Cast On x 3

Tuesday

I’m having a great time translating my machine knit saddle-shoulder prototype into a hand knit garment. I started out thinking I would just knit a plain, one colour cardigan. Within 4 rows I was a little bored. I could put in a stitch pattern in here and that would be fun. Break yarn. Throw out swatch #1.

I had a stitch pattern in mind. It was an old swatch I had made many years ago and thought this would be the perfect project for it. And yes, it was even already charted. No sweat. Just pop it in and I’m ready to go. Cast On again. Six rows later, it’s not working. I had charted it right out of the stitch dictionary and it had you introduce a change in the pattern on a wrong side row, actually on several wrong side rows. I don’t like that. So got out my trusty pencil and eraser and recharted it with all the pattern changes on the right side. Break yarn and throw away swatch#2.

Cast On again. I’m sure I’ve got it sorted this time. All major problems solved. You may have guessed it, the small things surface now. It doesn’t have a rhythm. No flow. I have to keep looking at the chart. Time to contemplate. What’s wrong? Break yarn and throw out Swatch#3.

I don’t know what you do but believe it or not, I sing the rhythm. I do this as I knit the pattern too. Works for me. So I took out a couple of columns of stitches, put them back in, took out a column somewhere else, ended up putting in two stitches where there was one, eventually I have this: Da, bing, da, bing, da, boo, da, da, boo, boo, da, da, boo, da, bing, da, bing, da. Emphasis on the “bing”, which are stitches knit through the back loops. Seems to work now. Cast On again. 

IT’S WORKING. I now have a stitch pattern with rhythm (at least for me), a chart I rarely have to look at (admittedly I have had 3 cracks at it already and am very, very familiar with it). On the wrong side rows all I have to do is knit the knits and purl the purls. That’s another goal I worked on in the finished chart. It’s so relaxing if you don’t have to continue to check the chart on the wrong side rows even though they are patterned.

I’m moving ahead with the charts I have now. It’s going well.

Wednesday

Today is the day of mistakes. After getting several inches done yesterday, I realized that the shoulders of the Front were too wide due to the width of the stitch pattern. Back to the drawing board. Then I cast on the wrong number of stitches, cast on again correctly and forgot the first shoulder increase. Cast On again and decided that today would be a good day to read a book. So I did just that.

Thursday

Progress. New narrower Front stitch pattern is working out well. I think I’m on a roll.

-Deb

Packing

Arggh, I'm in a muddle. I'm leaving on the weekend for 2 weeks at the cabin. And, unfortunately I started packing last week. Unfortunate because now I have packed:

9 books:  2 non-fiction, 4 light reading but longish, 3 more heavy duty reading

A couple of knitting projects, none of them started yet:
1 hemp sleeveless top
1 DK saddle shoulder cardigan
1 DK cabled saddle shoulder cardigan
1 aran V-neck
1 cowl

5 audio books to listen to as I knit at a frantic pace

about 17 extra balls of yarn just in case I have a wonderful idea

This is all reasonable, right? I have one more day to contemplate this idiocy and try to pare it down a bit, or not! You might wonder how I am going to pack all this, since weeks at a cabin might include clothes and food and one bundle of shingles which are going on the outhouse. I have another set of "camp" clothes there so all I have to throw in a bag is 1 set of clean clothes to come home in. We have a small store (one room) which started as a vegetable stand years ago and is 2 km away (1.25miles) and is my walk every other day so no food necessary either. This is good and bad. Bad because I know I have plenty of room to pack anything I want. Oh and I need to put a guitar in too since I'm learning to play. I obviously won't have a spare moment. Can't wait.
-Deb

Mknit saddle shoulder

What do you do on your holidays? I still knit. Hobby and work are all combined for me. Sometimes it seems I can never get away from it but most of the time I wonder why I would want to.

To make a change, this summer I'm working on machine knitting. It's a totally different breed of knitting. The only cross-over is some comfort with the yarn. Everything else seems quite different. 

I wanted to work a saddle shouldered sweater from the top down. This is my mock-up on the machine.

I knit it quite differently than I will when I handknit this sweater.

1. I knit it bottom-up, which screws with my head since I'm not used to working this way any more. That was kind of fun. I drew it like I would handknit it from the top and then worked out the rows from the bottom. I did it bottom up because it seemed easier to decrease every row. When I handknit this I want to work a double increase every second row. Now I have to figure out what double increase would work best.

2. I worked it in two colours so I could really see the seamline between the saddle and the sleeve.

I'm so happy this worked out. Now I'm going to get started on a handknit.

Deb

P.S. Thanks t_a and Sharon for your comments on your experiences with machine knitting. It is very different isn't it!? It does do stockinette stitch very well and I'm having fun knitting with fingering weight cotton at a much looser than I would by hand.

Machine Knitting in the wild

Written last week and posted today:
I am currently at my cabin for a week or so. No internet, no email, no radio, no TV, no distractions at all. It's very, very quiet. Just the sound of the waves and the rustle of chipmunks in the bushes.

To my knitting/designing friends, I have often bemoaned the fact that sometimes my bright ideas for changing the Top Down construction don't work. Imagine my surprise! My machine knitting friend Monika tells me that I could be trying sweater construction ideas out on a machine to see if they work before I dedicate 40 or 60 hours to knitting a sweater by hand and then finding out my idea didn’t really work like I wanted it to. I've finally stopped to listen to this advice.

In the summer I like to experiment and try new things. This year is the summer of the Knitting Machine. I’ve had one for a long time and not mastered it. I am told you do have to get it out of the box and use it more often than one week every 4 years or so. 

So here I am Mknitting in the wild.

I have made every mistake all my handknitting beginner knitters make. I’ve not read to the end of instructions and wondered why it didn’t work. I thought I knew what to do the second day when I cast on because I’m a pro after one day, Not. I knew this would happen and so am laughing at myself for being so cocky. I thought I started my short rows incorrectly, took it all out and then re-read the instructions to find that I had done it right the whole time. OK, wasn’t laughing so much over that one. Then worked my short rows and forgot all the wraps. Laughing again. You may have caught the theme here. It's actually good to be a beginner again. I’m slowly getting the hang of it.

I have a wearable garment! I’m so excited. This is in Saucon Fingering, a cotton/acrylic usually knit at 28 sts = 4". I knit this sweater at 22 sts = 4". It's a fairly open weave. Should be really cool to wear.

I made a drop shoulder garment since I thought it would be the easiest construction to get started. Although I did do some inexplicable things. I can’t figure out where my head was at. I decided to work it with a seam up the front and back, and the sides too?! What was I thinking? I also decided somewhere along the line that I needed 10” of ease around my hips. I don’t know what happened there. So then it was too short for all that extra hip width. The next day I added an extra 3-4” inches to the bottom and now I’m very proud of my first Mknit garment of the summer.

I worked short rows into the sleeves. Even on a drop shoulder garment, the short rows make the sleeves hang much better.

I added A-line shaping (with lots and lots and lots of increases for the hip, for some strange reason). And yes, I did mattress stitch all those seams.

Next week the experimentation begins. I can't wait to get back to the cabin to get started. I have lots of ideas. I hope I haven't forgotten everything I learned last week.

-Deb

Curvy Double pointed needles

Here we are in Arlington,VA across the river from Washington, DC. We setting up at The National Needlework Assoc Show tomorrow and will spend the weekend talking to Store Owners who have come to shop. Our flight was uneventful, except for being picked out of the security line to have all my belonging searched and to have a very lovely security woman give me a pat down or a gentle all-over massage as she called it, ha, ha. Nothing in my shoes, nothing on my hands, nothing in my suitcases, good to go.

I started my new socks again, having for some strange reason decided to make this particular pair an inch too small. Rip, rip, rip. The good news is that I am much bettter with these needles after knitting part of a sock.

These are Neko needles. It's very much like knitting with 2 circular needles. The needles are plastic and very flexible so I'm finding them fairly easy to use. The curve fits in your hand and the trick seems to be how to hold them so the ends of the needles don't impede progress.

Progress is being made. Yay. They are pretty interesting to knit with. I wonder if I got a larger set, if they would be good for knitting sleeves? They definitely have possibilities.
I got these needles from Tracy at A River of Yarn in Canada.
Deb

Mosaic boxes

It's the end of our Knitting Guild year. Yesterday we spent it at Linda's house learning to knit Mosaic boxes and V-neck Top Down knitting. It was a great day. Here we are, knitters hard at work, ha, ha.

Really we were learning how to read a mosaic chart. They are different from other charts.
Mosaic is colour knitting, working with only 1 colour across the row at a time. You knit the stitches you want to show in the particular colour you're working with and slip all the other sts. It's often found in your stitch dictionary in the Slip Stitch section.

Each row of the chart requires two passes (rows) of the same colour. With the Light Colour work the first row of the chart two times (Rows 1 & 2), once with the Right Side facing and back again on the Wrong Side. Now move to the second row of the chart and with the Dark Colour work it across on the Right Side and back again on the Wrong Side (Rows 3 & 4). Every row of the chart is worked twice with the same colour. Then the next row of the chart is worked twice with the next colour, alternating 2 rows Light and 2 rows Dark. It makes mosaic charts different from any other type of chart. Geometric designs result. The different colours make it look different.

These two below, have the colours reversed. The boxes are Light and the Background is Dark. To read the chart above and switch the light and dark is a real challenge and K & T did a terrific job.

Boo, hoo, that's it for Guild nights for a while. I'm going to miss my knitting buddies over the summer. Looking forward to seeing everyone in September.
Deb

Add Mosaic

Adding a little bit of Mosaic to this vest really makes it look different. Can't wait until the class I'm teaching on Sunday gets started so I can see how it looks in different colours. I did it in Cotton Tweed Denim with Sky Blue. It would look more dramatic with a greater contrast between the colours.

As you know, blue is my go-to colour. But I'm going to see what other colours I can choose to make more impact. The vests in the class will give me some good ideas I bet. Now I'm going button shoping. Always an adventure.
-Deb