Ruthless Knitting

I’m back from a few days in Mount Shasta, California, where I did some cross-country skiing, and from nearly a week in Klamath Falls, Oregon, where my parents live. I love Klamath Falls. How can you not love a place that looks like this in the winter?

I finished the last of the Christmas stockings before I left, sewed on the bells, and was rewarded with the lovely sight of all of the stockings hung up by the chimney at my parents’ house. And it’s quite a chimney — see?

I didn’t get much knitting done while I was away, but I did manage to make some quick fingerless gloves for David to match his Halfdome hat. He wears the hat around the house in the winter to compensate for the cruelly low temperature at which our thermostat is set, but his hands are always cold. The pattern is called Jacoby, and it’s free from Berrocco. These gloves are so stretchy, I think they’d fit just about any adult hands. I used leftover fingering-weight yarn and US size 3 needles.

My dad is a glass artist who is as obsessed with fusing glass in his kiln as I am with knitting. For Christmas, he made me two cards of glass buttons. I’ve been having fun imagining what kind of sweaters I should knit for them. I’m thinking of a white wool cardigan that buttons only at the top for these red and white buttons — something kind of swingy and modern and not too flashy.

The red and purple buttons are a little trickier, but I have a notion to make a purple (tweedy?) sweater that is double-breasted so that the six buttons can be displayed at chest level in two vertical lines. I haven’t done any sketching for either sweater yet, but I’ll get to it. There are still some sweaters in the queue that I already have yarn for, so I don’t want to buy any more until I’ve more or less used that up.

Meanwhile, I started a new sweater over the holidays. I’m using Shibuiknits Izu, a wool/mohair blend that apparently doesn’t exist anymore. As I hinted at the end of my last post, I was inspired by Priscilla Gibson-Roberts’s fabulous Knitting in the Old Way to make a Fana cardigan, which is a traditional regional style from Norway. (If you don’t have Knitting in the Old Way and you have the slightest interest in design, you really ought to buy it. It’s an impressive reference book, packed full of inspiration and ideas.) A traditional Fana cardigan would have looked something like this:

After making a swatch, however, I concluded that the braided bottom edge and I-cord borders weren’t going to work in this yarn. Then I realized that as much as I like the drawing of the Fana cardigan in the book, I’m not likely to wear a cardigan in this style. I cast on instead for a Fana pullover, knit the checkerboard bottom band, and decided that I didn’t like that, either. The part of the Fana cardigan that really caught my eye to begin with was the striped pattern, so that’s the part I ultimately decided to keep, with plain ribbing at the bottom. I’ve managed to knit about eight inches of the body so far.

My plan now is to make a henley pullover with pewter buttons, but the plan is rather malleable, as I’m not sure yet how far the yarn is going to go. I have two balls of the strawberry color and two of the wasabi, for about a thousand yards altogether of the main colors and another two hundred fifty of the white. I may need to rip out the green ribbing and figure out some other way to do the edging that won’t roll but will either use up less yarn (if I run short of both colors) or distribute the two colors equally (if I run out of the green). Only time will tell.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 4th, 2008 at 2:02 pm and is filed under 2007 Collection, Design, Finished Objects, 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.