Category: Knitting

My senior year in college, probably like most colleges, I had to have submit a photograph for the yearbook.  I asked a friend, who was a very good photographer, to take the pictures for me.  She told me to wear my favorite garment as long as it wasn't purple.  She told me it was very hard to photograph purple well.  There was something about the way purples absorbed and reflected light, although I don't really remember the details. (photographers may please chime in here).  

 

Unfortunately my favorite colors seem to all be shades of purple and this conversation keeps echoing through my mind as I keep trying to photograph purple garments and rarely capturing the color in its true glory.  Of course, I am also a very unskilled photographer so perhaps this too will improve with practice.

 

Project: Mulberries in the Snow

 

Pattern: Drops sleeveless dress 108-7, a free download from the Drops website.

 

Yarn:  Misti Alpaca Chunky knitted tighter than its recommended gauge at 15 stitches and 19 rows per 4 inches.

 

Changes made to the pattern:  I added a bust dart to accommodate my DD chest and I lengthened the torso by 1 inch.  The length was added in the ribbed section at the waist, which is supposed to extend down onto the hips, as it clearly does here.

 

Things I would do differently were I to make this dress again: I am basically very happy with this dress.  However, the pattern illustration shows the area above the ribbing ending just below the bustline.  I knitted this to exactly the length specified in the pattern above the ribbing but before beginning the armhole shaping (6 inches) and although it looks okay, I think it would look much better if I had shortened this area to 4 inches, or perhaps even less, so that the ribbing came up higher on the ribcage as shown here in this photo from Drops.

 

More photos are available over at my flickr page or on Ravelry.  They were not, however, taken before I managed to weave in those few annoying yarn ends that seem to have shown up in all my photos.

 

 

 

I thought I'd share a few pictures of what I bought on Saturday.  Everything was from Habu Textiles and I really wished I hadlooked up the vendors online before I went so I could make a list.  Instead I just bought what appealed.  Things were already fairly picked over but it worked out well.

 

A-60 Shosenshi paper is a linen tape yarn.  I am planning on making a lightweight cardigan with this, mixing the linen paper yarn with Habu Tsmugi silk.  I could also knit the two skeins together to make a sleeveless top, but if I were to do that I think I would prefer having two different colors.

 

N67-B linen paper in a much finer gauge.  I am planning on knitting this using a pattern by Cocoknits called Gretl, which basically only requires one skein if you make the shorter version.  But I thought I might lengthen it and two skeins would give me the option of making this tunic or perhaps even dress length.  

 

Here is a picture of Gretl.  If I make the shorter version, as shown, I can use the second skein for a scarf either alone or perhaps mixed with a lovely skein of fine copper wire I also purchased.  

 

I don't really know the yardage on the copper wire, but I when I picked it up I was thinking of knitting it with Habu's N-75 fine Merino in a deep wine color, shown next to the copper wire in the photo.  My basic impulse was to knit a cowl holding the two yarns together which would yield something soft and light but also with a little bit of form due to the copper.  

 

However there were two skeins of the wine merino available and it is a color I really love so I purchased both.  I could use one skein with the copper and one skein for a separate long scarf, perhaps using Habu's silk or wool blend with stainless steel.   

 

Or the two skeins of merino, held together would give me enough to knit a garment of some sort, nothing fancy, a soft top or tee or perhaps even a cardigan if I use large needles and make it very light and airy, which would still provide some warmth as the merino would trap the warmth nicely.   In which case I could use the copper wire with the fine linen tape to make a very lightweight summery scarf or shawl.

 

The last yarn I purchased was this lovely, very soft, lace weight cotton boucle in a soft grayed-purple color.  I am once again thinking of using it doubled to make a soft top or cardigan using larger needles, although I am sure it would make an absolutely delightfully soft scarf or shawl.  

 

I did also order some yarn from Habu while I was at the show.  There was a lovely garment on display  which I really wanted to knit. They did not have enough of the yarn on hand to complete the garment but they were taking orders.  I have also ordered the Tsmugi silk that I will use with the Shosenshi paper (top photo) to make a summer-weight cardigan.

 

None of these yarns are going to appear on my needles right away.  I am cold and these projects all make me think of warmer weather.  The heat will come soon enough though, and it will be nice to have some very lightweight projects on hand.

 

 

 

I Finally Finished

something…..

Actually, a scarf.

Pattern:  February Lace Scarf by Laura Nixon-Corfield (Ravelry Link)

 

Yarn:  Cascade Venezia Worsted, which is 70% merino wool, 30% silk, in color 167, a deep green.

 

This was not a particularly original choice.  I came into possession of one skein of the Venezia and I simply ran a Ravelry search to determine what other people had done.  Someone else had used this yarn for this pattern, which was written for a fingering weight alpaca, and I thought it was pretty.  That is one nice thing about scarves, you can probably knit them out of most anything and the results will vary accordingly.

 

Needless to say, I am very happy with the final result and I will happily wear it.  It feels luxuriously soft and silky against the skin, and it is warm but not too warm.  There are days when the not too warm part is very important. 

 

I couldn't capture the actual color in either photo, it is somewhere in between, not as blue as it appears draped on the brown chair, but deeper and with more of a silky shine than is apparent in the second photo.  It being winter and light being what it is up here in the NE at the moment, especially during yet another snow/ice storm, I can live with these results.

 

 

I promised a finished object.  There is none.

 

Or actually, there was one, finished, modeled, photographed, complimented.  It did not look bad; some said it looked quite good.

 

But it was not what I wanted.

 

I thought I would live with it anyway.

 

Then something occurred to me.  If I will not purchase something that is not perfect and does not make my heart sing why on earth should I settle for less with things I have made?  I should not.  

 

What was finished is no more.  The sweater has been unknitted.  The yarn will be washed and dried and rewound into balls. 

 

In time the sweater will be reborn.  The same pattern; the same yarn.  Perhaps better decisions will be made the second time around. Would that we could always have second chances.  

Last night I picked up my knitting for the first time since the Thursday before Thanksgiving.  In all my rush and business and exhaustion I had forgotten how calming it is to knit even a few rows.

 

And so, after my tasks were done for the day, I sat in a comfortable chair with a cat, a glass of wine and yarn, and I spent some time creating something beautiful just for me.

 

Friday I started a new project.  It was a simple project utilizing a fun yarn I had just picked up at my friend Theresa's new yarn shop:  Out of the Loop.  It is basically a bulky wool yarn, meant to be knit on size 15 to 19 needles, with felted balls of wool tied periodically throughout the skein.

 

I intended to make a simple cowl and thought it would be a fun hospital-knitting project.  Little did I know that this simple project would prove to be my lifeline on a rather difficult day. 

 

But first the specs:

 

Yarn:  U-Knitted Nations Giant Purls 1 skein equals 80 yards

 

Needle: size 17 circular needle.

 

Pattern:  a simple tube.  I cast on 48 stitches, joined them and simply knit until I ran out of yarn.

 

I am very happy with the results of this project although it is far from perfect.  If you look closely you will see quite a bit of variation in my tension and the general texture of my knitting.  As I said it proved to be a difficult Friday.  

My tension at the beginning was rather consistently loose.  I am, by nature, a loose knitter and I was focusing on trying to keep the stitches loose as I wanted a rather soft fabric with nice drape for this cowl and I feared it would become too stiff.   I actually think the felted purls fall more nicely where the scarf is more loosely knit.

 

The day began innocuously enough waiting for the doctor to come in with the results of a bevy of tests.   The results were not good, were not what I wanted to hear, what I expected to hear.  My knitting would be shoved aside, then picked up again and I would knit desperately, as if wrapping a small bit of yarn around a stick would make the world right again.  My tension varied widely during this period, although I was not aware of it at the time.  

 

Then after many discussions with many doctors, I entered a phase of fierce determination.  We would figure this out.  I had a list of rehabilitation hospitals to research and I was determined to do the best job possible over the weekend.  But first I had to finish the cowl.  For some reason I felt I could not walk out that door, I could not move forward, until I finished that project as if dangling yarn was an omen of doom.  My hands were holding the needles tightly and my gauge became much tighter and more evenly spaced again as I raced to the finish.  The end result was that the cast-off end of the cowl is smaller than the cast-on end.  But it works and I rather like it this way.

 

I've had many projects that remind me of the place and time of their knitting.  I treasure these sweaters:  the sweater I knit on a flight to Paris.  The cabled sweater in Noro Kureyon that I knit as we drove around western Texas the year we went to Big Bend.  The sweater I knit on my first Amazon Cruise.  Now I have this cowl, and although it does not remind me of exotic locales, it is equally treasured, its inconsistencies speaking volumes.

 

I kept that cowl in the bottom of my purse all weekend as I toured rehab centers.  I would occasionally reach my hand down into my purse just to feel it there as if the softness of the wool and the nubbly felted balls would help me with my decision.  At one point on Sunday I even wore the cowl as I had run out without a coat and there was a cold wind.  The warm cowl brightened my spirits as well as my neck as the wind whipped about. Every stitch of that wool was a piece of the puzzle, every stitch would help me make the right decision.

 

Well yes, there is knitting going on here.

I found myself between projects.  I fell short of yarn in my supposedly current project, which was anticipated and wholly my own fault as i was knitting the recommended yarn at a gauge which was tighter than was recommended in the pattern.  While I was waiting for additional supplies to arrive I needed something to work on.

 

Enter a few skeins of Road to China yarn by The Fiber  Company in a lovely reddish purple color named "rose de France".  I purchased this during an evening of hunting and pecking through the remaining stock at my LYS, Yarn Central, before they went out of business.  There was not really enough to make a sweater, but I thought there was enough to do something.  I was right, although just barely.

 

 
I had seven skeins.  Seven 80-yard skeins yields 560 yards of yarn.  Searching for patterns for an adult sweater using that little yardage yielded very little.  Originally I considered a vest pattern which required a little over 600 yards, more than I had, but I thought I could risk it as I tend to knit long skinny stitches and fewer rows per inch means less yarn is used.  But then I found this pattern, which was actually written for the yarn I was using and required the exact yardage I happened to have on hand: Bells of Ireland from Interweave Knits

 

That is, my yardage would work if I knit the smallest size, which produced a sweater with a 38" bust.  This would technically fit my 37" inch bust, although the sweater shown is pictured with "several inches" of positive ease, which means, I guess that the model's bust is around 33 – 34.  

 

I could work with that.

 

I made the smallest size.  However I made some changes.  This sweater, like most knitting patterns is designed so that the circumference around the sweater is divided equally between the front and back.  This means that if a sweater is 38 inches at the bust, it is  divided so that there 19 inches of width across the back, and 19 inches across the front.  This might work if the  person wearing the sweater is built like Gumby and is roughly the same front and back, but most humans aren't designed that way.  Most of us are narrower across the back than we are across the chest.  I thought that if I redesigned the pattern so that I had extra volume at the front to accommodate the fuller bust measurement I might be able to pull it off.    I used my actual back measurement at the bustline for the back of the sweater and put everything else in the front. This did not affect the knitting significantly until I got to the raglan shaping where, luckily for me, the shaping was done over the course of a six-row repeat.  Rather than decreasingly equally in the front and back, I needed to decrease three stitches in front for every one stitch decreased in back, a proportion that was easily worked out over six rows.  

 

Of course, since the sweater is knitted in one piece from the bottom up, I wasn't going to know how well it worked until I was almost done.  But I figured if the math was right it had to at least fit.  Whether it would be flattering or not was another issue.  I was going out on a limb here as I've never worn anything quite like this before.

 

Here are the results:

I think it works.  Of course it appears substantially shorter on my tall 5'9" frame and long torso than it does on the model, although I can assure you the length exactly matches the pattern specs.  It is not ideal, but it is not bad.  I even think it would be rather nice over a simple dress.  Unfortunately I don't have any simple dresses I could wear it with at the moment, a situation that probably needs to be remedied.   I am actually happier with the style than I am with the striping and color changes across the sweater.  I did check the labels and all the yarn was from the same dye lot, probably originally from the same bag, so I am wondering if the color varation is due to differences in light as the yarn was stored.  I didn't see the color difference in the skeins before I started knitting, or I would have made an effort to work the color progression a little differently. I think I will wear it, at least for now.  I'm wondering if the disappointment in the color will bother me over time, if it will be possible to over-dye it, or if I will just accept it as one of the many imperfections of life.  Whatever I decide I can't complain about the results considering it was sale yarn and a couple of weeks worth of nightly television knitting.

 

 

We did go up to the New York State Sheep and Wool festival last weekend, although I had rather mixed feelings about the whole thing.  I have lots of yarn, I have lots of projects in various unfinished states, and although there is more to the festival than the purchase of yarn, I have few illusions about my ability to go to a wool festival filled with a couple of hundred vendors and not walk out with something.

 

In the end we went, I bought, but only a little, and we left.  It was a sweet day, walking slowly, hand in hand with G as he marveled at the yarns, the knitting, and the spinning wheels.   We didn't make it as far as the sheep or the alpacas but we did sit on a bench eating a chocolate covered apple, G marveling at the combination of sweet, creamy, crisp and tart.  

 

G was fascinated watching a vendor making cord with a lucet.  He thought this was something he would like to try and hoped it would be easier than knitting.  I don't know about that and his knitting lessons are progressing very very slowly, but I was more than willing to give it a try.  

 

As you can see, above, I did buy yarn, but only a small amount, from Helen Hamann's booth. Perhaps I should have bought more.  I loved the yarn and the colors were fabulous.  Really, I wanted every single color in the booth, it was a color-lover's fantasy.  I may regret not buying more as it is not carried locally, but I restrained myself and purchased only the yarn I needed for a project that has been floating around the back of my mind.

 

I would like to say that you will be seeing this take shape soon, but I know that my dreams are often far bigger and more numerous than my ability to bring them to fruition, but it will appear, one of these days at least.