four blobs

As schoolwork and other obligations piled up over the last few weeks, all I've been able to think about has been knitting. But spring break is here, baby, and I can finally do all that knitting I've been jonesing for!


Today, officially the first day of break, a package arrived from Webs with two lovely blobs in it: Dream in Color Classy in Dusky Aurora and Chinatown Apple. The Dusky Aurora is destined to be an Adult Surprise Jacket for my mom, with some modifications to make it look a little more like a boxy Chanel jacket than a lab coat. The Chinatown Apple, I don't know. Something for myself, I believe. I'd say a February Lady Sweater, but in fact I already have one of those blobs on the needles:


The periwinkle bed jacket for grandma was so successful that I've started my own in Jo Sharp Classic DK -- the gauge is different from the original though (5.5 stitches per inch), which means that I am using the medium measurements to knit an XXS. That's on hold for a bit, though, for two reasons: the first is that I accidentally pulled out the needle from about 30 stitches and am going to have to steel myself before I look at the damage to the lace pattern; the second is that I have to concentrate on the lace, so I am saving it for mindless TV knitting. (I mean, knitting in front of mindless TV, not mindless knitting in front of the TV.)

But spring break also means fun reading, and the book I checked out of the library -- Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex -- is so interesting that I want to read it all the time. So I've cast on a Shalom Cardigan, which has a yoke that needs concentration, but a totally mindless body. Once the yoke is done, I'll have nothing but stockinette in front of me, and I can read and knit to my heart's content. That will be in exactly 3 rows. The fourth blob:


Of course, this is also not the same gauge as the original (5 stitches per inch instead of 3.25), being knit in Karabella Aurora 8, so I've had to make some modifications. In case you're interested, they are to cast on 101 stitches, have 7 stitches in garter for the button band, and to do the increases as written. At the end of the third increase row, it works out to 253 stitches. Doing the math on Ishi's modifications (Ravelry link), I need to add 7 more stitches somewhere in the last garter ridge for a total of 260 stitches, and I'll be able to do the following:

Right front 43 stitches, sleeve 51 stitches, back 72 stitches, sleeve 51 stitches, left front 43 stitches. I'm going to put all but the back stitches on holders and work 8 rows of stockinette along the back to hike up the collar a bit, then I'll cast on 15 stitches for the underarms and work the body (total of 188 body stitches), then for the arms, pick up 15 stitches along the cast-on edge and 6 more along the side edge of those 8 rows, for a total of 72 arm stitches. Here's hoping it works out! Of course, Aurora 8 has a reputation for stretching, so I am hoping that my worries about this sweater's being too small will be resolved in blocking. I am, this time, using a blocked swatch, having been burned with growing, multi-ply superwash yarn in the past.

By the way, I am pleased as punch with both the Jo Sharp Classic DK and the Karabella Aurora 8. I've knit with the Karabella before, but not the Jo Sharp. Both are hardy, well-made yarns, but totally different from one another. The Aurora 8 is heavy, bouncy, super springy, and absolutely not itchy at all. That's why I'm hoping it will knit up into a nice, close-fitting, stretchy sweater that I can wear even in the summer. It would have been a terrible choice, however, for the February Lady Sweater, whose lace pattern would have gotten all stretched out of shape with that much weight pulling it down. The Jo Sharp yarn is much lighter and more rustic, and wooly enough that I don't think this will work up into a seasonless sweater. However, I have high hopes for its being a perfect, mulitpurpose, super-warm and hard-wearing winter sweater, and I know its lighter weight won't pull the lace out of proportion.

Hooray for spring knitting! Even if it does result in sweaters I can't wear for months!

Projects completed and imagined

After learning that a college friend just had a baby girl, I finally got it together and finished what I'm calling my Faux-bruary Baby Sweater, because I didn't have the pattern and made it up as I went along, therefore not realizing that I was supposed to majorly increase in the armpits for both body and arms. However, I think that the sweater looks pretty much like the original:


Sorry about those dark window sash shadows. I didn't bother putting in buttonholes, and instead used snaps, reinforced on the inside with cheap buttons and concealed on the outside by some vintage buttons I bought last summer at an antique show. To complete the whole vintage-y ensemble, I made a really easy bonnet.


When I say easy, I mean easy. I just did a square of nine repeats of the gull stitch pattern framed by 4 garter stitches on the sides and 4 garter ridges on the bottom, putting an eyelet 2 stitches in from the edges after the first 2 garter ridges and every second lace repeat thereafter. After 4 inches, I did some unnecessarily fancy decreasing in something approximating the lace pattern (but next time I think I'll just switch to garter at that point, then switched to garter and decreased 7 stitches every other row until the thing was like 8 stitches, then ran the yarn through the stitches and knotted it. I wove a ribbon through the eyelets to make a tie. As usual, I have no idea how big a baby's head is, so I eyeballed it -- the kid might be wearing the two parts of this outfit at two totally different times in her life ...


Meanwhile, a shipment from Knitpicks just came in, with four colors of their new "Imagination" sock yarn. I really have enough projects in the hopper already, but I just had to get some of this yarn when I saw that one of the colorways was named Looking Glass! And then, of course, I had to get a few more colorways while I was at it...


From left to right, these are Wicked Stepmother, Seven Dwarves, Frog Prince, and Looking Glass. As usual with Knitpicks, the colors look significantly different in person and on the website. The worst offenders in this instance are Wicked Stepmother and Seven Dwarves, which looked sort of muted and sweet on the computer screen but are in fact quite bright and blaring. The other two look pretty much the same as on the website. In fact, though I was worried that Looking Glass would not actually be a color I'd like, it turns out to be the nicest in the bunch, I think. I'm planning to pair these babies up and make some more chevron berets for Christmas presents, since I so enjoyed making the first one. I'm banking on the mixing of the colors doing wonders for the brightness of the two bright ones -- after my first beret I was surprised how different the yarn looked in the skein and knitted up.

But that will all have to wait until I clear out some of my other unfinished objects...

Two saints down...

... and only one to go. Still feeling the end-of-term doldrums, but I'm slowly, slowly nearing the finish. At least the essay I am allegedly working on right now is a bit more in my field, being only half about a saint and half about a book...


Meanwhile great progress has been made, frogged and made again on the knitting front. I got the front bands done on the green peach blossom jacket, and am on a sleeve hiatus while I decide whether I have enough dark green yarn for both sleeve hems and i-cord closures, or whether I need to rip out the hem facing on the bottom and redo it in lighter green to conserve dark green yarn. That's a project that's destined to be done in front of the TV, I think, and too fiddly to knit on the subway, which is what I've been doing lately.

That barely-discernible fair isle sweater has been frogged (actually the second time I've frogged something partially-knit with this same periwinkle Baby Cashmerino), and I finally cast on something I'm happy with:


A February Baby sweater, a la EZ, only I was too lazy to go out and buy the book with the pattern, so I eyeballed it after briefly consulting a million project pictures on Ravelry and looking at Google Books (which will display only the second page of the Baby Sweater on Two Needles pattern). But, being me, I had to resize the whole thing, going for 26 instead of 20 pattern repeats on the body and casting on 56 stitches instead of 40. As other people have noticed, the yoke does seem to start too small and increase a bit too quickly -- were I to do it again I would start with a few more stitches and increase a little more slowly to keep its angle more in line with that of the rest of the sweater. Meanwhile, since I didn't actually consult the pattern so much as fake it, I did not realize that I should have cast on an extra two (?) pattern repeats under each armpit as I was dividing for the sleeves. I think, in fact, that the body looks perfectly fine the way it is, but I need to jerry-rig something now as I start the first sleeve. I'm thinking of just casting on another pattern repeat's worth of stitches and going with it -- the sleeves will still not be quite as wide as EZ's originals, but I think they will be fine.

I think it's perfectly clear what I have been expending brainpower on this week, as I claim to be working on papers...

However, honestly, this was the quickest-knitting, most fun baby sweater I've ever made. I did the whole yoke and body over the course of, I think, three trips to and from Lower Manhattan or Brooklyn in the last few days. Of course, each time I packed up stuff to entertain myself on these subway rides, I did diligently load like 3 articles and a book into the backpack as well... where they stayed, while I knit...

Silence and silent auction knitting

Apologies for the relative blog silence recently. I've been a little overloaded with schoolwork -- totally saturated with saints' lives, relics, manuscripts, and frescoes, not to mention bogged down with research (which I claim to be doing all the time and yet which never really seems to result in much actual material)...

I have been knitting, just a bit. The choir is holding another silent auction this year and I have decided to donate my two sheep sweaters. To sweeten the deal, I've been working on some hats and booties to make them in to sets. I've finished the boy's version:


I thought long and hard about whether to make the hat match the yoke pattern, and finally decided against it, thinking that the repetition of the pattern would take away from its cuteness effect. Also, I was running out of green yarn. I have absolutely no idea how big a baby's head or feet are. The hat strikes me as a little on the small side, and the booties as I was knitting them seemed grotesquely large. Now, placed next to the sweater, they look small. They are cute though:


I used Carole Barenys's pattern for two-needle baby booties, but enlarged it by a few stitches, added some familiar sheep, and knit them in the round. I have avoided taking pictures of their horribly kitchenered soles. I always think that knit baby booties look a little amateurish, a little lumpy and acrylicky, no matter how they are knit. I hope that the sheep offset this factor a little bit.

For the girl's version, I made up my own bootie pattern, which I think worked out rather well, albeit with straps that are noticeably too short. I am trying to figure out how to rectify this problem, and coming to the miserable conclusion that I may have to rip them out. For the time being, I am thinking of trying some elastic loops on the ends of the straps at least to see how long they could possibly be. They are cute, though; here's a blocking shot:

I could not find a knitted slipper pattern that had all the features I wanted (especially stockinette going in the right direction to add my sheep), so I made something up. I used a toe-up sock cast-on (figure 8), then increased the uppers a little more than the soles, then knit them as a tube up until the mary-jane part, at which point I continued them flat and then decreased dramatically for the heel end and kitchenered the backs closed (with an incrementally-improving kitchener stitch). No seaming! They are not perfect -- I need to fiddle with the pattern a little bit before I consider writing it up -- but they will suffice, and the pair took only one evening in front of the TV to complete. I've just cast on for the matching hat -- a tam following EZ's easy instructions. We'll see how that works out.

There's more to show, but the camera ran out of juice: additions to the stash, headway on the fair isle button band, another version of the peach-blossom baby jacket in different colors. Those posts will have to wait for another day, when batteries and time are more plentiful. Another month of both writing my own essays and grading my students', and I am free for the summer, with promises of much less sporadic blog posting!

ludicrously cute.

The Baby Surprise Jacket is finished, and it is absurdly, ridiculously cute. I want one of my own.


Anybody out there make the Adult Surprise Jacket? I've looked at the pictures on Ravelry and am abivalent: does this kind of thing just not look so hot on adults? Or is it a sizing question? I haven't seen one that was particularly form-fitting.

surprise!

Well, old habits die hard, and so I have gone back to my old starting - and - finishing - other - things - when - I - should - be - working - on - the - fair - isle - cardigan ways. This time the project in question was the Baby Surprise Jacket, which took me exactly three days to knit and which is freakin' cute. It's also freakin' heavy -- knitting worsted weight wool in garter stitch on size 6 needles results in quite a dense and squishy fabric. Luckily, the friends for whom I knit this jacket are super chill about their kids and won't think twice about putting a relatively heavy sweater on their baby.

EZ is awesome. As promised in the Spun Out pattern, the finished project looks "like nothing at all" when laid flat, but folds up into amazing cuteness. Here's the "before" shot:


I am going to wait to sew up the shoulder/arm seams until I show it to my mom this weekend when I go home for Easter, because she's the kind of person who'd take some pleasure in the way it all comes together.

I had avoided the BSJ phenomenon because I am not a fan of striped or variegated yarn and thought that some of the finished jackets I had seen with a lot of stripes looked kind of tacky. However, having recently seen some more subtle ones like Flint Knits's lovely brown striped one and Knitty Gritty's lovely pink one led me to think that it was possible to make a BSJ that retained the EZ coolness factor while not being quite as dated-looking. I think all in all I was quite successful. I also think that, given the wide variation in the dye job of this bunch of skeins of damaged Aurora 8, I don't know what else I could have knit with it. But the modular mitered shape of the BSJ turns a flaw into a design feature, I think. Go Zimmermann!

Of course, now that I've done one of these and saw how fun it was, I am tempted to do more. I still think that my top-down raglan or yoke cardigans will remain the go-to baby sweater, but when I'm looking to shake things up, the BSJ is a cool alternative!

Saturday Classics

It's a beautiful, partly sunny Saturday morning, and I've been spending it working on some classics:

Currant scones

Button bands on fair-isle yoke sweater (have to be ripped out because too short)

EZ's baby surprise jacket, for when the button band frustration becomes too extreme. This is my first time working with this pattern, and it's been fun -- although knitting what is basically a big rectangle could be boring, my interest has definitely been piqued by trying to figure out what part of the jacket I am knitting at any particular moment. Plus, this is a nice use for some variegated Aurora 8 I bought on sale at School Products a while ago -- I think that this was actually a botched dye lot, but I liked the subtle differences in color.

Here's the recipe for the scones that I adapted from one in Gourmet Magazine:

4 cups all-purpose flour
1 stick (8 Tbs) butter
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1 and 1/2 Tbs baking powder
1/2 cup dried currants or raisins
1 and 1/4 cups 2% milk

Preheat oven to 425. Cut butter into tablespoon-sized slices. Put flour, butter, sugar, salt and baking soda in your food processor and process until it resembles coarse crumbs. If you don't have a food processor, you could use a pastry cutter or your fingers. Dump in milk and raisins and process until smooth (or until your processor starts having difficulty with it). Lightly dust a countertop with flour and turn out dough onto it. If it's not totally mixed, knead in whatever crumbs are at the bottom of the processor bowl. Knead dough very lightly, adding flour if necessary, just until the dough holds together and does not stick to countertop (the less handling of the dough, the better). Pat dough into a rectangle about 9x12 inches big. Use a knife dipped in flour to cut dough into triangle shapes. Place triangles on baking sheet and bake 15-20 minutes or until lightly browned on top.

Two from the top

Because I can't seem to work on one project at a time, I've cast on for another baby sweater -- this time for a friend whose daughter was just born yesterday. This friend is Chinese, so I am knitting her a celebratory red sweater with a mandarin collar and asymmetrical placket.

Meanwhile, the top-down Arwen is chugging along. I have gotten to the last of the waist-shaping decreases:


I am continually pleased at the EZ-style fake seam I am knitting in as I go. Rather than unraveling and crocheting back up as EZ suggests, I am slipping the seam stitch on every knit row. This is easy to do when one is knitting back and forth. If I were doing a sweater in the round, I would probably use EZ's method. Here's a mediocre picture of the seam as it looks from the right side:
It's hard to see, but it's running through the center of this picture. Here's the wrong side:
That's a little easier to see, I think. This row of slipped stitches does seem to be less stretchy than the rest of the fabric, and it definitely provides a crisp self-folding line.

Arwen Apace

The top-down Arwen is making good progress. I think that I am about an inch away from the waist shaping. It was exceedingly helpful to be able to try the sweater on my sister as I knit the raglan increases, to ensure a perfect fit. It also fits me rather nicely.

The hood is beautiful, I think:

It's not really lopsided; that's just the way it's hanging on my shoulders. But in order to make it hang properly and to give it some extra support, I think I am going to knit in a strip of i-cord across the back of the neck, a la Elizabeth Zimmermann.

Knitting this sweater has made me love my Knitpicks options needles even more than before. In the picture above it is clear that I have used two 24-inch cables to hold the arm stitches, meaning that the stitches were easy to slip to the holder (I just purled the sleeves with separate needles on the previous row and then took off the needles and put on the plugs), and that when I get around to picking up the sleeve stitches, all I'll need to do is put needle tips back on them.

April is the cruelest month

There is no way I am going to finish my April sweater for the sweater-a-month KAL. After a series of false starts on my adult-size version of Anny Purl's Cardigan for Merry, which is a child-size raglan version of Kate Gilbert's Cardigan for Arwen, I am only this far:


I've never knitted a sweater with fronts and back in one piece before; while it appeals to me not to have to do pretty much any seaming, it is slow going, and I find it a bit disheartening to knit a whole ball's worth of yarn and only seems to have created a few inches of fabric. The reversible cable, however, fascinates me enough to keep my interest -- the right and wrong sides do look almost exactly the same, and the construction is ingeniously simple.

The bottom appears to roll with abandon here because I have not tacked down the hem yet; I am waiting until I do Elizabeth Zimmermann's phony seam from the armpits down. I found a nice laceweight merino that is almost the same color as the main yarn to use for the hem facing, and I am hoping that the difference in weight will minimize the bulkiness and obviousness of the hemline.

The yarn I am using, Lana Grossa Merino Big, is a pleasure to work with. It's very much like Karabella Aurora 8, but at a DK gauge. So far it seems like a good alternative to Filatura di Crosa Zara. All three yarns have a lot of small plies with a lot of twist and a rounded shape, a ton of elasticity, great stitch definition, and absolutely no scratchiness. I am hoping that the sweater does not pill like crazy despite its being merino -- the last two merino sweaters I knit, with Debbie Bliss Merino DK, are pill factories.