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!

]]> http://prairiespinner.com/2010/02/26/this-yarn-is-getting-tired/feed/ 0 http://prairiespinner.com/2010/01/23/another-fiction-inspired-sweater-design/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=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 Continue reading →]]> 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?