Attempt at a swatch (colour I)

The bad yarn shopping I described yesterday didn't dissuade me from trying a swatch.  I knew before I cast on that I had muffed it, but I thought I'd put the yarn to work anyway.  

In truth, there are a couple of things I like about the swatch.  I like the pattern.  I like the way the tiny stitches look.  

However, you wouldn't know that there were two colours besides grey in that, would you?  It sort of gets paler at the tips of the stars, but basically, that could be some bad lighting in the photograph or something.

Even the relatively big blocks of colour in the cuff keep their secret pretty well.  It's not worth the effort of having an extra colour.  Not if it's going to be my little secret, anyway.  "Not many people know this, but there are three colours in this sweater."  It's not clever.  

Attempt at a swatch (gauge)

A while ago, I picked up some yarn with this project in mind.  

I did it all wrong.  

Well, maybe not all, but mostly wrong.  Certainly, if I list wrong vs right, the wrong side is much longer.  

right

1. I went to the store in the country with the good colour selection
   

wrong

1. I went to the store with a non-knitter, who maybe didn't want to spend 3 hours in the shop
2. As a direct result of 1., I left the shop after exactly 1/2 hour
3. I didn't have a colour scheme in mind
4. I didn't have a budget in mind
5. I didn't have a pattern in mind
6. I bought yarn, but not enough for a whole sweater
7. I bought two different thicknesses of yarn
8. I only bought close colours; no compliments
9. I didn't buy enough colours to make a sweater anyway
10. The colours I did buy aren't actually distinguishable from each other when they're knit together
11. I had no realistic way to return to the shop to get the required "rest of the sweater" after I'd swatched with the stuff I did get
12. I had no reason to expect the shop to have more or a different or better selection the next time I passed through, or indeed at any time in the future
13. I might have been swayed by some sale prices

Yeah, so wrong wins.  

Undaunted, I did give swatching the old college try.   I'll write about that next time.

Colours of Scotland (Old Stones)

Of all the scenery we saw in Scotland, I liked the uneven stones the best.  They fit together (like in buildings, walls, and prehistoric monuments), but they're not alike.  

I think my favourite palette is the greys and greens, (with colourful moss and lichen) that one sees on the old stones of Scotland.  

I love the way the growth on the stones matches the growth on the ground, even though they are different plants.

It's not just the natural (or at any rate, pre-historic) stones possessed of the nice colours.  Stone buildings acquire new growths and stains in attractive ways.

And, better yet, the stone buildings leave some opportunity for the introduction of accent colours which pop out and make a bold statement.  

Colours of Scotland (Animal Life)

Basically, on our trip to Scotland, the fauna we saw were sheep.  We didn't see deer or other ungulates (except stuffed and mounted, and then only their heads).  We saw sheep.  Furthermore, we saw white sheep.  Now, I'm not complaining.  A little fluffy white lamb melts my brain such that I'm reduced to a murmuring cutsie-talker faster than you can say jack rabbit (we saw some bunnies, too).  

It occurs to me that the sheep aren't only white, though.  They are painted with all kinds of wonderful bright spraypaint presumably for identification purposes.   If I were a bold designer, I might be tempted to make a sweater in all sorts of neon-on-natural combinations with a grass green background.  

I liked the colours of the birds.  Where I live, we don't have chaffinches, and I love the way they have blue heads.   Why aren't there blue mammals?  It's a great colour.  

Colours of Scotland (Plant Life)

On my brief trip to Scotland, I loved the way the yellow gorse sprang out of the background landscape.  I am a sucker for yellow in sweaters and love a splash of gold where I can put it in.

I also loved the fact that delicate yellow primroses grow like weeds all over the place.  I didn't take any good pictures of primrose patches, but here's one to remind me: it's a little primrose growing out of a vertical drop next to a waterfall.  

There were little violet flowers painting the undergrowth.  I won't forget them and be afraid to put a dash of purple in for good measure.

Even the budding trees were in the same green/red pallet had been appreciating before.  I think I prefer that very delicate green at the tips of these buds to the vibrant green of the grass.

Another thing about Scottish plants was that some of them seemed like the kind of thing that the dinosaurs would have strolled amongst.   This thing, being enjoyed by a cold-weather bumblebee, churns out leaves so huge one could sleep under them.  

Colours of Scotland (Islands and Sea)

A trip to Scotland provided me with inspiration for colour schemes for a fair isle sweater.  

The greenness and redness of the scrub and blueness of the sea is rife with colour combinations.  The sky adds its own blue and grey to the mix.  The ground has some brown and grey for earth and stone.  The combination is very pleasing.

Furthermore, I like the way the houses are white with grey rooves and black windows.  It's in no way reflective of the landscape, but it does become part of it.  

Even in rainy weather, that lovely red and green and blue palette emerges.  It gets some rich greys mixed in, too.

The grey weather forms a palette all its own.  I don't know if I would enjoy knitting a sweater in a thousand shades of grey, but I do like looking at it.  NB white snow on the top of the mountains and white water cascading down the hillside.

Colours of Scotland (Inspiration)

After our trip to Scotland, I have some (not original, but still pleasing-to-me) ideas about what colour schemes to use for the sweater.  In the past, when making colourwork, I have gone to the yarn store (or my stash) and held skeins up to each other until I had a combination I liked.  There wasn't forethought; just taking the tools available to me and converting them into a pleasing combo.  

In many ways, I think this is a completely defensible way to approach the question of what colour a sweater should be.  If it is going to be knit, it has to be created from something that is available.  Much as I would love to learn how to dye, I haven't (yet) and so for me the colour of the sweater is going to be dependent on what colours are available in the shop.  

I do however see that serious knitters, with serious design schemes, start with colours in their head.  They start with an idea and colour is part of that idea.  I don't promise that I will follow this serious path.  I do like the notion of having a sweater which means something, though.  

Who am I kidding? I want a pretty thing to wear.  

The old, post 9 (the unkindest cut)

I have a problem with cutting yarn.  When you cut it, you commit to using it in the way it's currently in use FOR EVER.  Well, admittedly, you can unravel and re-use cut yarn but then there is some waste.  Plus, there's a bit of waste every time you start a new strand.  As a result of this problem, I end up carrying over yarn where I should have cut it and started anew.  

I have to get over this habit.  It creates a bit of a mess inside the garment, it creates loops to catch one's fingers and shirt buttons on, and most importantly, it opens up the possibility of having a vertical float that it too short and bunches the fabric.  Ugh.  

So, I will need lots of extra yarn for this project, if only to assure myself that it is okay to cut the yarn every time I change colour.  

The old, post 8 (seams and boundaries)

Being a self-taught knitter has all kinds of advantages.  That said, there are a few things which make an item graceful and those are often the kind of great skills that are taught.  I am NOT a skilled seamstress, especially not where knitting is involved.  Sure, I know: practice makes perfect.  As far as sewing goes, my experience has been: practice makes frustrated.  

In the old sweater, the seams are not the work of a skilled craftswoman.  No, indeed.  The seams are the work of someone who wanted arms attached to torso and had some vague, possibly tribal awareness that the attachment would last longer if there was a high density of stitches.  

I would very much like to have worked through this deficiency in my skills before I go too far with the next level.  Of course, if I'm going to make a steeked sweater (as is the plan) I won't have nearly as much seaming as I would if I made it in bits.  But there will still be some seams and they'll have to be dealt with by someone who knows how.  

In my defense,  I don't think the desperately bad seaming has a terrible effect on the outside of the sweater.  

The old, post 7 (casting on)

The part of the old sweater which has aged the least gracefully is the cast-ons.  This is, I will freely admit, because they weren't done well to begin with.  The wonderful book "Principles of Knitting" by June Hemmons Hyatt (pleasepleaseplease re-publish it soon!) makes the point that cuffs get the roughest treatment and therefore need the strongest edges.  Mine had no such thing.  I wasn't clear on how to keep the start and finish of cast-ons permanent.  Now, I tie knots.  Sacrilege, I know.  But the un-ravelling from the bottom up of my beloved sweater taught me to be ruthlessly definite about the limits of the cast-on.  

Also, I used to cast-on much more tightly than I do now.  I have learned (thx JHH) many different kinds of cast-ons and occasions on which one might use one or another.  I don't need to rely on my old system of long-tail cast-on followed by vigourous yanking until there was some resemblance between the circumference of the sweater and the circumference of the cast-on.  I am sure that technique contributed to the short-lived edges of my old sweater.  

The old, post 6 (insides)

Even though this sweater was my first two-colour work, I have always been fairly detail-oriented, so the inside looks just fine.  It made sense to me that the insides should have a nice pattern, just like the outsides.  

However, I didn't know much about stranding and so what I did was to wrap in the Estonian way (which is a twist in the same direction every time) instead of the Scottish way (which is to carry the yarns always above or below the other, without any twist).  The Estonian way works well if you're knitting back and forth, because the twists untwist in the purl rows.  It was a nuisance for my sweater, however, and I spent some effort untwisting the yarns.  

One thing I think the Estonian way handles better is floats that last longer than 5 stitches.  It's quite easy and natural to wrap the long float in the middle when you're twisting the yarns anyway.  If you're not twisting them, it's a bit of a to-do. My ultimate solution to this problem is simply to avoid patterns which require floats longer than 5 stitches.  There are plenty to chose from even with that restriction.  

The old, post 5 (colour)

From this sweater, I learned an important lesson about colour (I think).  To me, the magenta absolutely pops out.  It's basically a background colour + magenta sweater.  This came as a total shock to me when I knit it.  I thought that, since there were roughly equal amounts of each of the colours in the sweater, the sweater would come out looking roughly like a combination of those colours. 

I think a few things combine to cause the magenta to out-shine the other colours: 

1) I think most of the other colours were heathers and it is a solid

2) I think most of the other colours were similar in hue to their neighbours, but not the magenta.  

3) I think I used the magenta too frequently as the background colour in the long patterns.  Greater spacing would have been better.

I don't mind the overall effect.  As I've said, I love this sweater.  I just wish I'd intended it to be like that.

I think that really the only way I'm going to "see" such a think in advance is to do extensive swatching.  This isn't a strong point of mine, but I am sort of into the intellectual aspect of this project, so hopefully I'll find motivation to do my homework.

The old, post 4 (patterns in the round)

On the subject of patterns, I should admit that I made a mistake with the first one.  I had never made a sweater in the round or worked in two colours before and so I mis-followed the chart.  There is a gap between my repeats which shouldn't be there.  Presumably, the pattern indicated that there should be one the first time through (but not subsequent repeats), but I didn't understand it.  

I thought about keeping the mistake all the way through, but my love of symmetry trumped my love of similarity.  These days, I would unpick to fix a mistake like that, but I think at the time I was just happy to have got through the first couple of inches.  

The old, post 3 (patterns)

As I have mentioned in the past, I really liked the way that the patterns worked themselves out.  I liked the balance created by the pattern which was basically short, short, long, short, short, long.  

There is also a little bit of resonance between some of the patterns, and I like that even more.  There isn't any resonance between the two big patterns, and I will change that next time.  

Furthermore, one of the "long" patterns is actually just a short pattern with a couple of stripes underneath.  I'm not crazy about that way of extending it, but it is a useful thing to remember if ever a few more rows are required.  

All of the patterns have a single colour row at the start and finish.  One of the patterns (in green and light blue below) has single colour rows inside, as well.  This could be a problem for a sweater with steeks, but without those buffer rows, the patterns would all have to be carefully matched in terms of the number of stitches in their repeats.  This isn't the end of the world, but it is a bit fiddly.

The old, post 2 (yarn variations)

One thing I learned while making the old sweater was that there are different thicknesses of yarn.  I know that this is not a secret, but I didn't understand it until I was making this sweater.  It didn't (I think) strongly affect the build of the sweater itself, but I ran out of some colours and not others.  Thicker yarn has fewer metres in a 100g skein.  

It's a little thing, but it still nags at me that the top pattern on the sleeves is lilac and blue but on the sweater torso, it's lilac and green.  It should have been lilac and green on the sleeves according to the colour repeat rules I had devised.  But the green was a thicker yarn than the others and there wasn't enough to finish as I had planned.  

It has to be admitted that even though I am still annoyed by the variance, no one else is.  It's still a good sweater.  Thus, there is another lesson: nagging problems aren't sweater-ruiners.  They're just little nagging problems.  Minor background bugs.  

The last lesson I have already mentioned: a bit of difference between the yarns doesn't matter.  A little bit thicker, a little bit thinner ... it all came out in the wash.  I might have been lucky with that, though.  I would hate to take too great a liberty.  Still, a bit of variation is OK, especially with the pattern changing all the time.

Nonetheless, for my next sweater, I will be sure to have all matching wraps per inch and lots of extra no matter what.  

The old, post 1

The old fair isle sweater was made a long time ago.  I'm not really used to the phenomenon of things in my life being 20 years old, but this thing that I made when I wasn't actually very much of a child any more is about 20 years old.  

It was the first or possibly second genuinely wearable object that came off my needles.  There were other sweaters, but this one was good.  I could wear it in public without it being excruciatingly obvious that an amateur produced it.  I'm still pleased by it.  

I am going to spend some posts writing about it; the good, the bad, what I learned etc. 

Slacker!

OK, so much for using the blog as a spur.  

Also, so much for using the old sweater as a spur.  I have been wearing it quite a lot lately.  It's in really ragged shape, but I do love it so.  Despite the fact that it's not really holding together, people compliment me when I wear it.  It's a really great sweater.  I want another.  But I wear the old one and it's still working so why would I create another.  Surely the old one will still do?

Nonetheless, I haven't abandoned the idea.   I actually went to Scotland and am quite inspired by the colours and I want to KNIT them.  

.... Except that seems like it might be work and I really should use up my stash before embarking on a big colour project which will require lots and lots of stash-adding.  

Yup.  I'm torn.  

At any rate, the most important observation that came out of the scottish trip was that the reds on the hillsides are somehow more vivid when reflected in the lochs than they are on the hills themselves.  This idea fascinates me.  I want to make a sweater with green and a dunny red and blue-d greens and a vivid red.  We'll see what actually happens.  

Next post in 3 months!