Margaret’s Mimosa Mitts

Some time ago, it occurred to me that my friend Margaret needed a pair of black, lacy fingerless mitts. Not just any mitts would do; they had to be specially designed for her. So I got out my stitch dictionaries and went to work, producing a pair of gorgeous fingerless mitts with my friend in mind. I tried publishing the pattern on Ravelry, but didn’t do it right. Now that I have this blog, I shall publish it here.

Mitts for Margaret

less than 50 gm of fingering weight yarn (I used KnitPicks Capretta)

2.5 mm needles

Bobble instructions:

Knit into front, back and front of next st, turn and p3, turn and k3, turn and p3, turn and slip 1, k2tog, psso.

Wrist for both hands:

CO Heidi Bear’s twisted picot for 16 picots on circular needle, CO 1 st.

Row 1: K, *K1, Kfb* to last stitch, K1 (50 stitches on needle) (these 2 extra will make a seam later)

Row 2: purl

Row 3: knit

Row 4: slip last stitch onto end of second needle, in front of the first stitch and knit both together, joining in the round. K to last 2 st, K2tog (48 st)

Row 5: purl 

Row 6: *P2tog yo* to end of round

Row 7: purl

Row 8 & 9: knit

Row 10: *K3, yo, ssk, K3* 6 times, K3

Row 11, 13, 15, 17: knit

Row 12: *k1, k2tog, yo, k1, yo, ssk, k2* 6 times

Row 14: *k2tog, yo, k3, yo, ssk, k1* 6 times

Row 16: *k2, yo, sl1, k2tog, psso, yo, k3* 6 times

Row 18: same as 10

Row 19 & 20: knit

Rows 21 to 23: same as 5 to 7

Left Hand:

Row 24: knit

Row 25: k1, m1, k1, Mimosa shoot chart for LH, k to one before end of round, m1, k1.

Even rows: knit

Row 27: k2, m1, k1, chart, knit to last 2 st., m1, k2

Row 29: k3, m1, k1, chart, knit to last 3 st., m1, k3

Row 31: k4, m1, k1, chart, knit to last 4 st., m1, k4

Row 33: k5, m1, k1, chart, knit to last 5 st., m1, k5

Row 35: continue increasing until there are 62 stitches total. Continue knitting chart without increasing.

When 33 rows of Mimosa shoot chart are completed, put 16 thumb gusset stitches on waste yarn like so: k8, put those 8 sts on waste yarn, k46, put last 8 sts on waste yarn.

CO 2 and join round. Continue in pattern (48 sts) until palm is covered, ~1.5"

Next round: knit

Repeat rounds 5 to 7

BO with 2-stitch picot: *cast on 2 stitches using cable cast-on. Bind off 4 stitches. Put right stitch on left needle.* Repeat until 2 st remaining, K2tog, BO.

Right Hand:

Row 24: knit

Row 25: k2, Mimosa shoot chart for RH, k1, m1, k2, m1, k to end.

Even rows: knit

Row 27: k2, chart, k1, m1, k4, m1, k to end. 

Row 29: k2, chart, k1, m1, k6, m1, k to end.

Row 31: k2, chart, k1, m1, k8, m1, k to end.

Row 33: k2, chart, k1, m1, k10, m1, k to end.

Row 35: continue increasing until there are 62 stitches total. Continue knitting chart without increasing.

When 33 rows of Mimosa shoot chart are completed, k23, put 16 sts on waste yarn, CO 2, join, k23.

Continue in pattern (48 sts) until palm is covered, ~1.5"

Next round: knit

Repeat rounds 5 to 7

BO with 2-stitch picot: *cast on 2 stitches using cable cast-on. Bind off 4 stitches. Put right stitch on left needle.* Repeat until 2 st remaining, K2tog, BO.

Thumb (both hands):

Put reserved 16 stitches on dpns (or circular needle). Pick up and knit 2 sts from hand, knit four rounds. Work rounds 5 to 7 once, picot bind off.

Pink Sundae Camisole: What happened next.

We left off last post with the bottom edge of my camisole looking huge. In every single book on knitting I have ever read (and I’ve read several), the knitter is instructed to start by making up a swatch to check for gauge. I didn’t do that. I should have. It turns out that with the needles specified by the designer, my camisole was heading into XL territory.  What did I do? The only sensible thing I could do: I frogged it, very carefully rewinding my yarn onto the empty toilet paper roll. The stuff at the beginning was getting really ratty by this time. To make it even rattier, I then pulled out my 2.25 mm needles, and knit myself a swatch. Specified gauge was 31 st = 4 in on 2.75 mm needles. I made my swatch 31 stitches wide with 4-stitch borders of garter. When I measured, I was still 2 stitches too loose. What to do?

I stroked my chin and thought about this. I could always try again with even smaller needles OR I could take advantage of my loose tension and knit the smaller size. Less knitting overall, right? So I did that, frogging my swatch (carefully rewinding it onto the roll) and then casting on for the small size with the 2.25 mm circular needle. Luckily the rattiest of the yarn ended up in the first five rows before the picot edge and is hidden in behind. In one place, the yarn actually came apart in my hands, but it was very easy to splice in without any tails to darn in later. I even caught the cast-on tail in the turned edging. Rather clever of me, no?

Unlike the other attempts, this one has been going problem-free. I hesitate to say that out loud, lest the knitting kobolds come out of the skeins and play havoc with my project. I am now into the decreases and have enough fabric made to warrant a photo or two. I have two, in fact. Here they are.

I had to pin it for the photo as the knitting is extremely curly. I have great faith that blocking will solve that issue. I think I am sufficiently satisfied with my progress that I can stop talking about this and just post photos when it’s done. Although, since the pattern calls for a separately-knitted upper edge attached via picked-up stitches and a three-needle bind-off, and I plan to do things differently, you might be seeing more of this camisole here before then.

Keep those kobolds at bay!

Pink Sundae Camisole: an adventure

Many years back I bought the book Sensual Knits by Yahaira Ferreira. Of course, it wasn’t that simple. Let’s try this again, shall we?

Many years back, I was in Fabricville in Sherbrooke with my daughter and I saw a knitting book for sale with the most amazing garments in it. I needed to buy it. It was a French translation of the above-mentioned book, Tricot tendance, but I figured my grasp of that language was good enough that I could figure it out. I was wrong. The language of French knitting is obtuse, indecipherable and non-intuitive. The token francophone in my knitting group prefers English patterns because they are so much easier to read. As a result, Tricot tendance was cracked open only so that I could admire the patterns I figured I would never knit.

Fast forward a couple of years when I was visiting my daughter in Toronto. We made a trip to the Purple Purl and on a whim I asked the store clerk if she had Sensual Knits by Yahaira Ferreira. She did not, but she could order it and mail it to me in Quebec. So I plunked down my debit card and not too long after got my very own copy and gave Tricot tendance to my daughter, whose French really is much better than mine. The first pattern I attempted was “Lily-of-the-Valley Opera Gloves” by Olga Buraya-Kefelian. I had knitted one all the way to the wrist when I found the on-line errata for the bobbles, so I ripped back to the cuff and redid it. They turned out quite nice and I wore them for the premiere of my husband’s opera. They are opera gloves, after all.

I was on holiday in the Caribbean at the time, hence the shorts and sandals. That jade bracelet met an untimely end on that trip when it fell on one of those polished stone floors and shattered. I was quite devastated.

Recently I purchased way too much yarn from KnitPicks during one of their sales, including four different colourways of Diadem fingering. It’s a problematic yarn: gorgeous in the skein, but not so great once you get down to working with it. It’s soft and silky (50% baby alpaca-50% silk) but has barely any twist to it and fuzzes terribly. My first attempt at winding some off the swift into a cake resulted in a horrible tangle that took me an hour or more to tease apart. The fingerless mitts I knit with it lost all their sheen after they’d been washed and blocked, and stretched so much that I had to undo the ends and make them smaller. So I figured that Diadem would be more suited to something else, and hit upon the “Pink Sundae Camisole” by Angel. It’s been in my Ravelry queue for a long time, just waiting for the perfect yarn to come along.

 

My first attempt at joining in the round resulted in a möbius strip. As a result, I started again by knitting five rows and joining for the picot round. Five rounds later I rescued the live stitches from the provisional cast-on and made a nice finished picot edge. Then my problems began in earnest.

I have a very bad habit of not reading patterns correctly. I blame this on a) impatience, b) presbyopia, and c) the steps not being itemized so that you can’t miss one. I saw the bit about knitting in stockinette for an inch, so I did that. Just as I was nearing the end, I looked at the picture and saw the lace at the bottom. Oops! Back I frogged to the edge join. Then I dutifully followed the directions: *k2tog yo* every other round twice. When I got to the first knit round, I realized I had too many stitches. It wasn’t even a manageable number. So, back we went to the edge join.

Because of my experience with the first ball of Diadem I wound, I was very careful to wind my unravelled yarn onto an empty toilet paper roll. I’m glad I did.

Very carefully, I reknit the lace round. This time I was missing two stitches. I figured I could live with that. After the second round of eyelets, I made a kfb into one yo at each side, bringing me back to the right number of stitches. Suddenly it looked huge. I see from the picture that it fits over the model’s hips, and I’m making the medium size, which is what’s shown in the photo. So it should work, right?

Tune in, folks, for the further adventures of the Pink Sundae Camisole.

The Ladies’ Field Trip - or - More Grist for the Mill (where “grist” means fleece)

Ever since I discovered qiviut, I wanted to knit with it. First there was a handkerchief-sized piece of knitted lace in a yarn shop in Picton, Ontario about five years ago: I picked it up and let it fall and it just floated back to the counter. It was the lightest, softest wool I had ever experienced. The shop owner was very happy to tell me about the yarn and would have been even happier to sell me some, but it was prohibitively expensive and only available in tiny quantities. So I passed.

Qiviut and I did not cross paths again until the 2013 Toronto Knitters Frolic where I overcame my frugality and bought a skein. It was enough to knit a pair of wrist warmers with a tiny ball left over, enough probably for a handkerchief.

 

They are so soft and warm—I feel like I have kittens on my wrists.

Imagine my delight when I discovered that the home of Magic Tundra Qiviut is a drive of just over an hour away, in Adstock, Quebec, near the formerly bustling metropolis of Thetford Mines, home of the largest open-pit asbestos mine in the world. I tried in vain to organize an outing during the summer when my daughter was visiting, but I persevered and finally, last Monday, several of the members of The Knitters of Lennoxville hopped into a van and made the trip.

We had perfect weather for an outing. Most of the deciduous trees had lost their leaves, but the larches stood out golden against the dark green of their cousin conifers as we drove through some of the most beautiful scenery in the Eastern Townships. The GPS failed us at the end of our journey, instructing us to turn left on Rang 14. We realized the error as house numbers got bigger instead of smaller; so turned around, finally pulling in at a farmhouse with a large barn in behind. The daughter of the house was outside when we arrived and notified her parents that they had visitors.

We were greeted by Lorraine and her husband Gilbert, names that work equally well in either English or French (they are respectively one and the other) who took time out of their busy work day to show us the entirety of their milling operation. Gilbert also told me the story of how they became the successful business they are today: a story of serendipity and perseverance.

In 1967, a small number of musk oxen were introduced to Old Fort Chimo in northern Quebec where none previously existed. The operation involved several biologists and a vet and lasted for a dozen years or so while the herd increased in number. The biologists lovingly cared for the animals and brushed their great hairy coats often, saving the soft, downy under fur in garbage bags until there was a warehouse full of them. In 1980 the herd was released into the wild and has continued to thrive, now providing a major source of hunting and food for the Inuit of Kuujjuaq.

In the meantime, our friends Lorraine and Gilbert had started a mill to make angora yarn from angora rabbits. They weren’t doing very well and at a certain point the bank refused to refinance them. They were looking bankruptcy in the face, the prospect of selling their farm and moving to a city where they could find jobs to support themselves and their children, when the question of what to do with all this musk ox fleece came up. Gilbert jumped at the opportunity, buying it all and going about learning how to mill qiviut. The timing couldn’t have been better. The couple suddenly experienced a renewal in their business, the bank was willing to lend them more money, and this allowed them to survive the recession that hit a few years later. Once the bags of brushed fleece ran out, Gilbert made a deal with the Inuit, trading necessary goods (rifles, ammunition, canned goods, etc.) for the raw skins from musk oxen killed for food. It has proven to be an excellent association.

Gilbert showed us a skin he was in the process of shearing. The underfur is very dense, but the individual hairs are extremely fine. He shears huge chunks of fur off and lets it dry before Lorraine washes it in fabric bags in a regular agitator machine.

Once dry, the coarse guard hairs are separated from the soft fleece. This is done by hand and Gilbert and Lorraine employ their own kids plus the neighbour’s daughter for this task. They are paid by the bagful of cleaned fleece.

The carded fleece then goes through a motorized drum carder where it is further cleaned and/or combined with other fibres. Here is the conveyor belt with a 50/50 blend of qiviut and cashmere fleeces ready to be turned into roving.

The belt moves along very slowly and a soft bat comes out the other end. Gilbert gathers it up and sends it down a hole to collect as a rope of roving in a bucket.

There is another machine where four ropes of roving are blended together, producing a thoroughly homogenous fleece before it can be sent through the spinning machine and made into thread. The thread will later be plied and dyed and turned into salable yarn. Working by themselves, seven days a week, Gilbert says they produce about a kilo of finished qiviut in a month.

Lorraine has several knitting machines and programmes them to make sweaters, blankets and other large items. The only handknits are mittens and gloves, which she hires contract knitters to make. Here is one finished blanket from 100% qiviut, approximate cost $400 CAD.

Not really set up to sell from home, Lorraine nonetheless had a bit of inventory on hand for us to choose from. I ended up buying some 100% qiviut in a worsted weight, a 50-50 blend of qiviut with merino in a 2-ply lace, and a luxurious fingering called Queen: 70% merino-10% qiviut-10% cashmere-10% silk. I have no idea what I’ll make with these beautiful additions to my stash; I may just tuck them in the collar of my shirt to feel them next to my cheek for a while.

One of my fellow knitters asked me if the field trip had turned out as I had expected. I would have to say it was better. Not only did I get to indulge my yarn habit, but I am now friends with two wonderful people whom I would love to know better. The qiviut is just frosting.

* * * * * * * *

Thank you Philippa for the photos. You can find out more about qiviut and Cottage Craft Angora at their website: http://cottagecraftangora.com/

Too many shawls

A couple of weeks ago I finally folded and put away the shawls that have been lying on my ironing board. It necessitated emptying a bottom drawer in my dresser, getting rid of things that have accumulated there over time, folding and putting the various wraps and stoles I possess neatly away. The drawer is full. There are shawls I have knitted, a shawl I crocheted, two near-identical white lace shawls (one I bought, one my mother-in-law gave me), silk wraps I purchased from Burmese fundraisers, pashminas bought at the Montreal bus station and two gorgeous stoles bought in New York from the Metropolitan Museum on separate occasions (one painted silk, one a pashmina). There is even a black satin stole from a Montreal airport store. I have probably missed a few. The point is, I have way too many shawls. I can’t wear them all, and yet I keep knitting them. The most recently completed FO of this genre was undertaken for a MKAL on Ravelry: Rapt for the Holidays (Holiday MKAL 2014) by Heather Anderson.

I’ve been trying to figure out what the appeal of MKALs is. I haven’t yet, so that’ll be a discussion for a future time. In the meanwhile, I should talk about the shawl that is now in a zip-lock plastic bag awaiting a decision on its fate. I had bought a skein of Marine Silk-Lace from Blue Moon Fiber Arts at the Toronto Knitters Frolic last spring which was the right weight (lace and 100 gm) for the undertaking. I went to a local jewelry supply store and purchased way too many beads. I was prepared!

Heather leaked the clues one chart at a time. First the beginning of a semi-circle following Elizabeth Zimmerman’s π formula in stockinette; then a chart of snowflakes, then a chart of lace candy canes. Aware that not everyone would want to make a garment too obviously reminiscent of Christmas, she included an alternate second chart which more people chose to knit, even though it was untested. I am included in that group. Then there was another chart of snowflakes, followed by a chart of wreaths, a final sprinkling of snowflakes, and a row of fir trees. People posted photos of their FOs before I was even close to the last bit, and I determined that the trees looked a little squat; so I added another set of branches. There was a beaded eyelet edging, and a choice of blocking it with points or not. I chose points. Here is my FO with the pins.

After I photographed it, I repinned the edge to redistribute the points. I’m much happier with the finished result.

Now. What do I do with it?

When love hurts.

I love to knit. You who read this probably love to knit. Why else would you read a knitting blog? But sometimes the things we love most can be bad for us. They say that if you are suffering from gastric distress or an allergic reaction or something along those lines to look to your favourite food for the culprit. This is so often the case. My brother was diagnosed with lactose intolerance. Milk was his favourite food. My daughter loves eggplant but some day it might actually kill her. Some people who love bread and other bakery products end up being diagnosed with celiac disease or wheat allergies. They have to make dietary sacrifices to maintain their good health.

I have no such issues. Well, not exactly true that, since I am also, like my daughter, allergic to eggplant. However, unlike her, I despise it, so avoiding it is not an issue. What I do like to do is knit, and presently I am experiencing pain in my left elbow which I have self-diagnosed as tendonitis caused by indulging in my preferred activity. I have one project in particular to blame for this condition, a shawl I volunteered to test knit.

I saw the call for knitters in The Testing Pool on Ravelry and liked the photograph of the designer’s FO. It’s a crescent shawl, extremely lacy with beads strategically placed, and I was sucked in like a paper boat in a whirlpool. I soon found out that one of my knitting buddies had also signed up for the test, so we had a lot of notes to compare as we went along. The designer had left the pattern extremely open ended, allowing for lace right from the get-go, or for varying depths of stockinette stitch before embarking on the lace. There was also no stipulation for the number of repeats of the charted pattern; again that was left up to preference. The lace edging was easy to lengthen as desired, being only two rows that repeated until one felt it was time to bind off. I’m much happier with specific directions, especially in a test knit, but I embarked willingly enough on this project. For yarn I cast on with Manos del Uruguay lace in a lovely variegated blue and used No. 8 clear beads with silver centres.

It did not take me long to find issues with the pattern. There were the usual typos one discovers, but my main problems were with the lace charts and I took some issue with the designer because she was not only slow to understand my notes, but also defensive. As I may have mentioned in this blog at some other time, patterns are all about the completed FO. The instructions must be clear and easy enough for the stupidest of people to understand. The best patterns are ones which tell you exactly what to do without a lot of written-out explanations. We don’t want to read; we want to knit!

If I may digress for a moment, those same directions were given to me when I was learning choral conducting. The conductor must know the music well and be able to relay to the choir (or orchestra or band) what he wants through hand gestures only. If he has to explain it, then you know that he’s not a very good conductor. The musicians/singers don’t need to know any of the philosophy or background of the piece; they just need to have a good  director directing them and a well-written score. The choir/orchestra/band has often been compared to the conductor’s instrument, in the same way that the violin is an instrument. You don’t tell your violin what you want it to do; you just play it. The same thing stands for the conductor. He must play his instrument and do it without it being concerned about anything but what he has them do.

So, back to the knitting: I cast on, knit the 36 or so rows required for the depth of stockinette I was aiming for, then started the lace chart. The designer had provided both charts and directions. The latter were clearly written and laid out in the order of tasks performed. The charts were another story. There were four of them: a) the optional stockinette section; b) main lace repeats; c) transition lace section; and d) edging. The first problem was super evident: she had placed them on the page with the first chart at the bottom and the last chart at the top so that they lined up top of one to bottom of next. Even as I type this I am still amazed at the stupidity of this arrangement. As I told the designer, we read patterns from the top of the page down; especially if we are using a computer or tablet where we must scroll to the next page. If you turn the page and start looking for Chart 1 and instead see Chart 4 at the top, you are immediately confused. I explained to her that I understood her aesthetic reason for placing the charts as she had, but a pattern is not a work of art; the finished knitted garment is the ultimate goal. One must make sacrifices at times.

The next issue—which actually caused me some real grief—was the chart for the edging. She did not show the WS rows in it, but had illustrated three RS rows. Her brief description called it a two-row chart to be repeated ad libitum with a knitted bind-off on the WS. I saw three rows, the first one labelled with a 1, and the others left unnumbered. The first row showed the edge increases, the other two did not. So I knit my first RS row according to the chart, then knit the identical thing for the WS without the edge increases. When I got to the end I thought to myself, “This looks terrible,” and read her written instructions for the edging. They made perfect sense. The chart was horribly wrong. I had to tink that entire row, and then purl a proper WS (with edge increases) before I could continue. When I brought this up to the designer, she simply couldn’t comprehend what was not to understand. She even asked me if the chart was understandable once I read the instructions, and I said, no, the instructions pointed out how glaringly wrong the chart was. My friend got in the act and helped me out, but it took a lot of correspondence in the thread before she realized that she should remove the two bad rows from the chart and reword the label.

The final problem was the knitted bind-off. I used a 8-mm needle for it and it was still too tight to block out points in the finished shawl. The designer should have specified a Russian or other lace bind-off. Since it was a test, I completed it as instructed. If it had not been a test, I would definitely have used a different bind-off.

Nonetheless, the FO is very pretty. I was not all that keen on her method of shaping the lace, but it was still effective and I like the beads. Here it is draped over the armchair in my living room:

I got one of my knitting group ladies to model it (and another to photograph it with her phone since I’d forgotten my camera) and it looks so nice on her, that I think I will gift it to her this upcoming holiday season.

I will never test for this designer again. It simply wasn’t fun and I believe I was tense the whole time, thus causing my elbow to develop tendonitis. But I’m still knitting. There will be more updates on FOs shortly.

The knitted-lace chart dilemma: To be symmetrical or to list to port?

I have just finished test knitting a shawl by the exquisite Mary-Anne Mace. This is the second garment I have had the honour to test for her, the first being the nuppy Minarets and Lace shawl which shows up in another post here. In my view, she is a wonderful designer. I love her creations. Even before I discovered her on Raverly, I fell in love with Regenerate, a triangular shawl she conceived of while watching the renewal of nature following the terrible devastation of the September, 2010 earthquakes in New Zealand. When I saw she had another shawl ready for test knitting, I quickly volunteered my services.

I’m afraid that as a test knitter, I’m a bit of a pain in the ass. I don’t stop at finding typos and errors in the pattern; I try to find easier ways to explain to other knitters how to get the desired results. It is my philosophy that a pattern should be made easy enough for even the stupidest person to follow. That doesn’t mean the knitter can be a beginner. There are often techniques (like nupps) that require a fair bit of experience. It’s just that even an experienced knitter can become confused when instructions are not perfectly clear, or when an abbreviation is not explained fully or is similar to something else or simply doesn’t seem to make intuitive sense. I bring these things up and try to clarify them so that the knitting experience is as stress free as possible.

Having said all that, I now move on to the “meat” of the matter: the lace chart. When I learned to knit, there were no lace charts in knitting patterns; at least, not in the patterns I learned from. Most of the knitting books I still have from that era have every line written out in full, with asterisks setting off repeated parts. They are very wordy. Because the type is often quite small (needing to accommodate all those words and abbreviations), they are also hard on the eyes and it is easy to jump from one line to another and make mistakes. Until the pattern is established, you also have no idea what your lace will look like. Lace charts are a much, much better innovation. I am mystified as to why it took so long for publishers to include them in knitting patterns, since designers must have used charts to plan out their lace in the first place. However, that was then and this is now.

Now we have beautiful, detailed charts showing the directions of k2tog and ssk stitches, Os for yos, plain for knit, dotted or dashed for purl. It is the difference between a well-drawn road map with landmarks and a sheet of written instructions telling you to drive 12 km, then turn right at County Road 14. I would prefer to have the map so I can see where I’m going.

When one of my colleagues was pregnant with her first child, I made a baby blanket from a rather ancient book (about which I have already spoken in this blog). It consisted of a square in the middle, surrounded by an edging of four strips with mitred corners sewn on after. The instructions took two whole pages and buckets of words, words, words. Thus:

The central part consisted of a stitch pattern which drove me crazy until I had ripped out several times.

It shouldn’t have been difficult. But it was. After I finally got the hang of it, it turned out great.

It was, however, the lace edging which turned out to be extremely challenging. After all, there are a page and-a-half of closely-typed instructions. I ended up drawing myself a chart so I could see what I was doing. It was just pencil on graph paper, but it sufficed. This is what I was charting.

What I noticed as I drew my chart, is that the repeats for the pattern do not occur at the same place on every line. For example:

Row 5: p2tog, p2, k2tog, yo, p2, *k1, yo, k5, yo, k2tog, p1, ssk, p1, k2tog, p1, ssk, yo, k5, yo, k1, p2, k2tog, yo, p2. Repeat from * 5 times, p2 tog.
Row 6: purl the purls and knit the knits (it doesn’t say that, but that’s basically what it is)
Row 7: p2tog, p1, *yo, ssk, p2, k1, yo, k7, yo, ssk, p1, ssk, yo, k7, yo, k1, p2. Repeat from * 5 times. yo, ssk, p1, p2tog.

So, just from those three lines above, if you were to draw a chart, you would see that Row 5 begins its pattern repeat after the seventh stitch; Row 7 begins after the second. That makes sense when you are reading each line without regard to the “big” picture, but if you were charting it, you would draw a red box around the section to be repeated, with the different bits (in this case, the mitring edges) on either side. In the case where the WS is all purled, it would even make sense to start your box at the very beginning of your motif that repeats. But the wrong side of this fabric is not mindlessly purled. It is written out, too. Here’s the row I glossed over:

Row 6: k3, p2, k2, *p9, k1, (p1, k1) twice, p9, k2, p2, k2. Repeat from * 5 times, k1.

Remember, when charting that, you’re reading from left to right now, and of course all the purls and knits will be reversed so that the chart presents the RS only. Since the pattern is symmetrical, it makes sense to me to draw the red box around it so that when you read the chart from either direction, you’ll get the same number of stitches to the centre of the motif. So, for that line of instructions above, Row 6, I would have rewritten it thus: k3, p1, *p1, k2, p9, k1, (p1, k1) twice, p9, k2, p1. Repeat from * 5 times, p1, k3. (I actually had to draw it out on graph paper to see where I needed to put those asterisks.) That way you have a perfectly symmetrical motif.

Mary-Anne’s pattern was perfectly symmetrical. There was lace on both right and wrong sides of the fabric, which meant that, once you figured out which way to do the purling equivalents of k2togs and ssks on the WS, if you put your stitch markers smack dab in the middle of the no-man’s land between motifs, you had the same number of stitches to count on either side. That is exactly what I did. But that isn’t what Mary-Anne did. She had drawn  her box so that it began with the beginning of the motif on the RS. Under normal circumstances, this wouldn’t be an issue for me. But there was lace making going on on the WS of the fabric, which meant that when I read the chart from left to right, it was not the same as the right side number-of-stitches-wise. This was confusing because just looking at the chart, the symmetry was so evident! So I ignored her red box and did my own thing. But remember, this was a test knit. I was supposed to be doing what the designer instructed to see if it worked. In my opinion, it did not work. My method worked better. But she wanted to use her method because she was following this particular guide.

So in the end, I suppose we agreed to disagree. When I see a symmetrical chart, I will automatically start counting my repeat from the equal division between the two motifs, especially if the pattern is charted on both right and wrong sides. So there.

Dreaming about dreaming in technicolour, or, Not this again!

About a month ago we hosted a reunion at our house of my husband’s undergrad roommates. This is a bunch of guys who lived together in one house for several years while they were students at what was then called the University of Western Ontario and has (for no reason I can fathom) been renamed Western University. Their first impromptu reunion occurred at our 25th wedding anniversary shindig seven years ago. They had such a good time that they decided to do it every year. It hasn’t actually been an annual thing, but close enough to be called regular. Sometimes it has involved everyone’s families; other times, just the guys themselves.

There is one exception to this: the oldest member of the group has remarried and his wife accompanies him to these gatherings. She was there last year when they congregated at Cape Cod (I was in Paris being a cultural tourist) and the year before in New York. I have managed to avoid them for the most part. I do not drink and that is what they mostly do when they get together, plus play guitar and generally whoop it up like a bunch of college students. Boys will be boys. The wife, however, is a gentler soul. She drinks, yes, but she doesn’t whoop. This summer she was recovering from knee (or was it hip?) surgery, so was also rather sedentary, although we did get her to come on a tour of a local abandoned copper mine cum museum and she was a very good sport about all the stairs and only had one breakdown when her claustrophobia got the best of her.

While the boys were playing guitar and drinking, she was doing needlepoint. This is not a craft I have ever taken an interest in; I embroidered my jean jacket when I was a teen as was then the fashion, and I think some pillow cases when I was first learning the art, but I feel that it is a purely decorative craft and I am much better in the construction of things, not their embellishment (although I do like knitting with beads, which is fodder for a future post). Jen was working on cushion covers for the planned reupholstery of their dining room chairs. She had completed one, which she had brought with her, and was in the process of finishing another. She is very slow and meticulous, working only when she has a spare moment, and produces about one a year.

Her canvases were preprinted with intricate abstract designs in many colours and were quite beautiful. No two were alike. She told me they were designs by Kaffe Fassett, a name I had come across when I was reading Adrienne Martini’s book, but hadn’t bothered investigating further. Jen and I looked him up on the internet and pored over all the photographs of his work and I was suitably impressed and amazed. His designs are intricate, colourful and captivating. For example, this one:

Here’s one that is a little more “traditional” looking:

But he doesn’t just design needlepoint cushion covers. His work can be found in rugs, fabric, mosaics and, of course, knitting. I had to look at the knitting patterns. Look at this, from his Peruvian collection:

and this:

I can only imagine that it was these images (and more) which induced that dream I had about knitting Fair Isle.

I recently pulled out a pattern book I bought in the 1980’s (pub. 1983) which I had purchased with an eye to making some of the garments within. Some of them are rather dated now, but others have held up well over time. The one on the cover indicates the era which spawned it.

A quick Ravelry search reveals that several knitters have actually made this garment. Here’s one I particularly like:

There aren’t a lot of patterns from The Sweater Book which have found their way into the Ravelry database, unfortunately, and I am beginning to think it is time to remedy that omission. Here are a few that particularly caught my eye with their timeless quality, especially the last one with its catchy name.

Glitter Bands

Night & Day

Fair Isle

Red Neck

Perhaps there is some double-stranded knitting in my future after all. But don’t bet on it. At least, not for a while.

Dreaming in techni-colour

It finally happened. During an afternoon nap not long ago I dreamt about knitting. It wasn’t just any knitting, and it wasn’t any project I’ve recently completed or on which I’m now working. No, I dreamt that I was doing stranded colour work, knitting a fair isle sweater with a complicated design à la Alice Starmore. I have no idea why as I really have no desire to make anything like that; unless, of course, my subconscious is trying to tell me something. I also dreamed recently that I had grown a full moustache and tuft of beard on my chin which, when combed and oiled, formed a beautiful van dyke and the kind of moustache that curls at the ends. This I can perhaps attribute to my lifelong desire to have facial hair that I could twirl à la Snidely Whiplash. But stranded colour work? I am not ready yet to remount that horse.

Yesterday afternoon I performed with my early music ensemble in a stone church built sometime in the early 1800’s. It was hot outside and in order to prevent traffic noises from disturbing our concert or the ceiling fans from playing with the acoustics, we played to a small, but appreciative, audience in sauna-like conditions. Apart from the crumhorns refusing to tune and play together nicely, it was actually a very good recital. But because of the heat, when I was not playing or singing, i.e. during solos performed by others of the group, my eyes closed and I sank into a bit of a torpor. I dreamt about knitting.

Lace

I love knitting lace. I’m not quite sure why. I mean, why should knitting lace fascinate me and keep me interested more than colour work, or cables? I have knit my share of Icelandic and Balkan sweaters in the past and they hold no interest for me now. But lace? Always.

My first foray into the world of lace knitting was a baby blanket I started in early 1985 pending the birth of a nephew who arrived in May. The blanket was not ready. Then it was earmarked for a niece who made her appearance at the end of November. It was still incomplete. In fact, I finished it about a month before my own daughter was born, a whole year after the first intended recipient’s birth. The good part was that I got to keep it.

I made it out of a cheap, baby-green acrylic yarn, the pattern from Beehive Book No. 405, a long out-of-print collection of shawls, both knitted and crocheted. Before I started knitting, I crocheted a shawl from the book which is quite lovely. It consists of a long line of scallops, joined successively by other scallops until it diminishes in size, forming a triangle. On a very long bus ride (Toronto to Sudbury ~5 hours) I parked myself next to an elderly woman (they make the best travelling companions) and crocheted the entire trip. At some point I realized that my “triangle” was getting wider, not narrower, and started to panic. My seat mate thought it was “just lovely” and was no help at all. It turned out I had not been joining the scallops of the previous row as I crocheted new scallops into them, and thus ended up ripping out a whole ball’s worth of yarn. However, I am digressing, as you no doubt have come to expect by now.

Here is my first lace baby blanket:

It’s still quite pretty, especially from a distance. However, the yarn, which used to be baby soft, has gotten kind of stiff and scratchy since 1985. Maybe a turn in the washer and dryer would soften it up again. Since it was my first lace project, it is not error free. At that time, I didn’t know how to correct my mistakes, so I just left them. Like this one:

and this one:

The edging was knitted separately and sewn on. I cannot imagine doing that now, but I do remember doing it then.

I did not knit lace again for many years. In fact, I believe my next lace project didn’t happen until 2009, when I was in Lettuce Knit in Toronto and picked up a skein of Lorna Laces Pearl, a silk-bamboo blend in DK weight in the most gorgeous pink-purple combination of colours. I couldn’t put it down. At all. In fact, I ended up paying $49.00 CAD for it, which is utterly preposterous. I wouldn’t pay that much for a skein of yarn again unless it was threaded with gold. Real gold.

What do you do with yarn that expensive? I couldn’t imagine making something for everyday wear, or that would need to be laundered repeatedly. It was just too precious. My daughter found a simple lace pattern for me on Ravelry which served to show off the sheen of the fibres in a decorative scarf which I wear as an accessory and not to keep warm.

It is lying, by the way, on a lacy bedspread my mother made for me as a wedding gift from worsted weight acrylic. Knitting runs in the family.

I had not yet caught the lace-knitting bug, though. That didn’t happen until the fall of that year when I needed a project for a ball of yarn I had bought in a shop in Picton, Ontario when my husband was composer-in-residence at their annual music festival. (It was also in this shop that I became acquainted with qiviut for the first time.) I fell in love with a ball of 100% merino (Jitterbug by Colinette), determined I would make socks from it. The helpful storekeeper advised me to get some reinforcing yarn for the heels and soles, which I did (Baby Kid Extra by Filatura Di Crosa, a blend of mohair and nylon).

I never did make socks with either yarn. The Jitterbug was too pretty for socks, and the Extra was too nice to hide away as a reinforcer for heels and soles. I embarked on my first Nightsongs shawl by Jane Araújo. It was torture. Sheer torture. At the time I made it, my mother was going through her extended decline into dementia and finally dying. It took a while. The stresses of my personal and professional lives combined with my mother’s illness to make me a total wreck. I remember sitting in front of the wood stove, the only warm place in the living room, staring at my knitting, wondering where I had gone wrong. According to my notes on Ravelry, it only took two weeks to make the scarf, but it felt like an eternity. The pattern required all of my concentration, which was a good thing as it kept me from thinking about what was really on my mind. Eventually I saw how the picture developed, the directions the k2togs took vs the ssks. Whereas I hadn’t really got it before, I did then.

As for the mohair-nylon blend? It became the scarf version of Anisette by Kristeen Griffin-Grimes from Canadian Living online. I later made the full-sized shawl from Shibui Knits Cloud Silk, but I needed to practise first.

Since then, of course, I have knit a lot of lace. I’ve also knit cables and other things with no adornment whatsoever. But it is the lace that keeps me interested in a piece. Always.

The City and the Stars

The title for this post comes from an Isaac Asimov story which has absolutely nothing to do with the subject under discussion, but could be the name of my most recent FO. Oh, wait, that’s exactly what I named it. Heather Anderson asked me if I would test knit her most recent shawl and I gladly responded in the affirmative. I had already knitted two of her shawls in KALs (knit alongs) and I found her instructions to be clear and straightforward. I also think she’s a talented designer, so I said, “Sure.”

The first shawl of Heather’s I made is semi-circular, with increase rows every now and again. I haven’t figured out the math, but instead of the shawl getting steadily bigger, as do triangular and crescent patterns, It merely is given the opportunity to stretch. That sounds weird. I’m not describing it very well. You start out with a garter tab and 12 stitches on your needle. After several rows, you quadruple the number of stitches on your needle, either by yarn overs, knitting front-back, or something else. Continuing on, knit the pattern, then double the number of stitches again. This increase happens one more time, and then you knit until you’re done. Bind off. Wet block. Wear.

Here is the first such shawl I made in this fashion:

It’s a pretty clever trick. That particular garment was knit in Classic Elite Yarns Silky Alpaca Lace on 4 mm. needles. The pattern called for fingering, but I’m really happy with the way it turned out. It’s even warm. However, this entry is not about that shawl.

The test knit I volunteered for is also a semi-circular shawl. Because it was a test, I used the weight of yarn and size of needles specified, but the rest was up to me. Heather’s name for it is City at Night. It’s whimsical, and she chose two shades of blue: dark and darker. I chose Knitpicks Stroll Glimmer in Kestrel and Black. The composition of the yarn is 70% Merino, 25% Nylon, 5% Metallic, the latter what the company calls “stellina”. It sparkles. The main body of the shawl has lace “stars” and the border has a ribbed representation of skyscrapers. In a fit of whimsy, I added a red shiny bead at the tip of each building to warn off low-flying planes. 

Here’s a closeup of the warning lights:

A friend’s response to my description of the buildings being in bas relief was, “If it is knitted out of lambswool, then they are in baa relief.” I wish I’d thought of that!

Finally, the finished garment warming me:

And that’s all I have to say about this one.