Tuesday, August 30, 2016

the hurry-er I go...

the behind-er I get! I got that first sleeve off the machine in about 40 minutes, feeling pretty good that I had no glitches, like dropping everything off or switching the yarns wrong or something like that. After all, that's what the yarn changer is all about! LOL!  BUT, it looks suspiciously small!!! Now, I am using my KR11/knit contour/shaping device  for the size - you program in the stitch and row count from the swatch and it shows you how many stitches to cast on, when to increase and how long to make it. Usually I also have a to-scale drawing on graph paper that I can make brief notations, like how many stitches to cast-on and the row count at the underarm and top of sleeve cap so I can be sure that the next piece matches up AND usually I use the calculator to multiply the row gauge by the length of the sleeve so I should know ahead of time close to where I should be by the time the mylar feeds through to the underarm, but somehow, yesterday, I forgot this step...Sure enough, I had plugged in 63 rows to 10 cm instead of the actual 68 rows - no wonder it looks short. I briefly entertained the idea of teaching Rhiana to push her sleeves up slightly for the 3/4 sleeve look but my heart said no, you can't cheat a granddaughter!
A few notes on the knitting...
Bring the end needle out at the carriage side, at the beginning of each row. This makes sure the end needle knits properly and that both yarns/colours go to the edge of the knitting.
Increase: when the carriage is at the right side (away from the yarn changer) you have one colour at this side - bring out the next new needle and ewrap it with that colour. At the same time, do an ewrap at the left side with the unused yarn. This way you aren't fighting both yarns at the left side.
Decreases/shaping for the sleeve cap: normally I would want to shortrow the sleeve cap and then cast them all off at the end but that means holding position which will surely cause trouble because of the yarn changer. On the bad sleeve, I did go to the old method of casting off stitch by stitch with the transfer tool on the carriage side of the work. It takes more time and is rather ugly. This time, I used the ravel cord method of shortrowing - why didn't I think of that yesterday? So much better! 
BTW, that one at the bottom - no, I did NOT knit that in the opposite colours just to see what it would look like...but check out that cast-off! ;-)

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