The Lessa Grafting Project is humanly possible, but not by this human at this point in time.  I have enough challenges in other areas of my life that I can’t really enjoy this one.  So, having plenty of yarn (amazing but true!), I’m going to keep knitting down to the hem all over again.

I have found that the main difficulty, other than grafting the complex cables, is in keeping track of where I am.  The bottom section of the sweater is identical front and back, but it really does make a difference which way it goes, because if  the beginning-of-rounds don’t line up at the proper side ‘seam’, it will be off a row on either the front or the back.  About the time I think I’ve gotten my bearings, the grafting looks funny and I decide that perhaps I’ve got it half-rotated, and get frustrated and set it aside… only to pick it up a few days later and repeat the whole fruitless process.

The upshot of it is that if I want to actually finish and wear this sweater this winter, I’d better just forge ahead with re-knitting the bottom section with fresh yarn.  Having made that decision, I feel lighter and happier.  I’ve never regretted hacking it apart, and I’ve learned a few things through the whole process.  As usual.  You’d think I’d know it all by now, with as much trial-and-error experience as I have!

Next, I get to find out how good my notes were the first time around, and whether I’ll be as happy with the finished hem as with the original.

The Babies

Here’s the younger grandson’s Gansey-Henley sweater.  I may have to subtitle that one the Double Birthday Sweater – I realized that I started knitting it on MY birthday, and finished it on HIS (first) birthday.  Such a nice little coincidence.

He’s growing so fast, I only hope he’ll be able to wear it through the winter!

Baby #2

The picture below is of one of the kits in a recent litter of Mini Rex rabbits.

Its color pattern is SO lovely, I just had to share it!  The variety is called tricolor; and no matter how selectively you breed, there is always a large element of chance about how much and where those colors are going to land.  The idea is to have the darker and lighter colored spots on the white as balanced as possible, and while the size and placement of the spots in this breed (within the stated parameters) don’t really count for much on the judging table, such a pretty pattern is really eye-catching!

As time goes by and this little one grows up, I will find out if the quality of the body underneath and the coat carrying the colors measures up to the quality of the pattern.

Oh, it IS fun to watch babies grow, isn’t it?

Misdirection in magic may be as simple as a magician rolling up his sleeves and saying “nothing up my sleeve” and then producing an object that could never have been “up his sleeve”…  Attention can be controlled in various ways. A magician will first grab attention with a coin, or another small and shiny object…  Then attention is directed away from the object (hence, “misdirection”) through a combination of comedy, sleight of hand or an unimportant object of focus, thus providing just enough time for the magician to do whatever he or she wishes to do with the original object.

It doesn't look like much... yet...

Okay, so this baby sweater isn’t shiny, but perhaps it will distract from the fact that the Lessa sweater grafting project is temporarily on hold until I get a chunk of quiet time to myself.

Our second grandson is almost a year old, and doesn’t have a Nana-knitted sweater of his own yet!  (Give me a break – I was recovering from the baby blanket last winter, and it has NOT been sweater weather for the last several months.)  His mom requested a pullover in grey, and after doing a fair bit of looking around for a nice, washable heathery grey yarn, we decided on Plymouth Encore.  Yeah, I know.  It’s 75% acrylic.  But I console myself with the fact that it’s 25% wool.  I try not to be a yarn snob, but that tendency is a natural result of being a spinner.   I would have preferred superwash wool, but since I couldn’t find one that suited, this is a good solution.  The important thing is to make sure that this little sweater will be easy-care and wearable!

So.  I had the yarn and an idea of what my daughter wanted for him.  She is a generous soul, and understands that I need it to be an interesting little project, so gives me leeway in the design.  I’ve never made a gansey (or guernsey, if you prefer), so that seemed like a good place to start – but of course the usual pullover neckline won’t do at all for baby proportions, so this one will have a henley-style button front.  I have a few good books to use as reference, and since I’m at the deciding point about what designs to put on the upper section, am enjoying sorting through my choices for a combination that will fit nicely into 51 stitches.

This sweater is so little, Jack’s Gansey-Henley will probably be finished before I know it!  Unlike Lessa… (sigh)

After that last time, I decided if I needed to rip it out any more, I was just going tostart with a new ball and keep this yarn as a last-ditch reserve ball lump.

But I think all the false starts have finally paid off.  (And that doesn’t even count the swatch-knitting with another ball!)  I’m <fingers crossed> happy with the way it’s turning out this time.

The front, showing the split funnel neck.

So what was the problem?  The main issue was trying to figure out how to make a subtle-yet-obvious seamline at the seamless set-in sleeve… uh, line.  Yeah, I know.  It sounds pretty backwards.  But knitters who knit in the round put in fake seams all the time, for a variety of reasons.  And most of the time, that’s really simple – just do a purl stitch at that point on every row, and that column of purls will sink into most stitch patterns and almost disappear, leaving a nice little line of demarcation.

The tricky part here is that the body of this sweater is in reverse stockinette.  Purls don’t disappear into purls.  And knit stitches stand out.  A lot.  That’s the whole point of using purl stitches (reverse stockinette, seed or moss stitch, garter stitch, whatever) as the background for cables – to make them ‘pop’.

Here’s a lesson that all knitters learn sooner or later:  You cannot change the character of knit and purl stitches, no matter how much you will it to happen.

I swatched, trying out lots of different one- and two-stitch options.  When I finally had one that looked okay on the swatch, I’d give it a go on the sweater – only to find that it did NOT give me the look I wanted on the real thing.   For a little while, I would live in denial, thinking that it would all magically fall into place after the next row or two.  I really knew this all along, but guess I just had to prove it to myself.  *sigh*

But I WAS going to find a solution.  (Our daughters came by their stubbornness naturally.  I always told them that stubborn can be a good thing – it all depends on where you turn it.)  I looked and asked, but no one I found had a good answer, either.

There is probably a better technique out there somewhere, and I may very well run across it just after finishing this sweater, but I did find a solution to satisfy my requirements:

The fake seamline. (Did you notice the dragon stitch markers?)

And the winner is… slip a stitch.  Yup, that’s all.  To be more descriptive:

Right side row: work across the front to the stitch before the marker; move yarn to back, slip st purlwise.  Slip marker, make 1 stitch with backward loop, move yarn to front, continue purling.  And so on, slipping the stitch next to the marker on the body side, and increasing a stitch on the sleeve side of the marker.

Wrong side row: knit the slipped stitch and knit through the back loop of the increased stitch.

Progress to date, laid out as flat as possible.

Only time will tell if it will continue to be the solution, or if I will need to rip again!

Filed under: My Projects Tagged: Lessa, seamless set-in sleeves, sweaters ]]> http://prairiespinner.com/2010/02/26/this-yarn-is-getting-tired/feed/ 0 prairiespinner front_neck1 armhole_seam upper_section http://prairiespinner.com/2010/01/23/another-fiction-inspired-sweater-design/ http://prairiespinner.com/2010/01/23/another-fiction-inspired-sweater-design/#comments Sat, 23 Jan 2010 06:16:00 +0000 prairiespinner http://prairiespinner.com/?p=892 ]]> I suppose it was inevitable that two of my worlds – books and knitting – would collide, and I’m enjoying the result! I am also seeing the beginning of a trend.

The first one, of course, was the “Ithilien Brocade Jacket“, inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings character Eowyn.

The inspiration for this new one is Lessa, a pivotal person on Anne McCaffrey’s Pern.  The Dragonriders of Pern series, beginning with “Dragonflight”, is a classic in the sci-fi/fantasy genre (I’m not even touching that genre controversy), and I think Lessa can take some of the credit for that.  She is one of many characters who are beautifully crafted, believable, and very human.

This sweater is also intended as a compliment to Anne McCaffrey, herself a knitter.  She even wrote a contemporary fiction book, “Stitch in Snow”, whose protagonist is a nearly-obsessed knitter of Aran sweaters.

There are a couple of reasons that I like this confluence of interests.  First, fiction makes for a fascinating starting place for a sweater design.  I have come to realize that great characters in an interesting plot is only part of what draws me back to certain books.  When an author places those elements in a landscape that is almost another character itself, and then wraps them in cultures, traditions and history, that sub-creation becomes almost irresistible.  Paul Kocher, in his book “Master of Middle Earth”, defined the allure of certain fictional worlds: “Familiar but not too familiar, strange but not too strange.”  That rich background of culture and character is an endless source of ideas for creative readers, and once again, my chosen medium is yarn.

Another reason I like designing sweaters ‘for’ fictional characters is much less esoteric – they ALWAYS like what I like!  Once I decide they would like something, of course they can’t argue.  There are no tiresome negotiations on color, length, neckline, any of the gazillion little decisions that go into a new design.  It may be selfish, but there it is.  I like deciding these things, and it’s even better when I can imagine someone I admire peering over my shoulder to check on her sweater’s progress and nodding in approval.

Now, on to the details.  “Lessa” (the obvious name for the pattern) had to be red for Ruatha, and have cables to represent her distant Irish ancestry.  It needed to be fitted (easy to slip a wherhide flying jacket over), and had to be made of soft wool.  There are definitely sheep on Pern, but apparently not so many other fiber animals.  And it had to be warm, for those late-night hikes across a frosty Weyr bowl to the kitchen cavern.  After long consideration, the yarn I selected is KnitPicks’ Merino Style in Hollyberry.

So here’s its beginning… at least the first iteration!

Back neck

This is going to be a split funnel neck; a wide cable flows down the center front and back, with the center section of that cable repeated down the sleeves.

Right saddle (neck/shoulder)

The second picture is a view of the saddle, with the stitches to be picked up for the sleeve held on white yarn.  The front sections are on blue stitch holders.

I’m most likely going to rip out what you see here.  There are a couple of things bugging me about it, and I may end up knitting the set-in sleeve caps in the round along with the body of the sweater, instead of picking up from the armhole and working them separately.

I have a couple more tweaks in the design just to make it more interesting, but we’ll get to them as we go along.

The wonderful cable pattern is from Annie Maloney’s Cable Knitting Handbook.  I love the cable designs in this book!  And I’m using construction techniques from Janet Szabo’s Aran Sweater Design.  I cannot recommend it highly enough, either!  Armed with these two excellent resources, anyone who is interested in creating their own cabled sweater design will be ready to go.

But a few minutes before that, I snapped a few pictures on the easy chair in my office.  You know, just in case…

Front view

... and back view

I did wear it for a few minutes, and was gratified that it fit well!  The cabled gussets at the lower back and sides turned out to be a good way to create shaping while knitting the leaf-patterned sections in (mostly) straight panels.  The trickiest parts turned out to be mitering the cables at the front neck to form the collar, and deciding how to finish the unattached cable ends at the bottom of the front border and at the back neck.  I wonder if my sleep-deprived state made it slightly more difficult than it would have been otherwise?

Once I get it back from the fair display, I’ll take more closeup pictures and document some of the techniques I used, and share the chart for the leaf pattern.  We have a photo shoot planned, too, but in the meantime, I’m relaxing!

Oh, yes, the judging…

Best Of Show!

I am writing this on August 22nd, and entries have to be checked in by 6:00 p.m. on September 9th. It’s just possible that I may be able to finish it in time. On the other hand, it’s just possible that I have lost my tenuous grasp on knitting reality. Frankly, I wouldn’t take bets either way. It could get interesting.

On to the bump. I was knitting merrily along, at the spanking rate of one round about every 45 minutes, when I noticed that there was a little hitch at the join of my right needle. I’ve been using – and loving – the 3mm KnitPicks’ Harmony circular needle I bought last summer for this project. But I saw to my horror that the needle was coming loose! I could push it back together, but it wouldn’t hold. I immediately emailed KnitPicks’ customer support, and was gratified with their prompt reply and almost immediate shipment of a replacement needle. Under the state fair deadline, I decided to forge ahead. The glue I tried didn’t hold, and then the next day, the needle completely let go.

Broken circular needle

A couple of dozen stitches slipped off, but I was rather bleakly expecting that to happen, so kept my cool and picked them back up without much trouble.  I rummaged around and got out the 3mm ends of my (25 years old or thereabouts) Boye interchangeable needles.  I have used these TONS, and the only real complaint I have is that somewhere in the intervening years, they’ve changed the threading – so my old set isn’t interchangeable with replacement tips and cables.  Progress, I guess.  Anyway, I thought I’d just transition to those and be off again.

Uh-oh.  The bump:

Boye interchangeable circs

See that?  I’ve circled the nasty thing.  I’ve never had a problem with that before, but then I’ve never used these smallest of needle tips, either!  The bump at the connection is evidently microscopically larger than the needle itself.  (Compare that to the smooth join in the picture above.)  If I hadn’t been feeling under the gun, I would have just laid the whole thing down to await the arrival of my replacement Harmonies.  But I pressed on, only to discover that all of the pushing action I had to do to get the stitches to move along also unscrewed the needle.  The arrow is pointing to the place where I would find a stitch dropped in between the sections, trapped by the screw threads.

I struggled with this for a couple more days, completing maybe one or two rounds a day, until my rescue finally arrived in the mailbox!

So now I’ve been able to make more progress.

Ithilien progress, August 22, 2009

I’ve been pleased with the way the seamless set-in sleeves are coming along!  Here’s a back view:

Back veiw, right shoulder

And a closeup:

Seamless set-in sleeve detail

The orange plastic thing that you see is a locking stitch marker that I used to prevent pulling at the edges; I put the live underarm stitches of both the sleeve and body on waste yarn for grafting.  The white dotted line is a dental floss ‘lifeline’ at the underarm, which is acting as my measuring point.  You can see the paired decreases on both body and sleeve immediately above that.  Then I worked even until the last few rounds, where I just started the sleeve cap decreases.  Those decreases will create an increasing curve until I reach the top of the sleeve cap, when I’ll continue with the body and shoulder shaping, not forgetting the neckline shaping, front and back.

Then, all I have to do is decide how I want to handle the collar, knit it and its facing, cut the steek, rip out the bottom facing and work a couple of rows in bronze seed stitch, then do I-cord edging all around (double on the front edges and including buttonholes) and sew on the buttons.

Guess I’d better go get busy again, huh?

I have gotten a fair bit of knitting done since the last knitting post, so I’m trying to  catch up here.  I did finish Keith’s Cable Cardigan, but since I haven’t been able to corral him yet for a picture, I’ll save the details until I can.

Windowpane Check Rib Sock

Here’s the first half of a pair of socks.  This is an ‘original’ design – meaning the pattern came from my head, but with no claims to uniqueness, since it’s simple!  However, I think I like this as a somewhat anti-pooling stitch for handpaint or multi-color sock yarns.  This is a 3×2 broken rib stitch pattern; five rows of rib, then a purl row.  It’s interesting to see how different it looks when the light falls on it from various angles.

Windowpane sock detail

I like the way the colors trade places in the purl rows!  Those look best when contrasting colors fall above each other. Although it is rather heavily textured on the outside, the inside is a smooth rib.  I’m calling it “Windowpane Check Rib”, but in this colorway, I think something like “Brickwork” would be just as appropriate.  This is a gift sock, and since the recipient requested fall colors, I was delighted to find this Happy Feet yarn.   I liked working with it, and particularly like the short color changes.

Bumpy on the outside, smooth on the inside!

Mini gusset with short-row heel shaping

This pair is my first experiment with a short-row heel using a small gusset. I toyed with some other heel techniques, but wasn’t totally happy with them, so came up with this solution.

I used HiyaHiya double-point bamboo needles for these socks, but don’t think I would buy another set.  They have just the right surface feel, warm and smooth but not slippery, but they are too flexible for me!  I tend to knit tightly, with a semi-deathgrip on the needles, and started bending these immediately.  They now have a permanent curve, which is a slight annoyance, but they still work just fine.

'Customized' HiyaHiya needle

Now it’s time to get on with the second sock, and to pick up Ithilien again for my at-home project.  All of which is easier said than done, when I have two more sock pairs that I want to start on right away, and another sweater that is calling me.  Not to mention that spring is coming and the garden is looking forlorn, and I’ll have bunny litters coming along soon!  Nor am I mentioning the other less-fun projects around the house that need to be tackled.

*sigh*  Life sure gets in the way of the fun stuff, doesn’t it?

This kind of work has evidently been called Viking knitting for a long, long time, and is a method of creating wire jewelry.  It is technically not knitting, but closer to another fiber technique called naalbinding or nalbinding.  In the simplest explanation I can think of, knitting is one way of  creating fabric by pulling one loop through another, with the loops coming from somewhere along the length of the yarn.  Naalbinding is a technique of creating fabric by pulling the end of  the yarn or thread through loops using a needle.  The results can look very similar to each other, and in fact there are cases of very old textile fragments being incorrectly identified as knitting when they were actually naalbinding.  Okay, there’s your history lesson.  If you want more information on naalbinding, here’s a good basic description, and some more information.  And if you want to know how to do it, look here.

Back to Viking knitting.  Using very simple tools I had around the house, I made this length of ‘chain’.

Before the magic...

I realize it is not very impressive looking.  The tension varies quite a bit along the 11 or so inches I made, and it’s pretty lumpy.  But I was reassured that it would be so, and forged ahead.  When I got what I figured was a long enough piece (there are no hard and fast rules here – it’s something of a guessing game) I was ready to pull it through a draw plate to even out the diameter, which also happens to even out the tension and hide joins.  Since I don’t have a real draw plate, I drilled holes of several sizes in a piece of scrap shelf board.  I stuck the long ends of waste wire through a largish hole, gripped it on the other side with pliers, and dragged it through.  Then I repeated the process with the next smaller hole.  There was a bit more resistance that time.  The third hole, smaller yet, was where the magic happened.  That one took some teeth gritting, but the chain coming out the other side looked WAY different than what went in!  See?

...and after a few trips through the draw plate!

I was delighted!  The final length is about 17 inches.  I cut off the waste wire and aligned the loops on both ends to attach split rings.  This was actually the hardest part of the whole project.  Then I attached a little clasp to one end.  When I can get some plain sterling chain from my supplier, I’ll add on two or three inches to the other end so I can adjust the length as needed.

The finished product, worn with a pendant of blue topaz and rainbow moonstone.

For this project, I used about 9 grams of 26 gauge sterling silver wire.  I’m sorry now that I didn’t measure it for length.  I bought the wire at Hobby Lobby, where it is sold in 5 gram packages, but the packaging doesn’t say how long the wire is, either.  I will definitely measure the next package, since many places sell sterling wire by length, not weight.  And there WILL be a next package!

If you’re interested in exploring this fun project, I suggest that you start at the DIY Netowrk project page.  There’s also a video link on this page.  Watch another video on the technique here.  And finally, for some project ideas, this video shows some beaded bracelets.  Go for it!!

And in yarn knitting news, I’m making real progress on His Cardigan.  I’m ready for the armhole bindoffs on both sleeves, so I guess I’d better get busy and plot out the sleeve cap shaping, hadn’t I?  I decided to knit them both at the same time, so if I made a mistake, at least it would be the same on both of them.  Which I did, but I’m not telling what or where.

The danger with this method is that it’s all too easy to lose track of where you are.  You knit across on one sleeve, get distracted, then go merrily back to knitting, not realizing until several rows later that you turned and worked back across the same sleeve, instead of knitting across the other one, and are now totally messed up.  So I clipped the sleeves together along one edge with removable stitch markers.  It’s SO much easier to tell exactly where I left off!

These plastic stitch markers can also be used as little stitch holders or row markers, as well, and probably have other uses I haven’t run across yet.  They’re not pretty, but oh, so useful!

Posted in Knitting Techniques, My Projects Tagged: cardigan, Jewelry, naalbinding, sleeves, sweaters, Viking knitting ]]> http://prairiespinner.com/2009/01/12/viking-knitting/feed/ 7 prairiespinner begun finished necklace sleeves connected-sleeves http://prairiespinner.com/2008/11/19/before-and-after/ http://prairiespinner.com/2008/11/19/before-and-after/#comments Wed, 19 Nov 2008 21:26:51 +0000 prairiespinner http://prairiespinner.wordpress.com/?p=358 ]]> I will let the pictures speak for themselves first…

Before

After

No, I didn’t mix up the captions. I ripped out the whole sleeve, back to the cuff. It had slowly dawned on me that, aside from having other projects that I needed to work on, I was becoming reluctant to knit on this sleeve. I enjoy watching this colorful knitted fabric grow under my fingers, so the reluctance was unusual. Once I actually stopped to think about it, it didn’t take long to identify the cause: the sleeve was just too narrow. I had slipped it on my arm several times, tugged a little to approximate blocking, and thought it should turn out okay, but my subconscious was smarter than my conscious in this case (again). I wanted it to be better than just “okay”. So I finally listened, pulled out the needles and had a good old time ripping it back.

My eldest daughter watched me with a bit of dismay, but it felt good to start the corrective procedure. I knew darn well that if I wasn’t happy with it at this stage, I wouldn’t be any happier with it down the road. Any time spent knitting after I knew it wasn’t working out would have been wasted, but I count the time up until that point as well spent; it was the cost of learning (or reinforcing) something important.

I have changed the rate of increases and reprinted the chart. The yarn is ready to go, with all the different colors loosely knotted to each other in proper order and wound back around the working ball. This will actually make it much easier to work on – as long as I left long enough ends the first time around to make up for the extra stitches in each round!

I believe a good phrase to use in such a situation is “advancing to the rear”. I’m not sure who coined the term, but it is military in origin. As in, “not retreating, but advancing to the rear”. As in, regrouping for another forward action. As in realizing when it’s not working out, going back to a place from which it can be fixed and fixing it.

Once again, knitting illustrates a valuable life lesson. Too many important lessons have a much higher cost, so any time I can get a good one at no more expense than some time pleasurably spent knitting, I’ll take it and be grateful!

Here is photographic full confession:

Too many projects??

However, I am making progress! I have finished the shawl collar on the green cardigan for K, and have finished the first chocolate lace sock. Unfortunately, it looks like that sock’s foot may still be too long… I am waiting for a fitting opportunity for the recipient before I start (there’s that WORD again!) on the second.

The orchid summer top is going into winter hibernation, so I won’t be looking at it for a while.

The red cuff on the birch dpns is the start beginning of a pair of Evangeline cabled fingerless mitts; thank-you #1, using the wool/alpaca blend Cascade Yarns Lana d’Oro. (See pictures on the Sweet Sheep blog; the pattern is a free download on Ravelry, but you have to have a free account to log in.) I hope to have enough yarn left over to make a companion Calorimetry.

The fall-colored swatch of Plymouth Happy Feet (color 17) is for thank-you #2, a pair of socks for a rabbit-breeder friend. You can’t tell from the picture, but the sock swatch is on needles from the same set as the swatch for the blue and white mittens-to-be. Yeah. I think buying more needles is the solution to that problem.

Of course, there’s my Ithilien Brocade Jacket. I have made good progress (considering the fractured nature of my knitting time) on the first sleeve. The large size of the chart and frequency of color changes makes this one a poor candidate for take-along knitting, so the smaller projects have taken over those bits of knitting opportunity.

Oh, yes, not to forget the paua-shell colored yarn that I need to finish spinning for a sleeveless top, which didn’t make it in this little photo shoot.

The tell-all picture does show some versatility… a little lace, some cables, color work… at least I’m not in a rut!

So that’s SEVEN works-in-progress, three of them major, without even counting the hibernating top. And I see that the yarn I want for my next design, the one in the sketch, is now available. And affordable. Resistance is futile.

The diagnosis is in. My case of knitter’s startitis is incurable, but since I can expect the symptoms to fluctuate, it won’t be this bad all the time. Fortunately, the recommended treatment is not painful, consisting of regular exposure to yarn fumes and frequent periods of fiber manipulation.