Ruthless Knitting Archive

As you can see, Frances is fini! My self-imposed knitting ban has turned into more of an “Okay, you can knit, but not too much” rule. In the same way that during a drought you can’t wash your car, but you can still take a shower, I figured eight rows per seam was okay, especially since I had to sew down the hem in between, which hardly counts.

Pattern: I call it Frances. It’s just a top-down raglan knit following the basic recipe in Barbara Walker’s Knitting from the Top, with various customizations.
Size: 35″ bust, 31″ waist, 40″ at hip, 15″ from hem to underarm, 14.5″ from wrist to underarm, 14″ sleeve width, 10.5″ long raglan seam (measured on diagonal). Pre-blocking, it was 33″ bust, 30″ waist, 22″ total length, 12.5″ from hem to underarm, 15.5″ from wrist to underarm.
Yarn: Artfibers Golden Siam (100% tussah silk; 165 yds. per 50 g. skein), colors 37 and 38
Yardage: About 1,350 yards, divided 4.5 skeins of color 37 and 4 of color 38. (I swatched a lot with color 37.)
Source: Artfibers. This yarn was a gift from my parents, purchased while they were visiting San Francisco.
Needles: US 7 Denise circular needles; size 5 for neckband
Gauge: About 18.5 stitches and 27 rows = 4″ in stockinette stitch in the round
Notes: I really enjoyed this project from beginning to end. Something about changing colors every eight rows really keeps things moving along, even when the rows are those endless 200-stitch body rows that you have to endure when knitting in one piece from the top down. I also thoroughly enjoyed working with the Golden Siam, which manages to be soft, interestingly slubby, shiny, and enjoyably fuzzy without being even remotely over the top. The deep, saturated blue and brown continued to please me throughout the knitting. I know blue and brown are “in” right now, but I’m not afraid that my love for the sweater will be ephemeral, because these rich shades are so nicely balanced that they really do look perfect together.

If you’ve been following the saga around these parts (and one more link here for good measure), you know that the sweater grew quite a bit when I wet blocked it. I knew that it would grow, and I wanted it to get a little bigger. I also know that many people don’t wet block silk for this very reason. But my thinking was that sooner or later I’d have to wash it, so I might as well find out what was going to happen right at the outset. I had to cut three stripes off each sleeve to bring them back to the right length, but as best I can tell, the growth is more or less finished now. I wore the sweater around the house all day last Friday, and it didn’t show any signs of getting bigger.

If I had it to do over, I would probably have knit the sweater in pieces, or at the very least knit the sleeves flat and seamed them at the end. This would have given the sweater more structure and probably would have prevented a lot of the growth. Still, the final product is pretty much all I’d hoped it would be — a comfortable, informal tunic in silk yarn that makes it both warm and special.

This is the first finished sweater in my planned Fall/Winter collection. (All my swatches for the collection are pictured here.) So far, so good!

This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2007 at 9:29 am and is filed under 2007 Collection, Design, Finished Objects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.