textile dreams – fibery wake up

Cabled Cardigan—Finished!

I’ve been working on my cabled cardigan for quite a while, and have finally managed to finish it, and I’m very happy with the result:

The pattern is worked from side to side, starting at the end of one arm and ending at the end of the other one. I lengthened the pattern quite a bit from the original pattern in Sabrina Magazine 08/2009, since I didn’t want the cardigan to end in the exact place where I don’t need any extra volume. Other than that, it is basically worked after the pattern. Of course I also used a different yarn with a different gauge, so I had to completely recalculate the pattern.

The challenge with this kind of construction is to get the pattern to be symmetric at the right and left sides. I had to calculate exactly how many rows I’d need to knit just to know where in the 24-row pattern repeat I needed to start if I wanted to end up right in the middle of a repeat in the middle of the back. But luckily I’m one of those knitters who doesn’t mind that kind of challenge. I have many more problems with just starting to knit and figuring out the details somewhere along the way. Here’s the back view of  the cardigan:

I’m very happy with the result! Knitting the whole thing in one piece has its advantages and disadvantages. There’s less fiddly sewing involved, which I like, but at the end I was handling quite a heavy piece of work that I had to turn around at the end of every row.

The yarn I used is Toscano from ggh, which is a ribbon yarn. I really enjoyed knitting with this, the only problem I found were a few too many knots for my taste, leading to having to hide way too many ends.

All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed knitting this cardigan, and I’m pretty sure I’ll enjoy wearing it just as much in the Fall.

Finding the Right Tool for the Job

Remember this?

Yes, my Maltese Shawl from Victorian Lace Today is growing, albeit slowly. I really enjoy knitting the pattern, but finding the right needles to help me with that turned out to be an adventure. The first try was using my trusty Addi Click needles. While there’s usually no problem using the interchangeable needle tips from Addi, the joins are definitely not smooth, and working with this lace-weight yarn was simply impossible, since it kept snagging at the joins all the time. So after a couple of rows I switched to a fixed Addi needle of the same size (at the top):

They’re nice, shiny, the yarn moves smoothly over the needle, but for this kind of lacework, the tips aren’t pointy enough. This pattern has lace stitches in every row, so you end up having to purl stitches together when one of the stitches is a yarn over. Trying to do that with blunt needles leads to lots of cursing and severe lack of motivation.

So, I needed another option. My LYS just got some Addi Lace needles (middle of picture) that are ostensibly designed for this kind of knitting, so I got myself one of those. The tips are nice and pointy, so the lace stitches immediately became much easier to work. But, the gold-coloured coating of those needles tarnishes really fast (there’s almost no reflection of the flash on the photo, and I haven’t knit more than maybe 10cm of the shawl with it), and when that happens, the stitches stop to slide easily on the needles. I had to work all the time to get the stitches to move to where I needed them. No wonder I started to ignore the project in favour of others.

I needed another option. I had heard the KnitPro (KnitPicks for any Americans) needles (bottom of picture) have good tips and a smooth surface, so I decided to give those a try. This is another system with exchangeable tips, but the joins are constructed differently so they’re smooth. And they’re pretty, too. You can see the tip geometry is almost identical to the Addi Lace needle. I tried them out, and yay, the fourth needle I tried for this project finally does the trick!

This was a really good lesson to remind me that using the appropriate tool for a job can make all the difference between fun and tedium. If something obviously doesn’t work, try something else! This is a good thing to keep in mind for hardware tools of all kinds as well as software. If something seems to be more difficult than it should be, check if you’re using the optimal tool for the job!

Addicted to Lace

Now, that’s nothing new around here, isn’t it? After writing that glowing review for Victorian Lace Today a few weeks ago, of course I had to try my hand at one of the patterns. I’m going to make the Maltese Shawl, after finding the appropriate yarn, of course. Thanks to the perfect service from Jürgen Weidner, I soon was in the possession of this:

Three skeins of Malabrigo Baby Merino Lace in Bergamota. The first skein is already wound using my shiny new ballwinder, which I acquired at the same time. The yarn feels really yummy, and it’s a joy to knit up, as you can see here:

I made a provisional cast-on over a spare cable of my Addi Clicks, and acquired a 4.5 mm Addi lace needle after a few rows, since I want to make my life with this as easy as possible, or I’ll never finish. The pointier tips of the lace needles are just what I need here. I have the feeling the gold-coloured finish of the lace needles is a bit less slippery than the normal Addis, but this could well be my imagination.

The picture was made after 3 pattern repeats from 88 comprising the main panel of the shawl, so I’m into this for the long haul. You can also see some big bulky metal rings in the picture. Those are my sorry excuses for stitch markers currently, since my open plastic ones were driving me to distraction with catching the yarn in all the wrong places. I’d like to have some closed rings a bit smaller, but for the moment those will do.

So, don’t expect to get updates of this venture very often, this is definitely not TV knitting, being “real” knitted lace, meaning every row is a pattern row, no dreaming while purling back across the wrong side allowed. But I think the look of the finished lace will be so worth it.

Cabled Square Challenge

There’s been a challenge to design a 30*30 cm square for a knitted blanket on Ravelry: Verzopft & Zugedeckt. The deadline was April 30, and even if you’re not on Ravelry, you can admire the results here. The requirement to participate was to design a 30*30 cm square that includes some cabling somewhere. Being in love with cables right now, of course I had to play. Can’t be that difficult, right? Sure, only if you insist on making your life more difficult than necessary.

Since the start in February, I’ve been playing around with lots of different possibilities to knit a square. I was trying to get a complicated construction to work, and nothing worked in practice as well as on a piece of paper. So I frogged my sample square, more than once. Not getting anything to work, I gave up and forgot about it for a time, being more than busy elsewhere in the meantime. But the challenge kept nagging me. I didn’t want to give up so easily, and a week before the deadline I finally remembered what I usually forget when I try to design something: that there’s nothing lost by keeping it simple. Designing is as much about leaving out the superfluous as it is about putting features in. So, over the weekend, I finally got to work on a much simpler pattern than all my previous ideas and came up with this one:

I like the effect that the cables seem to be woven in at the top and bottom by horizontal stripes. This really came out like I imagined, which makes me happy.

It always amazes me how even designing something so small and simple ends up taking quite a lot of time. Collecting and discarding ideas, trying things out, working the design and writing up the instructions always takes way longer than I anticipate. A big thank you goes to all the designers out there who do all the work so I can do some mindless knitting without thinking whenever I feel like it. I appreciate their work all the more since I’m trying, little by little, to get into designing my own projects.

Fingerless Mitts—Adventures in Designing

A friend of mine asked me for a simple pair of fingerless mitts, nothing too fancy. I wanted to have some fun knitting, so I needed someting with a pattern. Every pattern I looked at had too much patterning, though, so I decided to make up my own as I went along. Here’s the result:

The mittens have a small cable on the back of the hand that’s positioned asymmetrically towards the outside of the hand. The cable grows out of the 2×2 ribbing and is a bit asymmetrical. The effect isn’t as strong as I’d like, since I wanted to emphasize the asymmetry of the design by making the cable asymmetric as well. You can see it a bit better in this progress picture:

So, while I like the result, I’m taking notes for the next time. I’d like to make the asymmetry within the cable stronger, so it really looks intentional and not just a bit wonky. Having the cable pattern run through the ribbing might add some further interest to a fairly plain pattern. Maybe I’ll make another pair, I’d like to have some for myself!

Knitting Swatches

Until now I’ve pretty much successfully avoided projects that needed to match a certain gauge to work, so I never knit any swatches before diving into the project proper. Now, while currently trying to finish up all those wintery projects so I’m prepared when spring finally comes around, I’m dreaming of summer knitting.

After some browsing of the magazines at my LYS I think I made a decision for a cardigan from the current Verena. The model I’m thinking about is the one on pages 6/7. Since this model isn’t available in my size and I want to use a different yarn, I needed to knit some swatches. I’m simply amazed how much difference needle size can make!

The upper swatch is worke with a 3.5 mm needle, the lower one with a 4.0 mm. The lower one hits the target gauge precisely on number of stitches, although the row gauge is still off. But I think I can work around this. I like the way the yarn (Online Linie 214 Senta) knits up with the larger needles, so although I’m currently doing another swatch in a different yarn, I think I’ll go with this. I think I might hate myself for ever deciding to knit something with that many cables before finishing, though.

Now I just need to do the mathematics to make the model fit my size, which will be an adventure for sure. But nothing a few hours with a calculator can’t solve, I guess!

Living Dangerously

A couple of weeks ago I surprised myself by feeling the need to make something for me to wear! I’ve always shied away from sewing or knitting clothes because of the need to fit. I guess I’m afraid of investing all that time and then finding that it doesn’t fit or I don’t like to wear it. But I immediately was attracted to this winter vest out of chunky yarn, and since this is a relatively easy piece of clothing (no arms, for one), I decided to risk it this time. Getting gauge wasn’t easy because I had to substitute yarns and the pattern doesn’t lend itself to a single gauge swatch, so I used the first front as an extended swatch, and around the third or fourth try I was happy with the results I was getting. Using chunky yarn definitely does cut the time needed to knit this up, so here’s the first front, all finished:

I seem to be in love with cables lately, so this is no exception. What I really start to appreciate in knitting patterns is the attention to the little details. Here it’s the ribbing that’s different where the cables are so they grow organically out of the ribbing, and the arm decreases that are done farther in on the area of purl stitches so as not to disrupt the 1×1 ribbing at the side. And I’m happy with the colour I chose, as well. The model in the pattern I’m working on was in white, which definitely isn’t my colour. The picture shows the colour off well, it’s a dark, rich orange.

The second front is already on the needles, so I hope to be able to finish this in less than a couple of years.

Versatility Mittens—Finished!

I seem to be exclusively knitting lately, I think the communities at Ravelry and at my local knitting group keep me motivated. So I finished my Versatility Mittens this week, and here they are:

This was my first try at designing something with a pattern, and the result is pretty and definitely wearable! It took a few tries and a bit of tinkering to figure out how to best finish the cable pattern at the top of the mitten, but I worked something out. For the left mitten, I mirrored the cable to make the mittens symmetrical by changing all C5F to C5B and vice versa. I also increased one stitch on the back after the ribbing to have an odd number of stitches at the back, so I could really center the pattern.

For anybody who wants to play, here’s the chart for the tip decreases with the end of the pattern:

The back of the mitten is 24 stitches wide, the decreases for the tip start on a row with a double cable crossing. The chart is for the right mitten, for the left one switch the cable crossings around.

If I were to make those again, there’s a few things I would change that I didn’t anticipate before starting to knit, but in hindsight should have.

Because of the cable on the back the back of the mitten is narrower than the front side. This doesn’t really matter until you work the tip, when the decreases show up mostly on the back when they should be at the front and back symmetrically. They also seem to crowd the end of the pattern in. There’s a couple of things I could try to fix this:

• Using the two-circs method to knit the front of the mittens with a smaller needle than the back. This would also lead to a denser fabric at the front where most of the wear and tear will take place.
• increase a couple more stitches at the back when beginning the pattern. I’d still have the problem how to lose them when working the tip, though.

This was a fun and fast little project, but if I really want to design my own patterns, I’ve got a lot to learn yet.