fusion knitting...

the process or result of joining two or more patterns together to form a single entity.
The San Diego photo-taker did send me one photo that I can show you of my denim lace hoodie (see previous posting) - notice, I only gave you the back view and my own photo of a flat shot. I did promise to tell you what I did to come up with this.
Starting off with the idea to make myself a spring jacket, I had visions of a denim jacket hoodie - I had this nice big cone of cotton denim boucle that my friend gave me last year - I had used that yarn in several garments and am very sad that it is no longer available - if you have some, be nice to it! Anyway, my favourite garments (blogpost - Update, June 27, 2012) in that yarn were a long lace skirt and my prototype for 'Two Way' (Serial Stuff 4), another lace effort. The yarn is cotton boucle with a nylon binder that makes it shrink up and become quite stretchy as well as thick, so knitting it quite loosely (T9) in lace thins it out so that it doesn't become too bulky.

I used the border lace pattern from  'Lace It Up', KW#37, used the A-line shape, hood  and the full needle rib hems from 'Lacey in Red',  KW#40. For the front bands, because of the shrinkage factor, I knew that the FNR horizontal bands wouldn't work  I did try a swatch of stockinette bands - a ripply disaster! Then I remembered making a vertical FNR band where I knit it from the top down so that the first buttonhole could be made at the beginning of the band, then make a bunch evenly spaced, knit more plain band than you know you'll need and take it off on waste ('Forever in Blue', KW#28). Assemble the garment except for the front bands - toss it, bands and all in the washer and dryer to shrink it all and then put the front bands on. That's the whole story!

Oh, today I found a new reason to be obsessive about hanging yarn marks every 10 cm at the edges of my knitting - I use them primarily for seaming - makes it go much more precisely when you can match up the marks. Well, I was happily knitting away on the front of another 'manfriend hoodie' and at RC140, thinking, wow, this is totally easy, zone-out knitting with nothing to do until the underarm and it suddenly dawned on me, I blew right by attaching the top of the pocket at RC090...arrrggghhh! No worries, I pulled it all off the needles, unravelled it down to RC082, 2 rows above RC080 for the exact row to rehang and reset the row counter exactly, no guessing and trying to count up from the bottom...