started...

knitting and thinking, thinking and knitting…I think I left you hanging, with me starting each piece, knitting the oatmeal, taking it off, setting aside, starting the next piece…but while doing the pockets, I revised that concept – too much work rehanging and all that, so, went back to a more scientific or maybe I should say, educated, mathematical approach?
Sidebar - Oh man, so frustrating, I’ve forgotten how to spell or is it type? I have no auto-correct on this program and I keep exxcpecting it to fix mistakes like on my iPad!!! Arr-r-r-g-g-gh-h!
BTW, in case I never said this before, knitting at T9 on the LK is not exactly a soothing, walk-in-the-park experience, especially for the almost full width of the bed.  https://knitwords.blogspot.com/2011/06/my-tricked-out-lk.html

It requires yarn spray, elbow grease and a degree of zen-ness, and, space it out – you cannot power knit something like this. Your machine needs to be firmly anchored on a good solid table that is not swaying back and forth. The one I have is sturdy, quite heavy and not portable. If using lighter weight yarns and T3 to 6, this may not be necessary but for the heavy work it does need to be stable. If you’ve ever been knitting on one of those crummy stands where you’re trying to anchor the legs of the table with your own feet spread out, you’ll know what I mean!
Back to the current event, I draw my schematics out on metric graph paper, to scale, in centimetres. Notice how the sleeve underarm point matches with the underarm point of the body. Because I had 4 colours, I divided the overall length of the body (65 cm) by 4 and came up with 16.25 cm, rounded that up to 20 cm just to make it easy. The bottom of the body, pockets and sleeve with be oatmeal and covers the largest area. The next colour, denim, is to divide the oatmeal and smoke which really don't go together and, to use the ivory, I threw a 5 cm band of it between the 10 cm denim stripes, leaving the top of each piece to be finished of in the smoke/gray. Drawing the sleeve to line up with its position on the body shows me where the colour changes are so it all matches up when sewn together!
Oh man, still firing on all cylinders! The Back is done! I love it and I’m already regretting making this in MF’s size which means I’ll have to give it away! ;(
The Back weighs in at 274g!
Not bad for my 30g swatch times 10!

 

local yarn shop...

Is there such a thing? Checked on the ‘net. Briggs & Little doesn’t have a website that you can order from and it’s a Canadian brand not carried by my usual US mail order source and I couldn’t find any stockist links. My LYS, where I had originally purchased the yarn, like five years ago, retired and closed shop a few years back. Look in the phone book – nada! Again, checking on-line, there are supposed to be two new local yarn shops that aren’t in the phone book, but have facebook pages…I hate that! Obviously, I haven’t kept up on local hand knitting stuff. Called the first, closer one. She told me she had an order in, currently had none in stock and didn’t expect it to be in for a month at least.

The second one does stock it and has all the colours! OK, back in business! I rushed over and picked up one skein of each of the four colours so now have 1250g total. Not worried about dye-lots – the new ones look surprisingly close, other than the denim but since I’m doing this double-stranded and with stripes, it shouldn’t be an issue. I’ll mix one of the old with a new and that should take care of any slight variances. My plan is to start with oatmeal (which I have the most of - the front pockets will be all that colour) at the bottom and move into navy, with a bit of the ivory and then top it off with the smoke – oatmeal and smoke don’t really ‘go together' but separating them with the navy and ivory should make it work… will see what happens. I figure I can knit the Back up so far, do the Fronts and Sleeves in the first colour and see where I’m at – guess that’s not really stripes – we used to call it colour-blocking, I think. Should have a better idea of how far the yarn is going by that time and adjust as needed…and whatsername has more if I hurry!  Ha! Jumping in now!

cross knitting...

the action or practise of mixing elements of two separate patterns to create a new design.
I’ve thought about this and thought about it some more and to be honest with you, I’ve let any excuse get in my way of jumping in.

Side Steps

I’m merging two of my previous designs. Side Steps, a sideways- knit cardigan with shortrowed gores that add an A-line shape to the body - the Back and Fronts are knit, shoulders joined and then the sleeve is picked up from open stitches and knit down to the cuff. Why? Because it already has the basic shape I want for that Eileen Fisher knockoff. Easy to turn it into a pullover – just keep knitting across the front instead of leaving an opening that would make it a cardigan.
Then the other pattern is Rectangles from Serial Stuff 4. Why? It’s done with Wool Crepe Deluxe which is the yarn I’m going to use here and it had automatic longstitch facings (that I want to use for the new neckline and hemline) and, bonus, a one-row-tuck stitch pattern that will combat the possible biasing of the loose-tension sideways knit (I have 500g of this Norwegian Slate WCD that am certain with the loose tension will be enough to get this knit without too much running-out-of-yarn stress).

Rectangles

So, you probably figured me out already – I’m going to attempt this without reswatching! Just use the same tensions and numbers as Rectangles and put them into the same basic shape as Side Steps. It’s all there, just getting to it seems the issue. I did Rectangles with DAK for the tuck patterning source but if you recall my DAK laptop computer bit the dust a while back and even though I have a very long cable that will reach across the room to my old desktop, which also has DAK7 on it – that machine has been making weird noises and I think it’s on it last legs. Today, I bit the bullet and just drew the 12X20 stitch pattern onto a mylar – took me at least 10 minutes from printing out the template from my DAK8 laptop (which I’ve never been able to get to work with my SL4 thingy that went from DAK7 to the knitting machine). My other option would be to install DAK7 on the current working laptop, but I’d need a life – another excuse!
This may not work but I’ll have had the joy of sharing it with you! More diversion! :)

earth to MAO...

After knitting all those different lace patterns, most of them being fashion lace (multiple transfer rows between the actual knitted rows) it dawned on me – who am I kidding? the plan is to knit BLACK (hard to see at the best of times), wool crepe deluxe (drop a stitch and it runs like a bullet!)  and I’m going to add 12 to 16 rows of transfers to the equation? Get real, MA! Back to reality! at least I used up all that orange (VBG)! Remember before we had emojis?
I’ve looked at virtually every lace garment I’ve ever knit and paged through the old Knitwords, looking for something and I found one! Lace Luxe from No 38, Autumn 2006 – I loved this stitch pattern but had forgotten it because the garment was knit in Wagtail Yarns mohair,  lilac – not exactly a colour at the top of my most-frequently worn list. Mostly I did keep the garments that were in the magazine but that one I gave to the Wagtail people because it was the first garment they had that was machine-knit! No wonder I forgot it!
Programmed in the stitch pattern and it knit up beautifully in Trenzi. Switched to a leftover WCD and knit an adequate amount to examine it – I’ve used WCD in lace enough to know that my optimum stitch size is T4 – I’m on a roll – swatch knit with a suitable trim added on, all washed and dried – looks great! Now to work on the shape!

concept...

Saw a picture of Becca the bachelorette wearing what I thought was a knitted lace cardigan with satin shawl collar and I loved it. Now that I have all this experience with searching the web, I thought, this will be a piece of cake. It wasn’t really, because it was just an ad on TV, not a show but I did finally manage to track it down – this wasn’t the photo I saw, no rose and she was turned sideways -  and it turned out to be a lace fabric, not an actual knit but that is totally irrelevant, I going with what I thought. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a bachelorette watcher – our cable TV comes from Minnesota and I believe Becca is from there, so it was a promo feature!

I have a semi-dress-up occasion for around New Year’s Eve and figure this would be perfect and could be used for so much more (I'm doing a seminar in Pigeon Forge, TN, March 22, 23/19 and another one in Waynesboro, PA April 12, 13/19 and even though I haven’t been to either of those places, you know how I like to have something brand new for each show).  I’m planning Wool Crepe Deluxe, black, of course and I even have a part cone of a shiny black rayon for the collar!

Have you ever had stuff for so long you forgot what stuff you have? In searching for the ultimate lace pattern for my ’Becca’, I pulled out every stitch book I had, looking for a lace pattern that was more holes than stockinette. One book in particular had several good-looking prospects. I spent the better part of an hour pencilling one design on the mylar sheet, feeding it into my Silver Reed SK580, reading it into the PE1 several times and checking for the usual mistakes. Finally got it in and knit – not what I wanted! Began to fill in another mylar and had a little tingle…suddenly I recalled that there were preprogrammed memory cards that came with this book  (they do not have a battery that would expire -https://knitwords.blogspot.com/2018/02/battery-operated.html )  – where the heck are they? A little searching and sure enough, I had them in hand – so much easier. Quickly tried several more samples - you might notice I'm using that gawdawful orange TAMM Trenzi that's been my waste yarn for the past two years or so. For experimenting, no use wasting WCD and as I know that T6 is the optimum stitch size for lace with Trenzi, that eliminates a lot of the usual issues when experimenting with lace. Only after narrowing down on the actual stitch I want to use will I attempt a swatch with the actual garment yarn!

fingers crossed...

Just to have something to do while I’m waiting for my CT8 order without a lot of thinking and prep work – let me back up a bit. The ideas, where do they come from?
On the way home from Toronto last week, I was wearing my blue 1Rt Linen Hoodie   http://knitwords.blogspot.com/2017/07/road-trip.html - it was quite warm and I was loving the hoodie. I had a black camisole under it with my light jeans and I felt cool and good. I caught a couple of glimpses in mirrors and liked the sheer-look of the fabric and it struck me I could knit a dress of the same fabric. Last year, for a special family occasion, I had sewn a dress of a sheer fabric with a bias-cut slip in black underneath instead of lining the dress and I could use that under a sheer-knit dress. http://knitwords.blogspot.com/2017/05/cross-training.html  


So, here goes! In KW#46, I did a four-panel fitted dress called Fit ’n Flare – it still fits me! I dug out the schematic/mylar that goes in my wonderful little KR11 knit radar. I have the exact same yarn, Sari – I originally had two cones of the same dye lot and the hoodie hardly took half of one. I had very good notes of the swatches, both unwashed and washed although, in a purging frenzy earlier this year I had trashed the actual swatches. To check the validity of my washed swatch numbers, I measured the actual garment and checked my row count numbers, and yeah, it looks pretty accurate. The only thing I forgot to note was which stitch pattern I had used. Because it is so loosely knit, it’s sort of hard to tell by looking but I feel certain that it was the one from Big Sister, KW#42 – hope that’s not subliminal just because someone mentioned that pattern in an email recently…
Within minutes of deciding to go for it, I was casting on and knitting! It’s a pretty quick knit, even if there are almost 400 rows to each piece and there is shaping happening all over – I got all four pieces knit in one day and even remembered to hang yarn marks at each edge every 10 cm/4 inches – these are long seams and that will be invaluable in making sure the seams are properly matched. Sort of cheating, instead of the fancy double bed hem, I just used a 3-strand ewrap – the fabric is light and floaty and if that doesn’t work, it’s easy enough to rehang and add one of my other edges to it.

the verdict...

 Have you ever had a cotton knit sweater that seemed to get heavier and heavier as you wear it and it is actually stretching and lengthening, growing in size? Well, that never happened!
I told you I was taking Lipstick & Smoke with me to Ireland. I did and I was so glad to have it. I wore it on the plane for several reasons. I was trying to pack light and it wouldn’t fit in my suitcase and I knew it would be nice and cozy for the flight. When I travel, I always take a longer cardigan that I can use as a dressing gown and, if there were cooler evenings, I knew I could wear it as a coat. I wore it so much over the three weeks, my sister was probably sick of looking at it but she never said! I kept waiting for it to stretch out but it never did. Even coming back to Toronto where it can be dreadfully hot, it still didn’t and with all that wear and not being washed for so long, it still looked great! AND, not a pillball in sight!
Impressed is what I am with Cotton Tale 8 and I’ve already placed another order for my next project – I’ve asked for 6 shades of blue – even with the printed-out shade card it’s hard to know what exactly you’re going to get and I want two or three shades that go together for my next long cardigan and I know I’ll use the other colours for something! I made a couple of trial swatches yesterday – I’m looking for textured stripes, maybe alternating knit side and purl side. The bands will be rib-look, with 3 knit stitches alternating with a tuck rib that will widen it out to match the width  of the lace stitches…

next....

I’m finishing up the watermelon GFH for Janet (I had it all made and took the pieces to the Raleigh seminar to use in my seaming class) – I need to finish the side seams and do the zipper. Am also working on the sleeve for the wedding shrug but because it is all hand-transferred lace, I like to have something else, not requiring such full concentration, to do, to give myself a break.
My next project has been percolating in my head for the past month. Janet (travel and hiking sister) wants a summer cardigan – we saw a lady wearing one that caught her attention when we were in Sydney – she was walking toward us and we both turned around to catch a look at the back of it - it was a handknit (popcorn stitch), but not too thick or heavy; sort of slouchy but not sloppy; casual but too casual with a partial shawl collar; three-quarter sleeve that was the underarm/shoulder extended, no sleeve seam; slightly longer in back with curved hemline ending just under the butt, and I’ve been day-dreaming about how to make it ever since.

The yarn was presenting the biggest problem because I want to make it on the standard gauge machine because of the popcorn-look. I figure I can use that basic tuck stitch to simulate the texture. I was planning to use the knit side, but so far, my swatches all look better to me on the purl side. I have a big cone of Softball cotton 2.2 in a neutral shade – we had discussed colours and she has a lot of jewel tones in her wardrobe but wanted to get away from that and try something different but she’s not sure what – I suggested pale gray, ecru, ivory…keeping it on the lighter, neutral shades that would kind of go with anything. I did swatch up the softball but it is knitting at T9-10 and after washing is like a piece of cardboard. Scratch that. My next option is a large cone of a cotton bouclé that I’m not sure where it came from (I’ve had it that long) but the label says Silk City Fibers Cotton Crepe – they don’t even show it as discontinued so I’ve no idea of the yardage…I made two swatches of tucks, one at T7 and one at T8 – they both look sort of loose and soft and it’s not washed yet. I weighed the swatch – it’s 28g and I have 540g left on the cone. I took out a largish, long cardigan of mine and lay the swatch over the back – 6 swatches would make the back, double that for the front and 4 for the sleeves portion, so 16 X 28g is 448g – this might work! The swatches are in the dryer – watch for updates!