Ruthless Knitting

Thanks for all the comments on my knitting mystery! I also got some great advice from folks on the Knittyboard. Here is what I now know:

The Afghan
The afghan is hairpin lace crochet. It was constructed of individual strips that were created using a crochet hook and a hairpin lace tool. Each strip has a knotted-looking center and fringy loops on each side. The strips were joined together by interlocking the fringy loops. On two sides of the blanket, the loopy edges of the outer strips form a finished edge. The third side is where the interlocking began, and the edge there is also finished, though it lacks loops. The final side is the side with the bobby pins, where the interlocking was completed. This is the side that must be finished to keep the blanket from unraveling. I’m still not entirely sure how to do this, but I joined a Yahoo group for hairpin lace enthusiasts, and I’ve asked for some expert advice there. It sounds like the general idea is to single crochet around all four sides using yarn in a matching or contrasting color. I still need some help with the mechanics, but I’m confident I can do this.

The Sweater
The sweater has progressed from “mystery” to “quandary.” I put all the live stitches on holders, picked apart the seams, and washed and blocked the pieces. Two things became clear to me in the process: first, the fact that one side of the front is lower than the other is no accident, nor is it the result of unraveling. Grandma definitely knit and seamed this sweater exactly how she meant to, and she seamed it to stay seamed. It was a real bitch to unpick because she was so thorough about spliiting stitches in order to keep the yarn in place. One of the Knittyboard commenters, keena, proposed that maybe the neckline was lower on one side because it was meant to scoop down and button along the top of the raglan seam. Aunt Cathy sent a few buttons along with the sweater, and these combined with the other evidence convince me that keena’s guess is right.

The second thing I figured out while blocking the sweater is why Grandma abandoned it in the first place: this was a tragedy of unmatching yarns. Both body pieces are knit in the same shade of the same yarn, but each sleeve begins with one shade of cream and then abruptly switches to another shade about six inches along. On one sleeve, this isn’t terribly noticeable because the same yarn seems to have been used, but on the other sleeve Grandma apparently tried an altogether different yarn — well, an altogether different two-ply worsted weight wool yarn — and it really stands out as being a different color and texture. I think that my earlier supposition was correct — that she had a bunch of cream wool leftover from different projects and tried to combine them. She ran out of yarn after knitting the body, so she used some different yarn that looked extremely similar in the ball. As soon as she seamed it up and had a look at it in the light of day, however, she realized it was a no go and abandoned the project. My mom said to me in an e-mail, “Thelma [my grandma] was plagued by whites that didn’t match.” Add creams to the list.

So how to rescue this sweater? I took all the cream yarns my Aunt Cathy sent, wound them into balls, knit a long swatch with ten rows of each yarn, and compared it to the sweater. I don’t think any of the yarns are exactly the same as the ones in the sweater, but there are some fairly close matches. Then I dyed the whole swatch brown to find out whether the dye would conceal the color shifts in the yarn. Unfortunately, it seemed to make the color shifts even more obvious, which rules out dyeing as a way to solve the problem.

I think the only solution is to partially or completely reknit the sleeves. The best method would probably be to reknit them completely using matching yarn. Even if they’re slightly different from the rest of the sweater in color, as long as each entire sleeve is the same color, the whole sweater should appear to match (at least in most lights). My next step is to baste the sweater pieces back together and try it on. If I’m going to reknit the sleeves, I may as well reknit them to fit me, don’t you think?

Yes, but Have You Been Knitting?
In other news, I knit some socks. These are short little bed socks knit with the yarn held double for extra warmth and speediness. They’re a very belated birthday present for my friend Anne. I used Mountain Colors Bearfoot in Flathead Cherry, size 4 dpns, and my own fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants version of Priscilla Gibson-Roberts’s dream socks pattern from Interweave Knits. Anne has tiny little feet, so these are knit over 44 stitches to produce socks that are 7 inches in circumference and about 7.5 inches long. I hope they fit.

I’ve also been working on the Clementine Shawlette, though not especially quickly, since I don’t find it very exciting knitting. I think I have seven or eight inches to go before I’m done with the first half. Can you spot the mistake? I’m ignoring it.

In more exciting news, I’m finished with the Puff-Sleeved Feminine Cardigan. Sort of. I’ve done all the knitting, and fits very nicely, but I had to order some buttons, which I’m still waiting on. Also, I’m concerned that when the buttons come and I install them, the front of the cardigan will be gappy. If that turns out to be the case, I’ll try making the button bands wider (though I don’t have very much of the green yarn left). I also have to weave in my ends and wash and block the sweater. Oh, and I have to undo the sleeve bind-off and try again, because it’s a bit tight. But we’re getting there.

Miscellany
This post is already too long, but let me leave you with a bit of non-knitting-related excitement:

This is a dictionary stand that my parents gave me for my birthday. It required some minor repairs that David did for me today, so it’s now officially in service. Libraries used to use these for dictionaries and other heavy reference books, but they’re gradually being decomissioned, and you can buy them now on eBay. This is a heavy-duty, cast iron stand with an oak (I think) top divided into two sides, each of which supports half of the book. As you flip the pages, one side will lower and the other will raise up so that the dictionary’s spine is supported. Professionally, I’m an editor of academic books, and I actually have to use the giant dictionary quite a bit, so it’s quite exciting to me to add this piece of furniture to my office. It means I don’t have to haul the dictionary off the shelf each time I need it, balance it precariously on my desk, and flip through to find the definition I need. I’ve been rescued by nineteenth-century technology.

An interesting package arrived today from my Aunt Cathy. It contains two unfinished projects begun by my grandma before she stopped knitting. The first is this cream sweater:

And the second is this afghan in browns and teal:

Ideally, I’d like to figure out how to finish both of these projects. But first I have to figure out the answers to some questions. This is where you come in.

The Sweater
Let’s start with the sweater. There’s a front, a back, and two sleeves. The sleeves are joined — more or less — to the fronts and back, but the seams are partially unraveled, and there may be a hole along one seam. (I have to investigate that further when I take the pieces apart.) There are live stitches along the front neckline, the back neckline, and both sleeves, some of them on holders and some not. The front left side of the neckline is clearly higher than the front right, which concerns me.

Along with the sweater came this pile of cream-colored yarn.

The yarns clearly do not match. When my grandma moved into a nursing home, my aunt received all of her stash yarn and patterns, as well as these unfinished projects. I am assuming that the pile of cream yarn was all with the sweater in one place, rather than picked by Aunt Cathy from among the stash. This would mean that my grandma intended to use some or all of the cream yarn to complete the sweater. Given that the creams in the sweater itself do not all match (which I tried and failed to capture on camera), I can only assume that the sweater is knit with different dyelots of the same yarn or, more likely, with several completely different cream yarns. Was this some sort of stashbuster? Grandma did make numerous fisherman-knit sweaters and could well have ended up with enough cream wool oddballs to decide to make a sweater with the leftovers.

There is no pattern accompanying the sweater, either because Grandma was making it up or because the pattern got separated at some point.

What I need to figure out is how to complete the sweater. I am fairly sure I can match the cable pattern and identify and match the lace pattern if need be. I’m also pretty confident I can lightly overdye the sweater to make up for the differences in the colors of the cream yarn. What I’m most confused by at the moment is why the front left side of the neckline would be so much lower than the front right side. How would that even have happened? Do you suppose that stitches were put on hold in the center front and then the two sides were knit separately, and one side was unraveled for some reason? That’s the only explanation I can come up with.

How to proceed? I suspect what I will do is unseam the raglan seams, wash and block all the pieces, and take a good look at them all before formulating a plan to finish the front. I would be grateful for any suggestions y’all have.

The Afghan
The afghan comes with no yarn. It seems to be nearly complete. I have never seen anything like it and am not sure it was knit. It may be elaborately knotted. It looks so regular that I almost wonder if it was machine-made, except that it is so clearly unfinished.

These bobby pins would suggest that the afghan was still in progress when it was set aside.

I’m much more out of my league with the afghan than with the sweater. Can anyone tell me how it was even constructed? Ideas?

The first thing I ever knit was a sweater.

Well, okay, I practiced casting on, knitting and purling, and then frogging for a few days before I began the sweater. But the first knitted object I made was a sweater. Why not start with something smaller and less complicated? My reasoning was simple: What I wanted to have was a sweater, so why knit something else? I figured that if I tried to make my own sweater, I’d learn a lot of new skills, and if it didn’t work out, I could always rip it back and start over. Sound reasoning, right?

I used really great yarn for the project, which I selected at the wonderful Webster’s in Ashland, Oregon: Rowan’s Yorkshire Tweed Chunky in Pecan. More or less following a pattern in The Yarn Girls’ Guide to Simple Knits for a basic roll-neck, and using size 10.5 needles, I completed the sweater fairly quickly. For a first project, it came out very well. It fit my body, looked like a sweater, lacked gaping holes, and could be worn out in public. Here I am modeling it just after I completed it:

At first, I wore this sweater a lot. So much, in fact, that David felt it was necessary to impose a rule: the sweater could not be worn for more than two consecutive days. And he was right to do so. The rule was necessary to keep me from living in the sweater until it had to be cut off my body. In part, I wore it because I was proud of it, but mostly I put it on day after day because it was very warm and extremely comfortable, and I didn’t leave the apartment much anyway.

This was a few years ago. Last winter, the sweater got worn a little, but not nearly as often as it had the first year. And this year, I found that I wore it hardly at all. I was beginning to focus more on what was wrong with the sweater than what I liked about it.

The sweater’s flaws were few, but what they lacked in number they made up for in glaring obviousness:

1. It was too short.

2. It was too wide.

The picture above makes the sweater look cuter than it actually was, because I had just pressed the hell out of the bottom edge. It was supposed to be a rolled-up hem, and it eventually rolled to make the whole sweater about an inch shorter — and unevenly, so that it was shortest in the middle of the front.

Notice how I’m using the past tense? That’s because I have just finished transforming my first sweater into this:

I had been thinking for a while of ripping out the whole sweater and reknitting it. It seemed it would be a bit disrespectful to my first FO to treat it that way, but I knew I’d enjoy the new sweater more, and I didn’t want to waste the lovely Rowan yarn on something I was no longer interested in wearing. After some reflection, however, it occurred to me that maybe rather than reknit the sweater, I ought to transform it into a cardigan. This would preserve the original knitted pieces (more or less), which seemed more respectful, but would hopefully also turn the sweater into something I wanted to wear again.

I had already accomplished a similar transformation of my second-ever sweater, this one in Rowan Felted Tweed in ginger. I had some typical newbie knitter gauge issues with this sweater, and it came out much larger than I wanted, but still rather lovely — except for the button bands, which were a disaster. I worried at the time that I would somehow screw up knitted button bands with knit-in buttonholes and thought that I would get a much more professional result if I sewed on grosgrain ribbon and did machine-knit buttonholes. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find very good directions anywhere about how to do this, and I didn’t take into account that the act of sewing would stretch out the front of the sweater. I ended up with button bands that were noticeably longer than the front of the sweater, and when I tried to block them back to the right length, the ribbon on the inside buckled, making the button bands lumpy and uneven on the front.

To make matters worse, I chose some wonderful green glass buttons for the sweater before I ever picked out the yarn, and I remained committed to them even though they didn’t really work with the color or style of the finished object. I ended up with this:

Several months ago, I decided to fix the Felted Tweed sweater as best I could by picking up and knitting new button bands and a new collar several inches outside the current ones, turning the excess fabric to the inside and cutting it off, and adding new buttons. The sweater was reborn as this:

Much better, right? And not just because my hair is slightly more presentable. (And no, I didn’t pose in the same place and wear the same shirt underneath over a year later on purpose. I just like that spot. And that shirt.)

With this success under my belt, I felt confident tackling a do-over of the Yorkshire Tweed sweater, and I’m very happy with the result. It’s far from perfect, but it’s definitely more wearable than it once was. It’s no longer too short, it’s only slightly too wide, and it has cute buttons and a floppy collar. While I’m not about to start wearing it all over town — the downside of the sweater knit with chunky yarn being that it tends to make one look chunky — it’s definitely been restored to a more high-profile place in my wardrobe. I feel that I’ve given my first sweater a new lease on life.

I considered posting a tutorial on how to turn a flawed sweater into a better one, but I wasn’t sure it would be much use. (Do other people have early sweaters that could use a face-lift, or was that just me?) Also, I didn’t take enough pictures to do a proper tutorial. Instead, I give you this.

Turning an Old Sweater into a New Cardigan in Ten Easy Steps

1. Remove the existing collar.

2. Find the center of the front and mark it with safety pins.

3. Decide how much fabric to either side of the center you want to remove and mark the cutting lines with safety pins. Keep in mind that the button bands you’ll be knitting on will take up some additional space, so unless you want the sweater to be wider, you’ll need to remove at least the width of a single button band. You can remove additional fabric to bring in the sweater’s silhouette a bit, but be careful in deciding how much, because if you take off too much, you’ll bring the armholes and side seams too far toward the front, screwing up the fit. It works for me to try the sweater on and decide while wearing it where the new button bands ought to go.

4. If you want to add ribbing or a decorative edging to lengthen the sweater, pick up the stitches and knit it on. You’ll pick up your first stitch one or two stitches in toward the center from where you intend to knit on the new button band, and you’ll likewise pick up your last stitch one or two stitches past where the other button band will go.

5. Cut up the center of the front.

6. Pick up and knit your collar and button bands. You can pick up stitches all the way up one side, around the collar, and down the other side and knit a round collar and button bands all in one go. Elizabeth Zimmerman describes how to do this in the Knitter’s Almanac, though her description is pretty spare. Or you can pick up and knit one button band, pick up and knit the other button band, and do the collar separately. This is the way to go if you want to have a more complicated collar. Some cardigan collars are knit upward from the body before the button bands are knit on, and some are added afterward. Make sure you know which you want before you begin either the button bands or the collar.

7. Working a stitch and a half or two stitches out from where you’ve picked up the button bands on each side, machine- or hand-sew a vertical line through each stitch in a column. Cut off the excess fabric outside of the sewing line. If you like, you can hand-sew ribbon over this edge, tacking it down to the inside of the sweater. I haven’t bothered.

8. If you want new cuffs, figure out how much of the old sleeves you want to keep, snip a stitch and unravel around, put the new stitches on your needles, and knit new cuffs downward.

9. Block.

10. Sew on buttons.

Voila! You’re done.

P.S. If any of you are concerned that I haven’t posted about Project Buster in a while, fear not: I’ve started seaming. We should have a finished object in a day or two.