Ruthless Knitting Archive

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: Bird in Hand by Kate Gilbert
Size: 7" in diameter and 10" long
Yarn: Jaeger Matchmaker Merino DK (100 percent merino wool; 130 yds per 50 g skein), shades 865 and 790
Yardage: About 160 yds turquoise and 90 yds beige
Source: Monterey Yarn, Green Bay, WI
Needles: US 2 (2.75 mm) Knit Picks classic circular and double-pointed needles
Gauge: 28 sts and 36 rows = 4″ in pattern
Notes: This pattern has become quite popular among the knit bloggers this winter, and for good reason. It’s easy to follow and quite cleverly put together, and the finished mittens are cute and (I hope) warm. The pattern can be purchased directly from Kate Gilbert as a PDF file for $5.95, and it’s worth every penny. 

The only modification I made was to knit the mittens in DK-weight rather than worsted-weight yarn. I did this for two reasons. First, I noticed that some bloggers were finding the finished mittens to be a bit too long in the fingers and thumb, and since these are a gift for a dear friend with tiny hands, I wanted to ensure that they would be small enough without having to resort to modifying the chart. Also, the thought of knitting worsted weight yarn on size 1 or 2 needles made me squirm. I did a project once with worsted yarn and tiny needles, and I found it thoroughly unpleasant. I am quite willing to trade off a bit of warmth for more enjoyable knitting.

Though many people have omitted or modified the braids, I didn’t mind them much. The cuff portion of the mitten is pretty time-consuming compared to the colorwork portions — I found that it took me about 20 minutes to do a braid, and there are three on each mitten — but the braids look nice, and I was glad to learn the technique, which is different than the one I had previously used to create two-color braid.

I had a little trouble with the thumbs, particularly with the birds. It’s hard to get the tension just right on such a small number of stitches so that the birds don’t come out funny looking. Also, my approach to embroidery is to make it up as I go along — perhaps a detriment in this particular situation. Still, I think the little fellows are acceptable, if not smashing.

I came up with one innovation in the process of blocking the mittens that makes me feel clever: I cut out cardboard into a mitten shape and used it to block the wet mittens over. This evened out all the lumpy bits (particularly in the thumbs) and made the mittens look more professional than they otherwise would have. Of course, if you look closely at the pictures, one mitten appears to be a little bigger than the other. That’s because it is. But I think it’s the case because I blocked one a month ago and the other yesterday, rather than because I actually knit one larger than the other. Over time, the more recently blocked mitten ought to settle out at the same size as the smaller one. And if it doesn’t, well, close enough.

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.

—————————————————————————————–

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

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’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.

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!