DesigKnit

Today’s theoretical knitting design is something of an anomaly. For this one, I actually have yarn in the stash (and have for years), and am completely unable to decide what to do with it. This very seldom happens, and when it does it very seldom lasts for very long. With this sweater, it’s been a long, long time.

The yarn is Cascade 220 superwash, and I bought it at the Fiber Gallery in Seattle, so it’s been in the stash since at least 2009 (probably even earlier). I bought it on sale, and I bought enough for a sweater, because I had a very specific colorwork design in mind. In fact, I spent quite a while designing that colorwork pattern.

I designed my motifs, carefully arranged all of the colors, and completely loved the results. Then, I went to swatch. And that was when I realized that my yarn is utterly the wrong gauge for this design. I hadn’t been planning on something so intricate when I started out, so the worsted weight of the yarn didn’t seem like it would be a big deal. But by the time I was finished, I had a design with something crazy like 60 stitches to the repeat, and it just wasn’t going to work unless I used a finer yarn.

I do still intend to knit that sweater someday, because I love the colorwork to pieces. But not in this yarn. So, it went back on the shelf.

I have gone to use it up a bunch of times. I’ve even swatched for other things a couple of times, but somehow it still really wants to be a sweater, and somehow I haven’t yet managed to make that work.

For over a year, I have been tossing around the idea of simple stripes. It works with the heavy gauge yarn, is a fun and fairly mindless knit, and would go pretty quickly. It would also work with the current distribution of colors; since I have a relatively small amount of each one, it would be hard to do anything in solids.

Over time, my vision of this sweater has morphed into something like this:

A very preppy, simple striped vest. In my mind and on paper, I love it. But here’s the rub: I don’t wear vests.

I’ve tried. I like the look, and I have a couple. I’ve had even more in the past, and I never, ever wear them. I think it’s because I’m always cold: I need the arms of a sweater to keep me warm. (Even in the summer. I have been freezing to death in my office lately; if there’s an AC on, I’m cold.)

But now that I’m sporting the professor look, I’m wondering if it would work to revisit the vest. Maybe combined with a jacket to give me back my sleeves. I do like the way that square neck would look with a collared shirt. Though I think it would look pretty good as a scoop neck, too:

Of course, I could knit it with sleeves; I have plenty of yarn. But I really wouldn’t want stripes on the sleeves. I thought about solid sleeves, in the dark green:

That sketch is wholly unappealing to me, though. Of course, I think I also lost a little of the fitted look while I was at it, so I tried again:

I like it better with a bit of a boat neck rather than the lower scoop, but something is still off. (To be fair, it’s quite possibly the sketch.)

But still, I just don’t like it as well. I’m not sure why, but there’s something about this design that is very stubbornly vest-like in my brain.

So, okay. We go with a vest. Then we need to talk about the other hurdle: stripes. (Really, this is how design negotiations sound in my head.)

I like stripes sometimes, and usually on other people. They have to be artistically done, visually interesting, and flattering all at once, and that’s a pretty tall order when you’re putting horizontal bars across your torso. But let’s just play with this for a while, because in this design I do really really like the idea of stripes.

Here is where I get myself into trouble. Because, you see, there are just so many options. Once I start heading down this path, I get stymied by all the choices, and end up not doing anything. (This is the downside of my tendency to overthink. I usually consider my analytical mind to be a strength, but there are times that it comes back to bite me.)

For today, let’s limit ourselves to just a few choices:

In #1, everything is very simple. All the stripes are even, everything is regular, and it is easy and brainless to knit. Doesn’t look bad, but I’m not sure I love it.

For #2, I’ve made things a bit more interesting. I made the dark “background” stripes wider, and used varying widths in the accent stripes to mix it up. I like this better.

#3 is a riff off of 2, using just one accent color rather than two. This evens out the colors a little bit. I’m not sure if I like this one better or worse. Having all the narrow stripes in the same color makes them more pronounced, but it also quiets the design a little (#2 can look a little too busy if you’re looking at the image close up, though I like it from a distance.) For #3, I’ve also been pretty deliberate in where I place the wide and narrow stripes to emphasize the bust and waist.

For #4, I did almost nothing differently, except to switch the width and spacing of the accent stripes at the bust and waist. The wide stripes at the waist make this one too bottom-heavy, in my opinion; I think the spacing on #3 is better. I was worried at first that the heavy accent band near the hem in #3 would emphasize the hip too much, but it actually does a pretty good job of offsetting the wide band at the bust, and it keeps the eye moving (in #4 my eye settles on the waist and stays there; stasis is usually not what you want in a design).

#5 has a fixed width for all the accent stripes, and the only thing that varies is their spacing. I do like the distribution, but compared to the other versions this one looks a little flat to me.

In all, I think I like #2 or #3 the best. They’d require a lot more planning to make sure that the stripes I knit turned out like the stripes I planned, but I do think they work well.

The time frame of knitting design resembles no other in my life, except perhaps the building of long-term science research career. It is a long, slow process, and years often slip by between the time I see a yarn and the time that I am actually ready to buy and knit with it, or between the time that a design first enters my head and the time that it gets cast on.

I can put a specific date on the time when today’s theoretical knitting project first came to my mind. It was almost three years ago now, in Germany. We’d headed out to the tiny town of Gondelsheim, just a few train stops away from the town where we were living. There was an old castle there that we’d seen from the train, and we decided to go there for the photo shoot of the waving lace stole.

Like so many places in Germany, walking up to the castle was like walking through the scenes of a story book. Can’t you just hear the horse’s hooves and the trumpets of a royal precession coming around the corner?

The castle was beautiful, and had a wonderful wildflower garden where we spent several happy hours snapping pictures that will probably become colorways one day. Around the back, there was a walled-in courtyard, full of all the exquisite architectural detail that makes old European buildings true art.

(I also love how this extremely old castle has two extremely modern traffic signs on either side of the gate.)

From inside the courtyard, we could see even more of those wonderful details. This one in particular caught my eye.

I knew as soon as I saw it that that needed to become a colorwork sweater. There are too many colors for a traditional fairisle motif, but I just loved the symmetry of the design. Wouldn’t it make a beautiful edging?

So now, three years later, I find myself sitting down to finally translate that photo into knitwear. I started out with quite a literal translation, except that I let those yellow triangles run together to make a zigzag along the bottom edge.

Next, I tried breaking them up a bit to stay more true to the original design. I think I like this better, anyway. This looks a little more like rounded castle crenellations to me.

Then I added just one extra stitch per repeat to make them a little bit pointier. I’m not sure which of these I like better, but I’m sticking with the pointy ones for now.

The contrast seemed a little bit low, but I wasn’t sure if that was the thickness of my design, or just the colors I’d chosen, so I decided to play a bit with that. After looking more closely at the photo, I realized that the details weren’t really gold at all, but more of an off-white color. So I tried that:

That was a little too bright for my taste, so I settled for something in between; kind of a yellow beige to match the wall below the design.

I like that one quite a lot, and I think it would show up much better than the darker gold. I also added in a series of scallops at the top edge on that revision; it’s similar to the lines in the architecture, and I thought it would be nice to have a touch more green before switching to solid red.

Then I went back and made one little tweak. I deleted one row of colorwork, making the second set of scallops a little less pronounced.

Then I decided to try just one more thing. I went back and deleted the sunburst lines. They’re not terribly pronounced in the architecture, and they do add a strong geometrical aspect to the motif, so I wanted to see what it would look like without.

I don’t like this one as well. It does a better job of emphasizing those central flowers, but it loses a lot of the motion and interest of the design. I’ll definitely stick with the sunbursts.

Overall, I am pretty happy with this design. It stays fairly true to the original, is interesting enough to be a focal piece, and is a small enough pattern that it could work for a delicate edging on a cardigan or sweater.

Next, I started thinking about what the sweater itself might look like. My first thought was something very simple; just a solid cardigan with an accent band at the hem and cuff.

I tend to be a pretty minimalist designer in most things, so simple is usually my preference when it comes to adding embellishments to a garment. This would be a nice, simple sweater with some pretty details; perfect for everyday wear. Still, I thought I’d play the edges a bit, just to see what happened.

I’m not sure how I feel about a yoke neck. I don’t usually go for them, but if the pattern is small enough it could work here.

Or we could go all out and put edging all around.

This would turn into a somewhat more formal jacket, and I’d probably want a more tailored fit than I’ve drawn here, and I might also raise the hemline a bit for an almost-cropped feel. The front edge would look great with some decorative frog closures. I don’t think I’d use a button band or a zipper, though. Not sure why; this just feels like it would want the dressy look of a jacket. I do like how this design would really show off the colorwork edging, though I think I’d be more likely to wear the plain jane version above.

Of course, once you start drawing out sketches you need to consider the yarn you’re using. I’d go for a lightweight wool, I think. Something in the fingering weight range, probably 7-9 sts to the inch. Shetland would be nice; something with a little bit of a halo but not so much that you lose the stitch definition. The edging is 22 stitches deep, so I’d probably need to stay on the fine end of things to keep it compact.

And then there is color. I would definitely use something like the colors I have here for the edging. I love the rust and beige and green. My first plan was to have the body be rust-colored, but the more I look at the picture the more I think that a beige body with the colorwork edge might be really nice. (Since this is theoretical knitting, I can blatantly ignore the practical voice in my head that says I never wear beige, or anything light colored…). Depending on the colors available, I might even go for oatmeal, in a natural wool color, something with a little bit of heather to it.

I’d probably do the ribbing in green, even in the plain-Jane version. It would add some interest to the edges and tie in the colorwork a bit.

This sweater (in some form or another) is definitely on my knit-someday list. I think it would get a ton of use, and it would remind me of our time in Germany.  I have no idea how long it will take me to get to it, but it will be fun to knit when I do.

You know that point where you know that something’s wrong, but you keep trying and trying to convince yourself that it will all work out fine in the end? You keep holding onto that hope that somehow the sweater will magically grow 8 inches with blocking, or that the fishnet you’re knitting will somehow turn into a nice, firm fabric. You know that there’s a problem, but you don’t want to face what it would take to fix it.

That’s a difficult place to be in knitting, but it’s even worse in real life, where there are things like jobs and commutes and significant money in the balance.

We’ve been in that place since June with our new apartment. When we first moved in, we noticed that the house smelled a little musty, but they’d just replaced the furnace in the basement, so we figured that the smell was from that. We opened all of the windows, put fans in them, and hoped the smell would go away.

It didn’t.

In fact, it got worse. And it kept getting worse, too. I have allergies, and they are complicated by asthma where mold is concerned. The only really severe attacks that I have had have been from mold, and they were severe enough that I was later scolded by a doctor for not going to the emergency room because “you could have died.” I didn’t know it was that serious at the time. Now, I do.

In short, this is not something I want to mess with.

We covered the heating vents. We did everything we could to seal off, vent, exchange, clean the air. And we just couldn’t do enough. I became more and more sensitized, and my asthma was getting to concerning levels (I have barely needed my inhaler in 3 years, and suddenly I was needing it every day, and then it started becoming less effective).

About two weeks ago, we realized that the smell was coming not just through the heating vents, but through the walls as well. It would seep up through the walls from the dirt basement, all the way up as far as my office on the third floor. When we realized that it was a problem of that scale, we knew that it was time to move.

We still didn’t want to admit it, though. We wanted to find a way to make it work. We love the house, and we love the area, it’s really a reasonable commute, and heaven knows we don’t want to move again.

We went down and sat at the beach, and went over the same things over and over again for the millionth time. Eventually, Branden looked at me and said “you know, we just need to frog this sweater.”

And we did. Things are still in that awful, messy, tangled pile-of-yarn stage where you despair of ever getting that monster wound back into neat and manageable balls, but the knitting is ripped.

We viewed an apartment on the 11th, notified our current landlord of our intent to move, signed a new lease on the 15th, and I moved into the new place to sleep on the floor that night. We were just in time, too. My breathing was getting much worse, and it was becoming harder and harder to control my symptoms. I went to the doctor and got a heavy duty inhaler, and things are slowly coming back under control now that I’m away from the main cause of the problem.

We spent last week moving all of the small things over by carload, and on Saturday we got a truck for the larger items. I am sitting in the new living room now, amidst a sea of boxes and piles, just getting back to my computer now that we have internet in the new house (they set it up yesterday).

There is so much left to be done. It is all such a mess.

And yet, when I stop and really think about it, my biggest feeling is of gratitude. I’m grateful to have learned the lesson that sometimes you just have to rip, and that it’s better to do it sooner rather than later (even if you do have to avoid it for a while first). I’m also grateful to be in a place where we can decide to move and figure out what happens with the lease later.

My first asthma attack happened in our first apartment, in a similar situation. Things smelled musty and were starting to bother me. We didn’t think it was all that big a deal, and were trying to clear it up with good ventilation. Thing is, the landlord had put carpet over an unsealed cement floor, and as soon as it got humid the cold cement condensed water and made the perfect place for mold to grow. It only took two or three days of August heat and humidity to go from musty air to mold growing up the walls, me having severe asthma attacks, and us having to throw out more than half of our things.

That was 8 years ago. Back then, we were too poor to move. We made enough together to pay our rent and have $300 a month left for things like groceries, utilities, and a T pass to get to work and school. The rent was as cheap as we could get in the city, and there was just no option to leave.

We’ve come a long way since then. We still don’t want to pay the extra money that this move will cost, but it’s no longer something that will hold us in a potentially dangerous situation, either. We’ve both been worried sick for the past two weeks about possibly having to pay double rent for a year (the landlord refuses to let us out of our lease), and about having to seek legal counsel and maybe even face lawsuits to get this straightened out.

And yet, in the grand scheme of things, it really isn’t the end of the world.

There are lots of things that I’d rather do with that money, but if worse comes to worse we can afford to pay it if we absolutely must. We are in a better place now, which still has a musty basement, but it can be sealed off and controlled with a dehumidifier, a bit of weather stripping, and a good airing out. I have no idea how long it will take us to put things back together so that it feels like a house and not a disaster relief zone, but we have time for that; it doesn’t have to happen all at once, and it will get done.

Still, I much prefer frogging knitting to frogging in real life. Real life can be much, much messier.

(Remind me of that next time I have to pull out a sweater.)

It’s a good thing we have theoretical knitting this week, as I’m afraid that the actual knitting has made negative progress once again. I knit almost to the cuff of the first sleeve on the Mike sweater, laid it out, and realized that a) the sleeve was way too wide and all out of proportion, and b) I am dangerously close to running out of yarn. So, I’ve ripped back to the armpit and started the sleeve shaping again, decreasing much more aggressively at the beginning in hopes of stretching the yarn.

This sweater is a very interesting exercise for my sense of proportion. I am used to knitting sweaters for Branden, who is very long in addition to being broad in the shoulders. Mike is about my height, so his sweater will be much, much shorter lengthwise, but he is well muscled in the shoulders and upper arms, meaning that I ended up using a raglan length almost big enough for Branden. Every time I look at the body of the sweater it feels about 8 inches too short, but when I put it on to try it out it’s just about perfect. When I put it on, the shoulders and upper body feel hopelessly baggy, but we measured a favorite sweatshirt and the measurements are spot on. Sometimes you don’t realize what a rut you’ve worked your way into until you attempt to knit your way out of it, and I’m definitely thinking that I have a well-worn path through sweater sizing for Branden, but that there are lots of other cases where it doesn’t apply. (Either that, or the whole thing really is off, my intuition is right, and I’m in a lot of trouble. Just throwing that out there in hopes of evading the inevitable disaster that follows unqualified statements in favor of measurements over intuition.)

Turns out that it’s a good thing the sweater isn’t any longer, though. I have about 7 oz of yarn left to make it through both sleeves. At this point, I am giving up hope of working the ribbing in the lighter color; that will have to be knit out of the darker MacGyver yarn instead. I could rip back the body to the arm split and do some decreasing there to squeeze out a little extra yarn, but I don’t think that’s worth it unless I end up really desperate. This was measured off of a sweatshirt, so it will have a baggy, sweatshirt feel to it, and a little extra room in the body will probably be a good thing in the end.

Knitting has been progressing more slowly than it probably could, because I’ve been spending time with my spinning wheel on the side. I’ve started the spinning yarn for Branden’s next sweater, which does not yet have a name. You might remember that I dyed three different braids just before we left Chicago. I now have full bobbins of the first two, and am about to begin the third.

The three colors will be plied together to make a barberpole yarn, hopefully making a nice, dappled fabric that combines the three colorways. To my surprise, I’m currently liking the brown and mint colorway the best:

Though it’s hard not to love the turquoise and gray, too.

Looks like that bobbin could actually use a little topping off, now that I look at it again. I’ve been working on not overfilling my bobbins lately, since overfull bobbins can get messy and I always end up with a little left over when I ply anyway. The plied yarn seems to take up just a little more space on the bobbin than the singles, probably because of the smaller amount of twist in the yarn, and slightly looser packing. Only one more bobbin to spin, and then we’ll really get to see how these colors will work together in the skein. I really like alternating three colorways in a project like this – it’s like getting to change projects after every full bobbin.

So I’ve been thinking about what exactly I want to do with the theoretical knitting idea (besides come up with something to talk about that does not involve how many stockinette stitches I have knit this week!). Mostly, I think I just want a place to capture ideas outside of my design notebook, and to make for more interesting writing that will keep me coming back to chat on the blog, even amidst all the craziness of fall.

Also, I find it really helpful to have a reason to think up new ideas. Design is one of those things that works best when the pump is primed, and if you wait too long in between it gets harder and harder to come up with things.  Ideas breed ideas, and before you know it you’re drowning in them. It’s a cruel cycle, really: you’re only coming up with thousands of designs when you already have too many projects and not enough time to do them. If you’re able to capture those ideas when they’re flowing, then they also manage to carry you through the dry spells when your creative powers are needed elsewhere. It’s no coincidence that I’m still knitting projects that I dreamed up in Germany, back in 2009. A tiny hint of a knitting idea can go a long way.

I spend some time curating photos for color inspiration in the same way; when I see something I love, I put it on Pinterest, and save it for a rainy day, or just a day when I have time to dye but no specific ache in my soul for a particular color. I am beginning to get quite a collection, and I can always find something to spark my interest, no matter what my mood. (This is my one and only use of Pinterest, lest I fall into yet another rabbit hole.)

A week or so ago, I was on a color-gathering spree, and came across this photo of an octopus:

I have looked around for proper attribution, but the best I can come up with is a tumblr link. I’d love to know where it came from, because I bet that photographer has a million other things I’d love to pin.

I was drawn to the picture first because of the colors, which are not altogether unlike these:

I am fascinated by the mix of orange and purple near the head, and those brilliant spots of white right at the hem.

That last bit got me thinking. The hem.

Wouldn’t his skirt make a beautiful shawl?

I’ve drawn inspiration from sea creatures before; they are masters of using simple design to create flowing, graceful structure. Nature has an excellent eye for proportion.

Now the question becomes how you would achieve such a thing in knitting. Those strong rib lines made by the octopus legs would work beautifully to space out the rapid increase and decrease sections needed to get the curved shaping. (On a related note, there’s an excellent discussion of how to make or avoid scallops in a knitted hem on the Rainey Sisters’ blog, where I have been lurking lately.)

But then, I think I’d want to knit the body of the shawl in stockinette, and knitting enough stitches in those long final rows to make that many scallops might just kill me. So what about short rows? That would let you keep that stunning contrast row right at the end, and would allow it to continue up into the body of the shawl the way those white dots follow the edge of each scallop right up into the body of the skirt. It would also break up the stitches into much shorter, more manageable rows.

Then I stopped and really looked at my sketch. Each one of those scallops is really just a half circle, stacked on top of the last:

What if you started at one end, knit a small semi-circular shawl, worked the contrast edging, and then picked up stitches and continued on with the next?

You’d work your way around the shawl, adding scallops as you went. No super long rows, and very simple knitting. You could do so many different things with the colors, too. Imagine this knit in a gradient yarn, or with two highly contrasting stripes to emphasize all those graceful curves.

Of course, this is the part where the practical side of me steps in and demands to know whether I would ever wear such a thing. This is one of those garments that falls into the questionable category for me, though I am rather smitten with the design. It’s a lot like the striped shawl sweater: a little bit of a stretch in the attention-grabbing department. (For the record, I love my finished striped shawl sweater, and wear it all the time.)

On the one hand, the shawl could be a beautiful, eye catching design. On the other hand, you might end up walking around looking like an octopus with a slightly shrunken head. You know – the usual fashion risk.

For now, the practicality likely doesn’t matter, given that this is theoretical knitting after all. Still, I think this is an idea that might be worth coming back to. It smacks of promise, and I do really like those curves.

I’ve been thinking lately about how little process has been showing up on the blog. That’s probably because the things that I’m knitting are really very simple items, without a lot of things to think about. Knitting (and reknitting) miles of simple stockinette or allover lace is fine by me, since I’m a process knitter and enjoy the knitting part regardless of the final outcome. Not having to think too much about new projects is also good for times where spare brain cycles are hard to come by, but it makes for really terrible progress blogging. Oh look! I knit another inch! Ta DA!

So, I’ve been trying to come up with ways to get around that. Unfortunately, there just isn’t a lot of time to knit right now, and when I get to the time I do have, I often find myself wanting to just zone out instead of knitting. Isn’t that sad? You know you’re working at full creative tilt when even stockinette knitting is too much…

I keep telling myself it’s all just part of the re-equilibration process, as I adjust to this crazy new life I’ve signed myself up for. (And it’s getting even better! In four weeks, I’ll have 120 students to teach, too!)

Really, though, it is getting better. Things are getting done, and I’m figuring out most of the simple things that should take 5 minutes and now take 3 days or 3 weeks, and can plan accordingly. (Also, once I know how things work and do them the right way, they often do actually take 5 minutes. It’s just the figuring out that’s hard.)

Still, with classes starting up soon I’m not really sure that there will be a lot of new, ambitious designs coming out to talk about. The projects will change, but it will probably still be a lot of slow progress on fairly mindless knitting, and that will be no fun to read (or write) about.

I’m thinking that I might try to do some knitting on paper. Theoretical knitting, if you like. Jotting down collections of ideas for the blog in the same way that I’d fill up a design notebook with things that would be fun to knit someday. Of course, that also requires brain space, but it takes a lot less time to draw a garment than to knit one. Or maybe playing some color-matching games to dream up mixed-color garments from things in the shop. I’m not sure yet what form this will take, but it’s rattling about in my brain. Any ideas?

In other news, I believe we will be having dye day #2 on Sunday, if all goes according to plan. I had a request for some grays, so look out for some not-very-colorful colorways coming soon. I’m really looking forward to this batch, actually. There’s something so comforting about a basic gray, and there are just so many shades to play with. I guess we’ll see what happens soon!