Ruthless Knitting

Since returning from Vermont, in addition to completing the Nine-to-Five Socks and making the XOXO Baby Socks, I’ve also finished up a couple old projects that have been lying around making me feel guilty.

First, I managed to reseam and weave in all the ends on the turtle sweater (explanatory backstory is here and here), and on Tuesday I returned it to its rightful owner, Gwendolyn. You may recall that the hood opening was too small for her, causing much consternation when her mother tried to dress her in the sweater. I solved this problem by (1) taking the sweater apart; (2) ripping out about 10 rows of the back, increasing a whole bunch of stitches evenly across the back so that it had as many stitches as the hood does at the back, and knitting up the remaining rows; (3) grafting the hood and the back together; and (4) grafting the shoulders together. Now it’s quite stretchy. As you can see, Gwendolyn looks adorable in it (though a tad concerned — I was babysitting her, and this is the look that means, “You are okay, but you are clearly not my mother”).

There are still some things about the sweater that I don’t like, but it’s better than it was. Should you ever wish to knit a copycat sweater, I posted the chart for the chart on my Designs page.

Next up, I finally got around to putting an edging on the hairpin lace afghan that may or may not have been knit by my grandmother. (Original posts about this project — from March, yikes! — are here and here.) To do this, I purchased some turquoise yarn in a similar color to the turquoise in the blanket, double crocheted across the unfinished edge, single crocheted back across, and then picked up a stitch through every crocheted stitch and knit several rows of garter stitch before binding off. The edges look much better now, though still not perfect. I did my best.

The blanket’s edge originally looked like this:

And now it looks like this:

Good enough, I think. I’m sending this off to my brother James today.

Having cleared up every last item of Duty Knitting except for my second Red Herring sock (to be cast on soon), I’ve been plugging away on the second sleeve of Frances and trying to get my Florence pattern written up. Busy as a bee, I am.

Also, Presents!

I got some excellent packages in the mail last week. First, I received two skeins of Undertow from Gryphon in the color “Cramp.” These were my prize for sort of winning her bodice design contest. I say “sort of” because I was the only entrant, and I didn’t exactly follow the rules. Still, a bodice will come of it, and I got some pretty yarn:

Now I just need to figure out to do with these. I haven’t formulated a plan yet. (The cardigan pattern and Undertow yarn are both for sale in Gryphon’s Etsy shop.)

Gryphon also sent a skein of Traveller, one of her hand-dyed sock yarns, for me to use in doing swatches for the bodice. I made a swatch using four different needles, and I had to show you a picture because this yarn is just so pretty. It’s soft and squooshy, too. I highly recommend it.

Then, on Saturday, I got my prize package in the mail from winning Mel’s contest. She sent a skein of Three Waters Farm fingering-weight yarn in the color lilac, as well as a great lavender rosemary goat’s milk soap from the same farm. I was thrilled to get these, both because I love to try local, sustainable products and because they remind me of the Piedmont of North Carolina, where I used to live. Thanks, Mel!

Thanks for the ideas and questions about the turtle sweater. My explanation perhaps lacked clarity, but no matter, because I tried something and it seems to have worked.

Here is Leona, modeling the new and improved (but not yet put back together) version of the sweater:

What I did, after picking apart the pieces (and inadvertently making a few additional holes along the way, whoops!), was rip back about 12 rows of the back and put the live stitches back on the needle. I marked which stitches were for the shoulders. Then I counted how many stitches I had left for the back neck and compared this number to the number of stitches I had for the back of the hood to determine that I needed to increase 20 stitches if I wanted the back neck to have as many stitches as the hood at the point where they were to be joined. I increased 10 of these stitches in the first row, knit 5 rows plain, increased 10 more on the sixth row, and knit plain until the back was as tall as the front again. Finally, I separately grafted each shoulder to its mate and the back neck to the bottom of the hood.

Here’s what the back neck looks like now. I’m sure the lumpiness will mostly block out.

Leona is worried that the neck opening is “a little big” now, but I told her, “That’s Gwendolyn’s mom’s problem, honey, not ours.” As far as I’m concerned, I just have to seam the thing back together, tidy up some of those holes, and we’ll be in business. Of course, since I’ve solved the problem, I’ve lost all interest in finishing the repair. I take comfort in the fact that it won’t be sweater weather here for a while yet.

In further news of things that are pink, I’ve been making steady progress with the back of Florence.

136 rows down, 70-odd rows to go. I’ve had so much work to do lately that the steady diet of plain stockinette has been rather soothing. I have high hopes of finishing the back soon, and then I’m sure the rest will go quickly. We may just see Florence finished before July is out. And when Florence does debut, I’m going to have a contest. Get your tape measures ready!

Once upon a time, I knit a sweater with a turtle on it for little baby Gwendolyn.

I used Mission Falls 1824 Cotton, and I made up the intarsia pattern myself. When I finished it, I was a little concerned that the head opening was too small, but given that Gwen wasn’t exactly born yet, and given that I didn’t expect the sweater to fit her until she was about nine months old, I didn’t have any way to figure it out for sure. So I had Leona try it on.

As you can see, it fit Leona perfectly well, and Leona has a biggish head. “Good enough,” I thought.

Seven months later, Gwendolyn is getting bigger all the time, and she’s just about big enough for the sweater. But it doesn’t fit her, because her head is not as squishy as Leona’s. Indeed, the process of being forced to try on the sweater made her quite grumpy, and she didn’t cheer up until her mother had removed the offending garment. Obviously, something must be done.

Gwendolyn’s mom would like me to try to fix the sweater, and I am only too happy to comply, in part because it gives me an opportunity to fix a few things about it that I never liked anyway. Also, it will provide a welcome distraction from my glacial progress on the back of Florence (formerly the Habu top), which looks like this:

Why have I managed to finish so very little of Florence? Well, there is the regular business of life: I have had to attend to work, house cleaning, bike riding, jogging, yoga, grocery shopping, making dinner, lunch with Gwendolyn’s mom, and so on.

Also, I’ve been trying to work up the Buster pattern so I can submit it to the Jimmy Beans Wool contest. I thought the hard work would be over when I got the charting done, but, uh, no. It’s been pretty painful. And just when I thought I was getting somewhere (around Wednesday), I realized that I had to more or less start over. So the Buster pattern and I are not on good terms right now.

Then, yesterday, after Yarn Harlot wrote about Mystery Stole 3, I totally got sucked in to the idea of making a mystery stole. I was particularly excited about using up a skein of laceweight yarn that I bought last winter with no particular project in mind. So I signed up, only to learn that I needed a lot more laceweight yarn than I actually had. I decided to just cast on for the swatch for the project, figuring I’d sort out some kind of plan as I went along. Luckily, by the time I finished the swatch, I had come to my senses: I don’t have the yarn for a stole right now. I don’t want to make a stole right now. And I have lots of other things I would rather do. I resigned from the Mystery Stole group this morning.

(Let me add that this outcome is one of many reasons that I love to swatch. When I’m really jonesing to start something new, nine times out of ten all I have to do is knit a swatch for the new project in order to realize it will in fact be no more exciting than my current project. Then I wash the swatch, put it away, and get back to whatever I was supposed to be doing.)

Which was what, again? Oh yes, Florence. Well, instead of doing that, I took apart the baby sweater. Now it looks like this:

It is time to formulate a plan. Here is what I’ve been thinking:

(1) One thing I didn’t like about the sweater to begin with is how thick the seams are. They are probably an okay thickness for an adult garment, but they don’t work for a baby sweater. The thick seams on the sides and for the armholes were unavoidable (because I couldn’t have knit the turtle in the round), though I can perhaps improve them a bit by doing the seaming with a lighter-weight yarn. But there was no reason to seam the shoulders or hood, so this time, I’d like to graft them. This should have the bonus effect of making them stretchier, which should help the sweater fit better over Gwendolyn’s noggin.

(2) I seem to remember that the back of the hood has more stitches than the back of the neck was designed to have. I tried to solve this problem by increasing in the last few rows of the back of the sweater so that I had a one-to-one ratio of hood stitches to back neck stitches. This is why the back of the neck looks kind of wavy in the picture below.

I don’t think that increasing those stitches was a bad idea, but it didn’t help much, because then I bound them all off and ended up with an inflexible back neck anyway. I’d like to rip out a few inches of the back and reknit it so that it gradually increases in width to accommodate the hood stitches.

That brings me to (3). If I make the back bigger but leave the shoulders the same size, and if I graft the hood on, and if I graft the shoulders, do you think that will give the head opening enough ease and flexibility? Or do I need to do all of those things and make the shoulders narrower, leaving more head space? If I do that, I’ll have to rip out the whole hood, because the hood is knit onto the front, and I can’t adjust the shoulder size on the front without also ripping out the hood. That wouldn’t be the end of the world, but if I can avoid it, I will.

What do you think? Other ideas?

Pattern: Source unknown, though I have a feeling that Grandma made it up as a way of using up leftovers. Huge thanks to Emilee, who pointed out that the lace pattern looked like Hedera, thereby saving me a lot of grief.
Size: 37-inch chest, 22.5 inches from shoulder to bottom hem
Yarn: Various worsted-weight wools in Aran color
Yarn Source: Grandma via Aunt Cathy
Needles: US size 8 and 6
Notes: In early March, I received an unfinished sweater and a large amount of cream-colored yarn in a box from my Aunt Cathy. My grandma had knit the pieces of the sweater but never finished it. There was no pattern, and no one seemed to know why it had been abandoned. (See my post about it here.)

Among the first things I noticed was that the cream yarns used to knit the sweater did not match. Later I concluded that this is probably why Grandma abandoned the sweater: I think she conceived it as a project to use up various stash yarns that looked like they matched but then sewed it up and realized that they weren’t close enough. (I wrote about coming to that conclusion here.) The problem was noticeable only in the sleeves; the front and back seemed to have been knit in the same shade.

I then learned through experimentation that one cannot make up for the fact that yarns don’t match by overdyeing them. Overdyeing just makes them not match in another color, and the problem actually becomes even more noticeable. So I couldn’t just seam the thing together and overdye it to hide the color problem: at a minimum, the sleeves would have to be reknit and a neckline added on for the sweater to be salvaged.

Next, I based the sweater together and tried it on. I didn’t really like the low neckline Grandma had planned. After doing nothing for several weeks, I decided to raise the neckline on the front and back pieces. But I didn’t have enough yarn that was a close match to reknit long sleeves and raise the front and back. Instead, I decided to knit short sleeves and rip back both the front and back partway so that I could alternate between the original cream and a new cream. In extremely good light, you can see a subtle striping effect on these pieces, but it’s virtually invisible most of the time, as is the color contrast between sleeves and body.

Grandma did most of the work for me on the sleeves. I followed her long-sleeve design and used the same number of stitches at the widest point. The only decision I had to make was how big around to make the sleeves at the bottom edge and how long I wanted them to be from the underarm. Figuring this out took a little trial and error, but it worked out in the end.

It was an interesting journey trying to complete this project, and I’m quite pleased with where I ended up. It’s a special thing to have the finished sweater to wear, and I like to think of it as a collaboration of sorts with my Grandma, who I never had a chance to sit and knit with.

Other posts about the Thelma sweater are here and here.

Though no one has exactly been clamoring for an update (”Ruth, how did the Rowan Denim tank do in the wash? Ruth, Ruth, tell us more about your grandma’s sweater!), I will pretend that you have, because it suits me.

So, first things first, the linen-stitch baby tank survived the wash beautifully. It is cute as can be. Also, kinda small. I am checking with a friend of mine who has an eighteen-month-old daughter to find out whether she thinks it will fit her. If not, I will give it to another friend who has an almost-six-month-old baby, who will grow into it soon enough. For the mega-twins, I will make another tank with the Knit Picks Shine and then, I think, do the Monica pattern from Knitty for the other top. I have a strong aversion to knitting things three times. Twice is a stretch, really.

Oh, and I do still intend to write up the pattern for this and offer it as a free PDF eventually. I just need to figure out the ideal sizing and then knit the other top to test out my directions and refine a few of the techniques.

I have been neglecting the Tedium Bathmat for a few days, but in my defense, I haven’t had much knitting time at home. We’ve gone out the last two nights, once for a panel discussion on the Holocaust and once for an Iranian movie, and the bathmat does not make good travel knitting. In good news (?), Mass Ave. Knit Shop still has the yarn and has promised to send me three more skeins to slog through. I will press on and see this sucker through to the end.

Meanwhile, I’ve been working on my grandma’s sweater, which I think I will call Thelma, after her. I finished reknitting the back to a crewneck level, and I also knit a short sleeve. Both are now blocking, as you can see:

The sleeve went very quickly, but I had trouble figuring out how many stitches I needed around my upper arm, and I cast on way too many. I ended up cutting off the ribbing I had knit and reknitting new ribbing downward, which I had to do three times to get it right. Part of the problem is that my grandma’s 1 x 1 ribbing is immaculate, whereas mine looks like regular old saggy crookedy 1 x 1 ribbing. After entertaining and then rejecting the possibility that she was somehow invisibly twisting her stitches, I went down two needle sizes and got something that is passable. My conclusion is that the yarn she used when she cast on is a little fluffier than the yarn I’m using to finish the sweater, so it fills in the 1 x 1 ribbing better. Just a theory, but I can’t think of any other explanation (besides the fact that she was vastly more skilled than I am, which I acknowledge).

I hope to whip out the other sleeve, rip and reknit about three inches of the front, and get the sweater put together soon, though I’m a bit frightened of what will happen when it comes time to figure out a nice-looking collar. Stay tuned.

I’ve really been wanting to write a new post, but until today, I had nothing of interest to report. As of this afternoon, however, I have finished the Clementine Shawlette. It still needs a good blocking, but in the meantime I can at least offer a few not-so-fantastic photographs and a mini-tutorial on grafting courtesy of Lucy Neatby.

I knew how to graft before I encountered Lucy’s technique, but I couldn’t do it with much facility. A few weeks ago, I watched the Knitting Essentials 2 DVD (available here, and highly recommended) and learned Lucy’s approach, to which I am now a convert. Lucy says that she knows how to graft perfectly well off the needles in the standard way but that she prefers her method. So do I.

What Lucy suggests is that rather than graft the live stitches off two needles, you knit an extra inch or so in a contrasting color, run the waste yarn tail through the live stitches, and then use the first row of contrasting stitches on each piece as a guide for your grafting yarn to follow. Once you’ve finished grafting, you unravel the waste yarn.

I thought Lucy’s approach might be helpful with the Clementine Shawlette, whose pattern directs one simply to knit the last pattern row on each piece (which is garter stitch from the right side but includes some purl stitches) and then graft the thing together. Now regardless of the approach you take, you’re going to have an obvious seam down the middle of the shawlette. I wondered whether it was possible to graft in pattern to some extent. I didn’t trust myself to create a beautiful seam (or even a tidy-looking one) using my normal approach, but I had an inkling that Lucy’s would enable me to graft in pattern without really knowing what I was doing. It worked!

For anyone interested in giving this a try, here is what I did.

After completing the last pattern row for each piece, I changed to some green yarn of approximately the same weight and knit a single row in pattern in the green yarn. I then changed to a second contrasting color and knit another row in pattern. I continued in garter stitch for an additional four rows, broke the yarn, and used a needle to run the tail through all the live stitches while removing them from the needle.

Now I had two pieces that looked more or less like this. (Please forgive the quality of the photographs. I don’t have the proper camera for this sort of close-up.)

I then threaded my needle with a length of the Sea Silk — not the same yarn that was attached to either piece, but a new length — and lined up the two pieces. About an inch and a half in from one edge, I found two stitches that I wanted to line up above one another and used the green yarn as a guide to where to put my needle into each piece. Basically, you want to follow your guide yarn where it connects to your main yarn. But when the stitch dips down into your second color of waste yarn, you don’t follow it there. Instead, you follow the guide yarn on the other piece, connecting the two together.

Once you’ve done a few inches and everything seems to be going well, you can go back and pick up the other end of your yarn and use it to close up that first inch and a half. You don’t want to leave this job for last, because if it doesn’t line up properly, you’ll have to start over. (This is Lucy’s wisdom, not mine.)

The advantage to using Lucy’s method for the Clementine Shawlette is that it makes it pretty easy to graft tricky maneuvers like double decreases and yarn overs.* All you have to do is follow the guide yarn. Though I am extremely inexperienced with lace and an admittedly poor grafter, I got all of the decrease and yarn over sections to line up nicely.

Once I’d worked my way across in both directions, I could inspect both sides. On the top, the grafting yarn now covered the green yarn completely and formed a new row of stitches. It looked like this:

The back looked like this (but, you know, in focus):

All that I had to do then was pull the tail of the waste yarn out of the live stitches on each side and unravel. Since the grafting yarn had replaced the first row of green yarn on each side, there was no chance that my knitting would come apart. I just unzipped, and voila!

You’ll have to wait until tomorrow to see blocked pictures, but I’m fairly confident that I will be happy with the appearance of my grafted row. I’m also pretty sure that I would not have been as happy had I grafted the way I usually do. For this I have Lucy Neatby to thank.

In return for her tutelage, I will plug her Knitting Essentials DVDs: If you haven’t already got your hands on them, you should seriously consider doing so. They are full of excellent tips for new, intermediate, and advanced knitters alike, and it’s much easier to understand her visual directions than any directions you’ll find in a book.

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*If you have to graft yarn overs, I especially recommend using two colors of waste yarn. The guide yarn seemed to dip down into the second color of yarn at these points, and if I had been looking at only one color, I don’t think I would have been able to work out how to do the grafting.