DesigKnit

Hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving!

I’ve been taking advantage of the break from work to take stock and catch up on some fiber projects around the house. When we last discussed the Fall colors sweater, I had just pulled back the upper sleeve shaping to make a couple of tweaks, and was just a couple of inches from done.

Well. I knit an inch. Then I knit two inches, and then almost 4. The sleeves still seemed too short, but were now a couple of inches longer than the sleeves on my reference sweater, so I finally decided to trust the measuring tape and call it good. A couple of weekends ago, I grafted on the sleeves and did the final finishing of the inside seams.

I had originally planned to cover the raw steek edges with bias tape, but decided that that would make them too stiff. Instead, I just loosely whip stitched over the raw edge to hold it in place. I can’t believe how  much neater it looks! Here’s the “before”:

Once everything was finished to my satisfaction, I blocked the sweater and tried it on.

The sleeves are still too short.

I put it aside, and decided to let it sit for a while before making a decision. This is a perfectionism-defeating strategy…sometimes things really don’t seem as important a week or two later. Of course, sometimes they really are just as important. When I wear the sweater, I feel like I have gorilla arms. Therefore, the sleeves really do need to be longer.

I’m not sure exactly what’s happening here. There must be some difference in the shoulder fit or shaping that I am just not seeing. Maybe it’s the stiffness of the double layer at the steek edge? I don’t know what it is, but something is changing the way the sleeve hangs from the arm opening, and it’s affecting the fit, requiring a much looser upper arm and a longer sleeve. My gauge did change pretty dramatically on going from fairisle to stockinette, so that may have something to do with it, too. I thought I’d accounted enough for that, but perhaps not. In any case, I need to go back, snip a stitch, and redo the upper arm shaping one more time, adding a bit more length as I go. I’d rather fuss with it now and get it right than end up not wearing the sweater because it’s uncomfortable (or constantly tugging at the sleeves when I am wearing it). I haven’t quite worked up the enthusiasm for that yet, but it’s at least made it back into my workbasket for next in line. Maybe tomorrow.

I’ve been humming away on the new Briar Rose sweater during my train commute lately. I’m about 4 inches into the body pattern, and am liking the basketweave pattern just fine. I’ve been noticing that it’s looking a little small, though, so on Friday I measured to check that it was really the right size. Verdict: 34 inches, not 39 – a full size too small. Sigh.

My swatch did stretch when blocked, though, so I did a quick blocking on the needles this morning, and it stretched right out to 40″ with no problem. Saved by the swatch!

Now I’m just waiting for it to dry before continuing on with the body pattern. It will be good train knitting for the week, at least.

In the meantime, I spun up another bobbin for Branden’s sweater:

I really think I like this color the best of the three plies that are going into this yarn. I need another bobbin of the dark gray and turquoise, and then I’ll be ready to ply off batch #2. It looks like there’s probably another 2 bobbins of each left to spin, so there’s plenty more to come. Shouldn’t run out of yarn on this one!

And then, this morning, I wound up a new warp for the loom. I’ve had this yarn in stash since February of 2009, when I bought it at Madrona.  It’s been waiting for just the right project, and a couple of years ago I decided to weave with it. I bought a companion skein for it at Rhinebeck last year, and am just now getting around to warping it up. Fortunately, hobbies have no deadlines, so things can marinate in the stash as long as it takes, but it will still be nice to have it worked up.

I had to weave off my last two tea towels to open up the loom for this one, but haven’t done all the hemstitching and the wet finishing yet, so I’ll show those to you later.

With all of these things in the works, I think I should be covered through the end of the semester. Only 7 classes left!

Those sleeves might never end, but it’s reassuring to know that the semester will.

As I said last week, I am slowly, slowly working my way back toward normalcy after the really heavy “crunch” weeks of the semester. There is suddenly light at the end of the tunnel, though – Thanksgiving is this week (!), and then there are only three weeks of classes before the semester is over (!!). This happens every term with teaching; there is the exciting burst of beginning, then that endless slog of middle-time, and then all of a sudden the end has come and gone and you’re left wondering what on earth just happened.

This week is the one where things really start to lighten, though. It’s not over yet, but it’s starting to ease up, and the end is firmly in sight. And also, this week is Thanksgiving Break, so there is time to breathe and catch up a bit before the final push.

As always, the first harbinger of normalcy is the return of knitting. I can’t say I got much done this week, but it’s more than the week before. After much dithering over the swatch, I decided to just cast on and at least knit the ribbing because it didn’t actually require a decision.

The blog vote was also split, so I eliminated one more choice this morning and then Branden cast the deciding vote. Basketweave it is. It’s not the cushiest of the fabrics, but it has a clean, crisp texture that will work up just fine. Also, just picking something means that I’m not heading knitless into another week. (Much as I believe in letting the creative process move at its own pace, there are times as a mostly-monogamous knitter when that gets me into trouble. No knitting on the needles is one of those times, and calls for some additional prodding to reach a decision.)

I’ve also been doodling around a bit with some swatches in the Rambouillet yarn that I spun as a shop sample for Greencastle.

The color of this yarn has always made me think of fields of wheat, and for some reason it’s been calling to me lately. So last weekend I pulled out some needles and just started knitting, looking to see what would emerge. It doesn’t look like much here, but after several variations on a theme, I think I’m starting to converge on the kind of pattern I want. I spent some time yesterday flipping through the Walker books to see if there was anything along those lines, and ended up heavily modifying one of her designs to help me over some hurdles with mine. It’s not quite there yet, but the general idea is coming:

I’m interested to see where exactly this leads; I haven’t done much designing of my own stitch patterns, so it’s exciting to toy with the idea, and simple lace makes for a good canvas.

I also got to spend some quality time with my wheel earlier this week when my brain was too done with thinking to attempt design. I’ve added one more fat bobbin to the pile for Branden’s next sweater.

I thought that the sweater would be spun and half knit by now, but these things always seem to happen in their own time.

One day of teaching, one day of research, and then the rest of the week is (mostly) free for family, fun, and fiber. I can’t wait!

The past month has just been a busy one at work; midterms are upon us, and everyone is realizing that it’s time to buckle down and get serious coming into the home stretch. It’s hard to believe that Rhinebeck was 3 weeks ago already, and it’s also hard to believe that it’s only been three weeks. It feels like an eternity, probably partly because I haven’t been knitting.

The festival was an almost-overwhelming glut of fiber, but since then there’s been hardly anything happening on the crafting front. Fun as it was, Rhinebeck weekend came between my two busiest weeks so far this semester (it was 80+ hours of work there for a couple of weeks), and it takes a lot of energy for me to be out and engaging at an event like that. No complaints about Rhinebeck, but I feel like I am just now beginning to repay some of the energy deficit I built up by not having downtime between those busy weeks.

One sure sign of energy (and time) returning is the return of crafting. I wasn’t quite ready to work on my current “big” spinning project (for Branden’s sweater), so I decided to try some of those batts that I carded up earlier this year.

This skein came from about 4 oz of blended batts, made of seconds from the dye studio. The base green is a corriedale, and the accents are BFL and polwarth, I believe. There’s also a tiny bit of banana viscose in there, just for fun.

This is the first batt I have ever spun, and I learned a few things doing it.

1) I like spinning from batts just fine. This is good to know, because I don’t like all of the fiber preps I’ve tried, and I wanted to make really sure that I would enjoy batts before making a final decision on the drum carder. I’d say they’re about equal to commercial top, in my opinion. Slightly less smooth to spin, but really nice and fluffy to make up for it. Definitely something I’d like to do again.

2) I expect batts to be very soft, and full of very fine, luxurious fibers. I did not know that I expected this. In fact, it kind of surprises me that I do. But when I looked at those batts and dreamed about the yarn they’d make, a practical corriedale sock yarn was not what came to mind. It took me a while to forgive the fiber for being coarser than my mind had imagined it, even though I knew full well that it was from a not-terribly-fine batch of corriedale. I’ve been thinking a lot about this expectation, and I think that part of the reason for it is the way that I blended the colors and the textures together. I made it look like an art batt, but it didn’t feel like an art batt, and I think that’s what lead to discontentment when I sat down to spin. I plan to check this theory by spinning up some of the batts of plain wool that I made from processing my fleeces, and see if I have the same dissonance with those. Either way, this is very good to know.

3) Generally speaking, I want a larger proportion of accent color relative to my base color to really make an interesting yarn. This one is just  fine, and I like the way the colors blended into a toned-down semisolid, but in future I think I would use less base color to mix things up a bit. What looks like a lot of accent color on the carder doesn’t look like a lot on the wheel. Again, good to know.

I’ve also spent the past couple of weekends washing my new fleece from Rhinebeck. I do not store dirty fleece for any reason, so when a new fleece comes in there’s always a bit of a push to get it washed up and tucked away. This time I used our new washing machine to do the dirty work, and it was a lot easier than lugging 5 gallon pails.  We bought this machine specifically because it was a top-loader with a soak cycle, which is perfect for washing wool, and I knew that that was a feature that I’d like to be able to use in the future.

Unfortunately, it turns out that there is no way to avoid agitation during the soak cycle, so I ended up having to abort that plan and do some more manual manipulation of the settings instead. It worked out ok, though, and the changes meant that I got to use the washer’s allergen setting (30 degree hotter water) to fill the tub, which helped a lot with removing the lanolin.

This was a very clean fleece, but there was still a lot of “sheep” in there, so it took me three soak cycles per batch to get it completely clean. Since it was a huge fleece (7.5 lbs), it took me three batches to wash it all. My office has looked like there was a sheepy explosion over every surface for the past week, but it’s finally dry now, and so I gathered it all up into a pile to put away. I swear there could be a sheep hidden in there somewhere…

That’s a 6′ x 8′ carpet it’s sitting on; this is a lot of fleece.

I still need to go through and sort it for quality; there was a section at the bottom of the bag that was badly sunburned, and has a really bad break in the fiber. (Branden got to experience firsthand what you’re not supposed to hear when you snap a fleece to test it. It’s a dramatic difference.)

Fortunately, I think the damaged section is pretty small, though, so I may be able to trim it down or just comb it carefully to get out those broken tips. It’s also easy to find, since the tips are all sunbleached as well. At worst, I’ll just lose some of the fiber. Most of the fleece is perfect, though. No bits of hay anywhere to be seen, very little suint, and the locks are so open that I could probably get away without any carding at all if I were going for a slightly more rustic yarn.

And finally, I have been working on a swatch. My train knitting has been completely eaten up by work overflow lately, but I’ve managed to steal a few minutes here and there to play with my new Briar Rose yarn.

I’m going for a very simple, knit-purl texture, something cuddly and casual for a sweatshirt-like sweater. Most of the sweaters I’ve knit lately have been very fitted and shaped, almost tailored. This one is going to be plain and simple, and minimally designed to really show off the yarn.

I’m still quite torn about which stitch pattern to use; I kept adding more hoping to find one clear winner, but there are still several options on the table. It turns out that it’s very difficult to photograph the textures in this yarn, but here are the finalists.

The first is a broken rib:

I really like the depth of texture on this one, and I love how it plays with the color. This was one of the first patterns I tried, and I liked it right away, but somehow my instinct tells me that this is not a ribby sweater. I would love to convince myself otherwise, but my internal auditor is having none of it.

This is the same rib worked with alternating blocks, separated by two rows of stockinette stitch. This had a delightfully pebbled texture in the swatch, and both Branden and I liked it a lot. The fabric was a little stiff, though, and when I washed the swatch all of that 3-D texture stretched right out. If I weren’t already concerned about the fabric stiffness, I’d just go down a needle size, but I think that would make something very rigid, which isn’t what I’m going for.

This next one is a modulation on the idea of a broken rib. I was swatching away on the train, and decided to replace the seed stitch columns in the broken rib with a welted pattern instead (2 rows stockinette, 4 rows purl).

I am unaccountably drawn to this one. If I look at each of the patterns individually, this isn’t my favorite. Branden doesn’t like it much at all. It still has a lot of that ribbed texture, and I already said that I didn’t want a ribby texture. And yet I keep coming back to it. I like the waffle weave texture, and the feel that it gives the fabric. Because the ribs are offset by the welting, the structure isn’t as stiff, and it does interesting things with the texture. It’s certainly not the showiest of the lot, but it’s a strong contestor.

And finally, there’s a more traditional basketweave. This one is 6 rows of k2 p2 rib, separated by two rows of stockinette and offset by two stitches.

This one retained the best visual texture in the washed swatch. The rib sections stayed nice and crisp, but the overall fabric still has pretty good drape. It feels thinner and less cushy than the welted ribbing, but it’s a good, solid fabric that would do the job well.

So those are the four choices. The swatch is still a little damp and I’m waiting for it to fully dry before actually making a decision, but it’s going to be a tough one. Branden votes basketweave (the last one). I’m still stuck on the welted ribs, even though I really can’t say why when I look at it next to the other patterns. Branden says I should just go with my instinct even if I don’t “like” this pattern as much as the others (and yes, he’s probably right). What’s “the blog” vote?

So, there we have it. Three weeks worth of fiber. It’s been a little thin around here lately, but I have a sense that things will pick up again soon. Thanksgiving break isn’t far away, right?

Remember the Cascade Eco Wool sweater that I knit for Branden while he was in Atlanta?

I finished it in September of 2010, and it has been worn at least once a week through the two cold seasons since then. Sometime around this time last year, we noticed that there was a dropped stitch at the back sleeve shaping on the raglan. There wasn’t any damage, so the only way that I could have ended up with a dropped stitch was if I had made a mistake in one of the decreases, and just hadn’t caught one of the loops when I was knitting the sweater.

It surprised me that it took us so long to find the drop, given how frequently people talk about how knit stitches can run (!), and about the horrors of a dropped stitch. (I always find it a little bit amusing when I run into a knitter who feels that stitches are just waiting to jump from the needles and run away to unravel a whole garment in an instant. That might be true for silk or tencel, but really, really not for wool.)

When we found the errant stitch (several washes and a full year after it had been knit), it had dropped down one row. One lonely little ladder…that was it.

Between needing to remember to fix it, and needing to remember while it wasn’t being worn, I didn’t get to this right away. Then, it kind of became a game. How long until it actually had to be fixed, anyway?

A year later, this is how far that one stitch has run.

See that? A whole two ladders!

Eco Wool is a fairly grabby wool, and I knit at a pretty firm gauge. I would have thought that this would be a pretty high-tension area, but maybe it’s stabilized by the shaping decreases nearby. Even so, though, I think this shows just how unlikely it is that a sweater will completely unravel just because there’s a dropped stitch or a loose end nearby. Considering how much reinforcement there is in a steek, and the fact that there are usually several “buffer” stitches between the garment stitches and the cut edge, I figure that I’m safe for at least a few years on any steeked knitting (and yes, my first steek was machine-reinforced on superwash wool, and no, it has shown no signs of going anywhere after being tucked neatly away behind a zipper).

I did decide to end the game and just fix the stitch in Branden’s sweater this morning. Two ladders seems like enough, and I think two years is enough to prove the point.