LEAF SWEATER PROGRESS
Back from a holiday sojourn with my husband’s family, I present my leaf sweater progress:
As you can see, the preponderance of twisted stitches (1×1 cables, not knit into the back of the stitch type twisting) do slow me down quite a bit. I can say however that I am almost done with the third 50-gram skein of Jaeger Matchmaker. Since I had just started the second before we left, I can attest to a modicum of progress. A couple people asked for close-ups of the texture pattern
Again, my poor photography skills do not do my object justice. This is however a very common twist stitch pattern, and appears as “Ribbed Leaf” on page 151 of B. Walker’s Second Treasury of Knitting Patterns. The Sarah James leaflet gives the directions in prose, very much akin to Walker’s. I however had to graph the thing out because I find working from charts much easier to do than working from prose. Here’s my chart:
On the holiday, we drove cross country from the Boston to Buffalo metro area, delighting in accompanying several zillion fellow travelers in the process. Thankfully most of them turned south and headed to New York City rather than trekking out across the upper part of the state with us. We spend a comfortable night in Utica, but send sympathy to Utica residents on what their local reviewers laud as an excellent restaurant. We found it to be grindingly mediocre at best (Italian restaurants whose sauces are both gummy and indistinguishable in texture from their pasta should be avoided). Also ear-splittingly loud.
The family and food at the end of the trip made the migration worth it, with the kids being thoroughly spoiled by their grandmother. And even us grown-ups had a chance to sneak out and have some fun visiting the Frank Lloyd Wright’s Martin House and the Roycroft cooperative over the weekend.
LEAF SWEATER AND TUBULAR CAST-ON
A day late, but not forgotten in the pre-holiday rush, I present progress on my Sarah James Ribbed Leaf Pullover:
You can see the wide twist-rib section; the tubular cast-on I used (my fave); and about 80% of the first full pattern row repeat. I’ve described the tubular cast-on before. You can also see the beginnings of the soft drape of the body, with just a bit of blousy fullness above the ribbing. My gauge is just a squidge looser than that recommended, but I am not worried about fit. I am at the top end of the pattern’s presented range of sizes. A bit more fullness won’t matter. Plus I have plenty of yarn. Two whole bags full – about six balls more than the pattern projects.
On the Jaeger Matchmaker DK, I can confirm my opinion yesterday. It’s soft. Very soft. Also a bit splitty for this particular use. I’d probably recommend a crisper, more tightly spun yarn for maximum texture effect, but this one is serviceable for the purpose and I like the hand of the fabric that’s resulting. I am a bit disappointed in quality though. I’m only on my second ball, and I’ve found more than a half dozen spots where a ply was spliced. No whole strand knots, but lots of repaired ply breakage. Most were large enough to be noticeable and I ended up cutting them out. That means more ends to end off. Also, I suspect that the luscious softness of this Merino yarn will display a typical weakness – pilling. I noticed that when ripping back, the yarn looks more used and fuzzy than I would normally expect. It mates with itself an exceptional amount for a superwash. All that easily encouraged surface fuzz usually bodes badly for pilling down the road. I’ll keep an eye on that.
In the mean time, I’ll be taking a computer vacation for a couple of days, and will catch up with both wiseNeedle and String after the holiday. If you’re in the US – may your long weekend be a pleasant one whether it be away with family or cozy at home. If you’re overseas, were my house to be big enough, I’d wish I could invite you all over for dinner.
PROJECT KICK-OFF – SARAH JAMES RIBBED LEAF MOCK TURTLENECK
Well, faced with all the knitting I HAVE to do, plus an upcoming holiday week with some time to (potentially) do some but with a limited noodling window, I have done the only impractical thing. I’ve opted to knit none of the above. I decided to do a commercial pattern with little or no alterations (for maximum mindlessness) and produce a sweater I can wear to work.
I’ve opted to knit Sarah James Ribbed Leaf mock turtleneck. I am using Jaeger Matchmaker, in a medium charcoal gray. I don’t see any on-line write-ups of anyone else who has tried this one, so I can’t compare/contrast experiences with other knitters.
I’ve gotten about one skein into the thing. Past the twist stitch ribbing (using my favorite tubular cast-on) and about two inches into the body. I did end up graphing out the texture pattern from the prose directions in the leaflet.
I have some cautions on this pattern. This is knit in DK or sport weight, at a gauge of 6.6spi. Two main body motifs (33 stitches) should equal 5 inches across. Gauge is taken over the pattern and if you knit up a gauge square according to the directions in the pattern, room exists for considerable error (more on this below). The entire pattern is produced using copious twist stitches, and they carpet every right-side row. Wrong-side rows are purled. The preponderance of twist stitches does make for slow knitting, and allows ample scope (for me at least) for stitches to be inadvertently dropped. I’ve had to go back several times now and rescue a loose stitch several rows back. Because of the heavy twisting, if I don’t catch a dropped stitch within one or two rows, I can’t easily ladder down and re-knit. All the entire intervening rows have to be ripped back and reworked.
Taken together these things mean that this pattern isn’t for those who like quick knits at big gauges and who are less than comfortable with precise patterning. It is good however for those who are looking for a very attractive project that will be wearable indoors and out; that will allow purchase of smaller gauge yarns that can often be found on special due to reduced demand; and that will take a while to complete (more knitting time per dollar invested).
Now on the problem with the gauge square instructions, the pattern directs the knitter to cast on 33 stitches and work Pattern 2 (the leaf motif body) for 28 rows. Then cast off, block or wash, dry, and measure the swatch – which should measure 5 inches square. The problem here is that for many knitters, the first several and last several stitches are not knit at the same gauge as the interior of the swatch.
Casting on only 33, then measuring edge to edge, taking these sometimes distorted stitches into account can introduce an error, making the gauge appear to be fewer stitches per inch than it actually is. Someone with this problem will find that their work ends up being smaller than expected based on their swatch. I’d advocate casting on for three repeats (49 stitches) and knitting more than the one full pattern repeat. The texture pattern however would make counting gauge very difficult. This can be addressed by taking two contrasting color lengths of sewing thread or other fine string and laying one between the 8th and 9th stitch and one between the 41st and 42nd stitch (there should be 33 between them). Every other row or so I’d flip the thread or string up the column, laying it through the the spot between those same stitches. Over time, the thread will look like it’s been basted through the work vertically, leaving clear lines between which gauge can be accurately measured. The same thing can be done with row count, threading a colored thread horizontally through a row life-line style a couple of rows up from the bottom, and a couple of rows before ending off, having counted out 28 rows from the first one marked. A larger than directed square of this type can now be washed, blocked and measured, and the gauge confidently extrapolated from the “prime” area so delineated in the center.
You wanted pix? Tomorrow. My camera is out of batteries.
BEGINNING TO BECOME HUMAN AGAIN
UPDATE: AN EASY TO PRINT FULL PAGE VERSION OF THIS DESIGN IS NOW AVAILABLE AT THE EMBROIDERY PATTERNS LINK, ABOVE.
I met my major deadline today, and am beginning to decompress. The best way to do that is to think of something completely different, so I’ve begun to contemplate patterns in general, with some idle thought to my Spanish hat. So I began playing with motifs I have lying around. Like this one
I don’t think this particular one is great for the hat, but I have an odd fondness for it, plain as it is. As the source annotation states, it’s one of the patterns I included in The New Carolingian Modelbook. While it looks like it would be at home as a border on the wall of a 1950s era tiled bathroom, it does in fact date back to 1546 by specific annotation. It may well have appeared elsewhere, although most of the da Sera patterns are pretty unique to his books. (If you think pattern piracy is rife these days, you’ll not be surprised by 16th century publishing ethics).
This particular pattern would work as nicely for stranding or for knit/purl textures as it does in cross stitch or other forms of counted thread embroidery. In fact it would have a number of advantages if done in knit/purl:
- Complete reversibility
- Low curl factor – roughly equivalent amounts of knit and purl
- Deep texturing – the knit/purl sections would pull in a bit like ribbing unless strongly blocked
- Ease of memorization – purl rows mimic the lay of the knit rows below them, and there are only two different row patternings, alternating blocks of k2, p2, and alternating blocks of k6, p6
So I put it here in part to make up for the consternation I caused with yesterday’s subject line.
KNIT REPAIR
Today I document a Good Deed.
A co-worker, all puppy eyes and pleading, brought his favorite sweater to me yesterday. He bought it in Ireland, and practically lives in it all winter. He’d caught the elbow on something sharp, and cut a strand. And then the snag started to run. He asked me if I could fix it.
The sweater is of good quality, rustic finish wool. It looks like it was knit from two strands of sport or guernsey weight. The seams are machine-sewn, and there’s a nice “commando collar” – double thick ribbing, inset in a V, with a low turtleneck finish and center zipper. I’m not a machine knitter, so I’m not really up on what can and cannot be done using one, but the cables are not deeply embossed. They’re all formed by traveling stitches rather than multiple-stitch cable crossings.
Still, it’s a particularly nice and obviously beloved item. So I brought it home to fix.
Fixing hand knits with runs in them should be second nature to most knitters. First, you want to identify the break. Then if a run or ladder has developed, you want to spot the bottom-most good stitch that sits below the run. That’s the one that needs to be secured, and the one that you’ll use later in the repair. In this case, I secured it temporarily with a safety pin so it wouldn’t ladder down any farther.
If the yarn has broken, the ends need to be secured. Since this is a nice, sticky, traditional finish wool, the stitches left and right of the broken one hadn’t raveled side to side. (A plus for working with real wool). I reinforced them gently on the wrong side with some darning yarn of the same color, taking care not to let my repair show through to the front. Then I smoothed out the lumpy ladder, separating the rungs. Obviously there was one rung missing – the one that would have been formed by the broken strand. I laid some long stitches across that spot with my matching darning yarn until I had approximately the thickness of the original yarn built up.
Then I took a crochet hook and starting with that stitch at the base of the run, I re-formed the knitting stitches. I did this by pulling each rung through the stitch below it. Luckily this particular repair occurred in a plain stockinette area. I didn’t have to deal with crossed stitches or purls.
Once I had re-built all of the stitches, I had one top stitch that needed to be secured. Again I was lucky. This particular column of stitches “dead ended” at a traveling stitch cable. I used my darning yarn to take a tiny stitch, securing the loose loop to the side of the cable at the point where it would have been eaten by the decrease that formed the cable’s movement.
Here’s the result (not that my lousy photography skills and a charcoal gray subject make it any easier to see):
The formerly broken bit is in the top center of the sleeve that lies across the body, roughly below the zipper slider. You can’t see it, but take my word for it – the repair is totally invisible.
So, today’s morals are:
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Don’t toss damaged hand-knits in a corner in despair. You can use your knitting-developed skills to rescue some of them. and
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Ease of repair down the road is yet another reason to use the best quality materials you can afford.
SOCK DEMISE AND MORE SNAKES
While I’m still under deadline pressure here and have not gotten to the Spanish Hat, I do have some knitting-related musings to report today.
The first is sock yarn wear. I have knit pretty much the same sock in terms of fit since shortly after I began knitting socks. This is especially true for socks knit with sock yarn or fingering weight yarn. I’ve also stuck to a group of sock yarns that are a mix of washable wool and nylon – the standards, Fortissima, Socka, Regia, and Melienweit – all major labels and not house brands or knockoffs. And I’ve not changed the way I care for them. I still do the soak, spin, air dry thing rather than subjecting them to more stressful full machine washing. AND I am always knitting more, increasing the numbers of pairs I own, so that individual pairs are worn less frequently.
So why then are my socks wearing out faster?
This is a big mystery to me. I have several pairs of Fortissima and Socka socks that are pushing their 10th birthday, and were among the first I knit. They’re fine. A bit floppy, but not significantly abraded or worn through. I have other socks knit in the past year that are already showing holes at the ball of the foot.
There doesn’t seem to be any correlation between yarn maker and sock failure. Nor does the failure seem to be related to gauge, since all the victims were knit on the same size needles.
So. Is anyone else experiencing this? Or is it just me…
The second is a product of the need to do mindless knitting. I started another Snake Scarf, knit from an extravagance – Schaefer Yarn’s Helene. This yarn is next-to-skin soft, with all the luster of silk. It is however an Aran weight/light bulky weight single, and like all singles spun from soft yarns, has a tendency to split. I suspect that it will also catch a bit. But it’s lovely stuff, and giving the scarf away will be difficult to do. I can’t identify the exact Schaefer color combo my Helene is (I bought it over a year ago and lost the tag), but it’s mostly navy and raspberry, with hints of brown. The color repeat is however quite short, and does not produce the eye popping striped effect of longer color run yarns. (I’ll be posting a yarn review of the stuff soon).
Still, the subtle mottled effect doesn’t fight too badly with the scarf’s basic wiggly shape or stitch direction, so I’m pleased. On another note, I see that my original write-up of the snake scarf’s beginning is flawed. I’ll be correcting it later this week from my new working notes. Apologies to everyone who has been challenged by it. On the bright side, I only got one note from a confused knitter. The thing is so dead-simple that most people appear to have taken the error in stride and weren’t tripped up by it.
REDACTION AND LIFE INTRUDES AGAIN
On the pattern redaction, Karen suggests that the 1892 pattern is the traditional Print o’ the Wave Shetland lace knitting motif documented in several places. The best example of it is in Sharon Miller’s Heirloom Knitting. The Eunny Jang wave stole pattern I just completed has a variant of it, too.
I reply that this pattern, although clearly of the same lineage, is different. It employs no double decreases, and minimizes the side to side movement of the wave element. I’m on hold noodling it out, between work-related deadlines and holiday preparations with the kids, I had no time to myself yesterday.
On the serendipitous end, the kids are finally old enough and use-specific tools have gotten safer enough to let them loose to carve their own pumpkins. Except for he icky scooping out the innards part (and rescuing the pumpkin seeds for toasting) they did them entirely by themselves this year.
So on hold right now are my Spanish hat; the repair, finish and block of the Wave stole; finishing the decipher of this pattern; plus beginning my holiday gift knitting. I have promised six pairs of socks plus several other small pieces as yet to be determined.
REDACTING 1892 INSERTION PATTERN
As you can tell from my intermittent posting of late, things are hectic here at String. Work deadlines intrude again into life, and promises made to family members in support of the upcoming costumed festivities eat up additional time. I can report that the mini-pirate costume is done (shown here during the family Halloween party sponsored by my kid-friendly workplace:
Gotta love those sneakers!
On the knitting front, I finished the edging on the Wave scarf, but was unable to do the final grafting and repair yesterday evening because we had no power at our house. Windstorms in our area took down trees and electrical lines. We were out from around 4:00 on. I also didn’t get a chance to burrow into my stash to look for the yarn I wish to use for the Spanish hat.
Instead I toyed with an antique pattern from Knitting Essentials: Knitters Historical Pattern Series Volume One. This is a reproduction edition of Butterick’s Art of Knitting, published in 1892. The editor for the repro edition is Melissa Johnson. Amazon’s on-line peek inside feature gives a good representation of the book’s contents. The particular pattern I was noodling with is on page 19. It’s called “Vine Pattern for Stripe.” In the book it’s described as “pretty knitted in cotton or wool…and may be used as an insertion or as a stripe for spreads, afghans, etc.” I’ve seen some similar things in other pattern books, most notably the zig-zag edges, but not in this exact combo, with the edging done on both sides of a faux cable.
When I saw it I thought it might make an interesting base for a narrow scarf. The directions are in this format, pretty standard for the time:
First row – slip 1, k 1, tho o, n, th o, n, th o, k 1, th o, k 2, n, k 4, n, k 2, th o, sl and b, th o, sl and b, th o, sl and b, k 1
Deciphering them isn’t too tough. slip 1 and k 1 are still standard today. “th o” is “throw over” – a yarn over. “n” is narrow – knit 2 tog; and “sl and b” is the abbreviation for slip1, k1 and bind off – the equivalent of SSK.
I graphed out each of the lines as represented and started in on the thing. But like so many old patterns, this one is chock full of errors. That’s probably why it hasn’t appeared in later pattern collections. And the engraving isn’t a literal interpretation of the directions. If you look very closely at the openwork zig-zags on the left, you’ll see they aren’t complements of the ones on the right. They look oddly twisted, without the neat chain like construction of the ones on the right. That’s because the person who knitted up the sample from which the original illustration was drawn used plain old K2tog decreases throughout. You’ll find this a lot in older openwork patterns – the left leaning complement to the right leaning K2 tog was not universally known or used.
In any case, the pattern’s writer did make an attempt to use complementary left and right decreases. The only problem is that he or she didn’t put them in the right places. The pattern as written doesn’t form the neat lines shown, so further redacting on my part is needed. Stay tuned…
Now if only my days were 36 hours long, I’d have time enough to get everything done. And knit…
WAVE SCARF PROGRESS
Back from a business trip, I exhibit productivity.
I was able to get work in during the plane rides and layovers. I’ve managed to get quite a bit further along on the Wave scarf’s edging: Overall, if I were to do this pattern again instead of following it verbatim, I’d change the ratio of attachment to make it a bit less ruffly, and I’d up the rate of attachment at the corners to diminish the cupping that occurs at the corners.
These things might have been less in evidence if I had chosen a wool yarn for my stole. I used linen, with very little stretch. When you use an unstretchy cotton, silk, or linen yarn for a pattern written out for wool, you need to be much more precise in the rate of attachment and in working the corners because you can’t rely on natural elasticity to even out tight or loose bits.
Obviously aggressive blocking is called for here, even though it will be only partly successful.
As to where I went and what I did – if you saw a tall gal with glasses and short dark hair knitting on this project in Logan, Chicago Midway or Dallas/Ft. Worth airports over the weekend – that was me.
WAVE SCARF – ROUNDING SECOND
Back to the Print o’ the Wave scarf/stole. I didn’t have enough time to sit down and noodle out a hat last night. Invention tends to happen over the weekends here at string. Instead I continued on with the knit-on edging. I’m within an hour or so of completing the second side and working the second corner. At that point I’ll be about half done, as I began my edging pretty close to the first corner.
The thing looks wing-shaped because I’ve got a zillion remaining live stitches picked up around the circumference all on a single circular.
Aside from the error in the chart described before, I’ve experienced no problems with the edging. It’s taking forever, but if you’re a process knitter like me, that’s a design feature, not a bug. The only remaining debate about this piece is to whom I will give it as a holiday present.
String-Or-Nothing 