Arwen!!

One trip to the zipper store later, and voila! My top-down Arwen in all its glory, all sewed up and ready to ship off to Boston to the sister. I think that she'll be able to get a lot of use from it: it's soft, stretchy, and practical, and the zipper definitely gives it structure.


Sewing a zipper on the inside of the placket definitely takes some of the awesomeness away from the reversible cable, but it's rather innocuous, and the custom-chosen color is a definite match.


Now I am finally DONE with this one and can move on to something more exciting -- like row after row of tiny-gauge stockinette in my post-yoke fair isle...

Frustrations

The good news is that the top-down Arwen is completely knitted and blocked, and looking good, if I do say so myself.


The bad news is that I have somehow lost the custom-color-and-length zipper I had chosen for it from a special custom zipper store downtown. It's not a huge deal; the zipper cost me only like $2.75 and about 20 minutes of matching colors, but it's frustrating because I had reserved this afternoon to sew in the zipper and be finished with this puppy!



These photos show the value of the nonexistent zipper: I had to hold the fronts closed for the photo shoot because they are wont to curl outward along the same curve as the one the hood makes as it flips over the shoulders. Also evident is the fact that without a zipper to anchor the fronts, it's pretty easy for them to get slightly off-kilter from one another and make one side look shorter. It's not.

The hood from the back looks quite nice. I waffled for quite a while on the sleeve cuffs, between finishing them with another cable or with a folded-in hem. In the end I went for the hem, partly to make life easier for myself with no grafting of live stitches to side selvedge, and partly to avoid cutesiness that might arise from too much matching cable. I didn't want to distract from the lovely focal point of the sweater.

I am hoping that this sweater fits my sister a little better than me. She tried it on numerous times before I divided for the yoke, and the sleeves seemed to be the right size for her. On me they seem a little too wide at the top. She is also a little slimmer and longer altogether in the torso and has much smaller hips, for which I planned when executing the shaping. I am hoping that the little wrinkles along the back from being hiked up on my butt will not appear when Sarah wears the sweater.

Tomorrow after class I will run out and get another zipper, I guess -- the zipper store is only about 6 blocks from my grad school, so it won't be a herculean effort. And of course, the moment I sew in the new one I will find the old one...

Incremental Progress

This looks very much like the previous yoke picture, but in fact it is not: here is a completed fair-isle yoke, about ten rows away from separating for the sleeves. I am pleased with the final product: there was no avoiding a sort of striped look, but I think I was able to balance simple peerie bands with more complex bands in a harmonious way. I'm not totally sold on the final band of pattern: the one that looks like lavender flowers with red centers at the bottom there -- it's lovely, but I am not 100% sure that it's in keeping with the other, more abstract and graphic patterns. I think that when it is on and I am not looking at it so critically that this will cease to be an issue.

If you look carefully at the photo above, you can see that there are stitch markers dangling from the cable at the bottom right-hand corner. That is because I decided after the yoke increases were done to switch to raglan-style increases until I divide for the arms. I don't think that it will be noticeable in the final product, but I think that it will make it easier for me to try on the sweater as I am increasing and divide at exactly the right point.

Anyway, if any of you are interested in the patterns that I put together for the yoke of this sweater, I have posted a link to my chart in the sidebar. It is not a sweater pattern so much as a very sketched-out "recipe," but since it took much longer than I thought it would to design my own balanced fair isle pattern, I though I could save other people the trouble.

Stay tuned in the next week for photos of a finished and blocked top-down arwen!!

Arwen emerges

The top-down Arwen's body is finished!

The hem, in laceweight merino that's approximately the same color:

The zipper will be the perfect length:

The fake seam:

Gratuitous cable shot:

Modeled shots showing the fit (keeping in mind that it is for my sister, whose torso is longer than mine). It is a little on the short side, but I am planning on its growing a little in blocking:

What am I going to do about this?

Nothin'.

Arwen's body is one pattern repeat from completion, and I am not frogging back three inches. Hopefully nobody will be staring so hard at my sister's upper pelvic region that they notice this little cabling error.

Meanwhile, I have discovered an awesome blog: TECHknitting, which has great clear illustrations of a lot of different techniques. Go check it out!

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.

Houston, we have a hood.

The top-down Arwen is going much more smoothly. Four balls of yarn later, I have a complete hood and about half of the raglan increases. The cable pattern seemed difficult to begin with, but I've got it memorized now (after all, there are only four cabled rows in the whole chart). With luck, I'll have this sweater finished by the time my sister moves into her new apartment -- that's right, her wool sweater will be finished just in time for hot Boston summer...

Froggy Jamboree

After weeks of knitting on my Arwen, I realized that it was just too big. So this:


became this:

Ensuring a proper fit seemed to necessitate knitting the sweater from the top down, but I wasn't sure how to make the hood work out from the top down. And then I hit on the perfect solution: the figure-8 cast-on for toe-up socks. And, aside from a few twisted stitches, I think that it worked out really well. Here's the hood progress so far:
I'm on the decrease section of the hood now, and when it reaches the right length and circumference for the collar, I'll just start the raglan increases for the top-down sweater.

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.