It's hard to get luckier...

I am always confused by knitting sleeves... they just go ON and ON and ON until suddenly they stop. So for most of this sleeve, I was sure the pattern could not end gracefully and I'd have to just run it straight into the ribbing; but in the end, it could. Check out how lucky I got:



So, I win. One more sleeve. :)

Hourglass Aran sleeve design

After some tribulation, sleeve #1 is long enough to show you.



The central cable is a (slight) adaptation of No. 46 from Annie Maloney's Cable Knitter's Handbook, the next cable out is my own, and the texture stitch is... um, I can't find which book it came from anymore. It's probably called "little honeycomb", and if you like doing 1-over-1 cable crosses this stitch is for you. :)

I made my life unintentionally difficult by wanting to do a shallow set-in sleeve from the top down. The faster I could increase stitches, the shallower the set-in... but it turns out that there's a limit to how quickly a person can do increases, and it's hard to even hit that limit gracefully. In the end, I begged for help on Ravelry, and this is the wisdom I came away with:

To increase 1 stitch on each side on every row, just do a yarnover for the increase -- you need that extra yarn in the fabric so that the edge (diagonal) stitches can be longer than the other stitches. Twist each yo on the next row to close the hole.

You can see in the upper right of this closeup that I got it working pretty well.



You can also see that I did a gusset rather than do the texture stitch all the way across. Decreases actually continue at the same rate after the gusset; it's just a visual feature more than a shaping one. I could have done without the fake seam, with a bit more planning, but joining in the round left me with a one-row jog in the pattern from one side to the other.

Finally, here's what the sleeve will eventually look like from the front when being worn:



Yeah, the cap wound up a bit trapezoidal, but I think it won't show much.

I already know it will be annoying to set these into the sweater body. I'm thinking of trying to do it using backstitch and a dressmaker's technique, explained here on Ravelry by Annie herself. But first things first: I need to finish the forearm, figure out how to gracefully end the central cable (which I'd like to close off) and do the cuff. To say nothing of the dog the second sleeve.

Hourglass Vest

Have you been wondering whether my crazy sweater-construction idea with the shaped cable panels was going to work at all? Yeah, me too. :)

It works...



Here's a side view (impossible to take this one without distorting the fabric of the front and back rather a lot):



Here I am looking smug, perhaps because instead of a handful of pieces I suddenly have a functional Aran vest. Or perhaps because it was windy out and I was squinting.



If you look at the sides, you can see I got bitten a little by the rows of plain reverse stockinette stitch on the side panels, which have a larger gauge than the cabling and caused the ribbing there to actually pull in. Though that's annoying, I think it'll block right out when I wash this and is not worth fixing in the knitting, at this point.



Now, onto the next huge challenge -- sleeves. I left a generous armscye in this sweater body, which make it very comfortable as a vest (I'm still wearing it as I type this!) but now need to be accommodated.

OMG applied I-cord

The sweater's neck is done, and applying I-cord to bound-off edges is my new favorite technique. I wish I had a before-and-after picture of the back of the neck -- it really went from ragged to gorgeous in about 30 minutes. Not only was the technique pretty easy (I did it based on instructions in The Knitter's Book of Finishing Techniques) but it matches the rolled edging on the sides of the V-neck perfectly.

There's slight unevenness on both right and left sides where the I-cord meets the rolled edging, but I'm not going to stress about that. After I wash this and the yarn fulls, I don't think it will matter.

Hourglass Aran construction plan

In response to some questions on Ravelry (eightoclock, have you lost your mind?), I put together the following badly Photoshopped picture to show how the side panels are meant to fit with the body panels to give me a completed sweater (and a svelte waist).



After doing this I finished knitting the swatch of the side panel motif, and it does look nice like that with the vertical symmetry. I'll probably do that for real.

Then I went to the gym:



The design process requires flexibility, you know.

Hourglass Aran progress

Oh, I am so slow, but the whole front is done now. I couldn't get the colors right, so finally just made today's pictures black and white. Here's the front, and the start of the back, which shows the completed neckline shape and also the ribbing I chose. They are baby cables, basically k2p2 ribbing with a tiny k-over-k cable cross every fourth row. It doesn't really pull in any more than my cables, which are close to k2p2 anyway, so I don't think it'll contract unflatteringly.



And here's the fun part, a swatch for the side panel, which I've been thinking and thinking about today. This is my second attempt and at least it's shaped correctly so far, but it's still too wide... I need less reverse stockinette on either side of most of the cable design.



As I said on Ravelry if not here, the side panels are why it's an *hourglass* Aran. They provide waist shaping and the chance to do some freeform cable design, all at the same time. :) And they are insurance, too... if I have the size wrong, I should be able to adjust by reknitting just the side panels and not the whole body.

The bad news (and this is bad news for my sleeve caps, too) is that doing closed cables and controlling the shaping of a piece at the same time is kind of hard. When the cables first begin, they don't really affect the width of the piece at all and you can basically ignore the new stitches, as though the cables were floating on top. Sadly, as the cables spread out they do inevitably change the stitch gauge from the initial stockinette gauge to the "gauge over lots of cables". Worse yet, as this piece starts to taper in, some of the decreases come from the edges and some come from cables melding together. I'm starting to have a lot of thoughts about things that affect gauge, and I'm coming to the conclusion that stitch count matters, but so does the number of knit-to-purl transitions across the fabric, and so do cable crosses.

I haven't finished the bottom half of this yet, partly because I haven't decided whether to just do the top half in reverse (with a couple of small adjustments) or whether to make a different pattern. I'll probably just do the top half in reverse, considering that this rather pretty bit will otherwise only be visible when I raise my arms! And I'd probably look weird, wandering around the city with my arms over my head.

Touched by a Harlot!

The Hourglass Aran had a brush with fame tonight:



Yes, Stephanie Pearl-McPhee actually touched it, offered to hold it up even, but I had already gotten this super-cute picture so I declined the kind offer.

I've never seen the St James Episcopal Church so packed with people as it was for Stephanie's talk. (Must you really point out that I'd never been in the St James Episcopal Church before at all?) I got to meet metak again, which was nice, and it's hardly her fault I have a lousy memory for faces, but failed to find Vicki in the crowd. And... it was fun. I have been somewhat lukewarm about the Yarn Harlot at times, but I REALLY enjoyed seeing/hearing her in person. The downtime and the laughs were valuable, and frankly? It turns out she has an incredibly great voice. I could have listened for hours.

Here is some better detail of the Hourglass Aran in progress -- actually, it's a photoshopped version of the swatch, which has now been entirely unravelled and redone.



As might be obvious, or not, this is a V-neck sweater front, worked from the top down. That means that when I'm knitting it, it's held upside down. (Duh.) At the Yarn Harlot festivities tonight, two, yes two different people asked if I was knitting a baby jumper.

Apparently the two halves of the V-neck look like pudgy little baby legs.

Transitions

I've been spending my knitting-time on design lately, and design is a slow beast to ride. I love it -- designing and creating is what I do, in general -- but it also involves more ripping out and less visible progress than I sometimes like.

It, or maybe the giant CONE of wool I'm designing bits of Aran goodness with, have also pushed me toward nonmonogamy. Here is what I've done with the two skeins of Noro Transitions I bought:



Sleeves, in a simple lace pattern lifted from part of an Interweave Knits pattern somewhere. (Note the small wad of zombie-flesh-colored yarn I removed from both skeins just before the sleeve caps.) I like these sleeves, but they do seem to lack something. What is it? Oh yes, a body. These sleeves were meant to be a shrug. Damn. So I've bought some gray chunky cashmerino to deal with that, but the sleeves hibernate while I get on with my real obsession lately...

What is it? It's a swatch, but it's a swatch of the one thing I started knitting for... a custom-designed Aran. You're looking at [a swatch of] the right side of the front, where I've tested the way my cables grow out of the neckline.



Things I know about the design so far:

• It will be done top-down, FLAK style, starting with narrow plaits acting as mini-saddles.
• It will have set-in sleeves, also top-down but probably just sewn in rather than done with short rows.
• From outside to center, the cables are
  • of my own design,
  • mirrored Windblown Cables from Barbara Walker's Third Treasury of Knitting Patterns, and
  • Annie Maloney's Cable 59 from her Cable Knitter's Handbook.
  
  
• The V-neck really will have a simple rolled-under edge, since that puts the emphasis on how the cables grow out of it.

I'm happy to leave some of the design for later in the project. I have ideas for the sleeves and the side panels that I'm hoping will be good, though. This sweater may or may not be a tour de force, but it will be a tour de as much force as I have. This is the thing I've wanted to be working on since pretty much the day I picked up needles.