WORKING REPORT – LACY SCARF
Thank you to everyone who wrote to say that they liked the level of detail in these posts. I blush a bit. I’m writing a blog that I’d find interesting to read. But my mom’s main point is taken – not every post need be essay length. I’ll try to make things a bit more readable, perhaps splitting longer thoughts over two or more days.
Lacy Scarf
I ran into a temporary snag on the lacy scarf pattern, but I think I’ve beaten the problem.
I chose a bunch of texture patterns thatI thought would lookgood together. Lots of play among them on diamonds and sharp diagonals. My idea was to knit a pattern panel at each end of the scarf, and use a simpler, coordinating pattern between them for the scarf body, with the entire piece trimmed with a killer edging.
I drafted up my patterns, and swatched each one. Here’s where the mistake came in. I’ve got**just enough**yarn with no chance of getting more, so I swatched each pattern in turn by itself, ripping back and re-using the yarn between swatches. Each looked great on its own, so I cast on and began the piece as a whole. End pattern #1 worked fine. The welted eyelet divider looked fine. But the simpler plain diamond pattern for the scarf body was wrong, wrong, wrong. The proportions of the diamonds just didn’t fit the proportions of the end pattern. They fought, and the piece looked way too busy.
So in a Wile E.Coyote moment, it was back to the drawing board. I decided to go with a contrasting pattern/texture. I had played with the rick-rack rib stitch in the Zen scarf pattern. It looked nice enough in a large gauge, but the texture didn’t really come out. I decided to play with it some more. I separated each column of the zig-zag by a column of p1, k1, p1. I like the look and I think that it’s enough different from the first panel to stand on its own:
Thinking on the edging I’ve graphed out, I think am going to have the same problem. I’ll scout around today to see if I can find something narrower that has a coordinating presentation.
The yarn is wonderful. It’s a hand-spun super-soft Merino wool, labeled as laceweight, but actually closer to fingering. (I’ll add a yarn review after the project is finished and blocked). It’s fromGreenwood Hill Farm, asmall producer here in Massachusetts, and is my souvenier from this year’s Gore Place Sheepshearing Festival. It’s a rustic-looking two-ply yarn in that there are thick and thin/tightly spun and looser spun, fluffysections on each ply. This makes a very informal feeling bit of lacy knitting – snuggly rather than crisp. (You can see some o the slubby, puffy sections in the piece above – look at the top corner of the top leftmost diamond.) It knits up evenly, there’s none of the kinking back on itself I’ve found in some other small-production hand-spun yarns. One minor annoyance – there was quite a bit of tiny, sharp vegetable fragments in the first third of my skein – about one thorn or spriglet every two inches. I understand the logistical problems/economics ofwhy these shards remain.I don’t expect this type of sheep-to-knitterenterprise to produce pristine yarn; but it’s a minor pain to keep the tweezers on hand to pull out the stickers as one knits. In spite of the rustic look and occasional tiny thorn, thisyarn slides like butter and feels like a cloud. It’s the absolute poster-child for non-itchy natural Merino. I’ve got about 400 yards, enough for a very short overlap style inside-the-coat scarf (as opposed to a wrap-around-the-neck grand scarf). If it performs as I expect it will, I’ll be trying out their sport weight real soon.
Another departure from my original idea: At first, I was going to work this scarf like I didmy Kombu Scarf – starting with a strip of edging, picking up along its spine, then working the edgings at the same time as the scarf body. I decided to work it differently this time, just for the sake of the challenge.
I am going to knit the entire center strip, end to end. Then starting in the scarf’s center (the part usually at the back of the neck), I’ll knit on the edging. I willcalculate the length of each edgingrepeat, so I should be able to work in an even number to the corner. If the edging I end up using is narrow and flexibleenough, I might be able towrap the corner easily, working an extra iteration on the cornerto avoid cupping. If it ends up being too wide for that I think I’ll try mitering the corner with short-rowsto makea nice, finished end. Remember,both approaches are"in theory." I’m not quite sure how I’ll go aboutthe cornersyet. In the mean time, I’ll just keep knitting the center strip.
WORKING REPORT – FULLED PILLOW II
Today I’ll keep it short. My mom found this blog and has told me that I go on so long it’s too much like work to be enjoyable reading.
I’ve finished the garter stitch tube destined to be The Small One’s pillow. I intend to full it as-is, then add some sort of buton or trim to fasten the ends. Although one can never be certain, based on previous experience with this yarn I’m anticipating 40% shrinkage in length and about 10-15% in width. It’s 26 x 14 inches (66 x 36 cm), so I should end up with somethingin the neighborhood of 15.5 x 12 inches (40 x 30 cm). That would let me use a 12-inch square pillow form, in a style similar to the Manos pillow.
Of course, I have to winkle her out of the thing first. She’s taken a liking to it as some sort of kid-specific cocoon:
Which makes me think that knitting up a cuddly tube to use as a nap-sack wouldn’t be a bad idea at all. Hmm….
GADGETS – STRICKMUHLE
A while back I asked for advice on buying one of those little hand-cranked I-cord knitting machines. I now present the outcome. This one is very definitely a boutique sort of item. Not everyone has use for miles of I-cord. I do.
I knit lots of baby booties using the pattern Ann Kreckel posted to the KnitList in the summer of 1995. The pattern is available at Woolworks. There’s a similar pattern in Taunton Press’ Knitting Tips and Trade Secrets. I make them as gifts for friends and family, or for charitable donation.
I don’t have any finished booties on hand right now and my sock yarn stash is in the storage cubby, otherwise I’d whip up a pair to photograph. I’ve modified the pattern a little bit, knitting the cuff with fewer rows so that it is more rolled than folded. I also like the look of I-cord rather than crocheted, braided or longitudinally knitted ties. But I-cord is tedious. It takes me almost as long to knit the I-cord ties as it does to make a bootie, so I splurged on a gizmo to do it for me.
About three years ago I got sick of hand-knitting the ties. I looked at the Bond Magicord Machine, the Inox Strickmuhle, and a couple of older models I found on eBay. Both the Inox and Bond machines have changed from the ones available at that time. Except for color, they’re now identical, both sporting little clear plastic sleeves surrounding a 4-hook needle bed.
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My older version of the Strickmuhle has no sleeve, uses a different type of weight, and has a protruding arm to position the yarn feed:
Back when I bought this one there was a big difference in quality between the Magicord and the Inox, with the Inox being much sturdier. Now they’re the same machine, so any differences will be in the accompanying documentation (if any).
You can see the hook-weight on mine(there’s a block of metal inside). On the newer models the hook-weightappears to have been replaced by some sort of clip. Mine also came with a second slightly smaller collar (that’s the blue circle that you can see sticking up among the four hooks). In theory, the smaller collar should be used for fingering and 3-ply yarns, and the larger one should be used for sport and DK, but I’ve never found the two collar sizes to have any effect on ease of production or I-cord evenness.
My machine works best on fingering through DK weight yarn, with best results from sport weight (6 spi). I’ve forced some Cascade 220 worsted through it (5 spi). It worked, and I got I-cord that I later used in a fulling project, but I wouldn’t recommend it for worsted as a matter of course. There’s areal knack to using this toy, especially with heavier yarns. Starting a new cord can be especially trying.
I did pick up a couple of starting tips from the French language instruction card (it came with a French, German and English card, but my English card was missing) – When starting out, make a loop, then stuff the yarn end into the tube’s body. Hang the weight from the loop. Then lay the yarn and turn the crank VERY slowly, skipping every other hook on the first round. You will be using Hook #1,Hook #3, then Hook #2 and finally Hook #4. After you get to Hook #4 you can let the yarn feed without skipping hooks. The combo of constant weight on the dangling yarn, plus the skipping-hook row produces a nice even end and minimizes the un-caught stitches that can make starting a cord difficult.
Once a cord is started, the thing does work quite easily. I often hand off my gizmo to one of my kids and have her crank out the required length. My weight isn’t as convenient as the spring clips, but I can move it up the cord if I need more yardage than the 5-year old is tall. Ending off is easy. I snip the yarn and keep turning the crank until the cord falls through. Then I use a tapestry needle and the dangling end to thread through the cord’s four loops. If I’m making bootie ties, I don’t bother making a two separate cords. Because starting is the trickiest part of operation I make a single cord that’s double long, plus a couple of rows – then snip the thing in the middle and bind off the two new ends.
Looking around, I see other people playing with these toys. Jenanne posted a summary of her experiments with the new version Bond and an Aran weight yarn (4.5 spi). Kate at Will Knit for Food also wrote about making I-cord from worsted weight yarns, then fulling it for bag handles.
Other than cost ,limits on the weight of the yarns it can handle, the difficulty of holding the thing, the yarn and cranking all at the same time (I wish it had a table clamp), and some trickiness starting off a new cord, my biggest disappointment is that the user is unable to alter the number of hooks being used. You get four-stitch I-cord. That’s all. One of the pre-1940s-vintage German-made all-metal machines I was tracking on eBay came with 6 hooks, and could be used with as few as two (sort of as a turbocharged lucet).
I also ran across the Hobby-Knit on eBay:
It looks interesting, but I couldn’t get anyone to confirm whether or not it could be used with a variable number of hooks. Also the very few of them that seemed to offered in operational condition were selling for upwards of $100. Much more than I could justify for such a trivial function.
If anyone knows more about this vintage toy, feel free to clue me in.
CHARTING SOFTWARE – GRAPHIC BUT NOT VIOLENT
Some people have sent in questions about how I am charting up the patterns I intend to use in the lacy scarf. In specific, they wanted to know if I am using one of the commercially available dedicated charting program.
I’ve tried demos for almost all of them. Alsoabout four years agoI broke down and bought Garment Styler Goldand Stitch Painter. I was sorely dissapointed in the usability of themodules and the quality of support available for both of those programs. Fewer than half of GS’s features worked and repeated requests for help were answered by "Sorry. It’s your machine and not our problem," in spite of the fact that I was able to replicate the failures on five more machines running an assortment of video cards and operating system versions. On top of that, Stitch Painter was primitive at best, and interfaced very poorly with the GS main program. Both may have gotten better since then, but I didn’t want to throw good money after bad.
Since2002 I’ve beenusing Sweater Wizardfor garment design assistancewith no problems. I didn’t get the companion Stitch and Motif Maker program.AlthoughI was a beta tester for the new version of SMM, andfound theprogramto beextremely handy,it’s not a major improvement over what I’m using now.What I really want is acombo program that truly integrates both garment design and motif design, producing shaped charts based on actual garment dimensions, or can superimpose garment outlines on a larger charted piece (like in Rowan and Jaeger magazines).
I’ve also fooled around with AranPaint. It’s a shareware program that produces custom graphs of texture patterns. The registered user version is the same as the demo, but restores the ability to print. AP does a nice job of charting simple cable and twisted-stitch texture pattern repeats. It’s able to produce a visual mock-up of what the design will look like, a chart with (more or less) standard symbols, and a prose printout of the directions. It’s biggest limitation is the small number of different symbols/stitches it can represent. AP can display/chartK, P, bobble, and 2 to 6 stitch cable crossings, not including most of the more eccentric ones (biggest lack – no YO). It also has a space limitation on the area. 50×50 stitches isbig enough for most people, but not big enough for many of the things I do. If an update of this one ever comes out and it includes more stitches, I’ll cheerfully pay for an upgrade.
My interim motif/stitch solution is to use Microsoft Visio Professionalas a stand-alone charting program. I regularly useit in my real-world work – answering Requests for Proposal (RFPs) for engineering and telecom companies.Visio isnot cheap. I certainly wouldn’t recommend anyone run out and buy a $400+ pro-grade drafting program just for graphing up knits when Stitch and Motif Maker can be had for less than a quarter of that. ButI couldn’t justify spending more on aboutique program (no matter how good) when the big boy could be tweaked to serve the same purpose.
I’ve concocted a series of stencils that contain all of the symbols I use, plus line and stitch numbers and 10×10 and 5×5 master grids. Each symbol is a small graphic unit, and all are predicated on little squares. I assemble my graphs square by square, building them like a little kid builds a wall of alphabet blocks by dragging over the symbols I need. Here’s a screen shot:
I used this to make all my graphs, including the extremely large one that accompanies the Raiisa lacy T on wiseNeedle. The screen shot shows just the basic knitting symbol shapes on the first stencil. Additional shapes are available on the cables and increases/decreases stencils (seen at the bottom of the green column). I built each shape myself, using plain oldsquares and rectanglesand the standard Arial font. While I haven’t incorporated any rules-based properties formy stitch shapesyet, each one does have a pop-up help window that gives a how-to for that particular stitch for both right-side and wrong-side implementation.
I can create more symbols as I please, adding them to the stencils if necessary. For example, if I’m charting colorwork, I’ll create a contrast color block for each color I intend on using, then store them on a separate stencil to re-use as needed. I even use stencils to store commonly used motifs, like the quaternary star that shows up as snowflake in so many Scandinavian patterns:
Symbols can be grouped, rotated, mirrored or arranged in layers.There are limitations:
- I can’t select all the squares of one color and change them to another unless I’ve placedor senteach color on its own drawing layer (think stacked transparencies, each bearing just one color of the design). If I’ve sorted my motifs this way into layers, I can flood-fill all of the boxes on one layer with the same new color.
- The *.jpgs produced by Visio are very large. I need to run them through something like Macromedia Fireworks to reduce resolution and size so that they’re not unwieldy for Web placement. The star above was 552 KB, which I slimmed down to 12 kb using Fireworks.
- There’s no "flood fill" with a chosen symbol. I can’t draw just the foreground, then flood the background with purls unless I create an all-purl layer and superimpose a layer bearing my motif upon it.
There’s no particular reason why any other drafting/drawing program with a stamp or stencil feature and layers can’t be tweaked this way. One final warning – Visio drawings and stencils in their native format are difficult to export to other drawing/drafting programs. They can be viewed by anyone using the free Visio viewer provided by Microsoft. Visio can export to many formats, including *.jpg, *.gif and several specific to various commonly used CADD platforms. But those are one-way solutions that send over images of the final product, not components that can be further manipulated. I work inside Visio, then export to *.jpgor print via Acrobat if I need to post a graph on the Web.
I’ve offered up my stencils before, but so far no one has been interested. I’ve got templates for Visio 5 and Visio 2000. The 2000 set should also work in Visio 2003. If sufficient demand is seen, I’ll postboth setson wiseNeedle in the tools section.
WORKING REPORT – LACY SCARF/FULLED PILLOW II
The past two days’ posts aside, I have been making progress on bothmy lacy scarf andmy fulled pillow. Knitting on the pillow is almost done. I’ve got maybe one more evening of garter stitch left. This weekend I intend on fulling it when I do laundry. I’m rushing a bit on it because I want to be sure to be able to full it completely before I have to leave this washing machine behind (it was a negotiated sacrifice in my house sale). I’m afraid the older hand-me-down machine at the new house might not be up to the challenge.
On the lacy scarf, I’ve finished re-graphing the patterns I intend on trying out. I’m working on modifying them a bit so that they play off each other better. I’m also narrowing the edging by either messing with or eliminating the double column of faggotting shown in the pattern original.
For those new to the term, faggotting is a true lace knitting stitch, in whichincreases and decreases occuron every row (as opposed to a lacy knitting stitch, in which rowscontaining increases and decreases alternate with plain knitted or purled rows). One common form of this effect when worked in the flat takes only two stitches and two rows for the entire repeat. Row 1 would be an endless repeat of the (YO, SSK) unit. The accompanying Row 2 would be an endless repeat of (YO P2tog).
So? Why is it called "faggotting" anyway? [Warning. This is a Kim-theory, so go chip yourself an enormous grain of salt before reading on.]
It’s not immediately evident why the name stuck to this particular knitting texture stitch.In historical usage, faggots are bundles of sticks – especially twiggy sticks used as kindling or cheap firewood. Nothing much looks bundledif you examine justknitted pieces. But if you look at those pieces in in the context of other needlework contemporary to the Great Whitework Cotton Knitting Craze of the mid to late 1800s the reasoning is pretty clear.
Withdrawn thread embroidery was one of those contemporaryneedlework styles. Commonly used for hemming or decorative insertions, it can range from the pretty simple to the amazingly complex. The sampler below shows several withdrawn thread patterns spanning several different substyles (the lacy white-on-white bits). Disclaimer and attribution: this sampler isn’t my own work, it’s a piece in the collection of the National Academy of Needle Artsthat I found doing a Google image search. I didn’t find a more exact attribution on their website for it. Great work though!
The topthree little bands on the sampler are the most widely known and used forms of the technique. The others, while nifty aren’t as often seen. The two most common names for this substyle that includes the top three are "Italian Hemstitching" and "Faggotting." The multicolor bands are double running stitch (aka Holbein Stitch or Spanish Stitch).
You can see in the openwork bandsthat the horizontal threads of the linen groundweresnipped at the left and right, then teased out. The cut ends were secured with stitches, usually before any cutting took place. The remaining vertical threads were bundled tightly with tiny hemming stitches that tie the fabric threads together like little bunches of sticks. In the more complex forms on this sampler, these bundleswere further embellished with threads woven in among them, orwere subdivided and/or twisted by additional stitching.
The second strip of the sampler with it’s running VVVVVs is the most interesting one for knitters. Compare the zig-zag pattern of one often-seen type ofknitted faggotting:
The zig-zags produced by faggotting in knitting mimic thegroups of verticalscreatedin withdrawn thread hemstitching. That’s where the bundle idea came in, andfrom where I believe the knitting stitchborrowed its name. This snippet is excerpted from Lewis’ Knitting Lace, p. 146 (Yow! I just saw the used bookprice. Ineed to update my insuranceto cover my library!)
Math! Knitting! Math!
Here’s an article that rises above the usual run of cutesy "ain’t your gramma’s knittin’" drivel:
http://news.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=627352003
It’s wildly immodest to quote oneself, but it’s an "I told you so" moment. I posted this to the KnitList back around ’95: "Knitting is at its fundamentals, a binary code featuring top-down design, standardized submodules, and recursive logic that relies on ratios, mathematical principles, and an intuitive grasp of three-dimensional geometry."
So all knitters should hold their heads high. Even the most math-anxious among usare using neurons that have atrophied among the population as a whole.
TOO CUTE
O.k. I don’t do ‘cute,’ and as a rule I refrain from domestic blather. But this weekend past was Mothers’ Day and I believe that gives me license.
My Kindergartner gave me a hand-drawn Mom Book as a present. In it I discovered this page:
What I really liked was the self-portrait in the rainbow sweater (extra big, just so you know the relative importance of the individuals involved); and the knitting needles heldlike picadors’ lances by the drab mom (implied threat negated by big smile). Yarn though is curiously absent, so my guess is that process is less important than product to the average self-absorbed 5-year old. Especially when she or he is to betherecipient of a custom-made present.
Good thing I’d just finished her poncho or the book would have ended with the page captioned "My mom is old." That one I leave to your imagination.
DEJA VU ALL OVER AGAIN
Yesterday I went out web-walking – mostly to read other people’s blogs. I came across Life in the Frogpond, and a post on it made earlier in the week by Becky of skinnyrabbit.com. She was looking at vintage tennis sweater patterns, and offered up this one from a1956 Bernat Handicrafter pattern leaflet (this scan is Becky’s, but the original copyright on both pattern and image is held by Emile Bernat & Sons):
I collapsed into a pile of amusement, because my mother had knit this **exact** sweater for my uncle when he was a teenager, probably circa 1958 or so. This sweater still exists! I have it in my closet right now:
It’s held up extremely well. No excessive wear, weak spots or moth holes in the entire piece, although once natural color ecru wool has aged somewhat to a beige/light yellow, and somewhere along the line aggressive laundering seems to have migrated some of the dye from the blue stripes.
Not only do I have the piece, I also have a photo of ME wearing it as a teen. This is from my high school yearbook. As you can tell from the wire frame glasses, nerd-bunch hair and wide shirt collar, was taken in the ’70s:
Now that I’ve dated myself, I can also say that this46-year old tennie is waiting for my own Tween-ager should she want to wear it when she’s big enough.
Moral of the story: Use good wool. It lasts forever.
UPDATE:
I got my wish. Younger Offspring, sporting the same sweater, circa 2014.
WORKING REPORT – LACE SCARF; ANOTHER FULLED PILLOW
Having finished the poncho yesterday, I scuff around with what little yarn remains here in the house (my stash being stowed in the storage cubby pending our upcoming move.)
At theGore Place SheepshearingFestival last month I bought two skeins of hand-spunfine gaugeMerinofrom Greenwood Hill Farm. Each is around200 yards so I have about 400 yardstotal. In my opinion it’s more like a light fingering weight than a truelace weight. I bought them with a lacy scarf in mind. No pattern in particular. I thought I’d noodle out one on my own.
I’ve decided to make a piece with two fancy ends, a rather plain but coordinating lacy middle, andtrimmed all the way around with a killer edging.
I swatched on several size needles, and decided I liked the way that lacy stitches felt when knit on a US #6. (That’s an argument that this stuff is trulyfingering weight, because I like lace weight knit on #3s.) Gauge is hard to estimate because I haven’t decided on pattern stitches yet, but I’m not worried about making a scarf fit. The various lacypatterns I played with worked up at between 5.5 and 5 stitches per inch, so I know roughly how wide a pattern I should be looking for to make a scarf of around 5 inches in diameter.
To that end I started paging through some of my knitting books and stitch dictionaries today. I found several things that had elements I liked. First, I found a wide diamond band in Lewis’ Knitting Lace (pattern #42). Nice wide diamond frames, filled with a smaller diamond pattern in the center. It’s a 12-stitch repeat, with 2 stitches before and one stitch after the end repeats. That’s 15 total for one repeat. Narrow, but I’m planning on adding an edging.
To complement the diamond pattern, I’m looking at a couple of simple lace grounds. Right now the leading candidate is a mini leaf pattern from Walker 1 (p.215, #3 in the set), but I’m not sure it will work out. I’d like to use a divider to set this pattern off from the diamonds. I’ve always liked a plain row of YO, K2tog framed by garter stitch welts.
Finally we get to the killer edging. I’m looking at Heirloom Knitting by Miller, the Victorian Zigzag Edging on p. 125. That’s a WIDE piece as written – 20 stitches at cast-on, widening to 26. I might have to eliminate some of the openwork on the attachment side to slim it down some.
The next step is to swatch a bit with each of the given patterns. Before I do that however, I’m going to redraft them using a uniform symbol set and put all the patterns I intend to try out on one sheet of paper. It’s easy enough to adapt to each book’s ideosyncratic style of stitch representation, but it’s a pain to switch gears between systems and flop all those heavyvolumes around while I’m knitting.
I give no guarantee that this process will lead to an Actual Design. I begin two or three of these for every one that ends up as an on-the-needles project.
In the mean time just to have something mindless on the needles for last night’s and tonight’s weekend sofa movies, I took my other Sheepshearing Festival acquisition and cast on for another felted pillow similar to the one I did in Manos del Uruguaywool. This one is also done in the rustic Nick’s Meadow Farm yarn I’ve mentioned before. The pale blue, light moss green, and light butter yellow skeins together cost less than one skein of Manos.
The movies that accompany this excercise in autopilot garter stitch? Last night it was Master and Commander. Tonight it’s John Cleese in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. If you like either adventure stories or Jane Austin, you’ll enjoy the series of books from which the former was adapted. The movies skipped over the whole drawing-room/social manners side of O’Brian’s books, especially the rivalries in love that divide the two lead characters. As for the Shrew – it’s so non-PC it’s over the top, but it’s also one of my favorite plays. I’m really looking forward to seeing Cleese as Petruchio, and finding out how the actors cast as Katherine and Grumio stand up to him.
Back to knitting. Thumbing through my stitch books I lighted againupon Indian Cross Stitch (Walker I, p. 112), a variant on enlongated stitches. I used itinmy Suede T. It seems that in just the past three months, I’ve seen elongated stitches, including this oneand Seafoam (Walker II, p. 21 ) all over the place,including the latest Interweave Knits and Knitters, Berroco’s patterns, and Lana Grossa’s patterns. Given the long lead time of both magazine and yarn makers’ pattern development cycles, it’s always interesting to see the same idea hit multiple sources at the same time. Shadow knitting cropped up in parallel issues of IK and Knitters a while back. Lacy knitting featuring lily of the valley-inspired textures is another recurring theme (IK led the pack with Forest Path last summer).
About the only explanations for this parallelism I can come up withare that the designing knitting community is quite small; some things are natural fits (elongated stitches work well with ribbons, ribbons are hot right now); and many designers draw inspiration from the same fashion industry sources (deconstructed/slashed looks were big on the runways two seasons ago, and it takes a season or two for runway ideas to percolate into retailknitting patterns.)
So far most sources talk about doing the elongated stitches do them with the multiple wrap method. Can a revival of Condo Knittingbe far behind?
String-Or-Nothing 