DesigKnit

After a couple more tries, I think I’ve gotten the stitch counts and needle sizes right for a nice, even fabric with no pulling in at the colorwork band. (I also tripled the number of stitches in swatches #2-4 so that I’d be able to see more subtle effects over a large piece of fabric.)

I thought that this would be the last swatch, but I’ve come up with one more thing that I need to try before deciding on an actual design. At the rate I’m going, this could take a while…

The rag rugs, however, popped up nearly instantaneously. It turns out that I didn’t have too much warp, after all. The take up on these things is huge, which makes sense if you think about the fact that the warp yarn has to go over and under each one of those fat weft scraps. I didn’t think about that at first, so was surprised when the warp ended up being quite short by the end of the weaving.

I’m happy with the rugs I got, though, and can definitely see this being a recurring project!

Since I’ve been dithering about so many other things (the swatch above, the crocus sweater, whose fate remains unknown…), I thought it was high time that I stopped dithering about this project, which has been quietly awaiting a zipper since November. I pulled out my duct tape dressform the other day and started pinning, and now I have one completed sweater for the fall.

The yarn is a Shetland lambswool that I spun from top purchased at Greencastle in 2012. It’s a pretty fine 2-ply yarn, and it knit up beautifully. I love the weight of the fabric, and definitely plan to knit more sweaters at this gauge. It’s not quite next-to-skin soft, but I didn’t find it uncomfortable for the short period that I wore it the other day. I think the embroidered details are working nicely, too. I kept them minimal, but decided not to pull them out, after all. Fall is coming far too quickly for me to want to hurry it along, but I’m looking forward to wearing this sweater when the temperature starts dropping again!

July has been a busy month. On the 5th, we set off on a week long drive along the East coast. First, we visited the Shenandoah national forest and the Luray Caverns for a couple of days, then we spent a couple of days in DC catching up with friends we haven’t seen in a long time, exploring the Smithsonian (Air and Space and Natural History), and seeing some of the national monuments. From there, we headed up to Fair Winds Farm to visit with Jan and Ellen and then on to Twinset Summer Camp. I was only able to be there for about 24 hours, but that was long enough to meet the other campers, make some new friends, and teach a tablet weaving class. On Saturday afternoon, we drove back to MA and I re-packed my suitcase before heading to bed. On Sunday morning I caught a 9 am flight to Chicago for a jam-packed 5 1/2 day conference. I stayed in Chicago for an extra night and caught up with my friends Mimi and Elaine (who has no blog, but frequents the comments), and then flew home on Saturday afternoon.

To say it’s been a whirlwind is a bit of an understatement, but there were a lot of fun things packed into those two weeks. I am just starting to feel back on my feet and caught up on email again (I’ve given up trying to feel caught up on work…). With all the things going on, I have done almost no knitting at all this month. Instead, I’ve been pondering what to do with the Crocus sweater. As you may remember from the last post, I’m a ball of yarn short of what I thought I had, and it’s not looking likely to surface anytime soon. I think that probably means a redesign is in order.

Honestly, I’ve been a little bit ambivalent about the yellow in the sweater yoke anyway, so I’m not sure that I’ll be heartbroken if I have to redo it. I did really like the flower stitch pattern, but it requires that I use the base yarn (the one I’m running out of) as one of the strands in the colorwork, and I could stretch my yardage a lot if I were able to eliminate that. Since the yoke is the widest point in the sweater, a small savings there would make a big difference in what’s left over to finish the arms of the sweater. Luckily, I knit the yoke separately and then picked up stitches from a provisional cast on to knit the body. I think that means that it should be very simple to pull back the yoke without tearing out the rest of the sweater.

I have two braids of a similar purple in a gradient colorway, and I’m thinking that these might just do as a substitute for the yoke. I’d need to decide how to spin them up, but I think these could work very nicely as an alternate yoke, and it would give me a lot of extra yardage to play with.

While that idea is percolating, I’ve been continuing to swatch for the next project, knit with the neon pink yarn from Steven Be’s. (This project really needs a name…). At the end of the last swatch, I really liked the colorwork pattern, but I knew that it would be challenging to balance out the gauge between the linen stitch, stockinette, and slipped stitch patterns. I used three different needle sizes, which worked great in my 3″ swatch, but I wasn’t sure I trusted that result to hold in a bigger piece of fabric. So, I started a bigger swatch. I also switched down one needle size on all 3 needles, because I liked the slightly tighter gauge for the slipped stitch pattern. (Now knitting on 0, 1, and 2.)

This is one of those instances where I’m glad I double checked the swatch. I haven’t blocked the new one yet, but you can see that the linen stitch edge is rolling slightly, and the fabric takes on a distinctly trapezoidal shape just where the slipped stitch pattern begins. The stockinette section looks almost ruffled; clearly there are still some issues to be worked out with the gauge before deploying this in a larger piece.

What exactly that larger piece might be still remains a mystery, too. I don’t tend to wear shawls, and this doesn’t feel like a scarf project to me (it’s very clearly single sided, among other things). I really like my moebius cowls, but that also requires a piece with two presentable sides. I have one simple cowl that I never wear because I don’t like how it hangs, but that’s a much thicker fabric and I think I might like one knit at a lighter gauge.

I like the Poncho cowl by Steven Be, which would be particularly fitting since I bought the yarn at his store. It’s out toward the edges of my fashion comfort zone, but then so is the neon pink. I’d really like to figure out how to knit a version of it in the round, though the decreases would be easier to get right in a garter stitch fabric.

Right now, I’m thinking that I’ll probably see how the swatch looks blocked and then go from there. There are certainly lots of options to consider!

I was inspired by a wall hanging in Mimi’s apartment to actually start one of my summer weaving projects. I bought some cotton rug warp back in November, and have been waiting for a chance to turn some of Branden’s old khakis into rag rugs. It turns out that this is the equivalent of knitting on super bulky yarns on huge needles. We warped up the loom last night, and I’ve already woven off the first rug! It is satisfying to be progressing so rapidly, but I have to admit that I may have put on too much warp…I think I’m likely to run out of pants to cut up before I run out of warp to weave. Still, I’m really liking the texture of the fabric, and I’m sure I can come by more scrap clothes somewhere – at the thrift store, if nowhere else.

Considering how fast the month is going, it’s nice to be making progress on at least one summer project!

The crocus sweater was growing steadily, right up until the beginning of the week. I was sailing down the home stretch to the cuff on the first sleeve, and went to get my last skein of yarn to start working two balls together to blend the colors. Except there was no last ball. Or, rather, there is a last ball, and it appears that I’m on it.

I was sure I had only used four skeins so far, but I’ve looked everywhere and can’t find the 5th. I’ve counted ends in the sweater, but since I was working two balls at a time for most of the sweater it’s hard to tell for sure how many are in there. So here I am:

And there is only a half a ball (about 100 yards) left. The sweater is already pretty well fitted, and any tighter would be too tight for what I wanted. I could bring the hem up an inch maybe, but no more. I have a tiny bit of unspun batt left over (in case there was a need for some creative color blending at the end), but it’s only a fraction of an ounce. I don’t really want to increase the width of the colorwork in the sleeves and body, and I’m not sure how much yarn that would save, anyway. I could pull back and reknit at a looser gauge, hoping to stretch the yarn just a little bit further. I could try increasing the colorwork band at the neck, or I could spin up and work in another colorway to help stretch the yardage. But as of right now, no matter how you cut it, I don’t have enough yarn.

For now, my plan is to stall and hope that extra ball shows up. I’m pretty sure it’s not here, but hope springs eternal. I’m not 100% in love with the yellow band near my face (yellow has never been my color), so maybe this is simply an opportunity to redesign the sweater into something that I’ll like even better. Fortunately, it’s on big needles and hasn’t taken long to knit, and I’m a process knitter at heart anyway. Before I rip, though, I’m going to let it sit in time out for a while and see what comes up.

In the meantime, I’ve been playing with this:

That’s the yarn I bought at Steven Be’s in Minneapolis earlier this summer. That crazy neon yarn cried out to me, and then I chose the green and purple to balance it out and tone it down. The pictures today are horrible, but you get the idea (we had a rainy day and I didn’t have time to futz with the camera and lighting…it was a post today or post in 2 weeks kind of deal, so ugly pictures it is). I’m playing with a wide slipped stitch motif  for a hem decoration on a striped/two-tone stockinette ground. The two ends of the swatch are the slipped stitch pattern with a forward-crossed stitch; the one in the center is a simple fairisle. I like the sharpness of the slipped stitch version, and the dimensionality that the slightly raised slip stitches give to the fabric. It looks like the neon is peeking out through a lattice of the darker yarn, and I like that effect a lot. I’m currently planning on a linen stitch derivative for the hem of the piece, since it won’t roll easily and should be firm enough to stand up to the slight pull of the slipped stitch pattern at the ends of the rows.

Combining linen stitch, stockinette, and a twisted slip stitch pattern in one piece is a bit tricky in terms of gauge, though. On the left end of the swatch, I used the same needle throughout, and the gauge varied markedly from one section to the next. Even after a fairly firm blocking, the fabric has a tendency to pucker and curl at the transition from one stitch to another. The pattern on the right was worked with three different needle sizes; the larger size 1 (2.5 mm) for the linen stitch, the smaller 2 size (2.75 mm) for the stockinette, and larger 2 size (3.0 mm) for the slipped stitches. (I’d like to say here that I find it absurd that there are six different needle sizes between 0 and 3 in my knitpicks harmony sock needle kit. I love having a series of closely spaced needle sizes, but the metric naming system makes so much more sense!)

In any case, the final effect with the three different needles was much better, and the final fabric is much more even in the later part of the swatch, though the stitches are a little loose for my liking. I preferred the slightly tighter look of the slipped stitch pattern worked on the smaller needles, so I think I’ll probably shift the whole series down one needle size to get a slightly firmer gauge. Since I’ll also be switching to Addi circs for the final garment, this calls for yet another swatch to see if their size 0, 1, and 2 are similar enough to the Knitpicks size 0, 1, and 2. (Or should that be 0, little 1, and big 1??)

More soon, hopefully, but so far I’m liking how this is coming together!