Friday, May 4, 2018

what do you call a hoodless hoodie?...

A noodie! LOL!  not sure that will catch on, but I’m loving mine! I wasn’t going to say anything because you already know I can be a bit obsessive. I was just going to quietly knit this thing and keep it to myself but I’m also somewhat of a show-off, I’ll admit it! With my Girlfriend Hoodie pattern in mind, I started off making three pockets - oh, did I say three? Yeah, I was doing that decrease hack and loving it - it's so much faster than that old, outlined full-fashioned decrease and it truly looks nicer and lays flatter - but in my excitement, I must have been operating on auto-pilot and thinking of other things and on the second pocket, I ended at RC078 instead of the 82 rows of the first one - somewhere in there I didn't knit two rows between the battenburg transfers - easy to do when you are shortrowing at the same time and there is something happening on every row instead of just every second, and not concentrating! I made the third pocket (16g each, by the way), paying full attention and got it perfect.
before washing
 
 In my haste for glory, I hadn’t weighed my cone at the beginning, just took the old information from that old post and acted like I had the same size cone (1.2 lb/520g) as the plumberry one. In my mind I was making a half-sleeved hoodie (do you like that ‘half-sleeved’ term – I saw it for the first time on something the other day and decided to use it a few times just to see if it catches on!), knitting the half-sleeve in the battenburg lace, the body a little longer than the  original version, with narrower bands to compensate (those deep stockinette bands do take more yarn so that was a consideration) and of course a hood, because, after all, this is a hoodie, right? 

After both sleeves were knit (I did weigh them, 46g each), I jumped right into making the back, determined to get it made plain before I could reason my way into jazzing it up unnecessarily. I kept saying to myself that people behind my back would notice the beautiful half-sleeves without being distracted with random patterning up the back and though I got it done quite quickly, was rather dismayed to notice the diminished size of the cone! ouch! The back was 84g so that meant that much again for the fronts and I still had bands to do – the hood would take about half the weight/yardage of the Back and I began to readjust my vision. By the time I had the Fronts done I saw this garment as a zip-front, summer cardigan with picot hems and neckband with half sleeves in lace. Final tally, 42g left, good thing nothing was written in stone! Oh, and because of the shrinkage factor, when I first tried it on before laundering, it was like, yuck! this is way too big, but sure enough, the machine wash and dry sorted it out fine!
 
P.S. The hems were ‘Knitting on the EDGE’ #3 – I used the neckline technique from Borderline, KW #25 and added 8 shortrows to centre back and fronts (but not to pockets) to even out the A-line.
MSP here I come! I'm teaching at Founders Fest in Minneapolis, July 28, 29, 2018.
Google Midwest Machine Knitters Collaborative for more information and registration! Hope to see you there!

2 comments:

Karen said...

Love the full Battenburg lace sleeves!

GF Mom said...

Perfectly gorgeous is what I will call it.