Sweetness

Finishing the Orals and the school year has made me want to do nothing but fall back on sheer relaxing pleasure knitting, which for me, unsurprisingly, is making top-down baby sweaters. I bought this yarn back in April to help sweeten a sort of miserable birthday spent alone and under the crushing stress of last-minute studying, and it actually did help.

The yarn is Sweet Georgia Tough Love Sock in "Cedar" with Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock in "Andersonville" as a contrast. They looked great together in the skein because there was a little touch of the cedar color in the Lorna's Laces. I bought them intending to make the mosaic-yoke "Cardigan B" from my "Steps to Stranded" patterns, but when I came to knitting the mosaic part, that stripe of cedar color turned out to muddy the crispness of the pattern, and my pretty squares looked more like smudges. So I improvised something that would work with this yarn.


Instead of six rows of mosaic pattern in alternating sequence, I worked four rows of garter stitch in the Lorna's Laces separated by two rows of stockinette in the Sweet Georgia. The beginning of each garter stitch section is where I worked my yoke increases.

I think it looks very nice, and it's a sweet little variation on the pattern. So if you're looking for a variation on the "Steps to Stranded" pattern, I'd recommend it, especially with yarns that are just a little too close in color to make the most of a stranded or mosaic pattern.


A note on the yarn: in my previous post I had expressed some doubt about the Sweet Georgia yarn, but I rescind that comment: after wet-blocking this yarn is heavenly -- soft and sort of silky feeling with no scratchiness, and it seems to have lost the fuzziness that was making me worry about how well it will hold up. I think if I were knitting socks with it I would still knit them at a pretty tight gauge just to be sure -- and this yarn is a relatively fat sockweight, so knitting on one's normal sock needles would already be knitting it pretty tightly. But at the looser gauge of this baby garment, it drapes beautifully.

Phew!

I passed my Orals, and I am celebrating by knitting another yoked baby sweater. I feel no shame about knitting a baby sweater with no intended recipient -- and I'm not alone; Grumperina just spoke on the subject herself.

This is made with some splurge yarn -- Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock in "Andersonville" and Sweet Georgia Tough Love Sock in "Cedar." Both are just gorgeous, sophisticated colors, and they work really well together. I have some questions about how well the Sweet Georgia will hold up as it seems a little fuzzy from the get-go, but I don't care. Who could resist that glorious, complex shade of blue-green?

As summer approaches I am lining up some more knitting projects and taking a vow that I will actually finish at least two sweaters I've been sitting on. And of course, I've also got to start writing the dissertation!!

Nothing New November

I'm in the process of moving apartments, and when I started to pack the knitting area I was appalled at the size of my stash, and at the pile of unfinished pieces in my work basket. Whence my new motto: Nothing New in November! No new yarn, no starting new projects!

Here are just a few of the pieces yet to be finished:


Selbu Modern. I have some doubts about this: it's looking very small, and I know that I can stretch it to block, but perhaps not as much as I originally thought. I have to say that I am a fan of colorwork but this has not been super fun to knit, so the thought of ripping it out and adding a pattern repeat to make it the right size is not particularly appealing. So this might be a back-burner project.


Ripping and re-knitting the sleeves of my Shalom cardigan. These just never fit right, and I had been thinking that the whole cardigan was too big to wear when in fact I think it was just the sleeves that were too big. This should be about a two-night project in front of TV, I think; I've already pretty much finished one of the sleeves. I'm also going to thread some elastic into the collar to make it stay tight -- Karabella Aurora 8 is a stretchy, heavy yarn, and the neckline gets pulled way big by the end of a day of wearing it. Re-knitting with it reminds me of what a nice yarn it is, though -- super soft, super bouncy, and not particularly pilly, yet.


Remember this guy? This sweater has been on my needles for more than two years! It's been languishing almost finished because I now hate wrapping my purls the wrong way, as I was doing when I started this. It seems to take twice as long to knit a row this way! One sleeve is about 3 inches from completion, and the other one is still unworked from the armpit join. This project could take me more than just this month to complete. In trying it on to gauge sleeve length, though, I am reminded of how adorable it will be when I finish it!


One new spiral mitt, waiting for thumb ribbing, and then for its partner to be knit. I tried a different design for these and have decided I like the original spiral mitt much better. This pair might be gifted for Christmas.

Then a couple of cheats:


I cast on a few days ago for a featherweight cardigan. I'm counting this as a "nothing new" sweater, though, because I ordered the yarn (Colourmart cashmere 4-ply) more than a year ago. Knitting my mitts and cowl with the gray cashmere made me absolutely burn to work with more cashmere, so I pulled this out of the stash.



This one is really a cheat: This is the ribbing for the left front of a new cardigan design I started only a few days ago. It doesn't really count as "nothing new," if I were being a stickler, but I've got to have something besides sleeves to knit, don't I?

This is only the tip of the iceberg, peeps. Among the other unfinished items I dug out of the knitting cupboard are not one but two baby sweaters awaiting a second arm, the left front and two inches of the back of my birthday BFL sweater, about half of a chevron scarf to match my chevron beret, another patterned-yoke sweater left off about an inch from the armpit division, an adult surprise jacket for my mom, and a cable sweater I've had on the to-finish list since I first learned how to knit five years ago. Oy!

Will it all be finished in November? Definitely not. But will anything new be cast on between now and December 1? Absolutely not!!

You hear that, Jennifer Little? Absolutely not!!

What I'm doing this weekend instead of going to Rhinebeck

Eating brussels sprouts.

(Isn't this thing cool? I got it at the farmer's market today. Who knew that they grew like this? It's heavy, too -- like a big caveman-club of healthiness.)

Knitting cashmere spiral mitts and listening to NPR.

Grading papers.

Reading for orals.

I'm sure that Rhinebeck will be more fun, but I just can't stomach it with both the work pileup and the upcoming move -- don't need more stash to pack!

Want another shot of those mitts? I thought so.

They're ribbed for her pleasure! I laboriously un-plied the double strand of 1/14 I had used for the spiral cowl (which I had originally twisted like that by colourmart), so these are exactly half the scale of the cowl. I love them! It was my first crack at top-down mittens -- I like it, and it does let you modify to fit the amount of yarn you have, but I'm not a huge fan of the thumb join part. These guys are so warm! Just trying them on for size or to snap a photo made my hands feel so warm and cuddly. I think they're going to get a lot of use.

NB: I cast on 56 stitches to make these, following the 8-stitch repeat of the spiral cowl's eyelet pattern after a picot edge. I added a 30-stitch-around thumb tube after 4 repeats, then decreased the thumb gore every other round until it was gone, then worked 5 more repeats of the spiral and cast off with a picot edge. I also tried picking up stitches and working a 3-needle BO instead of sewing down the final hem -- kind of a cool idea, and definitely a lot neater, but less stretchy, despite the fact that I used a needle 4 sizes larger for the bindoff.

At long last... Steps to Stranded!

Special note: from now until 2/14/10, I will donate 50% of the proceeds from all my pattern sales to the American Red Cross for Haiti relief efforts.

Cardigan A ($1.99): buy now

Cardigan B ($2.99): buy now

Cardigan C ($2.99): buy now

Or the packet of all three ($5.99): buy now


I'm pleased finally to present a pattern I'm really excited about: Steps to Stranded Baby Cardigans!


This package of three top-down baby cardigan patterns is intended for all ranges of knitters, from beginners who only know knit and purl to intermediate or advanced knitters who have been wanting to try stranded knitting but are a little afraid to try.


Cardigan A has a circular yoke worked in contrasting self-striping yarn for a big effect with very little effort. Cardigan B uses Barbara Walker's "mosaic knitting" to achieve a two-color yoke while only working with one yarn at a time. And Cardigan C... is the one I'm really stoked about: it uses a modified mosaic technique worked over one row at a time to achieve what looks like fair isle... but without ever having to use more than one yarn at a time, and without steeking!

Cardigan A

Cardigan B

Cardigan C

The 16-page pattern includes detailed, illustrated instructions for every technique included in the pattern except knitting and purling, as well as lots of other photos, hints, and charts to make everything totally clear. It's written for thee sizes, from 3 months to 12 months.

Best of all, these three sweaters use up extra sock yarn and are also the same gauge and measurements as my Sock Yarn Stranded Sweater, so you can graduate from these to that! And in fact, the Sock Yarn Stranded fair isle yoke never has more than 3 stitches at a time of one color, so you could use the same modified mosaic technique from Cardigan C to knit it!

There are two ways to buy: you can buy the individual sweater patterns, or you can buy the packet of three patterns at a discount ($1.98 less than buying all three individually).

Cardigan A ($1.99): buy now

Cardigan B ($2.99): buy now

Cardigan C ($2.99): buy now

Or the packet of all three ($5.99): buy now

Finito!

Phew, that was a lot of knitting for no particular recipient!


The second and third of my trio of circular-yoke baby sweaters are finally finished, and I'll be posting the pattern pronto! But first, a moment for boasting.


I am so excited about the technique I hit upon for working the yoke of this seemingly "fair isle" sweater. It achieves quite complicated, one-row color changes (whereas mosaic knitting requires pairs of two rows each), but without ever having to knit with two colors at once!

I am sure I am not the first person to have thought of this, but I did some poking around the internet and couldn't find any other examples. It's so simple, and yet so cool! If you're wondering how it works, check out the Purl Bee's Treeline Cardigan, which exploits the fact that circular needles have two working ends all the time to achieve one-row stripes in flat knitting. That's what got me thinking about how one could work one-row fair isle patterns, slipping stitches as if to work mosaic knitting, but instead of turning the work and purling back and slipping the same stitches, pushing the work to the right and knitting over the same row with the second color! It only works for patterns that have no more than three stitches in a row of one color, but it's an awesome trick! Now I want to use it as often as I can.

Anyway, be on the lookout for the pattern later this afternoon. Yay!

Actually, first a question, though: I am bundling them and selling them as one unit, with a price significantly cheaper than if I sold each individually. But would you want them also sold individually?

A lot of circles

Finally got a chance to photograph a few of the projects in the works. Everything on the needles at the moment is circular! I've got now two baby yoke sweaters in the works and one finished:


I'm quite pleased with how this one came out, though there's some noticeable difference in the dye lots of the two skeins of "Grasshopper" -- most noticeably where the button band meets the collar.

Then there's a really simple garter yoke cardigan, using some leftover Knitpicks Felici self-striping yarn and Knitpicks "Bare":


And then there's the one that caused me the most consternation: a "fair-isle" yoke sweater using a super-secret trick to make it look much more complicated than it is to knit (which is why it's "fair isle" instead of fair isle). I had to rip and redo this yoke a number of times until I was satisfied with the way it looked.


And even when I was satisfied, I went back in and duplicate-stitched one row with the MC yarn (Knitpicks Stroll in "Tidepool Heather") because I was afraid there wasn't enough similarity between the yoke section and the body section (which is the old standby Knitpicks Essential/Stroll Kettle in "Grasshopper" and Lorna's Laces in "Gold Hill" -- the same two colors, in other words, that I used in the mosaic yoke cardigan pictured above). That combo looks quite different in single-row stranding rather than mosaic knitting, huh?


But it looks quite nice now! I'm busily knitting these as I write up the patterns, hoping to publish all three in one packet (they all have the same gauge and measurements). It's my hope that knitters could work from the garter-yoke one through to the "fair isle" one, gradually becoming more comfortable with stranded knitting. Then they could graduate to my Sock Yarn Stranded (which also has the same gauge and measurements) or to any other fair isle pattern! I'm a little frantic to get the pattern finished by the time Sock Summit is over, because even though I'm not going to Sock Summit, I figured that people would come home loaded up with beautiful sock yarn and be looking for projects to knit with it!

Then lastly, to continue the stranded knitting fiesta, there's one of these:


Which I am sure you all recognize as a Selbu Modern in the works, using a popular color combination. It took me a while to hit on the right color of blue, and I'm still not satisfied with it -- I was looking for "Tiffany Blue" or robin's-egg blue, but this is a little greener than either of those colors. I was inspired by haveyouanywool's version on Ravelry. She used Louet Gems fingering, but that was a little out of my price range and I don't like working with it -- too heavy and not springy enough for my taste. This is Knitpicks Essential/Stroll in "Glacial," a discontinued color, and the red is Valley Yarns Huntington (color 4150). I think in combination the two yarns look better than separately, and the Glacial looks sufficiently Tiffany-esque to cut it. Last year I had so much fun knitting and then wearing my Chevron Beret that I figured another pretty beret was just the ticket for getting ready for hat season!

More knitting is afoot.

It's baby sweaters all the time here! (It's turtles all the way down.) As soon as I finished that uber-cute sock yarn stranded sweater, I started in on another. I had ordered three skeins of that Essential Kettle "Grasshopper" yarn but only used two, so clearly the answer was to order another skein and try out a different patterned yoke sweater! Then I had a couple more brainstorms while knitting it, and all the sudden percolating in my mind is a genius idea for a step-by-step pattern that lets knitters work their way up to stranded knitting, and not one but three sweaters in the works. So if "Sock Yarn Stranded" is Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, these three sweater pattterns are Episodes I-III. Only without Jarjar Binks. And with better dialogue. Uh, and in sweater pattern form.

Anyway, lots of unnecessary baby sweater knitting going on here. I don't even know anybody who's pregnant this time! I suppose it's always nice to have a few presents sitting around waiting to be given, right?

Sock Yarn Stranded

The sock yarn baby sweater is finished! I'm quite pleased with it.


The stranded yoke looks just darling.


The wrong side is the neatest of any fair isle work I've done -- I think knitting in the round is the key here (the first time I've done this with a stranded sweater!).


The steek threads are all snipped down and hidden underneath button band ribbons. I had to put the ribbon kind of halfway into the button band, but in fact, I think that it looks fine, and it makes it much easier with the buttoholes. Other sweaters with ribbon-faced button bands I've made, I've used my sewing machine to make buttonholes on the ribbon to match the eyelet holes on the button band, and they are a pain to do, plus the shapes of machine-made holes and eyelet holes are not the same and it's just an awkward business.


Here's the other side. I have to say, I may be a pretty neat knitter and finisher, but I am a total moron at sewing on buttons! My knots are never neat, you don't know how many times I threaded the needle through the wrong side of the button or the wrong side of the band and had to cut the thread, and then I had to rip out and reposition almost all the buttons at least once in order to get the bands to lie flat. Ugh!


But all in all, a totally fun knit and a great finished product! I've written up pretty detailed instructions and will post them soon.

tutorial: picking up stitches

The body of the new baby sweater is finished, and I'm picking up stitches along the fronts for the button bands. I thought I'd stop and take some pictures and do a little tutorial for any of you readers who have never picked up stitches for button bands (or other things, for that matter) before. You can click on any of these pictures to see a much larger image.

If you look carefully at your cardigan fronts, you'll see that between each column of stitches is a little ladder of yarn that makes a column of little holes. The column of holes you want to work with is the one between the very first column of stitches of your cardigan front and the column of stitches next to it.


Hold your work so that the right side is facing up and the button band is closest to your chest (your columns of stitches will be running sideways). Tie your working yarn to the back side of the work at the very right edge of the front. Poke the tip of your needle into the first hole (the one farthest to the right) in the column you were just looking at, from the front side into the back side. In the photo below, I've already picked up some stitches, but the process is exactly the same:


Here is what it looks like from the back side of the work:


Wrap your working yarn around your needle the way you would wrap the yarn if you were making a stitch.


Pull the loop of yarn you just wrapped around the needle from the back side into the front side of the work.


As you are picking up stitches, you are going to need to skip a hole every once in a while, because rows are shorter than stitches are wide. (Recall that gauge is sometimes given for stitches and rows, and it will say things like "5 stitches and 7 rows = 1 inch.") In this case, I need to skip every fourth hole.


When you get to the end of your cardigan front, you will have a whole bunch of loops of yarn on your needle, ready to turn and work just like regular knitting!

Adorability

Progress on the new baby sweater continues. I'm quite pleased both with how nice it looks (with the ends all tucked in on the front) and with how little yarn it seems to be taking up -- I had planned for three balls of Knitpicks Essential Kettle-dyed (the old 50g balls), but I think it will squeak in with just two. Sweet! And the yoke is all done with scraps, so for the price of a pair of socks, I get a baby sweater!

Meanwhile, I have discovered the joys and dangers of Etsy. It's an awesome, awesome site. The problem for me is not that I go on Etsy and order tons of handmade things, but that I go on Etsy and look at beautiful handmade things, and think, "I could make that!" Hence, the huge pile of designer fabric scraps and lots of zippers:


None of which I really need. But I did make some cute things today! Here are two little coin pouches.



I learned how to make a fully lined zippered pouch. I have not yet learned how to make it perfectly straight, but I'm getting better. I made the orange one first, and then the pink one, and I think the pink one is straighter. I also don't know how to make square top corners, and though I don't dislike these sort of "mitered" ones, I'd love to know if there is indeed a trick to squaring them.


Do I need these things? No. But they are cute. Did I spend $25 on zippers alone? Yes.

Then there's this little buttoned metrocard holder. This one I actually kind of do need, because I am constantly losing metrocards with like $40 on them. The plan is that a slightly bigger holder (that's super cute) will keep me from dropping the card in my pocket where it will slide out again. It's adorably reversible (and also definitely not square):


Also adorably reversible is this little purse for the two-year-old older sister of the baby who's getting the sock yarn sweater:




I'm a little disappointed with the strap -- it just looks kind of clunky. I also didn't really measure the buttonhole tab, and it's a little too long. But the combination of fabrics is really sweet. And the best part is this:



She loves playing with wallets and taking credit cards out of them, so I made her her own little wallet, with a few old cards of mine. So sweet!

Yes, I may have lost my mind. Adorable fish-print-induced mania!