sleeves and back. I may add elbow patches, as well. The cuffs and bottom will be hemmed, with the facing in the contrast color. I’ve started on the first sleeve, and my progress so far has been slow but satisfactory. Here’s where I was yesterday; I’ve since made it to the 6″ mark.

I’m using light sportweight yarn from Beaverslide Dry Goods for this sweater, and I’m knitting it on US size 2.5 (3.0 mm) needles. I’m getting about 7 stitches to the inch, which makes this project somewhat like knitting a gigantic sock. This morning, I’m blocking what I have managed to finish so far in order to make sure I don’t have any big gauge catastrophes. One thing I’ve learned about fine-gauge knitting is that small errors in gauge calculation become terribly magnified, so it’s important to get it right the first time.

I expect this will take until about Christmas to finish, and I will probably need to do some small projects in the middle to take the edge off once I get bored, but I’m hoping I can at least finish the first sleeve before that happens.

Happy Halloween!

The good news
I found some buttons that I think will work for my cardigan. I ordered them from Earthenwood Studios; you can look at them here. I chose the pill shape, the berryleaf pattern, and the amethyst color. I think the color is just the right purpley-brown to work with the Middlebury sweater.

The bad news
Since the buttons are made to order, they could take as long as three weeks to arrive. I think this is entirely reasonable, given what’s involved in their creation, but still. Three weeks.

Meanwhile, I set in the first sleeve all over again this morning. It looks better now. And I’m making progress on sleeve number two. I have an hour-long meeting tomorrow, and I bet I’ll finish the cap before it’s over. Then I can finish the seaming and weave in the ends to get the sweater ready for the arrival of the buttons.

Sorry, no pictures today — but I have a suprise I’m saving. I’ll post some pictures and good news later this week!

The good news
Progress on the Middlebury sweater continues apace. I got one sleeve finished and sewn in, the other one about two-thirds knit, and I completed the button bands and collar, too. It’s looking mighty fine, if I do say so myself.

The bad news
I think the sleeve cap might be too puckery at the top, so I might have to set it in again. Or reknit it for the third time. I am not yet willing even to look closely at it, much less consider what has to be done.

More good news
I ordered five different buttons to try out, and they finally arrived yesterday.

More bad news
I don’t like any of them. I ordered some purple ones today, and I’m investigating a vintage button source. Buttons are hard.

The good thing about “two steps forward, one step back” is that you do get there eventually. Don’t you?