Keeping the "wet" in sweater

It's not dry yet, so I can't wear it today. But I can photograph it. Unfortunately, it's a great big thing lying flat at waist height (on a grey day in a not-very-well-lit room), so the pictures are ridiculous. Here's one anyway.

I couldn't be bothered to haul out a ladder and given the height of the drying rack, I don't believe that the ladder would have done the job, anyway. However, I did take a close-up of the underarms, of which I am inordinately proud. I like me a good join. Better yet, a good join with no sewing! I'm going to have to write that one down.

And I can't resist a nice lace close-up. It (of course) opened up on washing. I like it. I like the combination of the worsted yarn and this particular lace. All in all, I am pleased.

'Tis done.

I spent well over an hour weaving in ends. There's a thing I should have been doing in between knitting jags.

Anyway, it's drying flat now. I hope that it puffs out as much as the swatch, since it was a little clingy coming off the needles. It looks like it's bigger now. It is certainly longer (which is a bit of a surprise). I should have swatched the lace, too.

It was almost exactly 7 balls. I mean, I was eyeing the end of the ball creeping towards me as I cast off the last few stitches. It wasn't that I was out of yarn, but I really didn't relish the idea of starting a new ball so that I could knit 3 or 4 stitches.

Pictures some other time. Celebrations now.

Another day, another sleeve

I do very much hope to finish the February Lady Sweater today. I'm 3/4 of the way through the lace for the second sleeve and even though there is some purling on the border, I think it won't be too bad to finish today. I had some thought of powering through and finishing yesterday, but it's better for my wrists if I don't.

One day last week I found that I could not squeeze the juice out of my grapefruit in the morning. That's a pretty good indication of too much knitting.

I did finish the first sleeve yesterday. I had decided that I would stop at 2:00 and go out into grey world for a stroll no matter what. I knit knit knit knit knit and tried it on and decided it was done, and looked at the clock. It said 2:00 exactly. That's pretty good for me.

I took some photos when I got back.

We feed the cat when we get home from work and so if we happen to get home in the mid-to-late afternoon, even if it's hours before her regular feeding time, she gets excited. She made the photo session a little bit trickier. She couldn't understand how I could possibly be neglecting to feed her right then at that moment and did all that she could to make sure she was the centre of attention.

Here's hoping that the next photos posted are of a completed sweater!

Can't blog; knitting

Yesterday I didn't get around to blogging about the knitting and if I'm honest, I didn't do all that much in the way of knitting. I was 1/2-way through the garter stitch border when I went to sleep on Thursday, 1/2-way through the body cast-off when I went to work on Friday and when I went to sleep on Friday night I hadn't gone much farther than to join up the first sleeve and knit a couple of rows.

This morning, though, this morning I'm going GANGBUSTERS! I'm 11 repeats in (that's 10 repeats knit, because there was one already done before the sleeves got separated). The body was only 20 repeats long, so I think it's not crazy to think that I'll finish sleeve one today. Hooray!

There is this thing about knitting in the round: it's fast. It's not fast because of some sane or rational thing. It's fast because it's spiral and I usually stop at the end of a row. There is no end of a row on a spiral, so now I'll stop at the end of a repeat. But that means that the repeats are just flying by.

Presumably, I'll take some pictures some time. Later. Must do another repeat of the lace now.

End of ball 4

I'm over being worried about the amount of yarn, by the way. I'm just about to start ball 5 and I'm slightly past the 17-1/2 lace repeats point.

I'm taking a wrist-restoring break, but then I'm getting back into the thing. I'm going to try it on at 20 repeats. Quite excited about it.

The beginning of day 7

I think I mentioned that last night I stopped after 15 repeats of the lace pattern on the body. This is what that looks like:

I think it looks good. I don't think that there is all that much left to knit on the body before making the edge. It's about 15 inches long now and in total I wouldn't want it to be more than 20. For my size, she says to make a 1.5 inch border, so I need to keep going for another 3.5 inches. Not bad. We'll see how far I get this evening.

Coming along

Well, my goal for this project was to get my mojo back. Sure, I'd get a kiki sweater out of it, but really what I wanted was to rediscover the pleasures of knitting.

Both are coming along nicely, thanks. The sweater, when I fell asleep last night, was at 15 repeats of the lace. But this morning, I remembered that one of the most wondrous things about the art of knitting is the fact that every little tiny bit helps. I was pressed for time and therefore couldn't possibly complete a repeat before leaving, but who cares? I knit a row, and now that row is knit. I will be one row further along this evening when I pick it up again. Every little bit is a bit of the end.

Ahh. Now, I need to remember that it's not necessary to injure myself to get the FLS finished and won't it be better if I can pick something else up immediately after finishing. Yes.

I actually think that's been a stalling point for the big fair isle project after which this blog is named. I get wrapped up in the idea of the big-ness of the project and forget that every little bit is a bit of the end.

Aw, geez!

Sure, the knitting continues alright. I even have a bit of extra time today thanks to some blizzard conditions, so I can knit up a storm while waiting for things to open. I stopped last night when I was finished the 3rd ball of yarn; just short of 3/4 of the way through the 10th repeat of the lace pattern.

However, I've been wondering why it is that my buttonholes appear to be on the other side than those in the photographs in the pattern. And then last night, taking a closer look, I noticed that the raglan increases are sort of better-looking on the inside than the outside. And then it dawned on me: I've got 1/2 of it inside out. The lace should be facing the other way. Now, it's not the hugest deal. I am not religiously opposed to buttoning things in the "masculine" way, given that that's a ridiculously arbitrary assignment. I'm not excessively distressed at the way the raglan increases look right now.

And, thanks to the fact that I'm spit-grafting all of my ends together, the inside and the outside are both equally presentable and they'll continue to be so. So, if I happen to finish the sweater with a lot of extra time, the option remains available for me to carefully, carefully, cut the sweater apart at the point that the lace begins and graft it on the right way around. I just have to remember that I might want to exercise that option when I attach the sleeves. Or, alternately, I have to make a final decision before then.

Even though I really am slapping my forehead and crying "d'oh!", I don't think I will go through the fuss & bother of the big switch. It's fine the way it is.

On learning new things

A confession here, folks: I am really a throw knitter. I am trying to be a pick-knitter (not a nit-picker!) because it's so obviously faster and, for me, a way to get a gauge that comes close to that of a pattern-writer's. However, I'm relatively new to this pick-knitting thing. And this sweater, this February Lady Sweater has a lace pattern for most of the body in which every other row is purled! Purled! Pick-knitting is not good for purling. Not at all.

So this sweater is a learning experience. It's my first time trying a large amount of pick-purling. I really really really want to go back to throwing for every single purl row. It's driving me around the bend to be going so slowly and painfully when there is a perfectly good (if much tighter) alternative available to me. But I'm persevering and that, hopefully, will mean that at the end of the sweater, I'm at least a competent pick-purler.

I keep thinking that maybe the next time I make one of these things, I will learn how to knit backwards (left-handed?) and then there won't be the need for any pick-purling at all.

February 16, 2010, becoming ladylike

The sweater is starting to look like it's going to look when it's done. I like the way that happens. You start with a piece of string and flick, flick, flick (repeat tens of thousands of times) it becomes a garment.

I am now finished the 6th repeat of the lace pattern on the body. I don't know how many it'll have, but her picture of the finished object has only 19 repeats and I'm sure she's making a size bigger than mine. I'm still comfortably using up my 3rd ball of yarn. I finished up to the end of #5 last night, but squeezed in another repeat this morning before taking progress portraits.

Overall, I am happy that I opted for 4 buttons, but I wish I'd left fewer rows between the repeats so that there was a bit more space between the bottom button and the start of the lace. As it is, they're exactly in line with each other.

Pictures of the sweater

After a little over an hour of knitting on Friday night, the February Lady Sweater was here:

I took that picture on Saturday morning, but it honestly represents where I stopped on Friday night. I wanted to make sure that the buttons would fit through the hole I was leaving for them, too. All in all, it was a satisfying experience. I have to admit, though, that I spent a few minutes panicking because I didn't know what PM meant in knitting instructions. I eventually worked out that it means "place marker". I guess it makes sense to have a short form for that.

On Saturday, I finished my first ball of yarn. It wasn't all that far in; I suspect that it was a ball some yarn had already been used from. The ball band was off it and some of the yarn was re-wound. I was going to do my usual thing of tying a knot to attach one ball to another, but in the spirit of doing things beautifully, I decided I would see if spit-grafting would work on this yarn.
I have limited experience with spit-grafting. I learned how to do it from Eunny Jang's sadly defunct blog "See Eunny Knit". Basically, you take two ends of yarn, tear out 1/2 of the fibres for a short distance on both, twist the ends together so that the two 1/2-thick bits are overlapping (into one full-thickness bit) and then you get it wet (that's the spit part) and smoosh it around until it's felted together into a single strand. I knew I needed to practice because I didn't have any idea how well the yarn would felt. The above picture shows that the practice worked just fine. I've now grafted twice on the sweater and even though it's a bit of a pain to smoosh the yarn with a great big object attached to one end, it seems to be doing the job nicely.

For the record

For the record, the yarn I'm using is Filatura Di Crosa Tutto and I went so far as to take a photo of the ball band so that I couldn't possibly lose track.

In other news, "ball band" sounds rude to me. When I was young, I remember being driven insane by my mother's ability to see the obscene in everything there was. She passed that talent on to me. It's not healthy.

Problems, problems

Yesterday, Sunday, went just fine until the late afternoon.

The first thing that happened was that I messed up. This isn't a big deal, really. I just needed to fix the mistake and all would be well again. I could see that the lace wasn't aligning properly because I'd flubbed something two rows earlier, so I dropped the offending stitches down to before the mistake and promptly made more mistakes. I have a rule that says that if I start to compound mistakes with more mistakes, it's time to set whatever it was aside and leave it to rest for a while. That rule applies even if it's a sweater I'm trying to finish on a hard deadline. So, I set it aside and went to cook dinner.

That's when the second thing happened. There's a slicing device called a mandoline and I have one without a holding thingy so one must always be wary of getting ones fingers too close. But unfortunately that same thing that made me so out-of-it that I mucked up the knitting made me so out-of-it that I ... well, let's just say I made a generous donation from both my right thumb and my right baby finger to our scalloped potatoes and I haven't knit a stitch since.

I think I probably will try later this evening. Maybe I'll finally post some pictures of the work in progress before I do try.

Chugging along

The February Lady Sweater, cast on at 10 pm on Friday night (which is when the opening ceremonies opened and there was no wayyy I was staying up until the thingy was lit), is chugging along. On Friday night, I knit past the first buttonhole. On Saturday, I knit past the next two buttonholes and beyond the eyelet increases row. It's now just had its arms separated from its body.

I am finding (of course) that the lace is slowing me down like crazy. I am also already nervous about the amount of yarn. I'm nearly finished ball 2, which means that I might be 1/5 of the way through the sweater (because I only have 10 balls; it can't take more than that), but I don't think that 20% of the sweater is in the collar. Sigh. Well, we'll see how it goes. I have two more weekends to manage.

Pictures later.

Button supply

I meant to say yesterday that my fabulous buttons come from the One World Button Supply Company and also somehow the North Carolina Watermark Corporation. Now you know as much as I do. Actually, I bought them at Baddeck Yarns in NS, Canada, (possibly spelled Baaddeck in order to remind you where wool comes from) which I am pretty sure does some online business.

Downsizing follow-up

The second swatch, knit on 4.5 mm needles, 0.5 mm smaller than the first swatch, was indeed exactly the same number of stitches per inch as the first. I don't know why. That's not entirely true. I can guess. I think that the up/down size of the stitch is limited by the needle size (the number of rows per inch) but the side-to-side size of the stitch is limited by the bulk of the yarn. This yarn knits at least 4-1/4 stitches per inch. More just can't be done. The yarn can't be squished into more than that. Not even to 4-1/2 stitches per inch.

I'm interested by the growing and shrinking with washing, too. It was quite striking. Above is a picture of the 2nd swatch taken while it was wet. Below is the same swatch after it had dried. That's a 6" ruler and it shows that the swatch has shrunk by about 1/2".

The two swatches side-by-side are different sizes because the second swatch had fewer rows and fewer stitches per row. At swatch two I was already confident that I'd have more than 4 inches if I just knit over 20 stitches per row. For swatch one I gave myself a large, comfortable margin (because I usually knit to tightly; I always have to put more stitches into my swatch than a loose knitter might).

Buttons

The choice of buttons is an interesting one. Buttons can complement a cardigan, cry out for attention all their own, fail to match, and - worst of all - fail to work.

I have a little stash of buttons that I have accumulated because whenever I'm looking for nice buttons I can't find them. It's not a huge stash; I wouldn't call it a collection. I could easily use them all up in my lifetime.

There were, for example, only 2 sets of 7/8" buttons (as required by the FLS) to choose between. Both worked with the black yarn, I think. I had a choice between cute teapots

and compelling handprints.

The teapot is a lovely geometric shape, recognizable from a distance. People will know that I'm wearing a cardigan with cute buttons even without getting too close. The sharper bits created by the spout might be a blessing in holding the pot in place, or a bastard poking between stitches and getting caught.

I was still very much on the fence regarding the teapot when the sweary one gave his two cents worth. He said that they belong on a buttoned teacosy. And he is 100% correct. I will have to do that.

So, I was fixed on the handprints. They're nice wooden buttons with this handpainted design on them. They certainly won't catch, no matter what kind of buttonhole I end up making.

The thing about the handprints is that they have (like hands themselves) chirality. There are two left hands and two right hands. I am one of those people when it comes to symmetry. The left/right thing is going to get me down; I know it.

I might use this as an opportunity to find artistic ways to arrange them.

Wouldn't that be clever?

In the right configuration, the left/right-ness of the buttons won't be distracting, even to people like me.

But then there will one left over. That's even worse. That's going to drive me nuts. One button from a set of four. It can't be done.

So, instead, I'll have to put 4 buttons on this 3-button cardigan. The instructions say to make a buttonhole and then make 2 more every 2.5". This means that the bottom buttonhole should be 5" below the top buttonhole. A little math for me ... I want 4 buttonholes evenly distributed about 5". The first buttonhole goes at 0" and the last one goes at 5", so those two in between have to go every 1-2/3", right? 0", 1-2/3", 3-1/3", 5". Yes. Alright. That little bit of math is done so I don't have to think about it any more.

Excitement Mounting

I think the mojo part of the plan may be working. I am tremendously excited about the sweater and want to start nownowNOW.

In fact, what am I doing at the computer? I think I'll go upstairs and check my swatches, re-read the pattern and choose some good buttons. I've only got from February 12 to February 28, so I really should get as much non-knitting done ahead of time, right? I want to be wearing this thing on March 1.

downsizing

My first swatch was too big. Even after drying, the number of stitches per inch isn't quite right. It's better now than it was when I first washed it, but the square knit on 5mm needles is 17 st per 4 inches, so I knit another swatch on 4.5mm needles.

Unfortunately, that one has exactly the same number of stitches per inch as the 5mm swatch. I couldn't believe it. It's 19 st per 4 inches on the unwashed sample and on the very wet sample, it's 16 st per 4 inches. So, I'm thinking that the number of stitches per inch is being set by the yarn, not the needles, and I'd better just live with being a quarter stitch off per inch.

That's quite a lot; one quarter stitch. It means that when I'm knitting 100 stitches I've got an extra inch and a half on the go. For the body, it's a choice between 154 and 167 stitches around. at 4.25 stitches per inch, that's going to be a choice between 37 and 40 inches. I know which I'm going for. 40 inches is too big for me. 37 sounds about right; loose but still reasonably close.

Mojo-seeking Olympic thrill rides

In an effort to find some good knitting mojo, I've decided to try the Knitting Olympics this year. I'm going to make a February Lady Sweater out of some black filatura di crosa slightly odd wool in my stash. I think the wool will actually really suit the pattern. It's very bouncy, but it has a particular spin which makes it warp when knit in stocking stitch. So I'm going to give it a go in garter stitch.

I have so far knit a swatch. It's 28 stitches across and 54 rows (including the cast on and cast off, which were done in without any attempt at cleverness, but consciously loosely). Before I washed the swatch it was slightly under 6 inches square. I was willing to live with that; it was 19 stitches per 4 inches instead of 18 stitches. I was going to make the 37.5" version of the sweater which would leave me enough leeway if the gauge was a bit tight in the end. I knit it using my trusty 5mm metalic blue circular needles.

I washed it today and it grew and grew and grew and GREW. I seriously had to squish it together to get it to be 6.5". I think that it would much rather be more like 7". It's now telling me that it wants to be 16 stitches to 4 inches, which is a serious enough deviation from the goal that I am now thinking of trying again with smaller needles.

So, this is a big thing for me. I rarely "get gauge". I find that if I throw instead of pick, I get closer, and this time I thought I got close enough. But clearly I did not. I am so very, very VERY glad that I tried washing the swatch. That's something I know I should do, but I haven't ever seen the dramatic change that this yarn produced. Important lesson. Will I remember it?

It's also a rare occasion when I remember to leave enough yarn to try Maggie Righetti's trick of tying a number of knots equal to the needle size on the tail. Now I have a permanent record of what size needle I used, rather than having to look it up somewhere. That is, as long as a) I can remember the conversion to US needle sizes and b) I am actually using a size that comes in US numbers.

It also unravelled in the washing. The tails are quite undone. I am interested by that. I'm sure it's related to how much it grew.

I'll try another swatch in a smaller needle. I want to be casting this puppy on come Friday night. I hope I can "get gauge" by then.