The sweater found

a new home yesterday. I wore it and as I was sitting in a meeting I could almost feel it “grow.” By the time I finished petting the horses and feeding them treats, the cuffs were getting hard to keep out of the way.

I drove to town, thinking about the sweater and the talented knitter, Claire, I was going to have lunch with. Hmmm. She knits gorgeous shawls (that sold like hotcakes at the Taos Wool Festival in early October). She’s taller than me. This would be a good color for her. Perhaps she would consider a trade?

Yes! Well, tentatively yes. I am giving her some time with the sweater to decide if she really likes it enough to trade. I know I love her shawls because I look at them every time she’s out and about offering them for sale. I just can’t justify buying one of them because, well, I’m a knitter. How can a knitter with an unmentionable amount of lace yarn and shawl patterns justify buying a shawl? Somehow though, as much as I love shawls and lace yarn, I just never seem to get around to knitting one. I would feel guilty buying a shawl. But, a trade. That’s another story!

Besides, the sweater looks really nice on her! See:

Don’t you agree it looks great?

It’s done!

Well, almost. It still has to dry and I have to sew the buttons on. And perhaps, tack down that ribbon strip.

After I washed it, it grew and grew and grew. I couldn’t believe how huge it was. The arms were over 24 inches long! I tried patting it all into place and squishing it in and shortening it up.

I messed with it for quite a while yesterday and again this morning. At least I have a nice view from the sunroom where it’s drying.

It looked kind of OK on the fronts, but the back was all scrunched weird and it just wasn’t right. So I threw the sweater and the towels it was drying on into the dryer for about 15 minutes. Maybe even a little longer.

Much, much better!

Stitches evened up and the texture smoothed out. The texture isn’t as overwhelming as I feared it might be. Of course, I won’t really be able to tell until it’s bone dry and I try it on.

I positioned the buttons over the buttonholes to get the “effect” of when they are sewn on. I like the buttons.

I still have to decide if that ribbon (see previous post) is useful inside the bind-off around the bands and collar. It did not get weird in the washing. It’s just fine. But is it a benefit? I don’t know. It doesn’t seem to be a detriment. Maybe I should leave it because if I pull it out, It would be a bear to put it back in later if I decided I really did need some stabilization along the button bands.

The collar seems to lay just fine with it in. Probably would lay just fine without it too.

Do I like the sweater? Am I pleased with the result? Would I recommend the pattern?

As far as the first two questions go, I always have this love/hate relationship with my knitting. I love the yarn; I love the pattern. I hate the finished product. However, I just pulled out two of my last season’s projects out last week (Refined Raglan and Textured Raglan) and was totally delighted and surprised at how well they fit and how nice they felt on. I’m not saying they are fantastic sweaters or anything like that. But, I’m not ashamed to be seen in public wearing either one. I even got a complement on Refined Raglan when I wore it to town.

As far as this one? Well, right now, I do not want to burn it. That’s a good sign.

Would I recommend the pattern? Yes. It is well-written. I found the knitting to be entertaining with all the do this every 8 rows and this every 16 and this every 4th or 5th or whatevers. Yet, it was repetitious enough to be able to learn the stitch pattern. I would describe it as a moderately challenging knit.

It is a very clever design (designed by Deborah Newton for Classic Elite). If you think that someday, you would like to try your hand at sweater design, I highly recommend knitting this one to see how it was shaped. The shaping is very well-done in this pattern. It is hidden, yet at the same time, not at all hidden. The shaping becomes part of the design. Nice. Kudos to Newton on this one.

Stop me before I

do something stupid. If that’s how this looks to you.

I made a couple of modifications in the blue cardigan.

1. I decided after reading a post by b r o o k l y n t w e e d to use a twisted rib for the ribbing on the bottom of the sweater. Jared Flood said, “I also opted for twisted stitch ribbing at the waist band and ankle-cuffs – a choice made to achieve a bit more elasticity – a great little perk of knitting things through the back loops.”

In my brain, I casually omitted the next part of what he says about stumpy limbs. I wanted stretch around the bottom of the sweater. Sounded good. When I got to the sleeves, it was a no-brainer to use the same ribbing on the cuffs. I also looked at my favorite sweater. (No, I did not knit it. So, no hesitation whatsoever in saying it is a magnificent sweater; it’s an Irish handknit.) It has twisted rib cuffs and a twisted rib lower hem.

So, twisted rib it was. I merrily proceeded onward. Then, I could hardly switch to a different ribbing for the button bands. This leads to choice two.

2. I changed the collar to a shawl collar of my own invention since I couldn’t find a pattern for one. All my knitting patterns were packed at that point, so I just sallied forth. It uses twisted rib — to match the bottom and the cuffs.

Twisted rib shawl collar took some time. A really long time. On to choice three.

3. On both the bottom and sleeve cuffs, since I had ribbing, I did a kitchner sewn bind off. Looks good, is stretchy, works well with twisted rib.

Here’s the problem. I don’t want stretchy button bands. That seems wrong. It also seems wrong to use a different bind off along the front of the sweater. So, what I am doing is this:

I looked for a grosgrain ribbon, but I wasn’t sure how to make button holes in it for the button hole side and it didn’t make sense to put it on one side and not the other. The store did have this tiny little satin ribbon in a good color, so I bought it and I am just laying inside the sewn bind off.

I figured I will need to tack it down at the top of the button bands:

So, I’ve left myself a little loop on either side of one stitch where I can sew the ribbon to itself to keep the front band from stretching. Then, I can arrange the collar with the ribbon as loosely or as firmly inside as it wants to block. I’ll tack it again when I get around to the other side at the top of the band and finally, after it’s all done, I’ll tack it down at the bottoms of each of the front button bands. All you should see is a little blip of ribbon at each of the four tack points.

Is this stupid? Will I have problems washing the sweater with the satin ribbon inside? Will it want to curl up or stretch or something when it’s wet?

I don’t think the ribbon will show more than the tiniest bit here and there:

You can see a tiny glimpse about four stitches in from the bottom edge of the photo.

What do people normally do to stabilize button bands? Besides of course the obvious: plan ahead and do not use an exceptionally stretchy stitch as the button band foundation and bind off. Your thoughts, please.

Still struggling to find time

to knit on the Classic Elite pattern. However, now that I’m home, I can show some pictures of the Asymmetrical Jacket I finished for my mom right before I left on the big adventure.

It looks really tiny. I hope it fits. I blocked it to her specifications on the measurements, so really, it should. The RNK mailed it off for me today. I guess I’ll know soon.

There are some unsightly bumps from the blocking pins. I pinned it out the night before I left on my trip so it was completely dry by the time the RNK got home and unpinned it for me. There are even — gasp — some rust stains from the pins. They are small and hopefully will come out. You can see the bumps along the arms. The stains are tiny specks in only one or two spots.

I think the bumps will come out in the wearing. I’m sure they will come out if she steams it lightly.

If I had it to do over again, I would do the decreases in the neck a little differently. I did make some modifications on the way the buttons were placed in the section that goes up onto the shoulder and in the shaping of the piece in which those buttonholes are placed. However, don’t ask me what I did. All I know was that I ended up practicing on another scrap of yarn because I knitted and tinked that stretch so many times the yarn would have shown signs of wear if I had worked on the sweater itself.

Hopefully, over the next few days I’ll make some forward progress on the other sweater too. Right now, it’s in one of those back and forth stages where everything I do one night comes out the next and so on and so on and so on.

I knit. I tink.

I head home in a week

One week from now, if all goes well with weather and everything, I will be on board a plane that has just taken off from Melbourne en route to LA. It’s bittersweet.

Of course, I want to go home and see the RNK and little Opal and Jakob. On the other hand, it’s been a very pleasant stay here. I met many fantastic people, saw gorgeous country, ate exquisite food and enjoyed relaxing and being on my own.

I wish I could post pictures of the finished sweater. But alas, I doubt if I will finish it over the next week. I’ll give it a go; but, sewing seams is a time consuming process for me and after I get it all put together, then I have to pick up stitches for finishing on just about every edge. The collar will require a fair bit of knitting too, since I plan to deviate from the collar on the pattern. It might have been a great collar in its day. But now, it just looks dated to me. I’m thinking that I need something a little bigger to go with the heavy texture in the pattern too. I may have to experiment.

I hope it’s OK to post this. The photo is from the cover of the Classic Elite pattern, A Morn in May, available from Patternfish. I highly recommend Patternfish. If this pattern is indicative, I also recommend Classic Elite patterns. Well-written, reasonably priced and interesting designs.

I’ve got the fronts and back done, the sleeves are getting really close to the last increases and then a bit of knitting to get to the sleeve caps. Hopefully, there will be time for one more post before I head home. I’m working on another newsletter and I’ve got another project going too, so time is at a premium.

I go through phases

with pretty much everything I do. Perhaps we all go through phases. But I hate to generalize my experience to other people.

I just know that now that I’m nearing the end of my 12-week stay in Tasmania, I find myself looking at everything differently than I did just a few weeks ago and feeling completely differently too.

At first, I didn’t mind being alone too much. It’s not that different from my life at home. We live about 12 miles from town and I work at home. So, there are a lot of days that I don’t see anybody but the RNK. That’s OK. I don’t mind. I didn’t mind too much here either because when I first got here, I had tons of work with me. Very busy.

Then not so busy. I started to feel really trapped. I didn’t want to use the car here because it didn’t seem right to run the house owner’s car all over the place. About the time I got super stir crazy, I rented a car and put 2,300 km on it. I covered a lot of turf.

Then the rental car went back and I had work again. Busy, busy. Now, the newsletter’s done, and I’m here and oddly enough, I’m not going stir crazy. I get out some. For example, I went to Hobart yesterday for the TasKnitters Ravelry group snb. Last Wednesday, I went to the post office.

The past couple of days, I sat and knitted without having to think about anything. I listen to the birds and the wind and the little eucalyptus thingies that hit the metal roof and the cars off in the distance and all the other things that one hears when one doesn’t have that running monologue that accompanies so many of my days. The one that says, “well, just two more hours and you need to have this project done, then you have to get started on the project for so-and-so, and when you are running the errands, be sure to remember you need to pick up the new shoe laces for the tennis shoes and while you’re at the store, you might as well run across the street and check out the . . . yada yada yada” Does it ever quit? I often found myself wondering that. Now I know the answer. Yes, it does.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that I am having some transcendental meditational experience. No, not that. It’s still just plain old me. I’m knitting. I’m not becoming enlightened or anything like that at all. It’s just that there isn’t anything I have to do. I don’t have to think about a project or errands or anything really. Sometimes I think about taking a nap.

My “job” right now is to be here. Pet the dog. Take care of the horses. Feed the mouse. It just doesn’t take a lot of thought.

Meanwhile, I am also going through phases with the project I’m working on. As I believe I have mentioned before, I picked the pattern because I liked all the texture.

I liked that it’s the kind of pattern that has a 16-row repeat that has two eight-row repeats inside of that and then there are decreases and increases and many of those alternate between every sixth and fourth row. It’s just a heck of a lot of fun. I also like that the resulting knit has a tremendous amount of warmth because of all that texture, yet it’s not all that heavy. And surprisingly, it seems to have a nice drape. I used a superwash merino instead of the cotton the pattern calls for and it’s all springy and squishy and it feels kind of nice — if you have your eyes closed.

But now that I have the back and both fronts done, it’s a heck of a lot of texture. I think it’s too much. It’s overwhelmingly textured. Fortunately, I’m only in the not-liking stage. I haven’t reached the part of the project where I think that I better finish it so I can burn it. That may be coming; but, so far, I just think it’s ugly. It’s still fun to knit. I still like the color. I guess I’m reserving judgement because I have hope that the way it feels will make up for the way it looks. Right now, I see it as the kind of sweater you can’t wait to put on in the winter on a cold Sunday morning, but that you change out of when it’s time to go to town and look presentable.

It’s not all frantic knitting though. Sometimes, I go outside and look at the pretty flowers.

Sometimes, I take a nap.

Dead batteries

I was going to post a picture of the back of the sweater, but the camera batteries were dead. Both of them. And since I feel like a pictureless post is, well, pictureless, I wasn’t even going to post. However, I’ve taken bazillions of photos (hence dead batteries). So, I grabbed a few of my favorites from the photo file and I’ll save the sweater till later. A half-finished sweater, or should I say a quarter-finished sweater, just isn’t that exciting to look at anyway.

First, whoever said money doesn’t grow on trees needs to go to the Tahune AirWalk.

Clearly, money grows on this tree. I had an amazing day with slippermaker (Ravelry name) and her family. They took me on an outing to the AirWalk and it was so much fun to talk with her lovely children and clever husband. Very nice day.

One of the more delightful things about Tasmania are the rainbows. Lots of rainbows. I spent a delightful half hour one day watching a gorgeous complete rainbow moving closer to me over the ocean. I saw a stunning double rainbow that touched down in Hobart on one side and out in the Derwent River on the other. I wish I could have taken a picture of that one; but, I was driving and couldn’t figure out where to stop. On the bridge? I don’t think so!!! Driving across that bridge still white-knuckles me. And I’ve seen dozens and dozens of partial rainbows and snips of rainbows here and there.

I was able to conveniently snap this shot of a lovely complete rainbow from the safety of the deck on the house where I’m staying. Too bad it doesn’t show up better in this web-sized image.

But it hasn’t been all rain. I have had some lovely days in the past month. And just to prove it, I took this shot from the overlook near Eaglehawk Neck.

It’s been a really great experience, staying in this lovely state for as long as I have. At first, everything was new and scary and I felt stupid dozens and dozens of times every day. Simple things, like getting gas in the car, were hard and felt unfamiliar in spite of the fact that I’ve put gas in a car at home too many times to even contemplate counting. But here, it’s just a little different. Which side is the tank on in this car? How does this pump work? What is that type of fuel for? (Fortunately, I didn’t have any problems identifying unleaded.) Which coin is the 50 cent one? What about the cents? Why can’t I just pull in and out of the filling station any which way I want?

Shopping in the grocery store was no better. Vanilla extract in the States is called vanilla essence here. Mayonnaise here is sandwich spread in Colorado. Eggs are not refrigerated. You won’t find them near the butter. The butter is so delicious it has the power to make a girl want to be fat. As does the King Island yogurt, brie and camembert cheese.

There are all those niggling little questions: What happened to “Z?” What bird is that? Why are the spiders so huge? Why don’t people insulate their houses more often? Is that really a dial tone? Am I using too much water — will the tank be empty when the house owners come home? How do you convert degrees C to degrees F? Why are there so many sheep and so few yarn stores? How do you cook lamb?

Then there is driving on the left side of the road and all that entails: which way to look first when you are crossing a street in Hobart, or perhaps more deadly, which way to look first when you are making a right hand turn in the car. I absolutely know that I induced road rage in at least a few people with my overly conservative approach to making right turns the first few weeks I was here.

To make it just a little more complicated, there has been an element of difficulty in understanding some people’s accents and having some people understand my American twang and the weird words I use. Place names have been really hard. Add in a little stress (say something like the key breaks off in the lock to the trunk of the car on a Sunday afternoon) and the difficulty in communicating expands way out of proportion.

The list just went on and on and on. But after a few weeks, I only felt stupid a few times a day and lately, it’s only a few times a week. That’s pretty much normal for me.

I had a friend who was an exchange teacher in Spain. She said she knew she finally felt at home the night she had a dream in Spanish. Well, last night, I had a dream in which Kevin Rudd made an appearance and everyone spoke in Australian English. Even me.

Homesick? Yes. I want to snuggle up to the RNK and hold the pups and pet the cat. I want to check on the horse and scratch his darling little head. But, I’m starting to feel at home here too. And that’s pretty nice.

A child of the 60s must have

designed Cromarty. What was she smokin? It is a gorgeous sweater, that is why I wanted to make it. But the gauge! The pattern suggests a size 5 (3.75mm) needle and indicates a gauge in st.st. (which I interpreted to be stockinette stitch) of 25 stitches and 31 rows to a 4 inch or 10 cm. square.

Bingo. Right on the money. So without further maths, which was a mistake on my part, I casted on. By row 3, I was starting to wonder. Seemed like a whole lot of distance on each round. So I pulled out a really long cable needle and moved it over just to see. That thing was freaky huge.

I’m talking 56 inches around. Now, I understand this is a really wide sweater with a boxy cut. But, 56 inches is so large that it looked like it would be uncomfortable to wear. I sat down with a calculator to figure out where I went wrong. Cast on 184 stitches for each the front and the back. That’s 368. At a gauge of 6.25 stitches to the inch, that’s 58.88 inches, and given that the pattern has cables pulling it in some, I probably was still hitting gauge right on.

However, the pattern schematic shows the sweater being 57 cm or 22.5 inches. Mistakes were made. I think someone got their math a little messed up and I double, triple and quadruple checked mine so I don’t think it was me.

My choices. Redesign the sweater like a lot of people have done. Leave the bigger more interesting cable patterns, but swap out some of the smaller patterns for even smaller ones and just eliminate a couple. That’s an option.

I also read that a lot of people used way different yarn and needle combos and very few people, even the ones that used a DK weight used a size 5 needle. Most used a 4 or even a 3. I would have to switch yarn — there is no way I could get a reasonable fabric/size combo with the yarn I am using by just dropping needle size.

I also considered that many people have taken well over a year to finish this sweater. That was the deal clincher for me. I brought this yarn with me with the intent of taking a sweater home on 6 Sept.

Back to the drawing board. I have a couple of contenders right now: One is a cable and lace cardigan from Vogueknitting, the other is Classic Elite pattern called “A Morn in May.” Both have lots of interesting stitch action. Might be a real challenge to get either finished, so I’m going to be quite realistic here and keep looking for something that can be finished in just a couple months.

Or maybe, I’ll just go back to socks. I brought sock yarn too. Maybe it’s time for more socks.

I wore these yesterday when I went on a beach walk. I got fascinated by the compositions the shells and seaweed made in the sand. I’ll spare you the bulk of the photos, but here are a couple of my faves.

He tried the sweater on

and absolutely loved it. I don’t know what came over the Resident non-knitter this weekend, but we were getting ready to watch a movie and he said, “I haven’t tried that sweater on yet have I?”

Off he trotted to the dresser, pulled Hamefarin out of the drawer, and pulled it over his head. Then he proceeded to model in front of the mirror, checking out every angle. He pronounced the fit perfect and he said this sweater was the nicest thing I have knitted so far.

I caught him on Sunday looking through a new pattern book I got on Saturday, Country Weekend Knits. (Great book, by the way. I heard about it from Cherry Blossom Hill. See the March 1, 2009 post.)

He said, “I think I want this one for my next sweater,” pointing to the Chevron Aran Crewneck.

“Ahh, not so fast,” I replied. “When the other sweater is worn, and by that I mean worn as in wearing out, not just on, then I’ll think about knitting another.”

He thought this very unfair. Late Sunday he caught me fondling a skein of Jabberwocky from Blue Moon Fiber Arts and proclaimed it perfect for another hat for him.

What has gotten into him?

On to a more rewarding project

I started on a sweater for my mom.

She picked the Cascade 220 in a heather lilac shade. I added the Kid Seta in a color I describe as Oyster to get up to the weight called for in this sweater:

I hope I’m not violating any copyright issues here. This “was” a free pattern on www.elann.com but it’s no longer posted.

Opal thought the photography was really boring. She offered to spice it up a bit:

She thinks she heard the robin who may be committing hari kari by trying to mate with its reflection in the large windows downstairs.

Now she’s getting bored, sitting on this stupid chair. A big yawn.

Finally, a nice pose.