Ruthless Knitting Archive

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!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 at 9:28 am and is filed under Button Collection, Design, Projects in Progress. 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.