Category: project – Mermaid

I passed the half-way point on Mermaid — in the dark on the way home from a concert in Pittsfield MA Sunday night.  Mermaid is not the best knitting in the dark project and I think, if I see more knitting in the car at night on the horizon I will have to find a project on bigger needles.

Mermaid is pretty easy but you do have to count at times.  The tough part last night was picking up the yarnovers and knitting them together with the next stitch as I finished the center back gussets.   Mermaid is pretty easy to feel on the needles  although small stitches are not as easy as big ones, espeically as I approach the end of a row, where it is much to easy to drop things. 

I think for piece of mind, knitting blind is better done at a much larger gauge.

Of course, by half way, I am not counting the sleeves.

I did start Mermaid on the car to Pittsfield, and knitted diligently in the car and on the flights to California and home again to New York a week ago.  Unfortunately there was precious little knitting in San Francisco — sewing, eating, drinking, and sleeping pretty much filled my time in that fair city.  There was not much knitting time in Knoxville either, and as mentioned earlier, what was knitted was reknitted on the flight home.  Oh well.

Progress is being made:

The wavy line at the bottom contains my circular needle, a mere one inch shorter than the sweater itself at this point, and therefore rebelling at being stretched out to the max without being allowed to disgorge its stitches.  As you can see I have worked from the left front, around the underarm area and am now on the back. 

I have been holding the sweater up to me as I go and it appears like it is going to fit fairly well.  The knitting is going pretty much as written.  The instructions are clear and it is a fun sweater to knit, despite being dreaded garter stitch, the color changes and the well laid out gussets make provide entertainment just before boredom starts to set in.

I have made minor alterations to the pattern.  The sweater as written is 25 inches long in a size medium.  Now I am tall and I usually lengthen sweaters.  On Hanne Falkenberg’s site the sweater appears to be what I would guess to be long jacket length, and I imagine it at about low hem or butt length, just covering the crotch area on a pair of pants.  This might not be the intended length exactly, but it appears pretty close from photographs.  Looking at these photos plus those of other bloggers, some of whom may be short as the sweater is definitely longer than that imagined length on some of them, I think this would be an attractive length on this sweater — longer rather than shorter.

Now usually, if I want a long sweater, let’s say just below butt length, I would knit it to 28 – 29 inches, assuming that most knits stretch about an inch in the hanging as you wear them (I usually sew my jackets at 29 – 31 inches depending on specific cut)

So it appears that 25 inches would be too short.  My favorite sweaters are all 21 – 23 inches or 28 – 30 inches, and a few are longer yet.  But Kingfisher, finished in April 2005, has godets at the bottom and comes in at 25 – 26 inches.  This sweater looks quite nice, although I need to wear it with different bottom styles than I do a longer 28 inch sweater.  So I decided to go with the 25 inch sweater.

I believe that this is quite fortunate because, looking at the length of the hip gussets, I would guess that I would need to lengthen this sweater by about an inch above the waist and 2 inches below the waist.  In order for the hip gussets to look proportional they would have to be widened as well as lengthened, and I am not at all convinced there would be enough yarn to allow for the increased yardage requirements of bigger hip gussets, as the sizing of the gussets does not change significantly between the sizes as written in the pattern, leading me to believe there is not a lot of extra yarn in the gusset coloor.

If I want to make Mermaid longer, it will have to do it using different yarn.  This is a possibility as the sweater is a pleasure to knit and the style appears to be one that I would wear frequently, assuming that the actual sweater turns out as nicely as the "mental image".

So what alterations did I make?  I actually shortened the gussets by about one inch at the hem so that they begin more in proportion to my torso.  The pattern as written would have started enough above my waistline so as not to be flattering; it would be fine if I looked good in a modified Empire line, which I do not.  So I started the gussets an inch closer to the bottom of the sweater and adjusted the short-row shaping accordingly.  Despite shortening the hip gussets, I did not lenthen the underarm gussets because  I tend to be short for my height between shoulder and bust, with a good long stretch between bust and waist.  So I do not really need extra room, or width in those gussets.  When I hold the sweater up against my body it looks very promising, and I think this is going to work out quite well.

It looks like all the math work has been done; the results look promising, and only time and lots of knitting will tell.

A small effort has begun at starting Mermaid by Hanne Falkenberg.  I am making colorway #6: light gray, slate gray and dusty rose:

The opening attempts have gotten me as far as the gauge swatch and beginning i-cord edge, but no further.

I went up one needle size, to 3.25 in order to get gauge.  Once upon a time I would have said this was quite unusual, and it certainly would be were I knitting with cotton or silk, but my knitting tensions have changed in the past year or two, so nothing really surprises me anymore.  Once I get gauge, I tend to be pretty consistent though, except for minor annoyances like that silly event with the blue baby kimono last week.

The i-cord is not perfectly neat but steaming might help, and I think I can straighten up any idiosyncracies while i pick up the stitches to begin the garment. I-cord is extremely tedious, and although it would probably come much more naturally with time and practice, it is not the kind of thing that I am certain that I want to force myself to practice.

It suddenly dawned on me, just this evening, that I have nothing to knit in the car tomorrow on the drive up to Pittsfield.  I do not trust myself to pick up stitches in a straight line along the i-cord in the car, which means of course that I will have to do it tonight when we return from dinner at our local Mexican hole-in-the-wall.

Oh the price we have to pay to practice our art.