Remember when I said in the last post that you can't tell for sure how a sweater will be until you sew the pieces together. Welp, that goes double and triple for the current item under construction. Sewed Sleeve #1 on, no problem. Got sleeve #2 ready to pin and, um, let's just take a look, shall we?
That's #1 in place, fine and dandy. Here's #2:
Compare and contrast. One of these things is not like the other. If you said there seems to be a triangle missing from the edge of #2, you'd be absolutely right! This is what comes of knitting the first sleeve as a "swatch", then the body, then the second as an afterthought. You stop increasing too early and end up with two utterly different sleeve shapes. Sigh.
My life flashed before my eyes as I initially thought I would have to frog all.of.the. pattern. area. of.the. sleeve. and do it again with edge increases. And how would it look made with partially shrunken and frogged crinkly yarn and partly with new yarn? Or knit a whole new friggin' sleeve and shrink it?
In the midst of the Slough of Despond (where the frogs live), I realized that this is a gansey. (I know, brilliant deduction, Sherlock, but stay with me.) One of the design features that marks gansey construction is the arm gusset, a diamond-shaped piece in the armpit area that makes for freer movement of the fisherman's active arms. I could make a half-gusset, a triangle rather than a diamond, to add the missing shape! Counting rows and stitches of the missing area, I came up with this:
I sewed it to one side of the misshapen sleeve (easing to account for its non-shrinkage) and washed the whole sweater again.
This is in its pre-shrunken state. Notice color difference as well.
Now what do you think?
According to the trotting horse theory, it's game over and fix accomplished, all within the tradition! Anyway, it's in the underarm area, and anyone who is inspecting my sweater armpits can go sit on a fishhook.
Not for nothing am I a faithful follower of the Yarn Harlot, as faithless to a single project as she. The Shepherd isn't done yet; the Brocade Leaves isn't done yet, and here I am casting on for something else major. So sue me. (I'm sure the Shepherd and the Leaves would if they could.) But it's not very appealing to sit for hours flipping a great honkin' hump of wool in your lap, nor is one very motivated to add a thick wool sweater or two to their wardrobe in June and July.
And so another sweater is begun. It's the Shearer, the other half of the Shepherd and Shearer pair, using the Colored Flock yarn I added to my S&S purchase last year. Like my Shepherd, I am reforming the pullover into a cardigan. To me, heavyweight sweaters are too much for daylong indoor wear. Because of the rustic nature of the yarn (coarse fibers and bits of the pasture inclusions) the garment is most comfortable as an outer layer, and cardigans are a lot easier to slip into and out of than something that has to go over your head several times a day.
I cast on the back, and away I went:
And here is just about where the trouble started. Let me tell you right off the bat that this pattern is not the one you want to start with if you are new to cabling. You want to start off with simple cables, a narrow pattern that is easy to memorize and quick to display errors. You want chart symbols that are easily discerned from one another. You don't want 2/2 and 2/1 crosses that look very very much like each other. Is it starting to sound like I got about this far and had to rip back to the setup row? I did.
And still I screwed up. About halfway to the arm decreases, I stood back to admire my work and saw two big fat errors. One I could maybe live with. Two makes you start to look like this is your first cable sweater. It's not.
Take a look. See that elbow-like thing in the center?
It shouldn't be like that. It should be a nice double twist like the one above and below it. But the next one is the big whoopsie. The elbow thing in the center is again the wrong un'. But in fact, that's the correct part of that cable. It's the crosses above and below it that are wrong. Oy. Two out of three.
How can someone with so much experience mess up so thoroughly?? Maybe it just takes extraordinary idiocy. Or overconfidence in one's vast experience. At any rate, this sort of thing just Will Not Do. I knit carefully onward and upward, remembering in the back of my brain somewhere that there are surgical methods for fixing cable muddles without ripping everything back to the setup row.
YouTube to the rescue. Sure enough, Lucy Neatby has a very clever and clearly done method of knitting a little contrasting holder flap that lets you (hold your breath) cut into the offending area, rip back just the naughty cable crossing, knit it back properly, and then graft it back together. Here, have a watch. Isn't it a super time (and mental health) saver?
So here's the result. Looks great, doesn't it?
And I saved myself some more time and hair-pulling in the 2-out-of-3 Bermuda Triangle by fixing the one correct one to fit in with the two incorrect crosses. I dare you to find it in the overall pattern. Its a case of 3 wrongs making a more invisible wrong. As some wise knitter said, " if you make the same mistake multiple times, it's a pattern".
My poor Sixareen Cape. She suffered from multiple errors in the pattern that turned her into an upside down knit funnel for a pinhead. Witness:
Kate Davies admitted Mistakes Were Made, and I recently received my copy of the corrected pattern, and a copy of Snawheid by way of apology. So now it's time to frog the top section down to the start of the decreases and do it all over again, this time with better instructions. So frog I did, 3 skeins' worth, ending with a very kinky pile of yarn.
Not to worry. A soak in tepid water, a squeeze, air dry, rewind, and we're ready to go again. It makes a relaxing alterknit to the Shepherd. so light, such straightforward stockinette stitch, I can do it while watching subtitled movies. Onward and upward with all the kinks out.
But the experience of this and the Shepherd have tempered my rabid fandom for Ms Davies. I still love her vision, I share a love of Real Wool, of Scotland, the Shetland Isles, and traditional designs and techniques. But she seriously needs a technical editor, a good one, so that her acolytes don't need to knit themselves wigs after tearing their hair out trying to make her designs.
Eight years of arithmetic. Algebra. Geometry, advanced algebra, precalculus and calculus. Statistics. At least 14 years of my life spent studying mathematics and I apparently still can't friggin' COUNT!
Making two equal sleeves on a striped sweater is so easy. All you have to do is count the stripes on sleeve #1 and start the cap shaping at the same place on sleeve #2. Did I do that right? Nope. Do I have to frog the top of #2 and re-knit it? Yup. Am I pissed off at myself? Most certainly.
After a period of mature reflection, I have decided to postpone the fixing of the sleeve problem until after I have completed the sweater front, have sewed the two halves together and tried them on. Because, once I was able to quit cussing myself out, it occurred to me that this might be a timesaver in disguise. If I try on the body of the sweater and then pin a sleeve in place, I will be able to tell if even one of them is the right length. The sleeve caps in this pattern are very shallow, so if the whole thing needs a couple of inches off, there won't actually be that much frogging involved, and it would be very worthwhile for a sweater that fits well, right?
Meanwhile, Sixareen Cape is taking a rest. Not that I have abandoned it, far from it. But after a long, long winter I'm not feeling the chilly-shouldered need for it. At least for as long as the sun is out.
Fear not, however, that I have monomaniacally wed myself to a single project. No--summer weather has brought on fond thoughts of the cool shirt pattern I got: Trigere. And if I'm going to have a chance to wear it before the snow flies again, I'd better get knitting! And so, dear reader, I cast on. I cast on with the original yarn, Lara. It's a wonderful color, much more to my taste than the orange, but it's not really big fun to knit with. It's like having 10 cotton sewing threads loosely twisted together, and it's really easy to miss one of those stinkers as you knit. And if you miss one, you've got a stupid little loopy thread messing up the texture of your fabric, so the knitting has to go a lot slower and more carefully than you'd think for acres of stockinette.
It struck me that beads mixed in with the lace inserts would look cool (you know how I love me some beads), so I've been fooling around figuring out where to put them, and I think after several tries I got it. (Because the lace is knitted upside down, the bottom two repeats are the preferred option.)
Now I've got to sign off and get busy--I've got so much knitting to do!
'Ten-SHUN! (oooo, knitting pun! 'tenshun, tension, geddit?) Hats for the Alaska Mountain Hut auction are on the march! Here is my second one:
A Sixareen Kep, (almost) as designed by Kate Davies, and made in the specified yarn, Shetland Heritage. It uses all the current colors of this new yarn, made of 100% Shetland fiber, and spun in the worsted manner instead of the modern woolen, then dyed in traditional colors to recreate the material of historic knitted items in the Shetland Islands.
To explain the "almost" above: In the fair isle section, 3 rows too late, I discovered that I omitted a change from the brown to burgundy. Rather than rip that far back, I just carried on, repeating the error in the top half of the pattern in order to stay symmetrical. To me, this seems to look ok and not a big deal. 2 other changes were intentional. The lozenges at top and bottom of the fair isle were one stitch off of symmetry with the center design. I pondered and pondered the situation, and could see no purpose, aesthetic or structural, served by this offset, so I moved it over one. And then to balance my color blooper, I made the i-cord bindoff at the bottom in burgundy. (It was supposed to be brown.) All in all, I think it looks very much like the designer's original intention, but I hope Ms. Davies can find it in her heart to forgive me if it's not.
I learned some things in making my kep--never done Turkish Cast on before, but I really like it. It made it very easy to extend the lining when it proved too short, and seems like it would be good to use with toe-up socks, shawls, and in other situations. I had used attached i-cord before (see Viola), but never for the edge of a hat. Works great!
Best of all, making the hat was a sort of exaggerated swatch for what I really want to make for myself, a Sixareen Cape. And I not only have got gauge (or 'ten-SHUN!), but will be more wide awake with color changes.
But before I do that, there's at least one more hat to make for the auction:
And doesn't that orange line make better sense? No? Well, wait till the blocks go together in the glorious whole.
Alas, I have no more Viola progress to show you because fixing the mess was the last thing I did before leaving on two weeks of travel. And a giant pile of blanket blocks is not exactly ideal travel knitting. Takes up room in the suitcase, for one thing. And the plane seatmates may not be too crazy about your spreading your blanket over their laps while you add on blocks.
So a new project for travel was in order, and I grabbed Willamette and some cheap sparkly sock yarn. (cheap and sparkly, that's me!) Actually, I really think the yarn adds to the theme of the pattern, which is the ripples and texture of the Willamette River in Portland:
What intrigued me about the pattern was the herringbone stitch that makes up the main section, shown here both front and back. (linen stitch on the tails). I had a hard time catching on to it from just the verbal description, but YouTube to the rescue! I found it easy and fun once I saw a demonstration.
Once I got going, I also found that the edging is what amounts to an i-cord knitted along as you go. That might really come in useful some other time, I think. So I just knit along, increasing the width, until I come to the end of the first ball of yarn and then start decreasing through the second ball.
And how do you like my improvised short needles? No use poking your fellow passengers in the ribs when the projects is so narrow.
So it's a Monday night, and I am all snugged up in an armchair with a fresh episode of Downton Abbey (the infamous Series 3, Episode 4) to watch, and The Last Block of Viola to stitch up. I've overcome the frustration of a missing square (knitted another one), I've found a much quicker way to block blocks; it's literally all coming together, and after this last little job and a round or two more of blocking, it will be time for some real gratification in the form of putting the blocks together and watching the grand design of these abstract parts begin to emerge. Thrilling times.
And then this happened:
A pair of squares sewn in upside down right in the middle of the emerging block. I couldn't believe it. How on earth could this have happened when I've been so careful and meticulous through the 17 previous blocks? I was distracted, dear reader. Something Happens to Lady Sybil (not saying what, get your spoilers elsewhere) in Episode 4, and my knitting concentration slipped. Imprecations and obscenities were muttered, I can tell you.
And then came the quandary of what to do about it. I tried very very hard to forget about it and believe that it would all blend in as part of the abstraction. But, see, that orange stuff is all supposed to come together to suggest the edge of a flower petal, and that just couldn't happen in the current configuration. Rats.
So maybe it wouldn't be too awful to unpick the two offenders (they are in correct orientation to each other, just not to the rest of the whole friggin' blanket), turn them around and sew them back in the correct way. Reader, I tried. But such is the wonder and efficiency of mattress stitch sewn in matching colors that the stitches are in-freaking-visible. Really invisible. Believe me, I looked. I pulled and pressed and separated, but still could not confidently locate the right place to cut and sever the sewn stitches but not the knitted stitches.
With a heavy heart and much gnashing of teeth I realized that the only thing I could do to correct this error would be to cut the offending squares on their side of the seam, pick out the remaining bits of the knitting plus the seaming yarn, reknit the two squares and put them back in the right way around. This called for another deep think about what the harm would be from leaving this mess the way it was. But the weight of 17 correct blocks and 204 correct squares was against it. Maybe (probably) nobody else would notice in the grand overall assembly. Certainly I would run afoul of no Knitting Police. But I just couldn't live with coming this far so successfully just to knowingly leave a big blooper in there. So it's snip, snip, pick, pick, and knit, knit those bad boys all over again.
Ever since I got back from vacation I have been on a knitting treadmill with the Jali Cardigan[ravelry link] pattern. I am vastly enamored of the combination of lace and cabling, the concept of a layer showing through the lace, and the silk-bamboo yarn I found to make it with. I'm not sure whether my obsession is a good thing or a bad thing, though, because just after I took this picture:
it was time to divide for armholes and I discovered the pattern had sneaked around and was off as much as 8 stitches in some areas. Crap! There is just no way to fake or finagle that big a miss. So merrily I frogged away clear down to the middle of the first repeat. FOR THE 6TH TIME. Mind you, I didn't get so far the first 5 times, but still...
This has certainly taught me something about my approach to lace knitting, which is that I don't do well just reading off the chart. I need to learn the rhythm and proportion of the pattern so that I can work without the chart much of the time, knowing what to expect and where stitches are likely to get lost or created. Apparently, at least in this case, I am a very slow learner. Add to my trouble the fact that I'm working with black, which hides problems in all but the best light. This will certainly be in my favor with little glitches, but I've got to do better than my previous tries. What keeps me going is the two (plain stockinette) sleeves already made, the forgiving strength of the yarn, and the fact that despite it all, dammit, I still am fascinated with the pattern.
But I took a little break to complete an item from the Heap of Malfunctioning Rubble and regain a little of my self-respect and sense of accomplishment. Aided by the discovery of the tiny ball of yarn I needed to finish sewing up my Dancing Vines sweater made, I dimly recall, out of Elann's denim yarn in a currently-not-available light blue.
Also visible in the picture is the poisonous jolly fairy ring of fly agaric mushrooms that have sprung up around one of our birch trees, just one of the features of the mushroom farm our yard has become as a result of the rainy rainy summer. I guess the rain is a good reason excuse to stay inside and try (again) to knit the Jali cardigan.
So I've been beavering away on Winter Sunset. The good news is that I've completed one whole sleeve! Hurrah! Sleeves seem to be the bane of the knit-in-the-round sweater maker. You feel like it takes the same amount of time to knit a sleeve as it did to knit the whole body although there are obviously many fewer stitches. Maybe this is because you have to keep flopping the whole bulky sweater around and around as you go. Maybe it's because it's getting on for a gazillion times you've knitted the motif and although you're proud of having memorized it, it is getting a little boring. With all of it to do again on Sleeve #2. So imagine my pleasure at finishing the first sleeve and picking up and getting going on #2. Toodling merrily along until--uh oh--dun da dun dun--the bad news: What you are looking at is the armpits of the sweater, the place where the fake "seam" is and the decreases take place. Finished sleeve is on the left; Sleeve #2 on the right. What's wrong with this picture is that on #1 there is an extra 1/2 of a motif. Eight extra stitches that don't belong there! Rats! Rats! And other cusswords that don't belong in a nice granny's knitting blog. [An aside: I learned to cuss at my mother's feet while she made our clothes on the sewing machine. Perhaps fiber work and cussing are natural companions.]
So my choices are:
Frog the new sleeve and re-pick up with the same number of stitches as #1. Make the mistake symmetrical.
Frog the first sleeve and pick up the correct number of stitches and re-do the whole thing. Make both sleeves without the mistake.
Don't frog anything, rejoice in the fact that the goof is most obvious in the armpit where nobody's looking, and try to adjust the shaping of #2 (fewer decreases).
The Yarn Harlot says, "Knitting is a human activity. It's OK for it to look like a human did it." That makes a lot of sense to me, so I'm choosing door number three. One advantage of this alternative is it's a potential boredom-canceller. I'm going to have to be on my toes all through Sleeve #2 to make sure the shaping is right. I could easily screw up the shaping--I'm only human after all....
