This is magic

Purple Haze Cardigan

I have a new knitting project.  It's going to be a V-necked cardigan someday.

What's so magical?  Its perfect top-down seamlessness.  Moreover, look at the shoulder!  (Mine is a little wonkier than this one, but one can dream.) The pattern is Slanted Sleeven by Ankestrick on Ravelry. It's a contiguous pattern - contiguous knitting is a technique where you knit the back, front and shoulder/sleeve cap seamlessly and top-down. Some contiguous patterns aim at a sleeve that mimics a set-in style but this one looks more like a classic seamed knitted shoulder.  I think it's brilliant.

I'm making my cardigan with ColourMart yarns - 100% alpaca held together with a cashmere/cotton lace weight to get a deeper, richer colour (which is impossible to photograph accurately) and the right gauge.  Once the yarn is washed after knitting, it fluffs up and the knitting evens out beautifully.

Swatching

Carpe diem, as they say. Since Adam's Rib and the Sunburst cardigans are more or less tied in your voting I decided to go to the next step before deciding finally.  (Though one commenter suggested I could "whip up" both of them, the pace of my expected progress means I really must choose one...)

I have therefore spent some of my day making a swatch, the phase of any knitting project that follows provisionally choosing a yarn and a pattern and precedes some critical decisions. For non-knitters (and some knitters) this seems to be a tedious and useless task that serves only to use up some of your precious time and materials, producing a scrap of fabric that is good for exactly nothing.

They would be wrong. Swatching is a highly educational step that tells you the answers to some or all of the following questions:

• How do I make this stitch pattern?
• Do the recommended needles, with my yarn, produce the gauge (the number of stitches and rows in a square of knitted fabric) that will allow me to knit a garment from this pattern that will have the right dimensions?
• What are the characteristics of the fabric that I can make with this yarn on these needles, following the stitch pattern?
• Do I like the results?
• How does the fabric change, if at all, after I wash it?

The last question is of particular importance with ColourMart yarns, since they are oiled for machine knitting and can change quite a lot after washing removes the oil and the yarn "blooms".

 

So here is a photo of my unwashed swatch. This is the stitch pattern from the Adam's Rib cardigan plus some stockinette.  I made some mistakes in the stitch pattern, because the chart was a little unusual. However by working through it I can see what the pattern is supposed to look like, which will help me knit it correctly when (if) the time comes. 

Unwashed, the yarn feels dry and the ribbing is a little crunchy. I hope that will wash out and the swatch will become more drapey. I wouldn't want a wrap cardigan that is as stiff feeling as this swatch. 

The good news is that the unwashed stitch pattern is almost exactly the size that it should be for the Adam's Rib cardigan. 

Finishitis #2

Let us turn, for a moment, to knitting.  A while ago I showed you an incredibly light knitted summer top.  It's made with a single thread of lace-weight slubby cotton from ColourMart.  It's hardly there at all.  While it will be just the thing for those hazy hot days of summer when The Sewing Lawyer would really rather not be wearing anything at all, those days are few in this neck of the woods.  For more versatility, a matching cardigan is just the thing.  However, it took almost 2 months of knitting to produce a sleeveless top that weighs only 51 grams.  So for the cardigan, the lace weight cotton was doubled to produce a slubby and still very lightweight cardigan.

This is the Featherweight cardigan.  There are 5,405 projects using this pattern on Ravelry.  So, a very successful pattern for the designer.  Briefly, mine is top of the heap :-) as it's the most recently-posted.

Beginning of endless rounds

However, as usual the Sewing/Knitting Lawyer cannot leave well enough alone.  The cardigan is knit top down and seamless, starting with a bunch of stitches which are the back neck and about 6 on either side which turn into the sleeves and front.  Then you increase, and increase, and increase, at the raglan sleeve points (8 stitches every 2 rows) until you have enough to make sleeves and are down to your underarms, and then you knit, and knit, and knit, and knit on and on and on until you have a sweater body and sleeves.

Back neck unattractiveness - as
designed

And then, you pick up those front/collar bands and knit back and forth in endless rows of stockinette stitch until you are ready to slit your throat with the boredom, and then you have a sweater where if you don't haul down on the front bands (as the model is doing, I notice), the back neck sort of sticks out at the wide and sharply curved back neck in a most unattractive fashion, as shown at right.

This would never do!  Taking a cue from the weightless top, I made front bands using the same lace pattern as in the top (but 2x the heft with doubled yarn), and blocked these into long bands which I sewed to the body.  This allowed me to ease the fronts above bust level and to make the band hug the back of my neck.

Without further ado, some pictures of this object, finished today after only one month of knitting!  (I bow down to people who can toss off a project in a couple of days.  I cannot figure out how this is done without time travel.)

Neck-hugging band
of lace

The sleeves are slightly shorter than the pattern calls for - they hit at my elbow.  The length of the body is slightly longer than the pattern calls for - I wanted it to end at about the same spot as the matching top.

The band hugs the neck very satisfactorily.

 I did the equivalent of a 3 needle bind off at the neck CB (I had to knit 2 bands to ensure the arrows in the lace bands would be in the same direction).  However, I used a crochet hook to do the bind off.  This makes for some nice symmetry in the pattern.  Do pause and admire the neck-hugging properties of the lace band.

Here it is with matching top.

Sorry for the dress form photos.  It is really wet and cool here today.  If it warms up tomorrow, maybe I'll model these for the blog with the last of the Finishitis projects.  If you were keeping count you will know it is a sewing project.  

Ethereal

See-through stockinette

Here is another finished object - it's a wispy knitted top.  It's made from 100% cotton yarn, 2 ply, quite slubby, lace weight.  In 150g of this (from ColourMart), there are 1,500 yards of yarn.  Needless to say, this little number barely made a dent in my two cones (3,000 yards) of this stuff, even though it took me about two months to knit it with tiny little 3mm needles.



Between the lace panels and the inherent thinness of the knitted fabric, this top is so airy as to hardly be there.




The pattern is from a free online knitting magazine, Knitty.  It's called "Etherial" (mis-spelled, yes).

As usual, I was incapable of slavishly following the pattern.  The designer had envisaged it in a lace weight alpaca, which would have a completely different character from my cotton.  The cotton is drapier and even though it is knit at the correct gauge (28 stitches and 42 rows per 10cm or 4"), so that the garment has the finished dimensions called for, it fits far more loosely.  Finished, it has about 4cm (1.5") of negative ease at the bust.

Knitty schematic

As I was knitting I was scheming how to change the way the design fits at the arm openings.  To the right is the schematic provided on the Knitty website.  You start at the hem, and continue in the round to knit a straight tube, which has a double panel of lace at each side.  The arm openings are created by simply splitting these two lace panels and decreasing.  I think it looks uncomfortable in the pattern photo on the Knitty page.

Knitty's version

Besides, in my looser fabric, the tightness below the arm would not look right with the relative looseness elsewhere.

Gusset - in progress

My solution was to insert a knitted gusset between the two side lace panels which allowed me to cast off a number of stitches below the arm, creating a looser, rounder opening.  As I added stitches under the arm, I decreased in the centre panels on the other side of the lace, keeping the stitch count the same.  This means the lace starts moving towards the centre more gradually, but it doesn't change the overall look of the top.

I made the back a little longer than the front, and a tiny bit wider, for fit.  I also firmed the finished arm edges up a little bit with an invisible edge of single crochet.  I think my modifications worked really well.

I'm going to love this top on the hottest days of summer, but it's kind of revealing.  While I'm waiting for the weather to really change, I've already started a coordinating cardigan, worked with the same yarn, but held double.  It's coming along nicely.

Check out my Ravelry project page for the top and cardigan.

Been knitting

I finished my cardigan.  

Soooo, what else can I say about it?  

I used extra-fine merino, double knitting weight, from ColourMart.  I've sung the praises of the yarn from this UK vendor before.  They are like a knitting yarn jobber - they reformat fine machine knitting yarns used in top knitting mills in the UK and Europe into weights that hand knitters can cope with.  (I'm wearing the cardi with a silk top also from ColourMart yarn.)

It does fit, as you can see.  The shoulders are dropped but not excessively so.  I made something between the smallest and second-smallest size and it seems about right.

The fabric is stretchy and could be pinned together at CF, if I was so inclined.  

I like the simple zig-zag lace - it was very easy to memorize the pattern.  

Inside Out

To the right you can see how the sweater is constructed, from the inside.  The horizontal line is where the back joins the front and lower edge of the collar.  I've reinforced this line with a row of single crochet chain, to stabilize the shoulder line.  

The edges of the cardigan lie nice and flat - it's a simple edge - K3, P1, K1, P1 (on wrong side, K1, P1, K1, P3) and then on with whatever the body is.  The 3 stockinette stitches at the edge curl to the wrong side and the 3 stitches of ribbing contain the amount of curl very effectively.  You can see the wrong side of this edge on the collar.  

I'm contemplating my next project.  I have a muslin cut out for this skirt.  

The problem is, as designed it's pretty skin tight.  I've added 2 cm at CF and another 2 at CB, because I'm contemplating it in a woven suiting instead of a cotton-lycra sateen as Burda intended.  

I need another suit...

Strange knitting competition

For the past two weeks (well, 16 days actually) I've dedicated my free time to a project entered in the Ravellenic Games over on Ravelry.  For the uninitiated, Ravelry  is a fabulous site for people who make things out of yarn.  Mostly, I pay attention to the knitting since I cannot get over my general impression that crocheting always results in an item that appears to be made out of granny squares, whether it was or not.*

The Ravellenics are inspired by the Olympics.  Sort of.  The idea is that you declare you are entering a fibre-related "event", start your project during or after the Olympics opening ceremonies (July 27), and finish up before the end of the closing ceremonies which take place later today.  Depending on the nature of the chosen project, this is a daunting schedule.  Just over two weeks to complete a shawl or a sweater is pretty impressive, IMO.  Especially if you knit madly for five days (9") before realizing that if you keep on, the thing is going to be ginormous, and that you really must rip back to nothing and start over.  (Ask me how I know.)

Which is why I'm totally chuffed to say that I finished my project, (yet another) knitted top, ahead of schedule.

This colourful little number is vaguely based on a pattern in the spring/summer 2012 edition of Vogue Knitting.  Only vaguely because again, I chose yarn that knitted up quite differently from the intended sport-weight cotton Vogue favoured.  Mine is 50-50 cotton and cashmere (yummy), DK weight, from ColourMart.

I call it my Ravellenics Missoni Gelato top (if you are on Ravelry you can read more here). I cannot take credit for selecting the fruit-flavoured coordinating colours - CM put together Ravellenics "scrap sets" for anyone who wanted to buy one (5 50g skeins - I have a total of 76g left).

Take a look at my garter stitch neck and arm edge bands.  I am proud of them because I totally winged the shaping and stitch count, and because I managed to turn off the pointiness of the knitted chevrons below the neck edges (it worked in the back too, but you'll just have to believe me).

I know I keep saying I'm back to sewing now, but really, this afternoon I intend to not start another knitting project, but instead to devote myself to the 2nd iteration of my Chanel-ish jacket pattern.  Since my first attempt was clearly too big, I've trimmed all the pieces down to a straight size 8 and will put the sleeves in this time.   Stay tuned.  

Fun fact:  There was much to-do on Ravelry and elsewhere after the games, originally dubbed the "Ravelympics" had to be renamed.  A somewhat offensive-to-knitters cease-and-desist letter was received by the owners of the site from a law firm retained by the US Olympics Committee.  The story even made the New York Times.  The USOC was forced by the resulting outrage to apologize publicly (twice actually) for offending knitters.


*  Well, except when its an amigurumi.  I'm ready for the cries of rage from all you dedicated crocheters who believe otherwise, and actually I'm anxious to be proven wrong with links to beautiful crocheted items that do NOT appear to be made from granny squares.  Especially nice garments, please.  Seriously.  I might be persuaded to take it up.

Yet another one

I knit another top.  Yes indeed.  Knitting something takes approximately 1,000 times longer than sewing something, but I'm finding it strangely soothing as an activity.  It's so portable.

This is a pattern on Ravelry known as the "Grown-Up Tee", because it was originally published as a kid's pattern.  There are only two other projects for the adult version of this pattern posted on Ravelry, which strikes me as strange since this is kind of cute, and not hard to knit.


One modification I made was to add shaping to the lace section by using smaller needles above the hip, and reducing one stitch per lace repeat at the waist level.  It is *extremely* subtle since the 100% silk yarn (ColourMart again) is very drapey and the ribbed lace pattern does not really draw in, but in my imagination the blockiness of the pattern as designed (no shaping whatsoever) is avoided.  (To be fair to the designer, if this was knitted in wool as intended, the ribbing would naturally pull in to create the illusion of shaping.)

It is an interesting exercise to apply my sewing and fitting knowledge to knitting patterns. The pattern as designed is the same front and back, which would make for a very wide open and low-feeling back neck.  I added some short rows which start along the top of the sleeve to add approximately 2.5cm (1") to the back neck.  At left is a photo of the sleeve, taken from above, showing where the short rows start.  The line is approximately where the neckline as designed would have fallen.

I am going to my sewing room now to contemplate Claire Shaeffer's latest Chanel jacket pattern...

In my defence

At least I'm finishing something, if not my turquoise wool dress.

Gray Harmony

Here is my latest knitting project, which I think is quite successful.

It's made from a blend of 70% silk, 30% linen acquired from ColourMart.  The gauge is about 30 stitches to 10cm (4") so there are about a millionty-million stitches in this puppy.

It was an adventure from the beginning because I used a pattern available only in French found on Ravelry (it's called Harmony; look it up if you are a member).  Though it had been on the site for several years, nobody had posted about making it.

Harmony

The first challenge was to translate and understand the pattern.  This involved some e-mails with the designer who was very responsive and helpful.

The second challenge was to decide if the pattern as written would actually work in my yarn.  I decided it wouldn't so I set out to adjust on the fly.

The third, of course, was the actual knitting.  It took just over six weeks.  

Things I did differently from the pattern:  chose a different fibre with different properties; increased the number of stitches; changed the cabled rib pattern a little bit; knit in the round to eliminate seaming as much as possible; adjusted the shaping to create the cowl; added i-cord binding at the arms to improve the finish.  It's a good thing I'm apparently fearless.

All that said, it looks quite a lot like the picture on the Ravelry pattern page, so I'm very satisfied.

My new dress (to be)

I was going to call this post "introducing my new dress" but I decided that would be cruel.

A bit further along than flat folds

At least it's cut out...

This will be the sleeveless dress with the asymmetrical faux-closure from February's Burda.  I'm making it from turquoise wool crepe, which will be underlined with silk organza. The bodice lining is the China silk print and the skirt will be lined with slipperier Bemberg.

Since taking this photo, I finished basting the underlining in place and construction has begun.

"Harmony" knitting pattern
by Nadia Zarrouk - available
on Ravelry

However, again I've been sidetracked by knitting.  My new project is a pattern found via Ravelry.  So far I've done the 2nd cable twist row and it's looking good.  I have some stash fabric lined up to coordinate.  More on that later.

I'm making the top from a silk and linen blend (70-30%) fingering weight yarn, which I ordered from ColourMart.  Oh my, if you are a knitter, you should check out the CM site!  They have lots of really luxurious yarns (cashmere, fine merino, silk etc.) for very down-to-earth prices. Four cones, each about 500 metres of 100% silk yarn for $22 (shipping included), were delivered to my door on Friday.  

100% silk DK in maroon

Here's one of them, auditioning with a scrap of a beautiful wool bouclé from stash.  Did Chanel knit?