On steeking: part the second

Yesterday, I cut myself off in mid-steek story. It's sort of an appropriate thing to do, since steeking requires a cutting off in mid-row.

I was saying that at a steek, you are going to "lose" some stitches, so you knit them in the closest-changing pattern you can (either single vertical stripe or single check). I love the way that looks on the inside.

See, in that picture, there is the patterned bit (with the long floats) and the sleeve steek (where the floats are all short at the middle). It's that shape because the top (shoulders) has been closed (try it with an envelope .. you'll see).

After that point (and after I'd finished the collar), I cut with my super-pointy embroidery scissors.

There is a purpose to using the pointy little scissors. You really only want to cut very specific strands of yarn at very specific points. The more intricate work your scissors are capable of, the better. It would be only too easy to catch a stray float in the tip of a big pair of sewing scissors and that would create a nightmare.

You cut between two stitches. You cut the strands of both colours for the stitches on either side of the cut.

After you've cut, amazingly enough, not much happens. The right kind of scratchy wool will grab hold of itself and be quite happy to maintain the shape of the stitches, even after they've been cut right through. However, a little bit of motion and they start to unravel, inwards, towards your beautiful patterned torso.

So, you secure the stitches somehow. In some places, you stick the knitted fabric through a sewing machine . In others, you crochet a chain locking the stitches up. In my case what I did was to tie each pair of stitches into an inelegant granny knot. The fabric is bulky enough that it's not going to be an issue & I'll sleep easier knowing about that knot.

I deliberately unraveled the first two stitches, leaving two before the patterning to hold the sleeve stitches in place. I found it easiest to start from the top and then un-stitch just as though I were frogging (but only two stitches per row). I also was very careful to tie each row before un-picking the next row down. It can very quickly become a messy tangle of short yarn ends. Knowing who should be attached to whom is a useful thing. I also suspect that my job would have been easier had I done stripes instead of checquers.

After I had picked up the sleeve stitches and knit a few rows on the sleeve, it looked like that. On the lower left, you see the inside of the sleeve, all patterned. Above that, there are 1-1/2 rows of single check (the half comes because I spent a half picking up the stitches for the sleeve). And above that there are the tied-off ends from the steek lying willy-nilly over the torso, which is of course knit perpendicular to the sleeve.

I will eventually encase those ends in knitting, just to keep them safe and tidy. I probably don't have to, and if the wool were a bit felt-y-er I would probably be better off just letting the friction from wear make them into an impermeable boundary. But I like encasing them, so that is what I'm going to do. Someday.

On steeking, part the first

I've been writing about steeking without really explaining it. Well, I've been writing about making mistakes doing it. I'll write a bit about steeking now, why not?

A sweater is basically a bunch of tubes held together. We knit those tubes in the round. However, there are a few places where the needs of the body outweigh the needs of the tube. The least avoidable of these is the neck. Sure, you can make a boatneck or wide neck sweater with yoked or raglan sleeves and then you're not breaking the tube.

However, that's not how traditional knitters managed their un-tubing. They invented a way to keep knitting in the round all the way to the top of the sweater while still making something that would have shape as though it were a flat piece of fabric. This invention was steeking. The difference between a tube and a flat piece of fabric is that a flat piece of fabric has edges and a tube doesn't.

A steek is where an edge is made by cutting (literally, with scissors and all) the knitted tube. If you just cut willy-nilly into knitted fabric it would fall to pieces. A thing that makes knitting so attractive to metaphorists is that each stitch needs its neighbours to survive. So steeking requires a bit of effort on the knitter's part to save the fabric after it's been cut into.

My armhole steeks (which were simple and didn't involve errors along the lines of my neck steeks) looked like this while I was knitting them.

What you see (left to right) is the bit of the sweater below the armhole, the stitches for the underarm held on a bit of white scrap yarn, followed by the steek. The steek is the bit that gets cut. The sleeve stitches are picked up along the far side of the steek. Because you're going to cut through the threads, it's a good idea to have a close-packed pattern on the steek stitches. I opted for a 1X1 chequer board (except on rows that had only one colour), but I think next time I'd go for a nice stripe.

I know I have barely started the story of what a steek is, but I've also been working on this post for an inordinate amount of time (I keep getting interrupted), so I think I'd better continue the story tomorrow.

Learning experience: picking up the pieces.

After I had unpicked my jugful of yarn, I re-knit, this time shaping the edges of the neckline with decreases instead of cast-offs. The new (correct) steek had only a single kangaroo pouch, no other holes or floats.

In fact, all of this activity only set me back 7 or 8 hours. It was a painful learning experience and I wish I'd read the steeking stories at Eunny Jang's excellent old website better when I was first learning. However, I do learn by doing and I'm unlikely to forget this particular lesson now. I'll know better next time.

Learning experience: the problem

I thought I'd try to show you what was wrong. I don't have photoshop, so I can't easily generate images with words overlaid, but I'll try to describe what is going on.

The root of the problem was, as I said yesterday, that I had let floats run from one row to another at the steek. Unfortunately, I couldn't photograph it (and at the time I was taking the picture below, I didn't know that there was a problem, yet).

The picture above is of the little kangaroo-pouch that one gets where a neck steek is born. Before the neck shaping, there is a whole torso worth of stitches and then after, there is only the shoulders (plus steek) so at the break there is a bit of extra fabric sticking out. I don't know how clear it is (because it is as clear as day in my pained memory) but there are two little holes on either side of the big kangaroo pouch. Those were formed by the cast-off (I was actually not casting off, just putting the stitches on a bit of scrap yarn) stitches after the first row (which makes the pouch). And there are floats from the edges of the pouch to to the tops of the holes, which then need to be cut to free up the cast-offs for the neck.

I did, indeed cut them. That's how steeking works. You steel yourself and then you take a pair of scissors to your work. You do this even though you know that it's only the stitches next to, above and below that are holding each stitch together.

The above picture shows things as they were just after I cut. I still had the "cast-off" stitches on their stitch holder, and you can see where there is a short stretch of white yarn where the first cast off row ends and the second begins. The big trouble is that there is a cut float that ran where that little stretch of white yarn was.

Those floats had no possibility for reinforcement. I had broken the steeking rule and there was no recovering. I had cut yarn and now stitches were starting to vanish, willy-nilly. And they were important stitches. Ones I really needed to make the neckline were popping out of existence.

It was bad news. By the time I took the picture above, I knew the jig was up. I'd have to pick all the way back to the start of the neck shaping. I'd cut every one of those strands, so it wasn't recoverable. I needed to junk all of that yarn (that jugful of short scraps) and start again at the neck shaping. I'd need to re-design the neck so that it didn't have the float problem (by decreasing rather than casting off) and then I'd need to re-knit all the way back to the shoulder. Then I'd need to re-make the shoulder seam.

After doing all of that, I'd need to steel myself, take a pair of scissors, and cut through the yarn. I knew it was going to be hard. I knew that, having learned a hard lesson, I was going to dread it.

But I also knew that this whole sweater is meant to be a learning experience. It's meant to be a learning experience even more so than in the usual way that everything we do is a learning experience. I knew I'd be making mistakes and wanting to fix things. So, that's what I did.

A learning experience

I made a serious mistake on this sweater. I made the kind of mistake that takes a fair amount of recovery. The kind of mistake that you learn rather a lot from the making.

This is not my first experience using steeks, but it is my first time that I'm going to complete. When I first read about them, I made a few small-scale trial objects (you might call them swatches, yes) so that I could cut them up. It is also my first time using steeks to make something I wanted to have some shape to.

I wanted to have a nice round neck on the sweater. I have knit a large number of square neck sweaters and they look great (on pretty much everyone, I think). They don't look as great pulled over a round neck tee and I wear a lot of those. I especially wear those under the kind of circumstances I imagine wearing my new fair isle sweater. It's really a casual garment, so I am not imagining it going over collared shirts very often.

So, I planned what the neckline would be like, in the way I would if I were not steeking: On the first neck shaping row, I would cast off x stitches and then on a subsequent row I'd cast off y on either side and z still later and so forth. You know, usual neck-shaping stuff.

In doing this planning, I neglected the cardinal rule of steeking: There shall be only one steek start point. A steeker is going to cut some string, and the cutting needs stitches on either side of it. No floats should go from row to row. But, in my plan they did.

After all the sweat and tears, I ended up junking this much:

That is a full pitcher of frogged stitches. Many, many metres of yarn that passed beneath my fingers.

Another diversion

I recently got a knitpicks catalogue (does anyone know how to make them stop sending dead trees at me?) and, I have to admit, I usually find their stuff oddly unappealing. Don't know why. Just do.

But this time, they've been bitten (like me) properly by the fair isle bug and there is a whole sweater sitting there. And it's not terribly, terribly ugly. It's not to my taste, I'll admit, but it will be to plenty of people's.

It reminded me that I still haven't told the story of my first attempt (last spring) to get a good combination of yarn, online, through WEBS (and therefore of valley yarn). I'll do the telling properly some other time, but I thought I'd say that I did learn that I don't want to try to figure out colours online. That's a mug's game. I can order colours that someone else has chosen and shown look well together. I can order colours that are different and therefore have a reasonable chance of playing nicely together. I cannot expect to find success through ordering close colours and hoping that they will flow. No chance. A lesson well learned, I think.

Confession: A pause in the proceedings

I believe that I have already admitted that this is not a blog in real time at the moment. In real time, I am at (hopefully) the end of rather a long pause in knitting. The pause is the result of something I've never experienced before: a gross knitting injury.

I guess it's not that gross on the scale of true gross-ness. There's no blood. There is no bone. There is no permanent debilitation. I am startled and put off by it, nonetheless.

I am now going to write about it. So, if you're really squeamish, don't read on. I'm really squeamish and I think it's gross.

I was knitting away on the first sleeve of the sweater. I was knitting, in truth, like mad on the first sleeve of the sweater. My right index finger, pushing at the outgoing stitches, was feeling a little tender. Maybe I was going to get a little blister because I was pushing in basically the same spot over & over. At some point, my sleeve became too small to knit with a single short circular, so I switched over to two circulars. One was the lovely rosewood lantern moon short circular I'd been using for the sleeve up to that point(nice, but slow) and the other was a pink plastic Susan Bates number I'd inherited. I have a bias against plastic needles, but these have a nice sharp point and are just about the right speed for the two-strings-left-hand feat I am attempting. I used the pointy pink plastic on the majority of the body of the sweater.

As I worked my way down (up?) the sleeve, my fingertip got more and more sore. But you know that thing where you get into the groove of something and even if you're experiencing a little bit of physical discomfort, you keep going? You're just so focussed on what you're doing that minor signals from your nerve endings can't reach the significant decision-making portions of your brain? That's where I was.

That's where I was until I actually stopped and looked at my finger. There was no blister. There was a little slit in the skin. A break between my fingerprint whorls. The skin on my finger couldn't hold together. It wasn't deep enough to bleed, but it was deep enough to be registering on some nerves. The nerves were sending "sore" messages to my brain because air was reaching my dermis where air had never been before.

It's not that gross, but by gum if my knitting is causing my skin to split apart at the seams, that's a problem.

So, I've been on a hiatus. I hope to be sufficiently free of split-open-wounds-in-my-fingertips to knit without further incident over the weekend. I only have one more sleeve to go (and all of the interior tidying), so I know it will get done, but I do so wish I were working on it right now!

Rules

So I've spent nearly a week writing about the rules I used to create the design for the sweater. They're guidelines, really. But having rules when I started meant that I could make it up as I went along but still have something that didn't look ad-libbed. It looks like I thought it through from the word go.

To recap, the rules are

1. There will be stripes of colour: first green, then grey, then pink.
2. No patterned stripe will repeat itself.
3. Every stripe will have some black.
4. The stripes of colour will alternate between black backgrounds and coloured backgrounds
5. If the background is black, the pattern will be picked out at least two stitches wide
6. Within a single stripe, the colours will change between one extreme of light and dark and back again. They will do that twice in the same order and then they will reverse the order for two stripes.
7. The patterns will align in a sensible way; repeats of 3, 4, 6, 8, or 12 only are permissible.

And with that (and some good pattern library books) a pretty sweater emerged.

More patterning: lining up

This last pattern rule isn't so much a rule as a manifestation of anal retentiveness, but here we go. The patterns had to line up one stripe to the next. Some of the patterns were built on a 4 repeat, some on a 6, some on an 8 and some on a 12, so they couldn't be perfectly aligned, but they could (and did) line up at least once per 12. Every last one of them did line up at least once per 12. Usually, more than once. There are some beautiful patterns out there based on 7s and 11s, but you won't find them on my sweater. There had to be a common denominator between two adjacent rows.

I did flub once. I knit a little more than a whole stripe before I realised that I was off by one stitch. The image above is what it looked like just before I unpicked back to the last commensurate stripe. I couldn't have lived with it. The ridge in that photo is created by the needle going through the stitches in the fabric. Since that was where I was going to frog back to, I had already picked up the stitches in that row.

I am glad that I fixed it. It doesn't actually take that long to do the thing right. But it does take a bit of OCD.

More patterning: inner glow

Because each of my colour stripes wasn't a single colour, but a group of colours, I had another set of choices to make. Should the colours cycle through once? Should they go from dark to light? Should they go from light to dark? Should they go from light to dark to light again? Should they go from dark to light to dark again? What?

I had got the colours with light-to-dark-to-light and v.v. in mind. I like a sweater that doesn't have pattern up or down (more on that later). But if I only have those two options, there is a danger that they'll cycle in phase with the foreground/background options I wrote about yesterday.

My solution was to increase the period of the cycle to two stripes. There is one stripe with light-to-dark-to-light as its background and then one stripe with light-to-dark-to-light as its foreground and then one stripe with one dark-to-light-to-dark as its background and then one stripe with dark-to-light-to-dark as its foreground. Yesterday I showed pictures of the light-to-dark stripes in pink.

This not-very-good picture shows much more of the sweater. (I took a lot of nighttime pictures ... it's dark most of the time here at this time of year.) You can see stripes that go light-to-dark that I showed yesterday and the ones that have an inner glow, too.

The rule applies equally to the colours other than pink, but I think it's most obvious in that one; they're bigger stripes. The green stripes in the picture above go dark-light-dark bg, dark-light-dark fg, and then just peaking through at the top is light-dark-light bg.

There is basically only one more rule and then I'm done.

More patterning: through thick and thin

Besides having the constraints placed on the patterns by the number of rows they were, I had freedom given by the colours.

I have one colour that is in every row: the charcoal/black heather. That colour could be the background for every stripe, or for some it could be the foreground. I'd say that the "foreground" colour picks out the pattern, but I know that it is easy to let your eyes reverse it for you. The foreground is the colour that is marked in the pattern chart and the background is the one that's an empty square.

In this sweater, the black-background stripes alternate with the coloured-background stripes. This works out nicely because I have 3 colour groups, so they alternate. The thick pink stripes are surrounded by stripes that are playing by the opposite background rule to them. If the pink stripes have black backgrounds, then the framing short stripes have black patterns. If I did a black-background green row last time, I'm going to do a black-foreground green row this time.

I found in my swatching experiments last year that I liked when the background changed colour. I didn't like seeing a single-stitch-width pattern changing colour. I do, however, like the stained-glass window look of thick patterns when they're picked out in a changing colour, especially against a solid, dark background.

So, I made another rule to guide my choice of patterns: when the background colour is black, the pattern must be thick (at least two stitches wide) and when black is the foreground, it should be only one stitch thick.

That picture above shows a thin pink stripe with the pink in the background and a black pattern picked out (admittedly sometimes in thicker than one stitch, but predominately in lacy-one-thick) on top. The picture below shows the very next pink stripe (if you don't believe me, check out the intervening green and grey stripes) which is in a thick pink pattern on a black background.

Patterning

My first fair isle sweater (the one this is sort of supposed to replace) is made of 6 patterns which repeat over and over again. I changed the colour for each repeat of the pattern, so there are no two stripes alike. I liked the way that there was repetition but with variation.

This time around, I didn't have the freedom with colour. My chosen colours were only going to work in particular groups which meant that I would end up having colour stripes repeating themselves.

I decided therefore to play with the patterns. No two stripes have the same patterns. The number of colours in the group determines the size of the stripe, within a few rows. That is enough constraint and freedom to make quite a nice design fall into place.

Because I have more of the pink colours, those are the big stripes and the greens/greys are the short stripes. The short stripes on either side of the pink are usually exactly the same number of rows (grey underneath the pink and green on the top). The end result of this is that if you look at it from the inside (where the patterns are harder to tell) you get a sense of little grey, big pink, little green stripes repeating.

On the outside you do, too, but then you see the variation in the patterns more.

Bottoms ups

One of the few poems I know by heart is by Ogden Nash. I often think of it when we're strolling through the park by the duckpond:

Behold the duck!

It does not cluck.

A cluck it lacks:

It quacks.

It is often fond

of a puddle or a pond

and when it dines or sups

it bottoms ups.

Now you may memorize this soul-juice and think of it when you are watching ducks delve underwater for pondweed.

The bottoms ups of my sweater is the inside of it.

I am normally a throw knitter, meaning that I hold the yarn in my right hand. Each stitch then requires me to sort 0f let go of the needle, pull the yarn over it, and grab hold of the needle again. I knit my first fair isle sweater like that, twisting the stitches around the same way every time. Since I was knitting in the round, the end result was well-twisted wool which I would periodically need to un-twist.

This time through, I am learning how to knit with two strands held in my left hand. I have already learned how to "pick" knit, that is, how to knit by picking up yarn from my left index finger. Since there is no letting go and picking up of the needles, it's faster. Also, since the yarn is just slipped over the finger and not actually gripped in my right hand, it is much looser.

Two strands is trickier. I had tried in the past holding one strand in each hand, (this way they don't get twisted; one is always on the bottom and the other is always on the top) but I found that the variation in my gauge pick-to-throw was a real problem. I could for a while force myself to knit loosely with the right-hand-held yarn but I couldn't keep it up indefinitely.

So this time, I am knitting with both strands held on my left hand. The primary strand goes over my index finger and the secondary strand goes over my rude finger (does that one have a name? It's the longest, anyway). It's going very well. It has taken me some time to get used to the feel of having very very little tension control in the strands (both get wrapped around my baby finger and go under my ring finger, so there is a little bit of grip there, but not a whole lot).

As a result, I think the back of the sweater will reveal my skill building as I progress.

Roly-poly bottom

After yesterday's post, I found another picture of the rolly bottom. But this time, it's actually on my own roly-poly bottom, when I was trying on the sweater. The art of self-portraiture in a mirror in a not-perfectly-lit room is as yet an immature one, so bear with me posting this dark thing, but hopefully you can see the roll & how much length it absorbs.

Rolly bottom

The fact that I didn't start the sweater properly means that it's got a rolly bottom. Nothing I can do about that until I go back and give it a nice hem or rib or something. Stocking stitch is not, by nature, a flat beast. It curls at the edges. It's very nice that there are ways to make it lie flat. I need to choose one, though -- not my strong point.

I took a picture of the rolly edge early on, but, of course, the instant that I had set the sweater down in a nice sunny place, it had company. That's the ever-obliging kitty, who sat on that sweater pretty much all day. It made it hard for me to do the photography, but even harder for me to do any knitting. She knows what she's doing.

As for how to finish the bottom, I think I'll do a few (very few) rows of plain black ribbing. I'm not keen on the idea of doing corrugated ribbing because if I'm going to include every colour it'll need to be quite long. I don't really want it to be long. I don't want the edges to be a significant eye-catching part of the design. I want the fair-isle patterning to be what the sweater does, and that's it.

Off to the races

After I'd made my swHATch, I was ready to begin. Except, I really wasn't. I hadn't decided anything other than what colours the sweater would be. I hadn't decided what shape it would be, nor had I given a thought to the details of how much cuff or hem it would have at the edges. Would I put increases and decreases in it to make it conform to my shape, or should I leave it plain and not complicate the patterning?

In a typical manoeuvre, I sidestepped the issue. I didn't decide much as I cast on. Basically, I decided the circumference at the hips.

I achieved this lazy, ill-planned thing by doing a provisional cast on. Later, when the sweater is completely formed, I can make a bottom edge that suits it. By knowing this one nice trick, I could start and let the sweater as a whole dictate its details rather than the other way around. I will freely admit that this could be a mistake, but for my purposes in this, it was a lifesaver. Instead of being paralysed by choice and the pressure of decision-making at the outset, I could simply start.

swHATch

I started a proper swatch. I wanted to be good and make a swatch on circular needles (because gauge varies depending on whether or not you're knitting or purling, so if you're going to be only knitting, as one does with circs, you need to swatch only knitting). I found my shortest pair of 4.5's, which is pleasantly short. I cast on the lowest multiple of twelve that I could fit on the needles without straining.

Then luck took a hand. After knitting a few inches of patterns, trying out some of the colour combinations I wanted for the sweater, I was joking around and slipped the swatch, still on the needles, it onto my head. It was an excellent fit. Seriously excellent.

My swatch had become a hat. I reduced in a way that I hoped would make a nice crown and called it done.

Eek! A mouse!

Not really a mouse. But a fabulous mouse toy, nonetheless. I knit a little teeny-tiny series of stripes to help me check the flow of colours I'd got.

It's just about mouse-sized and it has a tail because I did a tail cast-on. My cat LOVES this toy. It's quite possibly the most fun she's had in years. Maybe sometime I'll find it again (every so often it appears ominously at the foot of the bed in the morning) and photograph what it looks like now. Its not anything like as mouse-like, except when it's at the foot of the bed whereupon it looks dreadfully like a disembowelled mouse.

I took its picture to try to use the image-manipulation software on my computer as a sort of ruby beholder. I think it worked out OK as a scheme.

The light green (called sage by the company) comes out of the b&w image as a bit forward, which it's probably fair to accuse it of being on the sweater in reality, too. I like it, though, so I'm not too worried about it.

Yarn me up some more, Scotty!

The other colours in the sweater are:

1. a kind of brown-ish gray (called "light brown")
   
   
2. a kind of blue-ish gray (called "light gray")
   
   
3. a kind of black-ish grey (called "dark gray").

All of those pictures were taken in colour and are pretty much true to life, by the way.

The black-ish grey is the main colour of the sweater, in fact. I got 3 skeins of it, since almost every row includes that colour. The others I got only one skein of each.

You may have noticed that they're all heathers. That's a deliberate choice on my part. I had found when making my very first fair isle sweater that heathered colours blend better than solids. After giving it thought, I suspect that a bit of solid on the sweater would help it be less mushy. Maybe you don't know what I mean, but sometimes fair isle sweaters, the ones with really lovely colour progressions, are so perfectly blended that the patterning detail gets lost and you end up with a wash of coloured fuzz. Beautiful, without a doubt, but maybe not quite the way that I'd like to showcase my mad two-strand knitting skilz.

Yarn me up, Scotty!

What colours did I decide on? As I've said, I chose the colours based on what was available at the shop in the brand I was interested in that might make the effects I wanted while going reasonably well with the other colours. I didn't sit up and think, "I'd really go for a green and pink sweater". That's what I'm getting, though....

That's what the green looks like. There are two pictures because there are two shades of green. However, they are very close. That's what I wanted. I wanted colours that would flow seamlessly from one to another. In the SOMD (that's sweater of my dreams, you know), many, many colours flow seamlessly one to another. In the SOTRTIMLYS (that's the sweater of the reality that is my local yarn store), we have two greens. And we're grateful for them.

The darker green is called Fir Green and the lighter one is called Sage. Those aren't crazy names. That's a little bit of foreshadowing for you.

The pinks are very good at blending, especially in natural light (which is how I photographed them). There are three of them, which pleases me because I wanted to be able to try different numbers of rows of each and three is the bare minimum to enable such experimentation.

The three pinks have names mostly buried in fantasy. The middle one is called Red Granite, which I grant you isn't as fantastic as all that. Granite is pink, and so is this yarn. And maybe they in the business of calling rocks things call pink granite red granite. I don't know. I just know that if I were, say, mail-ordering this yarn and it was called Red Granite, I might be a little surprised when a definitely pink yarn came in the box. That's the lesson.

The darkest pink is called Red BWO. Don't know what the BWO is about, but it's not red, either. Maybe the BWO means "but without orange". Doesn't make sense, but neither does calling pink yarns red.

The palest of the pinks is called Copper. Sure, very clean, very new copper is a different colour than your average penny. It's not the colour of this yarn, though. In the eighties, this yarn would have been called "dusty rose" without shame. Maybe even "puce". But today, it's called copper and no-one is suing anyone for false advertising.

These two colourways, I think, end up stealing the show on the sweater. There are other colours involved, but to me, it looks like a pink and green sweater. I don't mind.

The yarn store

There is more history than I really want to spend time on at the moment, but I've been trying to find good fair isle sweater wool. I know, I know: Jamieson's. The thing about that is, and I'm just being honest here, Jamieson's is really, really expensive. Sure, you're buying little tiny balls of 25 g only, so you don't notice it as much as, say, when you're buying a 100-g hank of some lovely handmaiden merino. Nonetheless, it's pricey. I can't ignore it. And no one around here actually sells it, so I'd have to do a little bit of speculative purchasing and it's pricey. And the shipping costs and so forth.

So I tried webs and valley yarns and it was not the most successful experiment in the history of experiments. It wasn't expensive, so that's better, but I didn't come away feeling like I'd found a formula for getting the wool for the sweater of my dreams (the one this blog is SUPPOSED to be about). I was left slightly hemming and hawing again, which isn't the way to start the SOMD.

But I also want to knit and I also NEED a replacement for my current, raggle-taggle fair isle. And a little bit of low(er)-stakes practice of techniques wouldn't hurt, either. So, naturally, I turned to my favourite cheap workhorse yarn. I don't know what it's like where you live, but in my neck of the woods (the Canadian Maritimes), Briggs and Little (from, surprise surprise, the Canadian Maritimes) is pretty cheap. It's not a bad wool -- it's cheap because it has a propensity to have vegetable matter in it, and the spinning can be somewhat uneven. Also, it's not from fancypants sheep. Workhorse wool.

So, off I went to my local yarn store and spent a good half-hour piling up skeins in the window. I'd put two side-by-side and then return one to the shelf and then try again with something else. There are different ways to buy wool, right? There is the way where you sit at home and say "I want to make a RED sweater with GOLD accents and BLUE trim" and you go to the shop and look for the colours you had in your head and they don't have them so you re-evaluate and re-adjust until you find a red, blue and, let's be honest, not at all gold but in fact slightly different red combination that you can live with. Then there is the other way of shopping where you go to the store knowing that they will have something nice and you just have to spend a little time finding the nice thing for yourself. That's what I did. (I don't think it's the cheaper way to shop, by the way ... I strongly suspect that this is how stashes get so big.)

Anyway, with only the desire to come away with colours enough for some decent fair isle effects, I went straight to the Briggs and Little wall and started playing. I had learned through the Valley Yarns experiment that I needed to see the wools in natural light. It wasn't a very bright day and there was another customer trying to muscle some window space for herself. I can't imagine what the scene would have looked like to passers-by, but I live in hope that we were amusing.

I came away with one set of three colours I thought would blend well, and two sets of two colours I thought might flow nicely one to the other. The colourways didn't clash horribly, but since there were different numbers in each, and since I hadn't actually selected them to go well with each other, I decided that the sweater would be one where there was a colour and there was black on every row. Then I paid (not too painfully much) for my skeins and took them home.

An Actual Fair Isle Sweater

I am making an actual fair isle sweater. It's not the one of my dreams. That one has nicer colour combinations and smaller gauge and it's differently fitted and ....

Well, you get the point.

Nonetheless, I have been putting off making a replacement for my first fair isle (which is falling to bits) and I need a good, warm, workhorse sweater. I need something that's not ugly but that I don't feel sad about wearing when moving a sap-drenched pine tree or cleaning the cat box. A functional bit of warmth that I rather like the look of and I can take some pride in having made.

I'll tell you all about it, shall I?

The Second Coming

I can't believe it's been that long since I blogged here. Well, I CAN believe it, because I don't actually suffer under any delusion that my posts are being made to disappear by unearthly forces. It's just that I thought I had written about some of the things I had done in the past year. I have been doing things. Knitting things, even.

I'll write about them. I think that will make this not exactly a contemporary blog in the normal sense, because I do want to write about things I did, say, last spring, but it'll at least make for updates. Yeah. The second coming. Watch for it.