DesigKnit

You know that moment just after you finish weaving in the last end where you lay out the project to admire your handiwork? The one where you notice a mistake right in the middle of the project? Well.

Turns out a blog post can do that, too. I went to post on Sunday about how much I liked the new colorwork decreases (I do really like them very much).

They look like flowers in their own right, don’t they? I am very glad that I decided to go down to two stitches in the decrease pattern instead of 4, because 4 stitches along the decrease line made pretty prominent stripes that I didn’t love. I’m calling that change worth the ripping and reknitting, even if it wasn’t voluntary.

In preparation for writing my blog post, I went to take a picture of the decreases. Except instead of the flowers above, what I saw was this:

Not quite so flower-y, huh?

It turns out that my colorwork pattern is off by 2 stitches on two of the decrease lines, and that’s enough to move me from little flowers to something a little less exciting. Sadly, I  was apparently consistent within each sleeve but not from sleeve to sleeve. This means that I will have one set of decreases with flowers and one without in the front of the sweater, and a matching mismatched pair of decrease lines in the back.

I think this happened because I decided to mirror around the center, and it’s a 4-stitch repeat, which shifts everything over by two. Perfect symmetry at the button band = broken symmetry or a different stitch count across the two halves of the sweater front.

I’ve decided not to pull back again because I don’t think this will matter much in the grand scheme of things. A very detail-oriented person will notice it, but from a few steps away the difference kind of gets lost. (Or at least that’s what I’m telling myself.)

I was apparently spoiled by the slip stitch pattern that I used in the Seafoam sweater. There, I paid no attention whatsoever to the decreases, and they just worked. Next time, I’ll have to remember to swatch my transitions, too!

(Note: the title of this post is sadly apt, in a different context. Our backyard chipmunks have reappeared this year, and they have dug up and eaten each and every one of my crocus bulbs, and most of the hyacinths and snowdrops, too. Now, instead of the row of green shoots that I had a couple of months ago, I have a neat row of little holes where the flowers used to be. Apparently we’ll be re-planting this fall, and installing some chicken wire. It won’t be much use against the marauding rabbits, but at least it will protect the bulbs!)

A weekday post! If that’s not a sure sign of summer, I don’t know what is.

Of course, the reason that I’m posting in the middle of the week is that I have been (to borrow a phrase from the Twinset podcast) bitten by my knittin’.

I cast on for the crocus sweater on Monday, and worked an inch or so on the train on Tuesday morning. Tuesday night knitting got me well into the colorwork, which I then decided to tweak and ripped back about 2 inches to start over on Wednesday. I got back on track quickly, and things were going along just swimmingly until last night at around 11, when I looked down and saw this:

That, ladies and gentlemen, is a twist in my cast on. A twist that I did not notice for 4 inches and 3 days of knitting, including laying out the fabric to check that it was the right size against another sweater. I checked for a twist twice at the cast on, once at the 1 inch mark, and even had Branden check at the cast on to be extra sure (I often have him double check me when I’m casting on this many stitches. A second pair of eyes is worth it to avoid ripping back.)

And yet somehow, we missed it. Either that, or it magicked itself into being when I wasn’t looking. Knitting can be tricksy like that. There’s no getting around the fact that the twist is there now and it’s plain as day, even if two people could swear that it wasn’t there two days ago. It’s a mystery.

Just moments before I discovered the twist, I happened to be thinking of one more tweak I should have made to the colorwork decreases, but decided that it wasn’t worth pulling back again. I am taking the twist as a sign that that change really was meant to be. I am also taking it as a reason not to break the yarn on long colorwork repeats until after finishing the yoke next time.

We’re down to yarn fumes on the mink scarf, so I’m scrambling a bit to get the next project lined up. I spun up the 2 oz of fiber that I picked up at Steven Be’s in Minneapolis, which rounds out my collection of colors for the crocus sweater.

Now, all I have left to do is to choose a stitch pattern. In wandering through my pattern books, the multi-color slip stitch patterns have been catching my eye, so I started out with one of those. I didn’t love the way it worked straight out of the book (the first few rows of the colorwork pattern in the swatch), but have been working in some modifications and am liking it much better now. The top three repeats (close to the needle) are my favorites so far, and with some careful color sequencing I think we have a winner.

Of course, me being me, I knit those last three repeats with no idea of what it was that I was actually doing. I slipped into my usual knitting trance, and just kind of let my hands do their thing. I knit with one color when it felt like the right time, and knit with the other when I felt like it. I slipped some stitches with yarn in front, and some with yarn in back, when the pattern seemed to need only really paying attention to what was happening in the row below. This worked just great until I decided that I liked the pattern and wanted to write it down, at which point I promptly lost all sense of what I’d been doing. Then, I spent about 3 hours figuring out how to knit the next 4 rows.

I decided to chart the pattern out, partly for future reference, partly because we haven’t had a process-y post in a while and I thought it might be fun, and partly so that I could play with my colored pencils.

(That last one might have been the factor that tipped the scales in favor of documentation.)

So, now that I’ve figured out what on earth it was that I was doing, let me explain it as though I knew what was happening all along.

Here is the original slip stitch pattern for the Flecked Tweed from the 3rd Walker Book (p 229):

It’s a very simple pattern; you slip with the yarn in front for a horizontal bar, and with the yarn in back for a vertical bar. You work two rows in each color (knitting with only one color at a time). Here’s the color version of that first chart. The squares with a front-slipped stitch are colored with the working yarn, and with the color from the previous row, since the float looks like it cuts the slipped stitch in half in the actual swatch. The key at the right end of each row shows the colors of the working yarn(s) for that row.

That gives you this:

Like I said, I wasn’t in love with this version. I thought it muddied up the colors too much, but I loved the tiny little flower that were peeking out of the pattern (in green for those first few rows). I played around a bit, with the next repeat, and suddenly the green slipped stitch turned into little stems (orange flowers in the second pattern repeat). In this pattern, though, all of the flowers in the motif ended up stacked on top of each other, and I liked them better staggered, like in the original pattern. I wanted the stems, but I didn’t want them to shift my flower pattern by a full repeat each time.

Next, I tried adding an extra row of background color in between, and shifting the flowers. That didn’t work at all, and I frogged it.  I looked back at the original pattern, and realized that I really didn’t like the green flowers – I only wanted the stems. So I started thinking about ways that I could keep the green slipped stitches in the fabric without the rows of three knits and a front-slip. In the end, I decided to knit one row with two colors, stranding the green and knitting and slipping with the purple background color. That meant that the green got incorporated into the purple background rows, which maintained the stagger in the flower patterns, and it gave me a single green knit stitch to become the slipped-stitch stem. The new chart looked like this (squares in the key with two colors indicate rows where I used stranded knitting in addition to slipped stitches):

And the new swatch looked like this:

Up close, they look like little flowers with tiny green stems. From further away, they look more like an abstract triangle motif, which I also like. Of course, my flowers aren’t purple crocuses as I had hoped, but I think that this gets pretty close to what I’m looking for. I blended three different shades of purple for the colorwork band, so the background can fade from one to the other across the stripe. Overall, I’m pretty pleased with how this is shaping up.

The one drawback to this design is that the flowers face in the direction of the knitting, which means that I need to knit the sweater from the bottom up to make them face the right way. That’s kind of a problem because I am close on yardage and would rather be able to stop and assess yarn usage along the way. I haven’t quite decided how to deal with that one, but I’m thinking I might use a provisional cast on, knit the yoke and shoulders, and then unpick the cast on and pick up stitches to finish the body. That way I can knit the yoke with the flowers facing upward, and then knit the rest of the body in the direction that I prefer. I’ve never done a piece-wise sweater in quite this way before, which would make it an interesting adventure, and it means that I’ll start with the widest part of the sweater and decrease my stitch counts from there. It’s always nice when the row count goes downhill. The only challenge is figuring out how many stitches to cast on around the widest part of the yoke…