…and kinda sad too.
Moths. That’s my best guess at least. Ugh.
I started Oblique back in September, hoping to have it done in nine days, just in time to accompany me to San Francisco. The 90 degree autumn we enjoy in Austin makes it easy to get excited about visiting a city with more sweater appropriate weather. In fact the prospect of a crisp and chilly breeze can really do funny things to your head, like make you think you can finish a highly textured sweater in nine days. I didn’t, but managed to have a good time in the city anyway.
When I got back I let Oblique sit, sadly ignored while I was distracted with hats, mitts and other bitsy projects. No more though! I’m determined to finish her before our tiny little winter is over, and have been nothing but faithful this past week, building up a nice pile of sweater pieces.
I was feeling pretty pleased with myself until I decided to lay everything out - sorta have a look at it all together/stare admiringly at what I’ve accomplished so far (you know how you do) and saw that hole, and another smaller hole near it, and the way I had really mucked up the armscyes.
That’s the right front over the left front, and there’s about a 2″ difference in length between the two. I thought my gauge had changed but nope, I counted the rows, I definitely did something strange while decreasing through the lacy bit. So what fun and fabulous things will I be doing this afternoon? I’ll be charting out my decreases, clearing some space in the freezer, and of course, frogging. Wish me luck.
14 Jan 09 | 4:14 pm
Button choices, patterns for problematic yarn, sometimes it’s nice to have friendly people around who will point out when you’re being a bit of an idiot and overlooking something completely obvious. So thank you Winnie and Lin. Of course My So-Called Scarf! The long established, and rightly popular, savior of ker-azy yarns everywhere. And as good a reason as any to haul Magallanes back out of the yarn closet of shame.
Except right now I’m more into cloth scarves than knit ones, and I still want a hat. After pondering a bit I figured it wouldn’t be too hard to figure out the best way to decrease in pattern and make a so-called beret.
Actually it was ridiculously easy, mainly because someone’s already gone and done it. Looking at the completed hat though, I didn’t think the horizontal nature of the so-called stitch (what is it anyway? Herringbone?) would play that nicely with the slouchy hat form I was after. Out came the stitch dictionaries, the pencil, the calculator - maybe I could come up with something similar. Jo had mentioned a loop stitch, maybe that would work? 
I took my time, put on some music, and made a big, ugly swatch. I also came up with an idea I’m pretty hopeful about.
We’ll see.
Still, if worse comes to worse there’s always Chloe’s genius suggestion of overdying with indigo, or more likely around here, grape and blue raspberry kool-aid.
21 Nov 08 | 8:21 am
A few years ago I bought one skein of wildly variegated, thick and thin, Araucania Magallanes. If I’d been shopping for myself I never would have bought something where texture and color were having such a wild party together. But I wasn’t, I was actually looking to make a scarf for a friend of mine to whom texture is the salt of the visual universe. Plus it was really pretty in the skein. Got it home and the prettiness continued into ball form.
But all knit up it just looks barfy, like it very strongly reminds me of the time Chris Stephenson created a sensation by throwing up on the handball courts after the 6th grade pizza party. Too many color nuggets. And it isn’t soft enough. Soft enough for me certainly, but not to give as a gift.
So Magallanes has sat in the closet for years, occasionally let out to be knit up, frogged, wound, knit and frogged again as I pondered what exactly to do with her. I wouldn’t use a felted purse, and knitting her together with a strand of black or navy in imitation of this sweater would just mean having to find more of this problematic yarn. Finally Urchin came along and I thought I’d found the perfect pattern. Short rows might make the variegated color flashing more interesting, and garter stitch would work well with the thick and thinness. Plus I love hats - making them, wearing them, whatever.
I cast on and knit for 2 nights, with diminishing optimism. It’s a good pattern, but sadly not as perfect for this yarn as I had hoped. I soldiered on, thinking maybe blocking would achieve something magical, but by the end of the eighth wedge I was pretty discouraged.
Besides, I had left my glasses in San Francisco the week before and had sorta felt my way along, occasionally getting my bearings by holding the hat at arm’s length and making Marty Feldman-like faces at it, a system that wasn’t gonna work for the big picking-up stitches and kitchenering finale. Putting the hat aside and waiting for my glasses to arrive from the hotel was hard and in the end I couldn’t do it. I got antsy, mucked up the pick-up, sorta went into denial about that, and decided that a three-needle bind off was the way to go. I told myself that the seam would be barely noticeable amongst the garter and that this kind of half-assery was perfectly acceptable on a quickie project.
It was not acceptable, the bind-off was noticeable, it looked crappy, and I was still reminded of barf.
I gave up.
Meanwhile this is making me giggle, you might enjoy it too (though I recommend skipping ahead to 1:03.)
13 Nov 08 | 5:13 am
Sorta. I mean there’s 2 of them, they match, they’re attached to the sweater, and the seams are half their previous size.
Can you tell? My armpits sure can.
I was all resigned to classic set-in sleeves for this sweater when I found yet another top-down method in Knitting in the Old Way. P.G.R has you pick up 20% of the sleeve sts along the top of the armscye, slip the 1st st and purl back across, picking up 4 more sts along the armscye. You avoid holes (and all the wrapping, y.o.-ing, and safety pins usually involved in avoiding them) by picking up the first st immediately after the sts you’ve just worked. Keep on slipping, knitting, and picking up, back and forth, and ta-dah! Sleeve cap. So simple.
Great. Except here’s where the “sorta” part comes in: the sleeve cap wasn’t deep enough, so, following Nona’s excellent tutorial, I added 6 Japanese short rows. Adding short rows after the cap was pretty much a half-assed maneuver, there’s a certain funkyness about the resulting shape that’s less than ideal, but this was about my ninth sleeve attempt and I was just really, really over it.
Basically it’s a win, but with added unsatisfactory bits. Like the raisins in what you thought was a chocolate chip cookie.
12 Sep 07 | 11:12 pm
I really wish Vogue Knitting would follow Interweave’s lead and give their patterns names instead of numbers. I happily sped through the body of this little piece of chunky, summery goodness, but the sleeves are giving me a headache.
Usually when I have any sort of knitting question I turn to my friend the Internet, because I’m #16231 on the list, this means Google. In an effort to find out how other knitters have handled the sleeve situation I searched for every combination of Twinkle, Wenlan, Chia, cardigan, Vogue, spring/summer, 2007, I could think of. No luck, either no one in the webby world is as enamored of this thing as I am, or I ‘m a very bad googler indeed. Calling #28… say Chevron Cardigan (if we’re trying to be like Interweave,) or Penelope (if we’re trying to be like Debbie Bliss) might not have gotten more people to knit it, but it certainly would have made finding out how very, very alone I am quicker and easier.
Anyway, here’s the problem: this is a chunky sweater, made out of chunky yarn, and as such it has chunky seams. I know right? Who knew? It’s got four seams total, one at each shoulder and one at each armscye. Normally having these be big fatty seams would be less than ideal, but I’ve made the whole situation worse by knitting it one size too small (I think - we’ll see what blocking does.) I don’t really blame the too smallness on user error though, I blame it on this:
I know it’s sorta standard in knitting diagrams to give the body width at the hem of the garment, but I don’t think this is helping anybody decide whether the small or the medium will fit better. I went with the small, just ‘cuz that’s what I usually wear.
In good faith I knitted one sleeve as per instructions from the bottom up and sewed it into the armscye. Check it out:
Huge right? That bit on the left, by the way, is the shoulder. Not cool. In an effort to half the size of that ridge, I decided to pick up sts around the armscye and knit the sleeve from the top down, something I’d never done before with a set-in sleeve. First I went with Barbara Walker’s method, which has you pick up sts all the way around then begin short rowing, wrapping as you like. Perhaps I’m doing it wrong, but I ended up with too many sts for the circumfrence of my sleeve. I thought about decreasing them away after the short rows, but decided that would probably result in something very wonky, not so much a cute little puffed sleeve, but rather straight across the shoulder and baggy at the sides.
Hmm, what to do? I decided to seek the assistance of Our Lady of Perpetual Ingenuity. In her Kangaroo-Pouch sweater recipe E.Z. has you pick up 2/3rds of the sts around the armscye, knit straight for about an inch, then basically work a turned heel as the sleeve cap. This causes you to widen the sleeve cap by one st each row, while at the same time decreasing the circumference of the sleeve by one st each row, which (hurrah!) was exactly what I wanted to do. The result was underwhelming though.
It certainly does the job, and now I’ve got a smaller seam, but the pattern created by knitting straight and then short rowing seriously bugs me.
Besides, I think the ribbing looks better knitted from bottom-to-top than from top-to-bottom.
Can you see it too, or am I being sorta fussy and neurotic?
So far I’ve got three options:
- Knit the sleeves as the pattern directs, learn to live with the bulky seam, and hope for the best.
- Knit the sleeves as E.Z. directs, learn to live with the visible short rows, and hope for the best.
- Knit the sleeves as E.Z. directs, leaving out the inch of straight knitting in the hopes that the short rows look better flush against the picked up edge.
Right now I’m giving #28 a time-out for bad behavior and spending some quality time with the totally unfussy Big Bad Noro Shawl-Collared Thing. Yay. If anyone has any bright ideas as far as sleeve wrangling goes - please shoot them my way.
04 Sep 07 | 3:4 pm
