The Heathen Housewife

As promised, here comes the dish on my new sweater project. New in the sense that I haven’t told you all much about it yet, not exactly new in that I’ve been working on it for a few weeks now and have already finished the main part of the body and one and a half sleeves. To be honest, I’ve been dithering about whether to put this sweater up on the blog at all, and if so, how to do it.

I really want to do a tutorial on this sweater, as I think it’s going to be a pretty awesome design, something that I think is a fairly new concept of my own (although with a little subconscious influence from Nora Gaughn – here’s a Ravelry link to the pattern in question – not even a sweater but a poncho, and I’m making a bit of a leap here.) And the thing about this design is that it can easily be modified to any size and any weight of yarn, and changed by switching out lace or other texture motifs as you’ll see in a moment.

The only reason why I hesitate to to this is because of a tiny bit of negative experience with the Blankie. I wrote a post about it a while back when a woman started claiming that the blankie was her creation and teaching classes on it without crediting me for the design. Turns out, the same woman did it with the February Lady sweater, as have many other shops. It really does make me sick to think about people capitalizing on my idea, which I gave away freely as a way to say thank you to my readers who sent me their yarn.

Well, I’ve decided that the knitting terrorists have won if I let that hold me back from sharing this idea with all of you, and maybe just maybe someone else will decide that it’s a fun idea and knit it along with me. The prototype sweater isn’t finished yet, so you might want to wait and see the final result before casting on, but I want to go ahead and start the tutorial process while it’s all fresh in my mind.

The idea for this sweater came along as I was finishing the spinning for this yarn:

which I documented in full detail here. I sat there thinking that this yarn was going to make some lovely, slowly-shifting stripes somewhat similar to Noro type yarns, only with the added interest of barber-poling effect of three plies. I love those slowly striping yarns, and have brainstormed many times about how to use them to their best effect. I think my brain was in that special creative place (theta?) that activities like spinning and knitting help us find, which led me down a train of thought that included the fact that narrower strips do a better job of showing off the stripes, that I sure would like to do something more than plain stockinette, and hadn’t I seen something knit semi-modularly with kind of a spiral shape somewhere in the past?

At some point not too long after that brainstorming-while-spinning session, I sketched out a little picture that looks almost just like the one below on the upper left. This isn’t the same one, because it was before I’d decided on a stitch pattern, and the original sketch was a little sloppier and on a post-it note which is now long gone after having been scribbled on by one of my kids.

Between that original sketch and the notes you see above, several things took place. First, I dug out a huge stack of stitch dictionaries and spent a couple of evenings paging through them and marking every single pattern that caught my eye as a potential match for the picture in my mind. I wanted something kind of leafy, or maybe reminicent of something floral. But I had a couple other criteria in mind at that point too. I wanted something on a stockinette background, and without too much ribbing-type texture. It needed to make a nice not-too-wide panel, and I wanted it to be something fairly easy to remember. After my first pass, I had about twenty pages marked, but my second pass narrowed it down to a single favorite pretty quickly. I’d really like to try this concept with a cabled design next time, though.

And then I wound off some yarn and knit up a quick swatch, which as it turned out was also the beginning of the sweater. This, to me, is a huge advantage to this design. I love it that you can jump in and start knitting, knowing that if you like the way your blocked swatch looks, then it will very likely make a great start to your project. Same as the blankie. Shown here is my swatch after it had a bath and a very gentle blocking.

I measured that sucker up and down and sideways, getting both stitches and rows per inch as well as repeats of the lace pattern per inch and a good idea of the strip width total. One lesson that I’ve learned in my knitting years is to take good notes. I’m still learning it, actually. Always write down more than you think you’ll need to know later, even if you think you’ll remember it. I always forget little details about what I did unless I write them down, and every time I race along without stopping to document them, they come back to bite me.

Next, I pulled out a sweater that fits me well, that is shaped generally the same way that this sweater will be, and knit in a similar weight of yarn. In this case, I used my Ingenue sweater, which is a tiny bit longer than I’m planning to knit and has some waist shaping in it. I knew I was safe using the bust measurements, though, because this new sweater isn’t going to be long enough to need more width for the hips.

I layed the model sweater out and measured chest diameter, length to underarm, length of arms, and diameter of arms both at wrist and at underarm. I noted all these measurements on the sketch pictured above – not all the measurements are listed in the version shown, but that’s because when I took the picture I was still focused on starting the sweater body. My little brain prefers math in small chunks!

In the mean time, I knit my strip longer and longer. I’d started with just a couple of stitches, then increased by making one after slipping the first stich on every right side row until I had enough stitches to start my lace pattern at the center of my swatch. I continued increasing until I had a nice little margin of stockinette stitches on either side of the lace pane. In retrospect, I think I would omit a few columns of knit stitches next time to make the stripes a little longer and to increase the lace in the overall effect, and also it would have added room for an additional spiral on the body. You’ll see what I’m talking about in a minute. Also, I think I would change the initial increases to every other right-side row, to create a more gradual slope. Still, this concept is fairly forgiving, and I like it enough that I’ll be taking a second try once this sweater is done.

Alright, once the length of my strip measured the diameter I wanted for the body of my sweater (and I measured this by adding the post-blocking length of the non-patterned part to the number of pattern repeats multiplied by the repeats-per-inch I’d noted from the post-blocked swatch) I joined the thing into the round.

But not in the normal way, even though I was still careful not to twist. I joined them together by working across a right-side row, then picking up a stitch from the nice slip-stitch selvedge edge. Then, I turned my work, slipped that newly picked up stitch, worked my way across the back. I worked my way across the front again, until I reached the last two stitches – the last stitch of the strip and the newly picked-up stitch, and I worked them together by (and don’t ask me why I did this or where I got the idea from – it just seemed right at the time) slipping the first stitch as if to knit and inserting my right-hand needle through the back of the newly-picked up stitch, wrapping the yarn and bringing it through both loops. It makes a surprisingly nice, flat, non-bulky join. Oh, and then before turning, I picked up another stitch in the next selvedge chain.

There were many repeats of that joining and knitting, during which lots of family life took place. The girls looked super-cute in their matchy-matchy dresses one weekend afternoon, and I got them to pose for me.

That was the same day that we brought home Joe’s new-to-us car. It’s a 2007 Nissan Altima, which will replace the 1993 Honda Civic that he’s been driving since I got the Odyssey and we gave away his old Jetta a couple of years ago. I bought the Civic new and promised myself to drive it into the ground. 16 years is a pretty good record for car ownership, and Joe was not comfortable driving it any more, especially with the rear bumper starting to rust right off the car. Cars are a lot more important to Joe than they are to me, so I was happy that he got to pick out something nicer than my old hail damaged “Red Golfball” as he liked to call it. I just wish we could afford one of the many dream cars he lusts after. Someday, honey!

The flowers have finally been blooming. I love peonies, and our house has some of the first in the neighborhood since ours are planted along the southern exposure right next to the house where they stay warm all day. The irises were pretty too, but they bloomed for only about a week before going all wilty.

Okay, and finally, after all that knitting, I came up with something like this:

That’s the sweater body after I knit it up to the underarms, added a couple of rows of applied i-cord at the bottom to prevent rolling, and then blocked it again in the hopes that the i-cord would somehow look a lot more acceptable than it did pre-blocking. Well, it didn’t. It was thick and heavy compared to the body of the sweater, and as you can see, it also stretched the width out in a way that reminds me of those crazy clown clothes with hula-hoops in the waistbands.

Here’s a not-very-good closeup of the i-cord before I ripped it out.

Part of the fun of designing on the fly like this is knowing that you may have to change things as you go along, and being prepared to hop in the frog pond (rip-it, rip-it!). I have a plan B which I’m confident in, but I decided to try it on the sleeve edging, using that as another gauge-swatch situation, before applying it to the bottom of the sweater.

So, life has continued. The weather here was cold and rainy all weekend, and we all took a little trip to the Science Museum in St. Paul.

Those pink halter dresses have been a big hit with the girls. Julie was looking through a giant crystal ball meant to show something about lenses and light bouncing, and Sophie crawled through a barrel meant to show the size of a plant-eating dinosaur’s belly.

The knitting came along in the car while Joe drove, and as I said, I’m more than halfway across sleeve island. (Who coined that term, anyway?) I’ll share that part of the design with you in the next update. In the mean time, anybody think they might be interested in trying something like this out? Any questions so far?

Next up is a wrap-up post on the yarn I just finished spinning from the alpaca roving I bought at Shepherd’s Harvest. I washed it this morning, and I’ll post the details as soon as it’s dry and I can count the yardage and take some decent pictures.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 at 4:15 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.