FO: Chinese lace pullover

Pattern: Chinese Lace Pullover by Angela Hahn

Yarn: Eden Madil 100% bamboo

Size: Small, with adjustments to the shoulders

Needles: Size 4 Knitpicks

Construction: in the round where possible, bottom-up, but I sewed the raglan seams as directed by the pattern.

  

Here, the sweater and I are wondering whether anything can be better than knitting AND coffee together.

Then we went back to the yarn's origins at Mind's Eye Yarns in Porter Square. The ribbing on this sweater really lends itself to weird pixellation at some .jpg settings -- weird! But here we are. (It was fun to pose here, because I knew anyone looking out the windows would know exactly what we were doing and why.)

We went in to see Lucy and her new yarns, which may have been a bad idea. Yarn fumes!! (That hank of yarn around my neck has a really high cashmere content, just so you understand.)

Lucy really does have some lovely new yarns. Way down in the bottom right corner you can see some of the bamboo the sweater was made from, but all the newer stuff is for fall/winter.

Then, home for closeups. The place where I found the pattern least clear was probably the directions on the body/sleeve increase area. Here is how I did it: lifted increases one stitch away from the edge of the expanding region. I did lifted increases because this yarn was incredibly unforgiving, and it was the least visible least disruptive increase I could find, and I did them near the edge instead of always at the center so that the whole section would appear mostly vertical instead of all flaring out from a central line. One last minor detail: after the armpit bindoffs I had 3 stitches left from this new rib on either side. I kept it that way as I did decreases, ending up with 2 visible stitches on each side of the raglan seam -- a minor variation from the pattern which calls for 1 on each side.

A closeup of the lace, where I didn't deviate from the pattern at all:

But what about those shoulder adjustments? Sorry, I couldn't get a good shot of them. Basically, to kinda-fit my square shoulders I had to add both width and height, so I have a few increases and a few short rows. I decreased away the increases after the short rows. I hid all the short row turns in the purl parts of the ribbing, which was a good idea, but I did the wrap-and-turn method, which left pretty visible wraps on the surface. Maybe if I hadn't done the wraps and left little holes instead, it might have gone better with the pattern... it does have lace, after all. But the wraps are a very minor flaw in a sweater I'm otherwise happy with, so meh. :)

Finishing: did I mention this yarn is unforgiving? It also frays like an 18-ply mofo. So, I dipped the end of each end in a thin solution of fabric glue and water a day before weaving them in, to stop the fray. It may have been overkill, but I'll sleep better at night.

And the future? Bamboo stretches, you know. I'm actually counting on it to grow a bit. I'll try to post a follow-up picture in a few months when I've been wearing it for a while.

Fables of the construction

Ever seen this pair of fingerless mitts before? Yes, here is yet another one of the 6783 instantiations of Fetchings that people will admit to on Ravelry. I'm sure there are twice as many in the wild. Still, my mother likes these. I knit them up in 3 days for her birthday, and felt very competent doing them. :)

And, here is one of those pictures only a knitter can love. It's blurry on purpose -- I'm trying to get you excited about the NEXT post. And yes, that is a ball of yarn on my head. ;)

In between my monotonous chants of "never making a raglan again, never making a raglan again" I've been having a bit of fun with scraps. I finally learned the long-tail cast-on and an invisible caston for 1x1 rib, and have come up with a simple lace pattern to use with the Noro Transitions yarn that flew into my mailbox after I heard about it. This crazy-ass yarn changes fiber throughout the skein, always a wool blend but transitioning also between silk, cashmere, angora, alpaca, kid mohair and camel. I had to have it.

Also in the mail to me right now: Knitter's Guide to Stitch Design by Annie Maloney.

A torso and two wrists

"...that's all we could find of her, Sergeant. In pieces. I haven't seen a case this nasty since '73!"

Here's the completed body of my Chinese Lace Pullover. I did it according to pattern (with the TINY modification of doing my decreases one stitch in from where the instructions called for).



And here's the lace part of the sleeves, all done:



Innocent-looking, huh? Looks like I'm doing them two at once on Magic Loop, huh? Actually, the bamboo yarn was so slippery that the only way I could cast on in the round was plastic DPNs, and after a few rows of that the only way I could bear to keep going was Magic Loop. Each sleeve has seven repeats of the lace panel, so I kept 4 on one side of the loop and 3 on the other; it seemed to work fine that way. Now that I've gotten to the plain ribbing, I've transferred to a longer needle for continuing them both at the same time.

The sleeves are not going to go according to pattern. For one thing, since raglans don't generally fit well on my square shoulders, I'm going to add some short-row shaping; for another thing, the pattern calls for the upper arm on these babies to be HUGE, 14" for the small size. Investigation shows it's because each sleeve is expected to have as many increases as each side of the body does.



So it's time for some mods. I know the pattern is cleverly written so that the body ribbing lines up with the arm ribbing along the raglan seams, and I want to preserve that, so I'm busy doing the math for a smaller-but-still-clever sleeve. I think I have a plan. :)

A meme and a KnitPicks order

I got tagged with a meme by Vicki! My zillionth meme, but the first one on this knitting blog. It feels nice, like I'm starting to have an actual identity as a knitter.

1) What was I doing 10 years ago?

In June of 1998 I was... hmmm, I was in New Mexico, interning at Los Alamos National Lab, just getting going on my last stint of work for my thesis. I was making a quilt for my ex-boyfriend's wedding, and that was kind of fun; and I had just turned 21 and had just gotten a kitten who has been my constant companion ever since. The stint hadn't yet devolved into the mess it was destined to become in the fall.

2) What are 5 things on my to-do list for today?
Get a unit test working, go to ashtanga yoga, put sock yarn in an envelope to be mailed off to someone who's knitting small elephants for charity, fill out a reimbursement form for the class I took last spring, make this blog post. (Update: that was yesterday. I got 3 done out of 5.)

3) Snacks I enjoy:

Peanuts with a swig of orange juice. Cheese and Triscuits. Oatmeal cookies. Protein bars. The decadent cherry-apricot scones I sometimes get at our local bookstore cafe. Almonds with chocolate covered raisins.

4) Things I would do if I were a billionaire:

Pay off my mortgage; no, wait, I'd buy a nearby place with in-unit laundry so I don't have to deal with spiders just to have clean clothes. Figure out some deal where I could drop to part-time at work but keep working, or maybe go work for Kiva.org for free. I'd make sure my parents were set up right; I'd get an ocicat; and then I'd make my financial advisor a very happy man.

All of that's just with the first couple million though. A billion? I have no experience even thinking in those terms, but that would probably be enough to be a real player in the world of microfinance.

5) Places I have lived:

Kalispell, Montana
Los Alamos, NM
Boston, MA
Cambridge, MA
Somerville, MA

6) Jobs I have had:

Babysitter, bookstore stocker, Burger King worker bee, cafeteria server, mechanical engineering intern, software engineer, software engineer, software engineer.

7) Bloggers I am tagging who I will enjoy getting to know better: Lea and Krista, because they should post occasionally. :)

To keep this vaguely knitting-related, I got two books in the mail this week. One was Melissa Leapman's Cables Untangled, which taught me my preferred way of cabling without a cable needle a long time ago when I bought it for someone else, and the second was Cables: Volume 1, The Basics by Janet Szabo. What's that? Obsessed, you say? Nah, I am just making mental progress on an Aran sweater design and couldn't stand to go further without getting these two. I'm well beyond thinking I'll only make myself one Aran sweater, but the first one is special (right?) and I want to make sure I have lots of stitches to choose from.

If you have a Ravelry account, the cable I've chosen for the central panel can be seen here. It's from Annie Maloney's Cable Knitting Handbook, and I think it may be the perfect cable.

Worms, bird shit, and lace -- pick three

My social life seems to be getting more knitterly. Last week I actually taught a friend to knit (my first time), and my mother sent me this very lovely silk yarn... with a small crocheted worm in it. "I told you it was coccoon-colored", she said. Awwww!



For those who don't know, yesterday was also WWKIP Day (worldwide Knit in Public Day) 2008. I went to Copley Square and got to see quite a lot of interesting things... how drop spindles work, what Handmaiden Seasilk feels like, and what laceweight merino is like. I even got to see six inches worth of a Morrigan, which I recognized instantly and with some squealing. Other people were equally happy to pet the 100% Madil Eden bamboo I was rocking. The only bad part was that I did get splattered all across the shoulders by a pigeon. Yes. Gross but true. The good parts of the bad part were twofold though: I had a spare tank top with me, and... the nasty bird didn't get my knitting. :D

I said I'd be doing the Chinese Lace Pullover next, and so I am. The yarn I'm using is eighteen ply... eighteen ply!... and it's very easy to split it in a 17-to-1 kind of way, resulting in an annoying little thready loop. However, this lace is many times easier to work in the round rather than back and forth, so I'm experiencing much less splitting with the real project than I did with my swatch. (Notice there is no picture of my swatch.) Here is the progress so far:



The lace on the body piece is complete, and about 3 rows of the ribbing above the lace. The fabric is starting to have a lovely heft and drape to it; the lace, which seemed limp and formless while I was working on it, seems much nicer now that I'm not.

FO: Hild is done!

Pattern: Hild, from Elsebeth Lavold's Second Viking Knits Collection. In the end, I customized it, so be warned: if you knit it from the pattern you won't get the waist shaping or the wrist motifs.

Since it is my first sweater, I had to take bunches of "FO" pictures:



And here are some closeups just for the knitting blog.

The arm seaming was a bit dicey; I think the sleeve I knit first is also the sleeve I seamed first, so one side is way more beginnerish than the other. This is the one that came out more as I meant it to, though if I had it to do again I'd devote more stitches to the edging / central rib. And I probably wouldn't slip the edge stitches either; I didn't see until too late how that would limit my options with the actual seaming.



And here's how I brought the cables up into the neckline on the front, giving the stitches a few rows to migrate into the 2x2 design. I like the final effect and would definitely do it again... less nervously next time. :)



I've cast on for the next thing, the Chinese Lace Pullover in shiny red bamboo. It's going to be a very, very different project. Lea is knitting it too, so maybe there will be more multi-author action on this blog in the next little bit. :)

Things come together; the center can hold

An exciting weekend for Hild!

Yesterday I split the front piece for the neck, and obsessively stayed up late finishing the front; between the cable pattern, shaping on the neck edges, shaping on the outer edges, and dealing with two balls of yarn, I was afraid that if I stopped I'd never get back into the right head-space.

I used Grumperina's stretchy bind-off on the front of the neck, fearing that a regular one would leave the neck too tight to fit over my head. I don't know if that really would have been a problem, but this neck-hole fits over my head easily, so I'm going to call it a success.

And to seam the shoulders I used a crochet slip stitch... I had already not left all my stitches live for the 3-needle bindoff, and as the Yarn Harlot taught me, crochet creates a nice stable line. Yay for hooking!

Of course I had to immediately pick up stitches for the neck (I did that mostly with a crochet hook too). And then I had to knit just one row to get the stitches back OFF the stupid DPNs, which didn't work well with the yarn at all, and onto circs. I may have to do one more row yet tonight... some challenges still remain, as I'm carrying some cablework into the neck stitches just enough to get gracefully from the stitches as they were to an even 2x2 pattern. Need to get to the mindless part by Tuesday so that I can work on the neck in lecture! What is it on? Oh yes, NP completeness... I won't want to be cabling through that.

Happy Hild says:



"I'm starting to feel like a real sweater!"

In the meantime these Francie socks make me grudgingly admit I might make socks again someday.

I declare a thumb cozy.

I knit something for someone else! It's a thumb cozy, with attached I-cord bracelet to keep the end of the cozy down. Why would I knit a thumb cozy? One of my friends has a friend with a hurt/bandaged thumb, and let's just say it was either that or do my homework.



Un-pattern: cast on 3 stitches. Work in 1x1 rib, increasing 1 on each side on the RS, until the working edge is almost wide enough to go around the base of the thumb. Cast on ~3 more stitches, divide over 3 needles and work in the round until just past the tip of the thumb. Finally, k2g all the way around. Cut the yarn, thread it through all live stitches and through the center. Realize that a cute little wrist-cord would hold down the bottom corner. Curse self for not working in the other direction. Splice the end from your cast-on back onto the ball. Look up how to make i-cord. Make 2-stitch i-cord for a while; sew it back on itself to make a loop.

I'm amused to discover that I could get certified -- and pinned -- as a master hand knitter through a mail-order course. I checked it out on tkga.com; it's for real, all right. It does not tempt me though. I would probably have fun doing the swatches, but I don't want to make an argyle sock or a vest.

Airplane trips to the rescue

Thanks mostly to a couple of cross-country nonstop flights in the last week, the back of Hild is done. Here's a picture of it (2 rows before completion, but when the evening light was starting to fail and I couldn't wait any longer to pull out the camera):



And here's a closer shot of the cables.



Part of me is kind of sad, thinking of having to make all those cables AGAIN before it's all over, but this is going to be by far the prettiest thing I've ever made with my hands. I can't wait to wear it.

By the way, those mismatched sleeve caps? The longer one is the one that fits. The short one has been frogged.

I can has sinusoid? No, I can not has.

This is what Sweater Wizard 3.0 does to your sleeve cap design when you change the chest size from 30" (see the sleeve cap on the left) to 34" (see the sleeve cap on the right).



I understand why there are more stitches bound off in that initial bindoff row, I do. The number matches the bindoffs done in the body pieces. It makes sense. Why the second one is so much taller, though, I don't know, and neither one of them is a very nice sinusoid (as I complained about last time; but actually, the first one is better in that regard).

I'm sure this sweater will wind up looking okay -- I'll finish the front so that I can see which sleeve cap better matches the armscye, and redo one or the other -- but I can tell already that I'll probably crunch all my own numbers for this next time around.

More Hild progress

I think it's more than half done, yo!



And this doesn't even count the tiny line of progress on the sweater back, which I started so that I'd have something mindless to knit during 1.5 hr lectures. (In the class I'm taking, I'm much better off trying to listen and understand than I would be trying to take notes). I've quickly gotten past the ugly-worm stage that so depressed me on the sweater front; six rows is just enough for the ribbing to start looking like ribbing. At home I plan to finish up that second sleeve cap and then get back to the front (no pun intended), which is not mindless at all anymore because it's all cables, all the time.

Knitting is really my first experience with natural fibers, with the exception of a black wool coat that, as a yuppie Cambridge citizen, I am required to own. I have to admit, what I'm not loving about natural fibers so far is the little bits of nature you get for free with the fibers. The little bits of straw (or whatever it is) in the Silky Wool I'm knitting with are annoying, and they're not nearly as bad as the things I got in a merino-blend sweater I ordered from L.L Bean lately. I can only call them micro-tumbleweeds, and their diameter is so close to the yarn ply diameter that I've near-destroyed the yarn in a few places trying to get them out. Out they must come, though, if the garment is going to be wearable.

Mystery stitch in storebought sweater

Whatever this is, it's not in the Vogue Stitchionary.



Anyone have any ideas?

I had another thought about knitting recently (in the absence of interesting progress, my thoughts are all I've got for you). When I get done with the Hild sweater, I really might like to do some smaller pieces. Christmas got me thinking... despite my innate love of shiny wrapping paper, I've embraced the trend toward cloth bags and other reusable gift packaging like all the other good Cambridge yuppies. Maybe for next Christmas I'll knit up some CD or DVD cozies that are meant as gift wrap. That would be a nice way to swatch while getting something sort of cool and useful out of it. Lace patterns would have to be lined, but that's the only downside I can see.

Space invaders scarf!

Ah, who could fail to love this!?

Honestly, the old-school gaming systems are the only thing that make me AT ALL interested in colorwork. I'd like to ask what this says about me, but, alas, I'm already clear on that. :)

What other games, error messages, etc, would be good for knitting up, I wonder?

Progress, Grumperina style

Knit two, purl two, knit two, purl two... repeat forever. I'm knitting continental, so I find the ribbing pretty easy (and a lot of fun), but progress is slow enough that I can't bring myself to spend rare, precious knitting time on anything besides this. I'm turning out to be a pretty monogamous knitter.

I found it wasn't all that hard to make a schematic to color in, starting with the bitmaps the Sweater Wizard will export and going from there. And so, here's my progress on the Hild pieces!

Blue sleeve for Black Friday

Due largely to my getting sick and spending Thanksgiving knitting on the couch, the first sleeve of Hild is a done deal. I never did have to do any gusset-type sleeve shaping, because the sleeve remained tight enough while I went along; I never really felt the need to slow down the increases.



I wan't sure about the sleeve cap -- the pattern I used was generated by Sweater Wizard 3.0 and looked a lot nicer than the one that came with the original pattern, but still isn't the smoothest sinusoid I can imagine. In particular, WHY would the slope get steeper right before the final rows with all the bind-offs? That basically guarantees a stupid-looking little corner of waste fabric on each side of the sleeve cap. Anyway, I followed the pattern, but because I had suspicions and I am anal, I pinned the sleeve into a sleeveless black shirt I have.



And it does pretty much seem to fit! So that is good. As long as I don't skimp on the measurement between my neck and the point of my shoulder, I'll be fine. Here's a closeup of the cable detail down by the wrist:



I'll be putting the mirror image of that one into the left sleeve.

Sleeve shaping for Hild

It's a swatch! It's a blob! It's part of the sleeve of my first sweater!



Having decided to ignore the original pattern (only in two sizes, both way too big), I used a trial download of Sweater Wizard v3.0 to get a pattern based on measuring my favorite sweaters. Imagine my annoyed laughter when I discovered that the generated sleeve instructions were identical to the ones in Viking Knits #9, except for the much more detailed sleeve cap shape.

What I am supposed to do is increase steadily every 8 rows until I get to the cap, which is pretty wide to match the deep armscye. (I'm athletic, and have pecs and lats that make my armpits bigger than you'd think they are, so I want that.) If I do this, though, I'm going to get arms that are quite loose around the upper arms. I notice my commercial ribbed shirts seem to increase pretty regularly up the forearm, but then way more slowly on the upper arm; I also like what I know of armpit gussets, as nicely written up in this Yarn Harlot post. The idea's supposed to be to give men more room around the shoulder joint while not requiring a super-loose sweater... which is exactly what I need.

So, I'm thinking of playing fast and loose with this. Increase fairly regularly up to the elbow, then about half as fast until near the armpit, then do the rest of my increases in the last few rows (as if for a gusset, but continuing to form ribbing in pattern). I don't get many comments here, usually, but I'll ask anyway: does this plan sound reasonable to you sweater knitters out there?

First, and possibly only, but we'll see

Did anyone wonder what I was swatching for? Probably not, considering that it took me over a month to knit the real thing (despite having lots of time to work on it last week). At any rate, it -- they -- are done, and it is my pleasure to introduce you to My First Socks.

Hello, socks!


Needles: #1 dpns
Yarn: Lang yarns, JaWoll color superwash (75% wool, 18% nylon, 7% acrylic)
Pattern: Wendy's generic toe-up socks, plus the pointelle lace pattern from the first Vogue Stitchionary centered on the top. Lace on socks seems like a nice idea, since the feet will always stretch out the lace -- no time-consuming blocking with every wash.
New skills learned: oh geez. Short rows, lace, provisional cast-on (not that I ever got it right), k1p1 ribbing (very enjoyable, I found), and tubular bindoff.

I modified one row of the lace pattern slightly at the beginning and end so that it wouldn't show any orphaned yarnovers in either place, but rather start and end the diagonal lines of holes gracefully.



The ribbing is p1k1, and the bind-off is the tubular bind-off. On the second sock I even managed to do it rather prettily. It's as if a single, tiny tractor tire had been driven around in a circle, leaving tread marks on top of my sock.



Short-row heel: quite a pain to knit, but they are what I'm used to in cotton. On the first sock, they caused one of my friends to squeal "ooh, it even has a line at the heel, just like REAL SOCKS DO!"



My cat didn't see the big deal, but my husband's cat REALLY didn't see the big deal.

A few new things

It's been summer, it's been lovely outside, and I have been biking like a maniac. (Not today, as my husband managed to make the quick-release skewer holding on my front wheel explode.) Since I'm taking an enforced break until I get to the bike parts store, I thought I'd share a few things with you.

I made a sock out of some lovely sea wool.

I'm glad to say that my mother thinks it would make a lovely sea monster. That's my new emergency backup plan if I succumb to second sock syndrome. (The old plan was to find someone with one very small foot.)

However, my big finished object for the summer thus far is:

my linen phyllo yoked pullover! (Fair warning, anyone planning to knit this: mine is entirely different from the one in Knitting Nature, except having the same yoke stitch pattern. If you want my directions, just ask, they're quite simple.) It's lovely and drapey and soft after a little trip through the washer. On the other hand, it's also biasing around the waist and hips. I have no idea what made it decide to do that (unbalanced yarn? the euroflax didn't look like it had enough energy in it!). It's a small flaw in an otherwise perfect sweater.

Such wonderful socks!

My sock pal, Julia knit me the most wonderful socks!

They make a great use of the Koigu (which is so nice and soft). I'm just thrilled :)

Even on top of that, my sock pal was so sweet. She sent a bunch of little treats along with the socks.

Merino for spinning, a little sock-project purse (which I've really wanted), a little cute book, and some lovely little lemon chocolates (which my husband is about to steal). Thank you so much, Julia!

Could it be?

Baby's very first itty-bitty lace swatch. Everybody say awwwww.