Ruthless Knitting Archive

After feeling stalled out for a few weeks, I’m making visible progress again on the Kinari cardigan. I’ve finished up the body edging for the second time, and this morning I started the second sleeve. When I tried the partial cardigan on yesterday, it looked much more like my sketch than it had the first time around. I have my fingers crossed that the sailing will be smooth from here.

Meanwhile, David and I took off for Chicago on Friday, where we had a fun time tromping around the city for a few days, visiting the Field Museum, and generally pretending that we don’t have jobs or responsibilities. I kept saying that we were on "vacation," but David tells me that other people call this "the weekend." Hmm.

I checked out Loopy Yarns while we were there, where I bought some Aslan Trends souvenir yarn at 60 percent off. It’s an alpaca/merino blend in lovely shades of blue and orange that I didn’t quite manage to capture with the camera. David will have you know that he was the one who picked out these colors as the best pairing in the sale bin. I have already planned a hat pattern.

Thanks for all the amusing comments on the last post. Your guesses entertained me (and my mother), but alas, you’re all wrong except Rachel, who is right that that is the pig I made in Mrs. Smith’s middle school art class. Rachel knew this because she and I went to middle school together, and she has a ceramic pig of her own. Since Beverly Anne had the closest guess — that I am "making a piggy, cowie, bunny toy" — she wins the prize, which is either two skeins of Lorna’s Laces in Amish or three skeins of Manos Cotton Stria in a bright red (links go to Ravelry; if you haven’t joined yet, you won’t be able to follow them). I have to keep the exact nature of my design under wraps for a while, but I’ll let you know what I’ve been up to just as soon as I’m able.

The Kinari cardigan continues to require a great deal of patience. As you can see here, I have finished a sleeve, and lo, it is glorious.

But the part of the picture that’s in shadow isn’t going so well. I did finish knitting the body. It took a week to do the edging: because the yarn I used for that part was somewhat thicker than what I had been using for the body but the needles were the same size, it hurt my wrists to do more than a couple of rows at a time. It really wasn’t any fun. And then when I tried the sweater on, it became clear that the edging really hadn’t worked out. I had put too many increases in, so the bottom was proportionately much wider than it had been in my sketch, and since the fabric was thick, it was also rather stiff, with the result that it more or less stood straight out from my body. Wearing it, I looked like a very fashionable pyramid.

To cheer myself up and restore my flagging confidence, I knit the sleeve. Having learned my lessons from the body, I got the edging right this time. Then I cut off the bottom 4.25" on the body and started over with skinnier yarn and larger needles. The knitting is much more enjoyable now, and it seems to be going a bit more quickly. I’m hopeful.

I’ve been slowed down some by a Secret Design Project that’s going to keep me semi-occupied for the next several weeks. I can’t tell you what I’m working on, but I can give you a hint. Here it is:

Anyone who can figure out what I’m up to from that picture gets a prize.

The Kinari cardigan has reached a tough stage. Progress seems slow, the sweater is all scrunched up on the needles, and I’m having periods of doubt about some of my decisions. Will it be too wide at the bottom? I don’t own anything swingy, maybe for good reason. Will the bright white of the buttons look okay on the unbleached white of the sweater?

I suspect that many sweater projects are abandoned at this stage, when the fantasy that propels you through the first half of the knitting starts to fade, papered over with doubts. The rows are long now, and the edges all curl under, and it’s hard to envision just how the final product will work out.

It’s been my experience that art in general hardly ever works out just the way I imagine it will. But it often works out in a different way than I could have imagined — a way that is just as good, once I’ve managed to let go of the image of the old thing and to love the new thing as it is.

So I press on, one long row at a time, because that’s the only way to find out what this sweater will be when it’s finished.

I’m someone who can’t manage to keep a white shirt long without staining it. Come to think of it, I don’t actually own a white T-shirt (long- or short-sleeved) at present, probably for this very reason. Thus, the fact that I’m designing an all-white wool cardigan should be understood as an indication that my practical side has been overruled by the Design Mind, which insists that these buttons (a Christmas gift from my father, who made them) —

 — will work best on a sweater that looks like this:

In case my scrawlings aren’t altogether clear, that’s an all-white wool sweater with elbow-length raglan sleeves knit from the top down in one piece. The body widens all the way from the cast-on edge to the bottom hem, as do the sleeves, so that the sweater is fitted at the bust and flares out gently below. The bottom 6" of the body and sleeves will be done in a texture stitch that incorporates triangle shapes to echo the shapes on the buttons. The rest of the sweater will be stockinette. All the edgings are meant to be hemmed, so there won’t be any bands or borders, just clean lines. The buttons will be placed on the upper chest and will close with some sort of fasteners fashioned out of yarn, which may or may not be red. (I think red might look nice, but I’m afraid it will bleed on the white sweater when I wash it.)

I pondered yarn possibilities for a while. My overall vision for this design is that it ought to be clean and somewhat Eastern-looking, but at first I considered some more rustic white wool yarns, because I liked the idea of a contrast between the rustic yarn and the smooth glass buttons. Peace Fleece DK (in Antarctic white) was a serious contender at this stage. Ultimately, though, I settled on Habu’s wool roving A-81 1/6. It’s an undyed laceweight yarn that’s very loosely spun, so it has a slight halo and is soft. I’m holding it double, which makes it approximately sport weight. I thought at first that I could get the whole sweater out of one skein of this yarn (about 800 yards held double), but it later became clear that at a gauge of 7 stitches and 8 rows to the inch on size 5 needles, that’s not likely to happen. I had bought the first skein from KPixie, and I found a second on sale at Purl. The undyed yarn color is listed on the label as "kinari," which is where I got the name for the sweater. I don’t know what it means, but I like the sound of it. I hope it means "undyed," or at least not something embarrassing.

For the raglan seams, I’m using a double increase that I found described in Barbara Walker’s Knitting from the Top. It’s worked by knitting into the back of the seam stitch, then knitting into the front of it, moving it off the needle, picking up the vertical bar in the row below the stitch just created with the left needle, and knitting that stitch. This technique creates a neat line with raised center stitches that look almost beaded.

Progress so far has not been rapid, and in fact the last few inches before the divide at the underarm were a real slog, with more than 350 stitches on the needles. Since I divided the body from the sleeves over the weekend, however, I’ve been moving right along.

All that stockinette is getting a bit dull, so I’ve been telling myself that I just have to do a few more inches, and then I can start the texture pattern. For that, I’d like to use this simple lozenge stitch from Barbara Walker’s first treasury.

This is the first sweater in a new collection that I’m working on. The genesis was the two sets of glass buttons that my dad made me for Christmas. I had started thinking of designs to use these buttons, and then I remembered that I have some fantastic green glass buttons that I’d also like to design a sweater around. And then I remembered that I want to design something for the lovely purple buttons I bought from Earthenwood Studio that didn’t work for my Middlebury cardigan. And I also have a whole bunch of vintage mother-of-pearl buttons from an antique shop in New York that I want to use in a Habu sweater for my sister-in-law. Before I knew it, I had five different sweaters in mind and realized that the Button Collection had begun to take shape entirely of its own accord. Who am I to buck fate?

I haven’t entirely closed the books on the Fall/Winter 2007 Collection, because there’s a stranded design I would still like to do, but my knitterly instincts are telling me to let that marinate a while longer. So it’s on to buttons!

I got the Tokyo pattern written up over the weekend, so I offer it to you for your knitting pleasure.

You can do a direct PDF download (2.4 MB) via this link or visit the Designs page at your leisure and follow the link there.

Or, if you’re a Ravelry user, you can download the pattern and add it to your library here. I find it both exciting and somewhat alarming that more than fifty Ravelers have downloaded the pattern since I posted it after lunch today. Yowza!

Since I have one skein of Tokyo and a fair amount of Zephyr left over from this project that I’m unlikely to use, I’m going to give it away. If you’d like my cast-off Tokyo and Jaggerspun Zephyr, of which there is quite a lot but not necessarily enough to make a Tokyo top, leave a comment saying why. I’ll draw a name on Wednesday to determine the lucky winner.

Pattern: My own
Size: 32″ bust, 13″ to underarm on body, 5" sleeve length, 7" sleeve opening
Yarn: Interlacements Tokyo (50 percent merino wool, 50 percent silk; 500 yds per 100 g skein), color Taiga; Jaggerspun Zephyr Wool-Silk 2-18 Lace Weight (50 percent Chinese tussah silk, 50 percent fine merino wool; 630 yds per 2 oz), color Basil, held double
Yardage: About 475 yards of Tokyo and 650 yds of Zephyr
Source: Interlacements Yarns; Sarah’s Yarns 
Needles: US 4 (3.5 mm) Knit Picks Harmony circular needles
Gauge: 24 sts and 36 rows = 4″ in pattern
Notes: This project began with the yarn, which I bought through a Yahoo wholesale group a few years ago. Since that time, I have discovered that I am far more interested in knitting garments in solid and semi-solid yarns than in variegated ones, which left me with a bit of a dilemma regarding how to use up the thousand yards of wool/silk in my possession. My plan when I bought the yarn was to make a shawl, but that impulse faded fast. Later, I had the idea of using the Tokyo combined with some matching solid-colored Zephyr to make a baseball-shirt-style sweater with three-quarter-length sleeves — a sort of soft, warm, refined throwback to the popular baseball t-shirts of my youth. I still think that would have been kind of cute, but I sat on the idea long enough that I grew bored with it.

In search of another plan, I discovered wave and box stitch in Barbara Walker’s second treasury of knitting patterns, swatched it, and became smitten. In the book, this pattern is shown in high-contrast yarns, but I love how using two similar colors results in a fabric that seems to have a cellular structure but doesn’t give away the secrets of its construction without close scrutiny. The pattern breaks up the variegation but retains all the interesting color play; it manages to be colorful without, I think, being garish.

I decided to pair wave and box stitch with bands of garter stitch at all the edges of the top. This idea came straight out of Maggie Righetti’s Sweater Design in Plain English, which was also the source of my notion to try out the garment shape she calls a "T-topper." The planning from that point forward was quick and simple: I drew a sketch and a diagram and jotted down about three lines of instructions in my notebook. Then all I had to do was knit, block, and seam.

Since the T-topper shape is something of a throwback to the 1980s (and I am not the kind of gal to wear legwarmers), I wasn’t altogether sure how the finished garment would look on me. It turns out that it’s a pretty flattering cut — and I realized belatedly that I actually have a similarly constructed shirt in my closet that I’ve been wearing to dressy functions for about six years. Duh.

Creating the Tokyo top was simple and pleasurable, and I am so enamored of the result that I intend to write up the pattern and make it available alongside my other free designs in the near future.

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Other posts about the Tokyo top:

• In which I swatch Tokyo for the first time
• In which I swatch Zephyr and outline my baseball sweater plan
• In which I discover wave and box stitch
• In which I cast on
• In which I knit the front
• In which I block the front