DesigKnit

This has been a quiet week, knit-wise. Not a whole lot that’s new and exciting going on.

I snipped a couple of stitches and knit an extra inch or so onto the arms of my Seafoam sweater.

They sat just a little higher than I’d like all last season, so I figured I might as well fix that before the wool-wearing begins again.

I started working on a new scarf in another mindless lace (two row pattern, and they only differ by a stitch).

I’m not sure that I love how the color change is playing with the lace pattern; it actually shows up a lot more in the photo than it does in real life. I’m hoping that blocking will help with that, though. I do love the color, which is slightly more red and less purple than is shown in the photo.

And I’m doing some spinning.

This spinning is a bit unusual in that I have a lot of wool to get through and no specific project in mind. It’s the same shetland lambswool that I used for the Embroidered sweater. I bought several pounds of it at Green Castle in 2012, with the intention of knitting one plain oatmeal-colored sweater (check) and one colorwork sweater. I think I have 4 or 5 different colors in the closet, and it’s some of the only wool in the house not in a plastic bin (the way the balls of roving are wound makes it hard to fit). Since I liked the yarn weight that I used for the embroidered sweater, I decided to just spin the rest of it up at the same weight; a slightly heavy fingering weight 2-ply. It will be easier to store, and then when I’m ready to knit it will be all ready to go. In the meantime, it’s a nice mindless evening project, and there’s plenty of wool left to go!

Anything exciting on your needles?

After its long, long wait for attention, the Flower hat is now available on Ravelry. It needed a new name, so I looked up the botanical name for a flower with 6 petals: hexamerous. That seemed unlikely to be taken and appropriately geeky, but I couldn’t resist adding in a little word play. The final name is Hexamorous…who doesn’t love a hexagon?

My favorite part of pattern writing is seeing what other knitters do with a design. I chose a very strongly variegated (and slightly stripey) yarn for the crown of the hat, but that’s certainly not the only choice. Walden knit hers with stripes of different colors, which really accentuated the geometry of the increases and decreases.

I don’t think I ever would have thought to put that peach stripe in there, but it’s amazing how much it helps the colors pop!

Laura’s version is a bit more similar to my own, in that it uses a variegated yarn.

That’s about where the similarity ends, though! Her yarn was much more subtly variegated, and it gives the hat a completely different feel. The decrease ribs really seem to stand out in this version, and I love how the dark blue frames the light green crown.

YarnyDragonfly chose a yarn with a long color repeat and slightly softer tones for her hat. Her yarn was also slightly fuzzy, which underplays the structure of the pattern and really lets the color keep the spotlight. She kept right on going in the crown colorway rather than switching to a contrasting yarn for the body of the hat.

I love all three of the test knit versions…if there’s one you particularly love, head on over to their blog or project page and let them know!

And, if you’re eager to try a version of your own, the pattern is available on the Desigknit Pattern page on Ravelry. Thanks so much to all of the test knitters for helping me to get this one out the door!

This has turned out to be a productive couple of weeks, knitting-wise. Back in the spring, my very knit-worthy aunt had asked me for a scarf knit from my handspun. We sat down with the color cards and she picked out a color that she thought would work well, and I spun up some yarn and dyed it.

Unfortunately, the color came out a bit lighter than I’d intended, and I wasn’t sure that it was right. So, I put it aside to ponder for a while, and moved on to other things.

When I was getting ready for TwinSet Summer Camp, I grabbed a braid of roving to spin. I only had 4 ounces, and it wasn’t quite the color I’d been looking for, but as I spun it I started to think that perhaps that really was the one.

I finished spinning it a few weeks ago (there was a long hiatus in between), and cast on for a scarf.

I soon realized, though, that I didn’t have enough yardage for a scarf in the 4 ounce skein that I had on hand. I did some calculations, and switched to a cowl. I wasn’t sure how a cowl would work for my aunt, but figured I’d give it a try; I could always knit up something else for her if it didn’t work out.

By the time I finished the cowl, I was kind of in love with it, but I was also less sure that it was right for her. (I like to think that those two thoughts are unrelated.)

So, I cast on for a scarf in the original yarn, figuring I’d offer her the option and could always overdye the scarf later if that’s what she wanted.

It turns out that she was planning to be in town in September (she lives out of state), and so I went down for a visit last weekend. My second thoughts were right; she loved the color of the scarf, but the cowl had a bit too much gray in it.

I got right down to work, and by Tuesday, I had finished the knitting. This is the second week of the semester, which means that I have my commute back (with enforced knitting time), and it is not yet crazy enough that I spend the whole commute grading or sleeping. So, this was the perfect time to get a couple of quick projects off the needles.

The cowl was knit on size 5 needles, and took 300 yards (4 oz) of Rambouillet 3-ply yarn. The scarf was knit on size 6’s, and took 400 yards (8 oz) of Finn 2-ply yarn in a slightly heavier weight. (Grist is an amazing thing.) After blocking, the cowl is 36 x 12 inches, and the scarf is 60 x 14.5″. Both use the “Tracery pattern” lace from Barbara Walker’s second stitch dictionary (p 308). The cowl is 12 repeats of the lace, and the scarf is 4 (plus a second stockinette stitch at the edges). The pattern was simple enough that I’d memorized it within a couple of repeats, and it made good conversation knitting as well as train knitting. (I love projects like that. And really, I love anything that involves leaf lace.)

My needles have been empty now for a couple of days, and they’re aching for something new. I thought I had a project all planned, but it turned out that I had more yarn than I need for the project I was planning on, and decided I’d rather wait until I find something that will use all of it instead. So it’s back to waiting and thinking, looking for a new project to take into next week.

We all have them: projects that seem inspired at the time, and less-than-inspiring later. There are the ones that don’t turn out the way you expect, and the ones where you pushed the envelope a little too far. And then there are those where the execution just didn’t live up to the dream, for whatever reason (materials, skill, maybe a little of both…).

I can usually see a dud coming, and rip back in time. But not always.

I knit this sweater back in 2008. I knew as soon as I finished it that it was bigger than I’d intended, but I thought there was a chance I’d wear it anyway. (That was my first mistake: excessive hope.) This was also my first lesson in shaping oversized garments. In a word, don’t: it makes them look too big rather than comfortably baggy. If you must shape, do it subtly.

I wore the sweater for a few months, maybe a season after I knit it, and never since. In the meantime, I’ve lost about 50 pounds, and what was once big is now hopelessly huge.

The second sweater is of roughly the same vintage.

This was my first sweater on tiny needles. (Or at least they felt tiny at the time…looking back, they were size 3’s, which now feel pretty big.) It is also my only sweater in 100% alpaca yarn. I thought when I knit it that it might be too warm. That is not a problem. As someone who is always cold, an extra-warm sweater is something to be prized, not ignored. And yet, I never wear this.

The problem is with the yarn itself. Being 100% alpaca, it is quite slippery, which makes it hard to hold a bag on my shoulder or push up a sleeve with my hip when my hands are full (yes, apparently that’s an important feature of a sweater for me. I had no idea, until suddenly I couldn’t). Wearing it is like being coated in oil; everything is slippery, slippery, slippery. The alpaca also has a lot of drape. You can’t see it here, but the sweater grew significantly during the first few wearings. When it first came off the needles, it fit fine. But the (lack of) structure in a yoked sweater knit in the round combined with the slipperiness of the yarn and a sligtly-less-firm-than-usual gauge to give me a 10-20% increase in size. This garment was shaped well for a loose fit, and I still think it’s flattering, even after the additional weight loss. But if you look at the picture above, you can see that there are almost two different shoulder lines; one that was intended, and the other that emerged as the sweater practically melted off of me.

I pulled out the neckline once and reknit it, but it didn’t help. I’ve thought of lots of different fixes, but at the end of the day this sweater just never gets worn.

The third sweater is slightly more recent (sorry for the dark photo).

I knit this one back in 2010-11, with yarn from an indie dyer whose work I love. I bought the yarn online, which I never do unless I’ve seen it in person first. I ordered BFL worsted, but what came was a high-twist fingering weight. Think socks that rock heavyweight. I have no idea if that is her usual worsted or if something happened with the labels by mistake. But I loved the yarn, and I loved the color, so I set out to knit a sweater even if it wasn’t quite what I expected. I knit at a dense gauge, because that’s what I always do on a sweater. And it came out heavy.

At first, I didn’t think that was a problem, but as I wore it the weight started to bother me. Also, there were some construction details I didn’t like. I reknit the sleevecaps. I reinforced the shoulder seams to do a better job of holding up the sweater’s weight. I added a bit of an edging to the neck opening to fix the way it hung. None of it really worked. Like the others, I wore it for a season, and haven’t really touched it since.

Especially on this last sweater, I still love these yarns. I liked the sweaters at one point or another, but my enthusiasm waned after the initial excitement of completion wore off. For years now, I’ve been considering ripping them out and releasing the yarn for another project. I never wear them, and they take up storage space. The construction/structural integrity issues make them garments that I’m not likely to give away. I’m not inclined to keep things around simply because they took time and effort to knit. If they don’t serve a purpose, they’re going to be culled.

This year, the time felt ripe. And so, this week my projects have been ones of deconstruction rather than knitting. I unpicked ends, pulled out seams, and frogged with abandon. I got through the first two sweaters, but have hesitated on the alpaca because I”m worried about felting. The other two were fairly smooth wool yarns, but I’m not sure how well frogging will go for a fuzzy, loosely spun alpaca. I’m still thinking about that one.

I really liked playing with the crimped wool skeins, but sadly they needed to be relaxed if I want to knit with them again. So, after the frogging came a bath.

And I now have two sweaters’ worth of yarn to restash. I’m not sure that I’ll knit with it again right away, but I am glad that it’s been converted back from useless, abandoned garment to yarn with great potential.