Sneak preview

I am already at work on the next sweater on my list -- recently it seems to be all about the cables with me. The current project is an attempt to recreate a vintage sweater my grandmother bought once on her one and only luxury shopping venture with a personal consultant -- it is a beautiful but very petite hand-knit tan cabled sweater with snake cables framing the button band and bust, and a fancy leaf extending from the bottom hem to just below the bust. The button band is knit in one piece with the fronts, and there is a cabled rib neckline and puffed sleeves. The cable pattern extends into the hemline ribbing, a detail I like a lot. I'm omitting the puffed sleeves and trying out some different cables, but I am keeping the fancy below-bust detail, which adds some nice shaping without any decreasing or increasing. Here is is one front, up to the end of the fancy cabling:


Meanwhile, I reblocked Bristow, and it fits me now to a T. It also regained some of its bounce. Lovely, lovely Bristow, how I adore thee...

Things I Have Learned

• That gauge swatching with ruthless honesty is really important.
• That wet blocking is miraculous enough to stretch a sweater from size 33" to size 37".
• That stretching wool like this in blocking gives it a weird drape and no bounce.
• That none of these things matter when you have knit your first adult-size sweater, and you are just blissfully happy to wear your handiwork to school.

I discovered after seaming up my Bristow that what looked like it was going to be too small really was too small. As in, the size a twelve-year-old might wear. I also discovered the source of the problem: although my gauge swatch seemed to be knit at a tension of 4.5 stitches per inch, the finished sweater turned out to be knit at 5.5 stitches per inch. In retrospect, this was probably the case with the gauge swatch too, I just didn't want to admit it. So that meant that what was supposed to be 18" across the back turned out to be a little less than 16" across the back.

I resigned myself to ripping it out, but decided first to block it and see how big I could make it with stretching. The answer: it is now actually a little too big. I am going home tonight to re-block it and stretch it a little less -- which would be a good thing, because stretched as it is across the upper back right now, it's actually looking a little threadbare, and I'd like those stitches to plump back up and fill in the gaps. This is, admittedly, both a mean way to treat your fiber and a poor solution to the problem, but I don't really care. It's still significantly nicer than anything I have knit before, and I kind of like the fact that it isn't just perfect.

Oh, and another thing I learned: don't let your student photograph you outside in -20 F windchill, unless you want to look like a walrus with a weird hairdo:



Specifics:

Pattern: Bristow, from Knitty, size S (and then super-small with the blocking debacle)
Debbie Bliss Merino DK, color 202, overdyed with orange Kool-Aid
Size 4 and 7 Knitpicks options needles
Project started February 8, 2007
Project completed March 3, 2007

Snow and sweater sleeves

A snow day on Wednesday meant lots more time for knitting Bristow this week. I've completed a left sleeve and a left front, and have a right sleeve on the needles. This pattern has been fun to knit so far, and I feel inordinately proud that the yarn I overdyed is coming out so nicely. There is some pooling of the darker forest green, but I choose to ignore this fact:


Meanwhile, happy Year of the Pig, everyone! I inadvertently started out the lunar new year in the right way: by scrubbing the floors of my apartment yesterday. Of course I did so only because they were filthy, not out of any new-beginnings sentiment. But speaking of new beginnings, here are my knitting plans for the next month or so:

• complete current Bristow (the first project just for me in a long time!)
• knit another Bristow for my mom, if she will just get around to picking out her yarn
• knit a Cardigan for Arwen for my sister, potentially in time for her birthday, which is March 31
• Finish the arms on a cabled Rowan sweater that has been languishing at the top of my knitting pile for more than a year.
  

We'll see if I can actually do it all. I have been thinking about joining the Sweater-a-Month Knitalong; perhaps this will help me to stay focused. Aside from vague musings about projects to start, and that damned languishing sweater, I have been really good about working on only one project at a time this month. I hope I can keep it up!

Bristow progress and an observer

One Bristow arm is almost complete, thanks to a lovely Saturday morning NPR lineup. I'm really enjoying this cable pattern: it looks more complicated than it really is, and now that the increases are done there's even less thinking involved. By the way, I highly endorse starting a sweater with an arm: the novelty of a new project has kept this from seeming as tedious as other arms have been for me in the past.

I had some trouble finding a shadow-free spot to photograph it in this sunny winter afternoon light. And there was a little shadow trailing me around the apartment as I posed my work:

The wine-dark sea

Work has begun on a Bristow sleeve, knit with my Kool-Aid dyed teal yarn. I love the way the color variations and cables combine to ripple like ocean waves -- I think I have changed my mind on variegated yarn (or I guess I'd call this semi-solid color).

I started this project while watching the much-anticipated new episode of Lost last night, and I started with a sleeve, in the hope that I would not get stranded on sleeve island! It was perhaps not a perfect idea -- I had to concentrate a little too hard on the knitting, with the combination of sleeve increases and cable twists. But this is a really nice pattern so far! The cable is easy to remember and pretty intuitive to figure out by looking at. It's not the speediest knitting I've done, so I don't have a lot of progress to show: