DesigKnit

One of the side effects of me having more time on my hands (or even the suggestion that I might have more time on my hands, whether or not it materializes), is a sudden proliferation of project ideas that all want to be Done! Right now!

I have lists and lists of patterns and knitting and spinning and weaving, and all kinds of other things swimming around in my head, and it’s getting hard to hear in here. In the interests of brain space, I thought it might be helpful to make a list.

This first one is kind of a cheat, because it’s already done. This is the Targhee I’ve been spinning up to test the fiber before ordering some for the shop. I didn’t have to get all the way through the skein before I knew that the answer was “yes.” Unfortunately, I decided that I wanted 10 lbs right around the same time that they ran out of fiber, so I’m on a waiting list for the next bunch off of the mill in a month or so. In the meantime, I’m petting this skein.

The targhee is a fine, crimpy fiber, a lot like polwarth but with a little more bounce. It has great loft, which led to me getting a medium fingering weight yarn instead of the laceweight I was expecting. I’m still having a hard time breaking through that barrier; I am spinning yarns with less and less twist and loftier and loftier fibers at the same time as I try to make my yarn finer, and the final product is ending up just about the same. Fortunately, I can think of lots of things to do with fingering weight yarn, so this isn’t really much of a problem. I ended up with 452 yards from my 4 oz of top, compared to 214 and 316 from Finn and Falkland, respectively, spun from the same amount of fiber in a two-ply of roughly the same weight. Just goes to show that your yardage all depends on your spinning and the fiber.

This Targhee preparation has a lot of loft left in the top; sometimes wool gets kind of beaten into submission in a commercial preparation and you end up with almost no bounce left. I don’t know if it’s the processing or the fiber, but this one definitely stays bouncy all the way through the dyeing process, which helped with keeping a lot of air in the final yarn. Here you can see how fluffy it was, even before setting the twist:

The next project in the list is an old project that got pushed aside by some of these newer upstarts. (Kids these days.)

I still have quite  a bit of green left to spin for the fall colors sweater (next in line to cast on, as soon as I clear a couple of other projects off the needles). This isn’t too urgent, since I won’t need the green right away in the design, but I want to get it done so that the yarn is all ready when I need it.

First, though, I’ve been working on spinning up another shop test sample.

This is the Rambouillet, and it will also definitely be making its way to the shop as soon as possible. I haven’t heard back yet about quantities and prices, but we should be able to get some soon.

I’m spinning this up as a worsted-to-heavy three ply, destined to be a hat for Branden. And possibly some handwarmers. And maybe a scarf, depending on how long it keeps going. Remember what I said about the Targhee having a lot of loft left in the preparation? Well, it doesn’t hold a candle to Rambouillet. This is my first time working with this fiber, so it’s been really interesting to see how different it is from other wools I’ve spun.

The best word I can think of to describe it is “spongy.” In a very, very good way. This is the most aggressively lofty fiber I have ever seen; dying it was more like kneading bread than working dye into fiber. Usually I just tap on the surface of the wool with the tips of my fingers to get the dye all the way into the fiber. But the Rambouillet required full hand squeezing, and lots of it…my muscles were actually tired after wrangling color into a pound of Rambouillet. I was a bit worried about felting it, but it came out beautifully despite the abuse. The one thing I haven’t loved about it is that it can be hard to spin fine; the sponginess makes it a little harder to draft down evenly to a lace or fingering weight. I’ve been spoiled by not really needing to predraft my other fibers and ended up with a slightly bumpier yarn. That could be managed by more predrafting and not spinning long draw, but I decided to give in to the fiber and head for a heavier weight yarn for this first test run.

Next up is the new fiber for the current sweater (which needs a name that isn’t just “the striped shawl sweater”). This is way down the list in chronological order, but may need to move up to the front of the line so that I can actually finish the sweater.

And then, there’s a long-term project that I realistically won’t get to until sometime this summer.

This is some Shetland that I bought two summers ago at Wisconsin Sheep and Wool. I bought it to make a sweater for me, and it just keeps sliding further and further down the list. I didn’t have a clear idea of what I wanted to make with it, so I couldn’t start spinning the yarn until I knew at least what weight of yarn I wanted. There were a couple of ideas beginning to take shape, and then at Christmas, a friend was admiring Branden’s McGyver sweater. And admiring in a way that actually values the work that goes into making it. That’s one thing I really can’t resist, so I think that this will end up being spun up for a sweater for him, hopefully in time for next Christmas, though it will involve some espionage to figure out the measurements that I need. (We may need to enlist an accomplice for that part.) It’s very low pressure in terms of time, but it’s an important one to keep on the list, and I’d like to get to it soon.

And finally, last but not least, we have this:

That’s the fleece that Ellen and I bought at Rhinebeck and sent out for processing. I forget the breed* (at the time, I was too enamored with the color to notice much else), but it is beautiful wool, and the processing was beautifully done. It arrived last week, and I can’t wait to spin it! This is still in the simmering stage; I’m not sure what I want it to become, so I think I probably have a little while before this one jumps onto the wheel. I’m not sure if I’ll have enough for a sweater, but there’s a simple cabled cardigan kind of lurking in the background of my brain…

So there you have it. The spinning queue. That ought to keep me busy for a while, don’t you think?

*Edited to add: I’ve just gone back and actually read the Rhinebeck post, and the fleece is a Corriedale cross from Lisa Lafferty at Eidelweiss Farm. Yay for the blog record!

It’s been a long time since I’ve ripped out knitting. I seem to have ironed out the kinks in my design process to the point where ripping back has become pretty uncommon. Or maybe it just means that I’m not doing enough new things. Either way, yesterday I was thinking about how long it’s been since I’ve ripped back…while ripping back the striped shawl sweater.

I was also thinking about how little it bothers me now to pull out a few days’ worth of knitting. I hate to rip back for something pointless that I should have seen, or for some silly thing that I don’t think is very important, but when it’s the right thing for the design, it’s actually kind of fun. There’s something about that zzzzzzip! sound that the yarn makes as all those little stitches come undone, and it always amuses me (even when I’m not happy about the need to rip). This time, I could see why it needed to be done, and I found myself not minding at all. It’s a good thing, too, because I had knit to here:

and then I pulled back to here:

….which is about 2/3 of the stitches, and brought me back to exactly where I was the last time I showed you photos.

The problem was in the back panel. I had waited too long to stop increasing, and so the back was a little too shawl-like to hang nicely as a sweater. (See all those stitches bunching up around the shoulder blade in the first picture?)

Fortunately, I haven’t been breaking the yarn between color stripes, so all my yarn is still intact. I’ve been having my doubts about this turning into a sweater, and wanted some insurance in case I needed to frog. After putting all those stitches back on the needles, I thought about switching back to knitting a simple shawl instead, but I’m too far into the sweater design now, so I’m forging ahead anyway. The construction is too interesting to ignore. If it doesn’t work out, I can always pull back again and turn it into a shawl.

The other detail that’s nagging at my mind is the fact that I was already halfway through my yarn in that first photo above. That’s not terrible mileage, and I’ll actually get a lot back from the stitches that I’m eliminating in this second round, but I’m still not sure I’m going to make it to the end.

I’m also not sure that I want a sweater with that many strong stripes, and I have my reservations about a large arrow pointed directly at my behind if I continue the shawl point all the way down to the hem of a full sweater. (Some features don’t really need emphasizing with big flashy arrows.) In answer to that second concern, Jocelyn suggested using a matching color to fill in the extra yardage and cut down on the arrow-ness of the point. I’m finding myself quite taken with that idea, and have been trying to work out exactly how to add another color into the design.

There’s also the (not insignificant) question of whether or not I can get a good color to match. I should be able to get something close, because I dyed all the yarns in the project. In theory, that means that I should be able to recreate them. (Strong emphasis on in theory there.) I have it stuck in my head that I want more of that purple, and it’s been 3 years since I dyed that color. My dye technique isn’t terribly repeatable even on the same day, never mind with three years and different jars of dye to add to the challenge.

Still, I wanted to see how close I could get. I have my dyeing notes, and there’s nothing I love better than a challenge, so yesterday I mixed up some new solutions and painted them on the last of my Falkland.

And I have to say I’m pretty pleased with how it came out. I made 3, 4-oz pieces, plus about 2 oz that I had left over at the end of the bag. If you look closely, you can see a ball of the original yarn sitting in the middle there. I have a feeling that this batch will spin up lighter than the first, but other than that they are pretty close.

So, I think I’ve added yet another fiber to my spinning queue. The list is really getting quite long now, but I think that’s a post for another day. For now, I’m off to make up lost time.

Sometimes, the best designs are like a mystery novel; all twists and turns and unexpected conclusions. It seems that the striped shawl is destined to be one of these (at least the mystery part; the design part is yet to be seen).

You’ll remember that I started out thinking that it was going to be a pair of socks. And then a brown and yellow shawl. And then a brown and yellow and purple shawl. Well, lo and behold, now it wants to be a sweater. Talk about ambition, huh?

It all started the other day when I noticed how nicely the shoulder shaping works in the laceweight version. Then, when I was knitting the beginning of the handspun version, I started to see a v-neck coming out of the shaping.

Today, I transferred the “shawl” to longer needles and laid it out so that you could see. I like the striped version a lot; it really highlights the details of the construction.

It starts out as a simple triangle, knit from the top. As you get to about 5 inches long, you add another double set of increases, which makes it start to wrap around the front. If this were to continue as a shawl, I’d knit to about 10 inches and then increase again, to make tails that flip up over my shoulders and out of the way. Simple.

Here’s what it looks like in the back. That extra set of increases that you add at 5 inches become the shoulder line, and the back keeps the shape of a triangle shawl.

But when you look at the front, it wraps all the way around to cover your neck.

What I thought would be a v-neck turned into a great high-collar opening, and the rest is just begging to be a raglan. Add in some sleeve openings, and I have a cardigan with really interesting stripes. If this were to be a shawl, I’m a few inches from done (I like mini-shawls better than full-length ones). But I have a good bit of yarn left, and I’m tempted to see how far it goes. I won’t have enough for a full sweater, but I think I could make a cropped cardigan. What do you think? Sweater, or shawl?

At the moment, I’m actually thinking that I might do both…this one becomes a sweater, and then I make another as a shawl because I like the idea of a shawl that wraps all the way around (or I could just finish the first one, and have a shawl). It’s very hard to resist such an interesting piece of geometry…

This week has been all about new fibers. I’ve just placed my biggest order ever (32 lbs!) of fiber for show dyeing, and I’ll most likely be adding another 18 lbs over the next couple of weeks.

I mentioned the other day that I had received some beautiful Targhee in the mail for testing. I always want to see and spin a fiber before deciding whether it will go into the shop. I’ve had very good luck buying online, but there have been a few times that the quality just hasn’t been there. I’m excited about the Targhee, though, so I was really hoping that it would work out.

I haven’t managed to actually sit down and start spinning it yet, but I think it’s pretty safe to say that it will. I think it might be pretty safe to say that I am head over heels in love with it. Sometimes I feel like I have too many “favorites.” Every new fiber I try lately seems to become a favorite for the shop. Every new color is really hard to resist. I generally take that as a good sign, and I can’t imagine making something that I didn’t love, but sometimes it feels like there are an awful lot of favorites vying for my attention. (But then, there are worse problems to have.)

I dyed up the pound of Targhee, some Shetland, and some BFL over the weekend. And yes, I have some new favorites.

That will get a proper post all of its own in due time (soon!), but we’ve been having photo troubles again. I think it’s all this winter darkness; makes it hard to get good light.

I dyed these on Friday night so that I could wash them on Saturday and they would be dry by Sunday so that I could start test spinning some of the Targhee. I’m more than a little impatient to try it (the bounce! the soft!), but we keep our house fairly cool in the winter, and the basement is unheated, so it took forever to dry. We took our first batch of photos on Sunday night, but it was still far too damp to spin.

Yesterday, I had work to do during the day, and then I was out at knitting last night. Today was also full of writing and data crunching, but I was running out of brain cells anyway, and so have decided to take an afternoon break for fiber.

I had a hard time picking just one of the rovings to spin, but I think this one is my favorite of the Targhees. It’s a close tie between this and one of the light blue-greens, but I’m more likely to wear dark colors, so I think I’m going with this one. The color is a combination of four different dyes; a green, a blue, and two reds that make a deeply saturated purple. One of the reds tends to clump up in solution, and so it gets stuck on the outer layer of the fiber when you pour on the dye solution. I generally do a pretty good job of massaging it in, but there are always areas where the dye is much more concentrated, and so you end up with some spots that have a lot of red in them. I can’t wait to spin it!

I also can’t wait to play with the contents of this box that showed up on my doorstep this afternoon:

Isn’t that adorable? That’s my box of Rambouillet from Great Wool. And the best part isn’t even the outside of the box (though that’s pretty hard to beat).

This is another fiber that I’m pretty sure is destined for the shop. I haven’t spun with any of it yet, but just from looking it is absolutely beautiful. It is more expensive than my other fiber bases, but it looks like it will be utterly worth it. I have heard a lot about Rambouillet, but I have not yet gotten around to trying it. It looks soft, and sproingy, and full of crimp. I know what I’ll be doing on my next dye day!

Some projects take months to plan and prepare before knitting. Some take years to get around to, even though they’re good ideas. And then sometimes, a project jumps up out of nowhere and demands to be knit.

I finished spinning the yellow-brown fiber last week, and set the twist in the yarn this weekend. It’s been whispering that it wants to be a shawl, but I still couldn’t tell if the colors would “go” together, so I decided to swatch a bit on Sunday.

This picture is a little dark, but the swatch said that yes, the two colors would work together. Still, the combination seemed a little flat.  The variegation in the yellow-brown would help to liven things up a little bit, but it just didn’t quite pop yet.

The yarn had been sitting in my knitting basket on top of the lace ribs sweater, and the mixture of the gold and mahogany with purple kept catching my eye. So, I went looking in the stash.

I added in a narrower stripe of some spindle-spun yarn that I dyed just before we left Seattle and spun in Germany. It’s a tighter twist, but other than that the gauge is pretty similar.

The purple really brings out the pink in the mahogany, doesn’t it?

Even so, I felt like the purple was too dominant in the knitting, so I decided to change the stripe pattern so that I wasn’t putting the dark purple in the middle of the light yellow-brown. I also tried widening the stripe so it didn’t interrupt the rhythm of the color changes.

That looked a lot better, and I really liked the purple next to the greenish stripe where the variegated yarn is beginning to change colors, so I cast on.

The shawl itself is actually a remake of an old idea. This stockinette lace shawl served as my bus knitting for several months last summer, though I think it hardly (if ever) got a mention on the blog. The yarn is Knit Picks Bare laceweight that I dyed with logwood in a natural dye workshop in Madison.

The project stalled for lots of reasons. First, it was taking me 3 20-minute bus rides to knit a single row (I’d guess that I’m well over 1000 stitches per row). Second, while I love the color of the yarn, it unfortunately came out a little coarse from the dyeing process. I think we probably used too much mordant, which can dry out the fiber. Dry yarn is just not as much fun to knit, and the color leaks a tiny bit while I knit, giving me slightly sticky purple fingers over time. Third – and this is the real reason it’s been sitting in a closet for a year – I need to make a decision.

I’m at the point where  I could bind off and be done. I have vague notions of wanting a lace edging to finish off the piece, but haven’t quite found the right one. I also hate to bind now off without finishing off the skein, but it’s an 800-yard skein, so there’s quite a bit left to go before I run out of yarn. And so it sits. I don’t usually let UFOs hang around very long; there are maybe 3 or 4 projects in my closet that are languishing and not just frogged. But this one has a lot of potential. I love the color, I like the design quite a bit, and it’s really close to done. It’s one of those rare projects that I have given up on for the time being, but am actually pretty sure that I will return to it later.

In the meantime, I really want to play with that design. It’s a simple shawl, begun like a triangle, but then I have added extra increase sections as you knit to make it curve around (kind of a golden spiral kind of idea). It looks like a shapeless blob sitting there on the arm of the couch, but when I hold it up to look at it, I really like the shaping and think it will make for a really comfortable shawl to wear.

And this new yarn is volunteering to become a new version. I had forgotten about the purple shawl, but the idea has been tugging away at the back of my mind ever since I started spinning the yellow-brown to go with the mahogany. This yarn is a much heavier weight, so it will knit up faster, and the stripe pattern will take away all need for fancy edgings. Just plain and simple stockinette, but with color changes to keep me interested and a heavier gauge so that it doesn’t require 800 yards to knit. Sounds like  a good deal.

I knit on it last night at knitting group, and it’s getting pretty big already.

So big, in fact, that I can’t even lay it out to show you the shape. I’ll have to put it on a second pair of needles later so that I can take a picture of it all laid out. The rows are getting longer (and longer) but I really like the colors together, and so far it’s knitting up really fast. And I kinda can’t stop knitting on it.

Fingers crossed that the second version finishes faster than the first!

The nice thing about finishing a bunch of sweaters is that there is suddenly room on my needles for new projects. First up on the list is the re-make of the lace ribs vest, this time as a long-sleeved version.

I love the color. It’s not showing up quite right in the photo, but it’s a beautiful, saturated purple-red from Dream in Color (called Velvet Port). It’s a semisolid, and its subtle color changes are just right for lace. Very happy with how this is coming out.

I also finished spinning the fiber that I showed last time. It’s a reject from the shop, and has been sitting in the stash for quite some time now. I decided that it was time to pull it out and do something with it, and was hoping to get enough for a pair of socks. I ended up with just about 300 yards of fingering-weight 3-ply, which is definitely finer than I’ve been getting from the other flyer.

I apparently forgot to take a picture of the yarn by itself, so here it is with its new partner (also an outcast from the shop):

Or what I think will be its partner. I’m still not 100% sure that those colors go together. In some lights I think they’re perfect, and in others I’m not so sure.

Since the yardage on the first yarn is just a little short of what I was hoping for, I am now dreaming up new ideas for this project, and I have a sneaky suspicion that it might become a shawl instead of a sock.

Here’s a picture of the second fiber comparing the dyed top and the singles:

I always like to compare the way the colors look on the fiber and in the yarn. It helps me figure out how to dye toward a particular effect. I’m often surprised by how much the colors even out in the spinning. This fiber is dyed with color patches that are just about a staple length, and in some cases shorter. None of the colors have very high contrast, and it’s turning into a nicely blended yarn, but with some variegation in long sections. I’m planning to chain ply it like the last one, so it will be interesting to see how much variegation remains in the final yarn. I’m almost out of space on the bobbin, so I’ll be plying soon!

The last of the projects is the one I’m most excited about. We’re gearing up to make a (really, almost scary) big fiber order for the shop, so that I can start dyeing towards a fiber festival or two this spring. Last weekend, I went poking around online, and today this was on my doorstep:

That’s a terrible picture of some beautiful fiber (it’s really creamy white…my house is just dark). It’s 100% Targhee, from Sweet Grass Wool. This is just a small purchase to check the quality of the fiber before thinking about buying more, but if the spinning is as good as the smooshing, I am 100% sold. I’m especially happy about buying this fiber because it’s one that I can buy direct from the farmer rather than through a distributor. The rest of my wools are bought through a small company in Vermont, but they are still a distributor, and I like to work with a farmer whenever I can.

I’m also thrilled because, well…it’s just amazing wool.

There will be more on that soon, I’m sure, and then there might be some Rambouillet in the mail, too. All kinds of new things popping up over here…

Last weekend, I was having a hard time getting back into the swing of dyeing after the holidays. I have a bunch of ideas simmering on the back burner, but none of them was quite ready to go. And then, Linda asked if I ever dyed semisolids to coordinate with my more variegated colors.

That seemed like a manageable goal for the first dyeing session of 2012, so I set to work mixing up multiple dilutions of single colors, and then began painting them onto the fiber in layers, mixing and blending as I went. Most of my semisolids have just one main color, with occasional highlights here and there.

Using the base dyes that make up a majority of my color mixes, I have a rainbow of semisolids that will pair well with a lot of the fibers that I dye. In order, that’s Semisolid Red, Orange, Jade, Teal, Spruce, Sapphire, Navy, Berry, and Brown. These colors are deeply saturated, and often mixed with a touch of black to deepen the shadows even further.

(They are also nearly impossible to photograph, because they are so saturated and have a similar set of hues, so there’s nothing for the camera to use to color balance them. If I dye many more of these, I  might have to start worrying that Branden will quit as my photographer. This really is too bad, because I really like them.)

I also dyed a few tinted grays:

That’s Blue silver, Storm Gray (more of a gunmetal than a silver color), and Silver Rose. All made using a couple of low-saturation grays, with tiny bits of color added here and there as highlights.

And now, for the fun part:

1) Semisolid brown and Fallow Fields

2) Semisolid brown, Fallow Fields, and Alaska Mountain

3) Semisolid brown, Fallow Fields, and Cocoa Berry

4) Semisolid brown, Fallow Fields, and Semisolid Jade (I like the Brown and Fallow Fields together, can you tell?)

5) Semisolid Jade and Cocoa Berry

6) Semisolid Jade and Storm Green

7) Fall Reflections and Semisolid Sapphire

8 ) Fair Winds Peacock and Semisolid Spruce

9) Fair Winds Peacock and Semisolid Sapphire

Both Sapphire and Spruce are used in the Peacock colorway, and it’s interesting to see how mixing with the semisolid brings out those different aspects of the color.

10) Fall Reflections, Semisolid Orange, and Navy

11) Semisolid Spruce and Sapphire

12) Semisolid Sapphire, Sea and Sky, and Whitecaps

13) Semisolid Sapphire and Blue Silver

14) Silver Rose and Semisolid Berry

15) Semisolid Berry and Alaska mountain

That last one wins hands down as my favorite of this group, with the Jade and Storm Green following close behind. Despite strong temptation to keep a few aside, they are all available on Etsy.

And, just like that, I’m back in the swing of things. I don’t know if I’ll get to dye this weekend, but I have at least one and probably two sessions plotted out. I’ve been collecting photos on Pinterest like crazy, and I’m sure there will be lots more colors coming soon. Sometimes all it takes is returning to basics to get that jump start.

I somehow thought that my first week of unemployment would be quiet, a chance to work on projects, do some reading, and generally decompress from the crunch of finishing off my fellowship.

Not quite.

So far in January, I have submitted one manuscript, been asked to author another, been sent a third to proof and review (has my name on it, but didn’t know it was coming until Wednesday), and been sent a set of figures to critique for another that’s been in limbo for almost a year. I’ve heard that one job possibility is likely not happening, and decided to apply for a faculty position, which is a whole ‘nother kind of application. The last few days have been consumed by writing teaching statements, assembling a portfolio containing all of my previous teaching experience, and starting the application process. Next week, there’s a research proposal to be written, and funding to be thought about.*

And this is unemployment?

Needless to say, not much crafting has happened this week, despite my plans. I did attend a weaving guild meeting on Thursday (the first time I’ve been able to go, because they meet during normal work hours), and last night I managed to sit down and spin for a little bit with my new flyer. It’s coming out much finer than I was able to achieve before, and the bobbin is almost full.

I’m hoping that this will turn into enough fingering-weight 3 ply for a pair of socks. There’s not much spinning left, so we should know soon!

And I am determined that this swatch will turn into cast-on stitches for a new project by the end of the weekend.

It’s been sitting by my knitting chair since last weekend, just waiting to be measured so I can calculate a stitch count and cast on. That sounds like a reasonable goal, right?

*Just for the record, all of these are good and exciting things; just not what I’d expected to be doing this week. It might be a bit of an understatement to say that I was caught a little off guard.

After blocking and drying, Bright Lights was finally ready for surgery this morning. I’ve installed plenty of zippers into sewn clothing, but I’ve never attempted to put one into my knitwear, and I’ve never done a full-length steek, so I was pretty excited to get started.

First, I tried it on in the pullover version to get a few more photos, and to measure the length of the sweater front when worn.

Then, I went to the swatch. I wanted to try a crochet-reinforced steek, but realized at the last minute that the black yarn is superwash, and so decided that a machine-sewn edge would probably be a good idea. First, I sewed a row of straight stitch, cut the steek, and then pulled and tugged at it to see what it could withstand.

The answer was: not much. I managed to get past the sewn stitches pretty easily, and then the inner stitches started to unravel. Clearly not what we’re going for here.

Next, I tried a zigzag stitch instead, with a width and length about the same as a single knit stitch at my gauge. This stood up to wear much better.

I did manage to get a few small ends to pull loose, but couldn’t get past the machine stitched line, even after several minutes of picking and tugging at it.

While doing the machine stitching, I discovered how easy it is to slip over a stitch or two and end up with a crooked line. I wanted a straight steek, so I decided to use some of the contrasting yarn to make a marker to guide my sewing.

Then, I stitched a line of zigzag on either side of the marker stitches. (You can just barely see it here, if you squint.)

Once the edges were sewn, it was safe for steeking. I put a book between the layers of knitting to make sure I didn’t snip any stitches in the back panel, and started cutting along the marked line, pulling out my marker yarn as I went.

This is about the point that Branden came in to see what the gleeful chuckling was about, and took an action shot.

Here’s the raw steek after cutting.

Next, I rolled under the edge stitches (where the machine stitching is), and pinned the zipper in place. I made sure to use the length of zipper that I’d measured while the sweater was on my body rather than following the length that the steek seemed to suggest. If I’d pinned without measuring, I probably would have used 2-3″ more zipper, and it would have buckled when worn. (Thanks to Grumperina for that tip!)

Once everything was pinned in place, I tried the sweater on again to make sure everything was behaving properly.

And then I began tighly handsewing the sweater to the zipper. I could have done this by machine, but handsewing let me get closer to the zipper, and it gave me more control over the very edge stitches. (More control is always good, yes?) I made sure to adjust the fold so that my stitches fell in the valley between two columns of knit stitches, and to use the same column of knits the whole way up the front. The sweater edge tended to roll while pinned, so I needed to be extra careful to check as I went to make sure that nothing had shifted.

I was also careful to line up the folded edge of the sweater so that the zipper teeth were just barely poking out from underneath. I pinned it with a little more zipper showing the first time, but the zipper was really obvious when I tried it on. Tucking the teeth further behind the sweater made them much less visible in the final piece.

When the zipper was sewn in, I checked to make sure that I’d caught all the raw steek edges. You can see them tucked in there, right in the crease where the zipper meets the sweater fabric.

Then I whip-stitched the zipper flap in place, to protect those ends just a little bit more. This was a little trickier, because I needed to be sure to ease the zipper to fit the garment shaping. Since the zipper is stiffer than the knitted fabric, you want to make sure that it bends along with the sweater curves, or you’ll end up with lumps and bumps. Fortunately, it was pretty willing to follow the sweater shape, and then it was just a matter of whipstitching the curves in place.

Alternatively, I could have left the zipper tape free-hanging. It would have been secure enough, and it’s much more flexible when it’s not tacked down. I think it looks more finished this way, though, and it adds just a little more protection for those superwash ends.

And that was it.

Here it is, all zipped up.

And half-zipped (the way I’ll probably wear it most of the time).