The Heathen Housewife

I’ve been spending most of my free time since my last post working on my spiral sweater project. Well, actually, most of my fiber-related free time.

Last weekend Joe and I spent a couple of hours cleaning all of our windows, and it crossed my mind a few times that I was risking my lazy-housekeeping credentials. Honestly, though, I actually enjoyed the chore. I got to spend a couple of hours hanging out with my husband doing something together, with immediately gratifying results. The girls followed us around for most of that time, watching the goings-on and playing wherever we were. Luckily, our house came with awesome windows that fold down to the inside for cleaning, so we were able to do the entire project, with the exception of the bay window, from the inside. We dirtied almost every single one of our now-raggedy cloth diapers on the project, and they worked quite well. I felt so *green* getting the extra use out of them (and then washing them and drying them on the line outside.

A few other little projects have also gotten in the way. Last night, I spent the evening filling an electronic photo frame with choice family photos as Joe’s Father’s Day gift. I think it was a successful one, and I topped it off this morning with a breakfast specially catered to my man, including bacon (which is one of his favorite foods but which we almost never have), biscuits, and country gravy (which I despise but which he seems to enjoy), among other things.

Still, I have spent many hours on this sweater, enough so that it should be well done and blocked by now, but that is not the case. I’m a little frustrated, but I’m taking it in stride as one must do when designing a sweater on the needles. Let’s back up a bit and start where we left off.

Last I mentioned, I was halfway through knitting the second sleeve. It didn’t take long to finish the one and while I was finishing it, block the first to double-check gauge and fit. So then I had three parts that lined up like this:

It was time to join them all together. I started by picking up and knitting stitches all around the top of the main body. I started by picking up one stitch in every chain link of the slip-stitch selvedge…

And then I went back around, knitting that first row of stitches and also knitting an extra stitch into every-other purl-looking bump left at the back of the fabric by the first round of picked up stitches.

I know, clear as mud. I am not in any way claiming that this was the *best* way of going about things, but I started the process late and night, and it did work out okay. I ended up with the right ratio of stitches to rows, or close enough to it.

The next day, I found myself in a lawn chair in the back yard, watching the girls play. Which gave me a chance to do a little math and preparation for getting down to business. Here’s what I had with me:

The pink book is Elizabeth Zimmerman’s posthumous The Opinionated Knitter, which contains some great instructions on saddle-shoulder sweater shaping, which wasn’t exactly my original half-assed plan, but which I thought would suit my purpose well enough. Except that I didn’t exactly follow her directions because I had my own special reasons. Still, the base steps before joining it all together are about the same regardless of the shaping to follow.

First you need to put some of the stitches from the body and some of the stitches from the sleeves on hold to serve as the underarms. Elizabeth says 8-10%, and I agree. I multiplied out 8% and rounded up, which gave me 16 stitches to place on hold in each spot. I have never in my life owned any of those giant-safety-pin stitch holders, and have no desire to get them now. I like using waste yarn to hold my stitches because it is lighter and more flexible, which means that it stays out of my way and also doesn’t stretch out my stitches unnecessarily.

Lately, I’ve been using bits off this skein of crochet cotton and loving it. It was dirt cheap from Michael’s, it’s white and non-shedding, so it’s not going to leave funny colors on my project, it’s smooth and strong so it’s not going to break while holding my stitches, and it will come out easily when I want them back on the needles. What’s not to love?

I took the following picture to remind myself to point out that it’s a very good idea to leave rather long tails of yarn on the sleeves, and to end the knitting at one of the points where the underarm stitches start. I use this end to graft the underarms together once everything is joined. In the mean time, I wind the end into a little mini-skein blob to help it stay out of the way while it’s waiting.

Since I had my darning needle out, I went ahead and wove in the ends on the sleeve cuffs. See the pretty moss stitch there? Much nicer than those nasty i-cords I tried on the sweater bottom before. Once the top business is all finished off, I’ll go back and add some pretty moss stitch to the bottom of the sweater and (hopefully) all will be well with the world.

So here we are wtih the underarm stitches all on hold…

And the body of the sweater is all ready to go, with Elizabeth keeping an eye on me in the background…

I have no idea what I was trying to show with this picture…maybe that the center front is right where the spiral join left off? No clue.

True to form, I had several late-night trying-on sessions. At this point I was thinking “Okay, it’s going to work out fine. I know I’m not following EZ’s directions, but knitting is flexible. It’ll fit!”

Well, you can tell from the way I’ve been talking that the top did not end up working out the way I’d hoped, but at least you can see from the picture that the sweater is going to look pretty cool once I do iron out the issues.

Daisy says “This looks like a great place for a cat butt.”

And this is the sweater, almost done, right before I ripped the top back to the sleeves. The collar turned out way too wide, and the whole top was way too big, which in turn made the sleeves too long. Blech.

That was days ago. It’s been ripped, and I’m well into try number two. We’re going with a raglan shaping this time.

Meanwhile, I joined my first spin-in yesterday. The group of ladies that meets at the Black Bear pavillion by Como Lake in St. Paul were nice and welcoming. I was a little flustered and very late when I got there because traffic had been a nightmare. 94 was down to one lane because of construction and then there was some crazy auto show at the State Fairgrounds, backing traffic up worse than the actual State Fair does.

Still, it was a nice day, there were lots of pretty wheels and fiber to see, and the ladies made me feel at home. Thanks!

This entry was posted on Monday, June 22nd, 2009 at 2:22 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.