Author: Mardel

It seems there are many posts with today's date.  Actually I decided, erroneously or not I cannot tell, to put all the knitting related from my regular blog, Restingmotion, here as well.  This is mostly so that I can link projects to them on revelry.  If I link to the new blog, I lose all the posts from the old blog.  If I want to keep linking, then apparently there will have to be double posting.

I wrote a blog post this morning that caught up with sewing and knitting, but I just clipped the knitting-related portion to add here.  I suppose I will be double posting for a while.  Perhaps eventually there will be some differentiation between the two, perhaps someday I will work out a way to link between blogs.  That has always been in the back of my brain, but I am not there yet.

Anyway, there has been some knitting, but no finished projects since Ausma.  The sock I was knitting in my last post was abandoned because I DID NOT like the colors and hated knitting it.  So there.

Here's where I stand on my ongoing projects:

I am still working on the ribbon cardigan.  As much as I love both knitting and ironing, I find that this project tests my patience.  I may like to iron but ironing yards upon yards of rayon ribbon flat is tedious at best.  I have just finished ironing the third 100-yard skein of ribbon.  I need to wind it on a spindle, after which I can knit another section of the sweater.  The knitting itself is also slow, fun, but slow.  There have been evenings in the past month where one row of the twisted basketweave stitch is all I can accomplish of an evening.  Of course, the body of this cardigan is being knit in one piece, so the rows are not short.  Sometimes self-justification is all that keeps us going.  I know that I will love this cardigan.  I love the fabric that I am creating.  But it will be a long time before I take on another ribbon sweater.  I will be happy if I have finished this by fall, which is, realistically, as soon as I would wear this sweater anyway.

Greater progress has been made with "Murder of Crows".  I finished the body of the sweater and have picked up the first sleeve.  This too will be a fall sweater, although there are still early mornings in the garden which would be cool enough to wear this sweater, were it finished.    I really like the way this sweater is turning out and knitting it has reminded me that, as much as I love complicated texture and color work, patterns that require thought, it is also very good to have a simple mindless project on the needles. Pardon the dark photo — an unblocked sweater on a dark background,  taken on a deeply cloudy day.

This will be my last post for February, which has been a quiet month anyway, at least in terms of finishing things. 

I don't need to finish objects, there are more than enough things in my life as it is.  Nonetheless there are quite a few piles here and there, and various ideas floating about that may or may not be beginning to shape themselves into tangible form. The creative fog is itself refreshing, and not limited to any particular medium at this point. I am dreaming of gardens and food, embroidery, sewing, knitting, color, texture form.  It will all sort itself out in its own time. 

I have managed to finish one thing, a simple scarf sewn up from a navy/blue/black sweater knit.  This piece had been languishing in a stack for a long while.  I had a sweater made from this fabric when I still lived in Hyde Park, but it has long since been worn to threads.  I don't remember my original intentions for the remaining piece, but lately I keep looking at it, thinking "That will make a nice scarf someday" and then putting it aside.  Well someday arrived.  I honestly don't know why I had been putting this off, perhaps thinking I might have a more interesting idea.  But interesting is sometimes overrated. And a scarf in hand is always good.   

On the knitting front I've gone from working on one project (Ausma) to having three projects on the needles.  

One is a rayon ribbon cardigan, that I love but which is proving to be a slow project.    I had started this once before but had trouble keeping the yarn from twisting.  I felt like I was spending more time untwisting the yarn than I was knitting.    I ripped and began again after pressing all the twisted ribbon I had already knitted back into smooth silky shape.

I figured out that a ball, even a carefully hand wound ball, didn't work for me.  Somehow, while knitting, I would twist the yarn even more.  I came up with the idea of winding the yarn on a spindle of sort, using an embroidery frame as the spindle.  This is tedious and time consuming, and each skein must be wound on the spindle painstakingly.  That means the interruptions between knitting each skein becomes tedious. More tedious in fact, because the skeins themselves are twisted and tangled. Each new skein has to be slowly unwound, ironed,  and slowly wrapped onto the spindle.  

I do not believe the tangling is the manufacturer's fault.  This yarn has been packed and unpacked multiple times, and treated non-too-kindly I fear.  I take full responsibility even as I mutter under my breath while standing (not) patiently at the ironing table. Although I love the actual knitting, and the pattern is both simple and entertaining, the pressing and winding is far less exciting.  It will be some time before this sweater is done, and most of that time will not be knitting time.

The ribbon project is not portable, so I needed something I could tote around with me.  Enter socks.  I'm not far along yet, but far enough that the sock is stable enough for traveling about.  The yarn is a self striping yarn from Urth Yarns called Uneek Sock and I am knitting them on size 1 needles.  The skein pictured is enough for one sock.

Feeling in need of more mindless knitting time to balance both the annoyances of ribbon flattening, and the fog of creative dreaming, I also started another fairly straightforward project, an assigned-pooling sweater using BFL fingering yarn from Barker Wool.  The pattern is from Barker Wool as well and is called A Murder of Crows.  I've just started this as well, so I don't have much to report.  I am having fun with it so far.  I really need a loose comfy sweater to just throw on all the time around the house and studio and I am hoping this will be the one.  

Anyway, I hope the remainder of February is kind, and I will see you in March

Let me introduce you to Ausma!

The pattern is Ausma by Inese Sang and is knitted using A Verb For Keeping Warm's yarn, Reliquary II. The yarn is lace weight, 80% merino, 20% silk.  

During 2020 – 2022, and even into 2023, I belonged to several mystery yarn and knitting clubs. I joined in order to support favorite vendors during what was a difficult time.  I wanted to do my little part.  I didn't actually manage to knit everything I received during that period, but I have no regrets.  This was one of the club offerings I received from A Verb for Keeping Warm, and although I adored the pattern, I was initially less  than thrilled with the colors of the yarns.    I did not re-up my membership in the shawl club, but not because I regretted anything about the club.  In fact participation in these clubs has converted me into a knitter of shawls.  I don't think I will ever give them up, even though sweater-knitting remains my first love.  However, I prefer to have more control over what I actually acquire and make.  When I was younger I would make something just to try a technique, to learn something new.  Now I only want to make what I love.  I feel no need to be on trend. I feel no need to be the first.   I want to knit not just for the joy of knitting, but for the joy found in the finished object.

Back to Ausma.

This is basically a warm neutral shawl.  But my coloring is basically soft and cool.  Beige has never been my color.  The base color, Santolina is a beige.  It is a fairly neutral beige, but it is not a taupe.  As I knit this I have made a valiant effort at convincing myself that I can wear this shawl with taupe, and you might think so as well from the photo below. 

But you would be mistaken.  In this photo, in low bedroom light, on a black background the shawl looks beautiful with my silver/taupe evening skirt.  And it would probably work in an evening situation.  But, in bright sunlight, in florescent light, or anywhere the lighting is warm or glaring, the difference in the colors becomes markedly incongruous.  The skirt looks more silver/taupe, and the shawl quite yellow in comparison.  It would not flatter the skirt; it would not flatter my skin. I do not have a photo to show you, so you will have to trust me on this.

The contrast color, Paloma, is definitely warm.  The Santolina tones it down in the interior puffed rib panels, but the outer border is definitely warm soft pumpkin color.   

Despite this, I have no regrets.  I loved knitting the shawl.  I have already purchased more of the same yarn, Reliquary II,  in shades that will work for me with the intention of knitting another Ausma, one that will see plenty of wear.   I do not regret the purchase.  I do not regret the time spent knitting.    As I have been writing this post however, I have also realized that I feel no need to hold on to Ausma now that she has been finished.  It is time to release her into the world.    She has already been donated to a worthy cause, and hopefully she will make someone very happy.  That thought makes me very happy.

I finished a sweater while I was traveling in Texas in late November and early December although I am only now getting around to posting photos.

The pattern is Veronique by Chloe Thurlow from Rowan Magazine No. 73, Summer 2023. The above photo is from the magazine.  The design is knit it Rowan's Handknit Cotton, which is a worsted weight cotton.   I knit my version in a cotton yarn from Malabrigo called Verano.  In my experience, Rowan's Handknit Cotton and Malabrigo Verano knit to exactly the same gauge, but the Malabrigo is lighter in weight.  The Rowan yarn comes in at 186 yards per 100 grams and the Malabrigo is 205 yards per 100 grams.  A seemingly small difference that is nonetheless noticeable in the drape and weight of the finished sweater.

In my hot humid climate, neither yarn works for me as a summer yarn but both produce garments that are perfect for the transitional seasons of Spring and Fall, and even for the milder winter days here in Tennessee.   This sweater was knit not so much as a summer sweater therefore but as a transitional and layering piece.  For that reason also I made the sweater slightly on the boxy side, as shown in the photo in the Rowan magazine.  

There are a couple of things I noted about the sweater before starting.  On the model, the focal point of the joining of the colors occurs slightly below the fullest part of the bust, but just below that point, probably not a full inch, guessing here, based on the photos in the magazine.  This is fine on a younger, and perhaps not very full-busted model.  This means that accurate measurements, and some fudging in the actual knitting are critical, as I am not sure that this would be particularly flattering if the design lines cross at exactly the full bust, at least not on most women.  

One possibility is to make the top, yoke-portion, shorter, so that the dividing line is clearly above the bust line, and the lower portion is longer.  This would be particularly flattering on someone who is not only fuller through the bust, has a longer length from bust point to shoulder, and/or is short through the torso, or short waisted.  The advantage of knitting our own sweaters after all, is to create garments that are most flattering to the impression we, as individuals, wish to portray.

That short-on-top- long on bottom silhouette would not work so well for me however as I am long through the torso.  My distance from shoulder to full bust is shorter than average in terms of most patterns (both sewing and knitting) and the distance below the bust to my waist is longer than average.  To balance my figure, I would want the division line between the colors to be below the fullest part of the bust in order to lengthen that top portion, rather than accenting my long-waistedness.

In think I was fairly successful with that.  I wanted this sweater to be very close to waist-length, which meant I did have to lengthen it slightly, and the bottom section is a few rows longer than specified in the pattern.  I did not alter the top section at all, except for slight modifications at the shoulder line, as the length in the pattern ended clearly below my full bust.  The dividing lines on this pattern fall slightly below the bottom of my brassiere band. I think it works for me, although it is also possible that I could have made the top portion every so slightly shorter, a row or two perhaps.  This is not a big enough problem to make it worth fretting over and I am happy with the sweater as it is,

Autumn has arrived along with the requisite switching of the closets.  Generally this is a good thing as summer dressing is my least favorite and I I find joy in my reacquaintance with jeans, sweaters, boots, wool, and velvet.   I actually love this weather with mornings int he 40s and daytimes in the 60s or 70s.  But I don't mind looking forward to colder days with warm sweaters and toasty fires.

But what, you may ask,  about all those knitted tees I have made this past year?  Actually, they are perfect for the kind of weather we are having right now.  It is not yet woolly sweater season.  But the temperatures are perfect for layering and for thicker tees, which brings me 'round to yet another addition to my growing hand-knitted tee collection.

Presenting Arizona Sandstone.

This was a deep stash project.  The yarn, from a long since closed store called ArtFibers in SanFrancisco, was purchased before my grandson was born.  Named Fauvé, the yarn is a knitted tape, with alternating sections of beige cotton and a purple/lavender/bronze nylon blend.  The yarn is complicated enough that it seemed best suited to a simple tee, so to start I simply began playing with stitches.  Half-linen stitch is an old favorite for hand-dyed and novelty yarns, and I really liked the way the yarn knitted up in half-linen stitch, forming striations that reminded me of the patterns and colors of sandstone in the Arizona desert.

I didn't remember what my original plan was for the yarn  so once I got a gauge I liked, it was simple enough to make the calculations for a simple tee.  I wasn't initially sure if I would include sleeves, simply because I didn't know how much yarn I would need.  So I started with the idea of a sleeveless shell, and figured I would ad lib from there.

Well, I did have enough yarn, but I dilly-dallied a bit before actually starting on the sleeves.  I finished the body of the sweater on September 11th, but didn't pick up the yarn again to knit the sleeves until October 1.  The sleeves only took a day to knit, but did that mean that I was on a roll and finished the sweater forthwith? No, it did not.  

Cooler weather and the advent of autumnal colors started to seep into my head, eventually reminding me to get this project seamed and finished.   And now I have a new light-weight tee.  I think it will see a great deal of wear.

Technically the colors are a little on the warm side for me.  But they are also muted, and I can lean more toward muted warmth than I can toward clearer warm colors, so this tee actually works well with a great deal of my wardrobe.

Somewhere along the line I apparently decided that I needed some simple tees, warmer weather tees perhaps, although these are mostly transitional weather projects, not suitable for the heat of full summer, at least not in Tennessee, not for me, although I can admit that after living here for over 10 years now, I am getting a little more cold-natured than I was.  Not sure that this transition has anything to do with Tennessee, but is probably more the affect of age and the aftermath of cancer/heart issues.  

All this to say that the purple/yellow tee I showed you two posts back has been finished.

This all came about rather serendipitously.  While I was knitting the lilac Noro tee (two posts back), I was volunteering at the welcome desk at my church, and knitting, when I had a conversation with another knitter.  We talked about our love of Noro yarns and she told me about a simple tee pattern she had recently discovered and really loved.  The pattern was Olori Sweater Tee by Lanre Ojikutu, which I immediately looked up on Ravelry, purchased and dowloaded even though at that point I had no immediate plans to knit it.   After I finished that tee, I had a little over half a skein, or 316 yards, of the light purple Noro yarn left over. I had been eyeing a skein of the same yarn in an acid yellow/green and it occurred to me that the two yarns would work well together.  However it took me a couple of weeks to make up my mind and actually buy the second (yellow) skein.  But eventually I did, and this sweater was born.

I hadn't knit a top down raglan sweater in quite some years, and I had never knit one that was intended to be even slightly fitted.  The pattern is meant to have 1" to 2" of positive ease.  Mine is closer to 0 to 1", at the bust, a little looser elsewhere.  I didn't make a gauge swatch because I had just knit a stockinette sweater using the same yarn, but I should have.  Not surprisingly, my gauge when knitting in the round is slightly tighter than when knitting flat, although the difference is not large.  Since I was trying this on as I went, it was not an issue.  Actually all that trying on was in order to finagle the raglan shaping just a bit to accommodate my uneven shoulders.  I am happy with the result, it is acceptable, but I do think I could have adjusted the stitch counts slightly and have made a note of this for the future. I am not sure these notes translate directly to the next project due to differences in gauge, weight, spin and fiber content and they way all affect the actual knitted fabric, but the process was a useful learning project.

Best of all I am very happy with the result.  The only real change I made to the pattern was to add a little extra room at the hips, where I needed it.

I used up the remainder of the purple yarn (316 yards) and 7/10ths of the skein of yellow yarn (370 yards) for a total of 686 yards.  My sweater is longer than the original as I am tall, but that is a minor adjustment.

The big surprise was how well this sweater goes with a pair of yellow chinos.  This was not planned.  I am a firm believer in serendipity, and the idea that what one loves tends to be harmonious.    Anyway, I've worn the yellow chinos for years with white, or black, sometimes with soft pinks and greens, but I've never had anything that actually "went" with it.  And frankly I didn't think I had anything in my closet that would match this sweater.  I just thought the colors were pretty and I could always wear it with jeans, or especially with white jeans or cords, both of which I do own.

Happy serendipity.

I finished knitting a sweater in early August and I forgot to share it with you.  I didn't forget the sweater itself, a tee, and have been wearing it frequently since the weather started to cool.  In fact, I think it will see a lot of wear.

This sweater came about on a bit of a whim.  I had been admiring the pretty purple yarn in my lys, when I also saw the Noro spring summer knitting book that includes this pattern.  This is the same book that had the pattern for the green cardigan I posted two weeks ago, although I knit this sweater first.   The yarn is called  Akari Solo,and it is a silk/cotton/rayon/mohair/wool and nylon blend from Noro yarns.  I knitted the tee on a size 6 needle, which gave me a post-blocking gauge of 16 stitches and 24 rows to 4 inches.  This is slightly looser than the recommended gauge of 18/26, but this yarn at this gauge felt stiff and tight to me on the needles even though the final fabric is soft with a gentle drape.  I do not think I could happily knit it any tighter, and I think a more open fabric is often preferable in a summer knit.  Anyway, it was easy enough to do the math required to adjust the pattern to my gauge.

Even so, I did mess up a bit although not with the maths. I modified the pattern slightly to adapt the fit to my own shoulders, and I intentionally knit it is a more closely fitting sweater than the designer had envisioned. However I also ended up modifying the pattern placement inadvertently.  There are supposed to be three motifs across the bottom of the tee, and then two only following the first full repeat.  I did not notice that in the photo, and, as I read the pattern quickly, with an idea already in my head, I misconstrued part of the instructions.  That was completely my fault, although I am somewhat dyslexic (despite my heavy reading) and I do sometimes get instructions scrambled.  At any rate, by the time I discovered the mistake, I decided I actually like my slightly eccentric placement, and forged ahead without ripping.  I've always preferred that were a little off-kilter, or slightly off-proportion anyway, so this suits me perhaps even better than the original.

The resulting sweater is soft and comfortable.  Perhaps not suitable for the hottest and most humid days of August,  but perfectly fine when the humidity is lower or the temperatures in the 70s to even low 80s or below.  It is also a good weight for layering with jackets and cardigans throughout the Autumn and Spring months, so I do believe this will see a lot of wear.

I used slightly less than 1 1/2 skeins, of 749 yards to knit this sweater.  Inspired by my joy in this top perhaps, and spying the same yarn in a pretty yellow, I decided that I could combine it with the purple to knit another tee, in progress now, and shown below.

It ends up that I no longer object to simple stockinette knitting, and I like having a relatively mindless project on the needles for those days when I either am distracted or just tired (quite suitable after a tough day in the garden for example).  I apparently also like knitting simple tees that I will wear, although I haven't yet moved onto simple stockinette on small needles.

I surprise myself sometimes, but that is neither here nor there.

I knit a shawl, a light airy beautiful shawl.