Ruthless Knitting

It’s been about a week since I blocked Frances, and this is all I have managed to do so far toward remedying the sleeve situation:

To tell the truth, I also got most of one sleeve rehemmed, but then I realized that I’d forgotten to decrease in the first row of the hem, so I’ll have to rip it out and do it over. Sometime.

I’ve been rather scattered in the knitting department lately, drawn to lots of different ideas but not too interested in tackling anything that requires any sort of commitment. All my progress has been swatch-sized; in the past week or so, I’ve swatched for four different projects. For a while, I considered this unworthy material for blogging, but then I enjoyed Desi Knitter’s post about her swatches so much that I thought I’d go ahead and write about what I’d been knitting.

My first swatch, a bodice design for Gryphon, has to remain unphotographed until its debut, but it’s coming along better than any of the others. I’m writing up the pattern for the person who will wear it, and then later I’ll write it up for all the sizes.

Meanwhile, I also started one of the fronts for the cardigan I’d like to make with the yarn I bought in Vermont. I got this far –

– before I stalled out. See how I’m stretching the piece here? That’s how I like it, with the stripes between the ridges showing. That’s also the correct width for one front piece. But when I let go, the fabric snaps back into a much shorter and wider shape. I have to figure out how much lengthwise blocking this yarn and this stitch pattern will take and hold on to. In other words, can I stretch it to my desired length and count on it to stay there, or will it gradually get shorter and shorter as I wear it until I have several more inches of positive ease than I want, as well as ribbing at my belly button?

It’s occurred to me that maybe the thing to do is to knit the back in matching two-row stripes, but without the garter ridges. If I do that and then seam the cardigan together, the fronts should remain the same length as the back, since they’ll be quite firmly attached at the seams. With that plan, the big question becomes what the row gauge will be for the back, and if I stretch the front to match it, how wide is the front piece then, and do I like how it looks? I have thus far been completely uninterested in discovering the answers to these questions, so the Middlebury cardigan has been placed in a Ziploc bag until the urge strikes to resolve the mystery.

Last week, I also came up with this swatch as a possible plan for some Silky Wool that I bought in the recent Webs sale.

The idea here is to knit a cardigan with this cabled ribbing at the bottom, one cabled rib traveling up each side next to the button band, and a reverse stockinette backdrop. It would have short, tight-fitting sleeves. I’m not sure whether the stitch pattern pops enough on the swatch, though, and I fear the pattern will just disappear, in which case I probably shouldn’t bother with fancy cables. Sometimes I like this swatch, and sometimes I don’t. It’s hanging out in a drawer now. (Cyn of the Half-Assed Knit Blog bought what appears to be the same color and had the same problems with it, so I guess it’s not just me.)

Finally, there is this, which I worked on yesterday:

For many months, I had planned to use these two yarns to make a baseball-shirt-style sweater, with solid green sleeves and a variegated body. But the longer I thought about it, the less I wanted to knit such a sweater, so for a few days I’ve been idly considering what else I might be able to do with these two yarns. I turned over the problem in my mind at yoga today and came up with a plan for a stranded design that I tried out when I got home and immediately abandoned — the colors here are far too close even for subtle colorwork designs to show up.

Then I saw this stitch pattern in Barbara Walker’s second treasury, swatched it, and am rather delighted with the result. In her book, the two colors are sharply contrasting dark and light, and the blocks really pop out against the stripey background. There’s a similar version of the pattern, which is called Wave and Box Stitch, shown in this picture at Knittingfool.com. In my version, the two yarns blend together so much that the pattern just allows the solid green to mute the variegation and frame it, which I like. (For comparison’s sake, there’s a picture of the two yarns by themselves in this post.) I’m thinking of knitting a pullover with this pattern used for the body. I’ll have to figure out the sleeves later; I don’t have enough of the Zephyr for sleeves, but I could probably buy more if I wanted to.

One reason for my drifting about from swatch to swatch, which I’m reluctant to admit even to myself, is that my right forearm has been showing signs of a repetitive strain injury. I don’t actually think it’s from knitting — I think it’s from mousing at a bad angle at my desk, where I do mouse-intensive editing work all day — but the knitting surely doesn’t help. David installed a keyboard tray on my desk, and I am endeavoring to improve my ergonomics and use more keyboard shortcuts. Unfortunately, I’ve also resolved that I need to cut out knitting for at least a few days. Hopefully, by the time I post again, I’ll be quite recovered and we can pretend this never happened.

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P.S. If you have yarn in your stash that you don’t intend to use and are looking for somewhere to send it, Steph of Who Needs Gauge? could use donations for the knitting club she runs at her school. I took the opportunity to divest myself of a dozen balls of cream-colored wool that my aunt send me to use in finishing the Thelma sweater. And should this process make you reflect about your stash itself, wondering what you want to have and how much and why, I’d point you toward an interesting post at Mishka Knits on this subject that didn’t, in my opinion, get the attention it deserved.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 13th, 2007 at 5:35 am and is filed under 2007 Collection, Design, Projects in Progress, Swatch-o-Rama. 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.