Stepped Stitch Pattern

This is a little baby vest I just finished knitting for a workshop I'm giving this weekend at the Eastern Needlers Retreat in Gananoque, ON. We'll be experimenting with adding stitch patterns to top down garments. This little vest is based on the Basic pattern from the Need A Baby Cardigan book. Working cap sleeves makes it a really quick knit. I added the waffle stitch on the Fronts and Back.

Patterns are a little more of a challenge to introduce from the top down. This pattern is stepped. The stitch pattern is 4 stitches wide. Increases are worked at the Raglan line and when 4 more increases are worked there are 4 more stitches available on the Front to work another repeat of the pattern.  I'm going to write this one up next week so you can try it yourself.

Deb

Swatches can Lie!

Oh, no. This is terrible. Swatches can lie. Not for everyone but maybe for you and definitely for me. If you find that lots of your garments are bigger or smaller than you thought they would be, read on.

When you knit a swatch are you very careful? Are you looking at every stitch, knitting slower than usual? Are all your stitches perfectly formed and looking beautiful. Do you knit a large swatch? What happens when you knit while chatting with a friend, or as your mind wanders, or while watching TV?

You got it. Your gauge can change. When I teach classes I have the knitters work a swatch, cast on for their sweater and work several inches of their top down sweater. Then we check the gauge again. In every class, one third of the knitters have found that their gauge has shifted. Usually they have loosened up and every once in a while someone has tighten up.

What to do?!
1.  Rip back and start again with smaller or larger needles to get the correct gauge. I think we've all done this one.

2.  Continue on and work to a smaller or larger size to compensate for the gauge shift.

3.  For knitters working out of one of the Cabin Fever multi-gauge books there is a good solution. Continue to work with your New gauge and change to a new set of stitch numbers that correspond to your New gauge.

There's a very good reason I write these books. I don't get gauge and, I admit it, my gauge changes.

Say I started out working 20 sts = 4" (same as 5 sts = 1") according to my swatch. Now I'm 4" down my top down sweater and I discover that I'm really working at 18 sts = 4" (4.5 sts = 1"). Yikes, my sweater is going to be too big. At this point I can continue knitting and working my raglan increases as usual, towards the stitch numbers for the Bottom of the Yoke. But now I'm going to work to the stitch numbers for my New gauge instead of my original gauge (especially the Back) so that my sweater will fit.

The top chart is the number of stitches for the Bottom of Yoke for my size, assuming I'm working at 20 sts = 4" gauge (top chart). At the Bottom of the Yoke, in my original gauge, I want to knit until my Front has 44 sts, Sleeve has 60 sts and Back has 88 sts. BUT my gauge has shifted to 18 sts = 4". So I'm going to move to the line of stitch numbers for my New gauge (see shaded line on bottom chart).

Now, working in my New gauge, I'm going to work until my Back is 78 sts (instead of 88 sts at original gauge). This will ensure that my Back, and therefore my Front, will fit for my size at the New gauge which I will maintain for the rest of my sweater. I'm knitting at a looser gauge than originally planned, so I will work my Back and Front with less stitches to get my size.

This works for many, many knitters. It saves the stress of ripping out or recalculating all your numbers. Just shift to a new line of stitch numbers that correspond to the gauge you are now knitting.

Your swatches may be wonderfully truthful. You may get gauge and maintain it. I hope you do. But if you don't, these multi-gauge books have an added advantage for you.

These numbers are out of one of the Need A ... series of Multi-gauge books by Cabin Fever. http://www.cabinfever.ca/knittersbooks.html ;

www.patternfish.com/collections/73

Questions? I'm sure you have some.

-Deb

 Thanks for your comments. I really appreciate hearing from you.



Mom's newest

I'm up at camp and Mom showed me her newest projects. Her neighbours, Nan & Dave, are expecting new twin grandbabies and asked Mom to knit them each a sweater, so here they are and excuse my feet!

Mom used the new book "Need A Baby Cardigan?" (which we'll start shipping next week) and the "Need A Hat?" book for the hats.
-Lyn

We're off to TNNA!

Deb and I are off to the TNNA show today with our new book: NEED A BABY CARDIGAN?

Super cute baby in a pretty cardigan! This new book is the third in the "Need A ... " series of books. The first two were Need A Hat? and Need A Sock? This series is a "multi-gauge" approach to each topic. So, for example, the new Need A Baby Cardigan? provides you with a range of cardigans (with colour, textures & lace) in 4 sizes (newborn to 18 months) in NINE (yes, 9!) gauges from sock yarn right up to chunky weight.
We'll be providing support and taking orders with Barb from Up North Fiber Arts Supply, our U.S. Distributor. Here's another shot of the cutie from the book:

-Lyn

I had a wonderful weekend in Ottawa teaching all sorts of Top Down classes.

The first one was an exploration of what you could do with a basic pattern.

And all the students showed me that you can do a lot. How about a fancy cable down the back with a lovely fancy cable bottom border to match. Laurie is going to pick up around the neck and make a matching collar. It looks terrific with her choice of yarn (makes me think of watermelons).

By Monday night at the Ottawa Knitting Guild meeting quite a few little sweaters were more than half done. Even those students who had to go home and give their project a rethink to get their pattern placed exactly how they wanted it to be had the finish line in sight.

Back in the classroom we tackled V-neck shaping on a teddy bear sized sweater.

Lynn brought her very well-dressed teddy to the guild meeting. Adorable. We finished the classes with some solutions to 'fit' issues which I hope will enhance their future adult-sized projects. A great time. Thanks Ottawa knitters.

I also got the chance to have lunch with Liz who happened to be spending the day in Ottawa. Note to self: It's good to get out of the house sometimes. It gives me a chance to see people I usually email. She has a brand new pattern out Perth Cardi available on Ravelry. It looks terrific.

And more news from the Ottawa area. The Eastern Ontario Needler's Retreat sign up is opening soon. If you're in the eastern Ontario area it's a great time. I'm checking my dates because I would love to go again.
-Deb

I’m on the road again and it’s coming up soon. If you’re in the Ottawa, ON area the Ottawa Knitting Guild is hosting me for a weekend of workshops on April 9 & 10. Ottawa Knitting Guild

On Saturday I’m going to be teaching “Designing for the Faint of Heart” which is based on our upcoming baby book. This should be fun with lots of creative juices flowing. On Sunday we’re going to throw all the rules of the raglan yoke shaping out the window and see what we can come up with. Always a favourite class for me because I love to play 'what would happen if '. And then we’re doing a 'Top Down that Fits' class. I have lots of ideas for that and some adult sized samples with some of my experiments.

After sewing on about 25 buttons I have a stack of samples to take and only one puncture wound to my finger. That's pretty good for me.

I think I'm done for tonight.
Deb

I think it does take some time to be comfortable taking a step away from the pattern. But it is fun when it works out.

I got one more sweater done despite the barking and sneezing of a cold. Don't you hate a spring cold? Yuck. But I must say that knitting a little sweater in chunky weight yarn sure goes quickly even with a fuzzy head.

On Wednesday we're doing a group button sew. Sure is nice to have the company. We're going to have a huge pile of sweaters when we're done. I have a couple more to do before then. I'll be busy knitting tomorrow.
-Deb

This is a newborn size with a small front panel running alongside the buttonband and this back panel. It's fun to try different combinations of patterns for the back panel and see if they work. This one is a keeper for the book.

The intention of this book is to take you one step away from the pattern to a place where you can combine the stitch patterns offered into something that is your own design. I'm trying to set it up so that you're comfortable doing this. But stepping away from the pattern is a little risky. What you come up with may not turn out exactly as you had envisioned it. A good reason to start with baby sizes because they are quick to make, quick to frog and try again. This is an adventure and the thrill of getting a combination which looks just right is wonderful.
Why do you knit a pattern exactly as written? Do you often go off on a tangent to the pattern and end up with a different design? Do you do this elsewhere, in cooking, sewing, another art form?
-Deb

I am still writing out the last section of the book. The first section has been corrected by our patternchecker and is now pristine. Not much knitting is getting done on my side, lots more pecking at the computer keys. But Bernice has been working hard with her needles. You might like to check out her progress. It's a sneak peak into the 'pick a pattern and design it yourself' sections of the book.
-Deb

One more sweater done. We have quite a collection now. They all need buttons so a big button sewing day is in order. I'm trying my best to do some boy's sweaters. Some knitters don't have any girls to knit for and find that books mainly feature styles for girls. Boys' sweaters can be fun to do too. This one was a nice knit in Perfection by Kraemer. Although I really wish we could extend the colour range available for boys. It's still very restricted mostly, from the comments I hear, because of the baby's dad. Loosen up guys!

I have sent the first section of the book, the Basic Cardigan, to our pattern checker. That means that I'm pretty happy with it. Yay. In a couple of days the second section which deals with patterned borders is going too. This brown sweater is in the Border section. We have several sweaters knit for this section already. The last section is working with panels of pattern. Bernice and I have come up with a list of patterns we like. Now we're working on combinations and Bernice has knit some up. But I haven't seen them yet because she's keeping them a secret until tomorrow. It's time to stop writing and try some combinations myself.
-Deb

I'm on a single track now. It's all book, book, book. My husband asked if I dream about it since it's the last thing I do at night and the first thing I do in the morning. I'm a fun gal to be around! Apparently there is a point in a project where for me it is all consuming and I'm there now. This would explain my problem with committee work. What do you mean you have to go home? We haven't made all the decisions yet. What do you mean we have to wait until next month's meeting to make the rest of the decisions. You have a life outside of this committee? What is that about? Lots of fun.

But it is fun for me. I'm loving this. We're rolling downhill now instead of pushing the book uphill which we have been doing for the last couple of months. Soon we'll be running to catch up with it. More samples are coming off the needles.

And the last section of the book is on the table. And I think this morning I got another idea for doing it. Don't you find that solutions pop into your head first thing in the morning? I do. I guess I do dream about it.
-Deb

We have finally started doing some knitting for the new baby book. Yay. This is one of the Basic Cardigans in Heavy Worsted weight yarn. I'm laying them out to be blocked.
We have quickly moved on to some variations.

The Blue Jean sweater in regular worsted weight yarn. An easy variation.

And a very nice cabled cardigan in worsted weight yarn.

With the pattern on both front and back. We are working on a bunch more.

We've made good headway the last couple of days and 36 pages of the book are written up. Whew. I think I can see the end now. The sweaters should be coming off the needles at an alarming rate. I finished the sleeves on all of these today and tomorrow I'll start another one. But I need to get some more yarn for a boy's sweater. Onward.

-Deb

I don't know if I have to feel too jealous of Lynda being in California since here it was like a spring day. I hope it was where you live. It was above freezing and I went out without my boots, wool socks, hat or mittens on. I felt so light on my feet!! What a difference wearing shoes makes.

I have one more partial sweater.

Not finished of course. I'm afraid this is the way it goes for a bit. I think I'm up to 3 partial sweaters now. They'll all get frogged or pitched. I don't know why but the sleeves are giving me grief. The finer weights of yarn are great and work fine for the 12 & 18 month sizes. But the thicker yarns don't want to fall into place. This morning I had another go at it and I think I have it all fixed now. I'm going to do the knitting to see if that is indeed the case. I hope to be doing the happy dance tonight.

That finishes off the plain cardigan. I need a name for it, anyone? All I have now is Basic Cardigan.

I've started to write the section in the book where we indicate where you can do some designing of your own. It'll be fun and I'm anxious to get going on it. Bernice and I are working on some examples to show you what you can do in different sections of the sweater. We've worked out a couple of stitch patterns to try. Lots more knitting to go.
-Deb

The beginning of a book is rather s-l-o-w. Writing out the pattern is work and figuring out the charts for the multi-gauge is fun but all of it is slow. Then I had a week of looking at it and thinking it was cumbersome, awkward and just plain messy looking. But yesterday I had a moment, that ah-ha moment and now it has a new format which I think is going to work. Yay. Nothing revolutionary, just a way to deal with the charts so they aren't hanging around all over the page and messing up the written pattern. So I'm relieved, happy, thrilled actually. I'm sending it out to get this section test-knit and see what comments I get back but it's fine tuning now because it works as is.

As I was fretting about the formatting I finished my socks. Isn't sock knitting wonderful when you're in that place?

I'll need to cast on another pair because I'm not finished the book yet and there will be another fretting period but they'll all be smaller now. The big fret is over, yay, yay, yay!
-Deb

I'm setting up my day of work on the book. At this stage the book doesn't look like anything but a pile of papers but Bernice and I made some decisions on Friday which I am going to put in. We've added one stitch to the buttonbands so we can work a slip stitch at the edge of the garter stitch bands to neaten up the edge. Task 1) 1 st to be added to any place where the buttonbands show up starting with the Cast On.

While we are working on getting the plain garter stitched bordered sweater done we have to remember that we are going to put stitch patterns in this sweater. Since this is a multi-gauge pattern which starts with sock yarn and goes up to chunky weight yarn, the extremes are the places to check. Does the largest size with the finest yarn work? Does the smallest size with the heaviest yarn work? In this case the chunky yarn in the small sizes needed some tweeking. We had to decide what the smallest number of stitches we could work with on the Fronts. That took a bit of discussion and working out some stitch patterns we would like to use. Task 2) tweek the numbers on the 2 small sizes with the heavier yarns.

We also made a large decision to fit into the constraints of the book. We have a certain number of pages available to us. That was a decision made some time ago. It's actually one of the first decisions. I wrote out the plain sweater for each size individually because I thought it might be easier for the knitter to work but it takes up too many pages and we won't be able to get to the designing part. Task 3) Right up charts with all 4 sizes on them.

There, a days work at least and here we go . . .
Deb

It's Thursday already. Where did the week go? The shrugs have gone to the photographer, that pattern is written up so it's back to thinking about baby sweaters for me.

The new book Bernice Vollick and I are working on this winter is a multi-gauge Top Down baby cardigan book. I've knit 3 of the sizes in chunky weight yarn to check the necks. Now we're talking button placement, buttonband width and anything else that comes up. I've done the charts for all the sizes and gauges and Bernice has set up spread sheets so we can manipulate the numbers if we need to. I've written up the first 10 pages of the book with a basic pattern using the charts. If you've seen our Need A Hat? or Need A Sock? books you know what I'm talking about.

The format for the book and figuring out how to make it user friendly is the first and biggest part of our book writing. How much information is too much? How can we make it understandable? What are we assuming the knitter knows that they might not know (that's a tough one). Does it all follow smoothly or do we have to move this information onto the next page? Have we put too much information on any page? Does this sound like fun yet? Actually, it is. I love this stage of the game. Once we have all this figured out the rest just falls into place believe it or not. 

If you knit every size in every weight of yarn there are 36 sweaters so far. There aren't any actually knit up yet but the potential is there. I've knit 3 partial sweaters and Bernice has also be working on a couple. There will be many, many more by the time we're finished. The designing of the sweaters comes much, much later. Right now we have to get the bare bones worked out. Tomorrow we take a look at what we have so far. I'm excited.
Deb

Happy New Year. Here we are at the start of another year.

Today is my first working day and it's time to organized my work for the next month or two. I have several projects on the go.

This Little Tumbler sample from the Baby V book needs finishing because it is going to the Stitches West show in February. I think there are a couple more samples which will need knitting up so this one needs to be done quickly to clear the queue.

This shrug cardigan needs to be written up from my little squiggles on the back of an envelope (my normal pattern writing method) and then photographed. I still have to decide on the size range for it. Right now I have it starting with a finished bust of 37" and going up to 52" finished with the overlap of the front bands. There are 6 sizes in total so if I want to go a size smaller I'll have to take off the biggest size. What do you think?

I've also almost got the idea for the next book figured out. I'm still working on how best to present the charts for the multi-gauge baby sweaters. They have to be easy to follow and fairly straight forward in their application. I hope this book will encourage knitters to add in their own stitch patterns to make the sweaters their own design. It's coming along.
And I am still knitting socks. If you are too I hope you'll join us at our Sock KAL and show off your knitting. I'd love to see it. You can blog along with us by emailing me, it's all there on the KAL blog site.

It looks like the winter is going to have lots of busy knitting in it. Have you made any plans?
-Deb

I've got a couple of things cooking at the moment, maybe too many. Besides the blue/black sparkly Top Down I have the baby project going too. I started on it again after I consulted with 2 Friends of Cabin Fever, Dana Gibbons who wrote the Buttons Cardigan and Bernice Vollick who wrote the Baby J, who are obviously wonderful baby garment knitters and convinced me to make the neck cast on a little bigger for my smallest sizes. So I cast on again and changed the ribbing to my favourite K2, P2.

I'll finish knitting this sweater in sock wool (somehow it looks much bigger here than it actually is - sock wool on 3.0mm needle) and then I'll try it again in a bigger size in a heavier weight of yarn.

I also have a sock going which is following the Fancy Sock set-up in the Need A Sock booklet . It's a step away from the sock patterns in the book although I'm still using the Sock Percentage System to work out the numbers.

I'm finding that this 6-stitch slip stitch pattern works really well with the very stripey hand-dyed wool. If you're interested in socks then take a look at the other socks being knit from the book on the sock KAL blog. If you are a sock knitter you may want to join us. Send me your email  at deb.cabinfever@gmail.com for an invite to blog along with us as we knit socks over the winter.

And now we have winter. It's odd isn't it that for lots of us it takes snow to make it winter. I think as long as I can wear my running shoes, even in below freezing weather, it's still fall. Some years it's fall until Christmas. But as soon as the snow covers the ground then it's winter. It happened over night this week, donning the winter boots makes it official, it's winter. The sock needles are now clicking merrily.
-Deb

What's on your needles? I have a second baby sweater with ribbed borders in sock wool. This is to follow up on the Basic pink baby sweater and the idea of a pattern which will ask you to add in some design work yourself.

I must admit to preferring heavier yarn in general. I have mastered knitting socks with sock wool but this is the first garment I have tried to knit at a sweater-type gauge with sock wool. No, that's not true, now that I think of it I have knit a hat in sock wool and a couple of shawls too. But this is my first sock wool sweater. You might guess that the switch in gauge from a sock gauge of 8 sts = 4" on 2.25mm needles to the sweater gauge of 7 sts = 4" on 3.0mm is for some reason throwing me a bit. I keep wanting to tighten it up. It's going slowly.

I also have a hat on the go for our Christmas charity knitting at the Aurora Knitting Guild. They especially need hats for men and boys so I will have one ready for next week.

And I'm starting a newer project which although it's knit with sock weight wool will be worked with 2 strands held together. And it's going to glitter.

It will be black and blue! -Deb

I was signed up to teach a class this weekend on Top Down Designing for the Faint of Heart. But unfortunately it's not running due to lack of students. So . . . I thought I might go ahead and do a many paged pattern or a small booklet on the same subject. Because I think it could be a lot of fun. I might will do a KAL-DIY (design it yourself) once I have it all done. How does after Christmas sound? We might all have more time to play around with our knitting by then.

My idea is to do a NO-SEW Top Down blank canvas sweater with all the numbers worked out so that we could have some fun jazzing it up. And because little tiny sweaters are so much faster to knit up and also rip back on to try again, that's the sizes I'm writing up. Here's the first blank canvas cardigan, size 6 months.

Can you imagine it with cables, a favourite knit/purl pattern, some lace (wouldn't that be nice), a collar or a wide decorated buttonband? I'll let you think about it while I get my calculator warmed up.
-Deb