Ruthless Knitting

The story begins with a bag of yarn that I bought on eBay. This was about a year ago, and I was in a heady phase of daily eBay yarn auction perusal. In retrospect, this phase had its advantages, as I learned a lot about different types of yarn and how they were valued. I also managed, by allowing my inner cheapskate to regularly trounce my inner fantasy shopper, not to buy too much — just some Green Mountain Spinnery Mountain Mohair that I got for a song and a bag of Andes yarn by Elizabeth Austen.

I think that the day I ordered the Andes I was feeling a bit deprived, and I was therefore unable to resist acquiring these ten skeins of yarn, for which I had no particular plan. I liked the way the yarn looked in the skein, half pinkish red and half bluish purple, and I wanted it for my own.

Once I had paid for it, I spent several anxious days waiting for its arrival and Googling variations of “Andes yarn knitting blog Austen” to try to determine if I had made a stupid purchase or a good one. Clearly, I had managed to get a bargain — but what were other Internet-savvy knitters making with this Andes yarn? What did they think of it? What did it mean that the yarn was frequently called “good for felting”? Did that translate “scratchy and not good for much of anything but felting”? My suspicion was heightened by the fact that I managed to find very few blog posts about the Andes yarn. I found one about a wine cozy made of Andes that had pooled terribly, and I began to fret. Maybe the fact that it was a half-and-half yarn, not quite variegated but far from solid, was actually a detriment. Maybe no one was buying it because no one could figure out what to knit with it. Maybe I had made an impulsive mistake.

When the yarn at last arrived, I was fairly happy with how it looked until I knit a swatch. In the swatch, the pink was so PINK, the blue so BLUE, and the predictable switching from color to color as across the rows was just . . . blah. It seemed too garish yet too boring, and it was just not me. The only promising thing about my swatch was the garter stitch edging. See, I’m one of those people who not only faithfully knits swatches (one of my favorite things about knitting) but also puts little garter stitch borders around the swatches so they’re pretty and easy to measure. The border looked pretty good, because the pink and blue kind of mixed together in those bumpy garter rows. This got me thinking that stockinette was not the way to go here. I needed to mix things up a little.

My next thought, some days later, was that I should make spirals with this yarn. Yes! I had a vision of an afghan made up of squares that were knit from the center out in a spiral, so that the pink and blue would alternate unpredictably and swirl around. Even better, the squares would have garter stitch edges, maximizing their attractiveness. I was very excited about this idea until I actually made a spiral swatch. Not only was it tedious, but the result was, again, just blah. I abandoned the spiral plan.

Then I forgot to consider what the yarn wanted to be and started thinking about what kind of sweater I wanted to have. Ribbing! I wanted a ribbed sweater with saddle shoulders.

I made a big swatch with the Andes yarn of 2 x 2 rib, 1 x 1 rib, 3 x 2 rib, twisted rib, and some other combinations. I didn’t like any of them. I abandoned the ribbed sweater.

At this point, I was getting discouraged. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the yarn. Okay, I definitely didn’t love the yarn, but I at least had tepid feelings of affection toward it. I just couldn’t figure out anything to knit with it that seemed actually worth knitting.

So I put the Andes away for a while. Sometimes when I’m between knitting projects or just bored with my current project, I knit an afghan square from Barbara Walker’s Learn-to-Knit Afghan Book using the Green Mountain Spinnery yarn from eBay. I just flip through Walker’s book until I see a square that strikes my fancy, choose one or two colors that seem nice, and knit away. One day, I made the Rose Fabric square in two shades of purple.

I liked it, and I thought to myself, “I wonder how that Andes yarn would look if I tried this stitch with it? Wouldn’t the blue and pink kind of pop in little roses, and wouldn’t the stitch break up some of the boring color changes?” So I hauled out my practice ball of Andes and gave it a shot, and lo and behold, it looked pretty super. Inspired, I drew a sketch of another sweater.

It’s hard for me to recall the details of this ill-conceived plan, but the fact that I drew this crude sketch in pen is pehaps an indication of both my enthusiasm and my failure to think things through. Excited, I tried to knit a miniature version of the sweater to determine if my plan would work. “Disaster” does not begin to describe the outcome of this experiment. I put the yarn away again.

Fast-forward to December. I was finishing up a few projects, and I needed a new one to take with me to my parents’ house for Christmas. I wanted to make myself a sweater with yarn from my stash. I especially wanted to make a particular sweater that I had just dreamed up: a V-neck in camel-colored Nashua Creative Focus with argyle patterning on one side of the front. Instead, I forced myself to take along the Andes yarn, since it was the oldest sweater quantity of yarn in my stash, and I reasoned that if I didn’t use it soon, I would never use it, and then I would feel guilty about it until the day I died. I can be that way about the yarn stash. I hauled four balls of Andes yarn to Oregon.

Apparently forgetting the lesson of the mini-sweater experiment, I again fell into trying to make that Andes yarn into what I wanted instead of into what it wanted to be. I had a vision of a big, slouchy sweater, like Starsky without the cabling. But I didn’t have enough yarn for that — 10 balls of light worsted might have been enough (about 1,600 yards), but I’d used one up and given one away, so I only had 8. Then I started thinking about a dense, textured, fitted little jacket with a short stand-up collar. I tried out a couple different stitch patterns with this jacket in mind and found one I liked: Star Tweed from Barbara Walker’s first Treasury of Knitting Patterns (p. 67). It made a nice firm fabric with interesting diagonal dotted lines (made by slipping stitches) stretching across the right side. I was envisioning a jacket with diagonals going in opposite directions, rising up to the right on the left front and up to the left on the right front, with a back composed of two vertical panels with diagonals moving in opposite directions. This was going to be great.

For some reason, I assumed that I could get the diagonal created by Walker’s pattern instructions to move in the opposite direction if I just turned the finished fabric panel upside down. When I tried to show my mother how it would work, it didn’t. The diagonal went the same direction whether the fabric was right-side up or upside down. I still cannot quite fathom why this is the case, but no manipulation of the swatch could force the diagonals to change direction. Undaunted, I rewrote the pattern so that the diagonals were formed on the wrong side but showed up on the right side and moved off obediently in the opposite direction. This worked, but for some reason the diagonals were not at the same angle when I formed them from the wrong side. They were much closer to horizontal. I had to give up and admit that the Andes yarn would never be a snazzy diagonal jacket.

While I was working on the diagonal swatch, my dad wandered over, picked up the Rose Fabric swatch I had made many months earlier, and asked, “What’s wrong with this one?” What was wrong with it, indeed? I scrapped the jacket and started over. I would make a pullover sweater in Rose Stitch. The yarn changing from pink to blue would give the sweater all the interest and texture it needed without being too boring. I began sketching again.

I decided that the sweater would have a ribbed shawl collar and deep ribbing at the cuffs and waist. But I didn’t want to do the ribbing in the Andes yarn, because I didn’t like how the Andes yarn looked in ribbing. I needed an accent yarn. I found two balls of Dale Falk in a lovely dark navy blue (shade 2587) at Webster’s in Ashland, Oregon, and snapped them up. (Falk is technically a DK, but the Andes is a very thin worsted, and the two seem about the same thickness.)

And so I began knitting. Rose stitch spreads a lot horizontally and, it turns out, uses very little yarn. I alternated between two balls of the Andes as I knit the back to minimize the pooling. While I suppose I could have eliminated the pooling and flashing altogther by cutting the yarn at the edge and carefully offsetting the two balls so that they never caused the colors to line up for more than two rows, I decided that I needed to let the yarn be what it was and embrace the pooling. When I had finished with the back, I had a lot of yarn left in those first two balls. So I knit the front. Still some yarn left. I didn’t run out of those two balls until I’d finished half of the first sleeve. The whole sweater used less than four balls of the Andes yarn. You know what that means? I HAVE FOUR AND A HALF BALLS OF THIS YARN LEFT. Is this some kind of Andes yarn curse?

By and large, I’m happy with how the sweater came out. Yes, I could have made it a little larger. But I wasn’t entirely committed to it while I knit it, so I let some things slide. Also, I was never able to figure out the anatomy of the rose stitch, though I did try, and I therefore found it hard to correct my errors without ripping back. I could not fix a dropped stitch a few rows down with my handy crochet hook — and I did try. A few times, I noticed an incorrect stitch that I had missed and decided to just leave it there rather than rip back. Don’t tell anyone. They barely show.

In any event, here she is:

Pattern: My own
Yarn: Elizabeth Austen Andes in color 01 (blue/pink); Dale of Norway Falk in color 2587 (navy)
Yardage: about 550 yards of Andes; 232 yards of Falk
Yarn Source: random eBay seller; Websters of Ashland, OR
Needles: US 7 bamboo straights; US 6 for ribbing
Gauge: about 20 stitches and 30 rows over 4 inches, unstretched; 32″ chest
Modifications: –

As for those other four and a half balls of yarn, I came up with the perfect solution: I overdyed them. The Andes yarn is now a lovely, saturated sapphire. I think I’m in love.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 21st, 2007 at 12:03 pm and is filed under 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.