Harvest reapings

It’s officially fall and I have not posted new FOs for quite some time. I’m still awaiting a thank you note for the tablecloth featured in the last entry, but I am made to understand that brides these days aren’t as quick about sending out acknowledgements as we were in my day. Well, it’s only been a month. Patience, Eleanor, patience!

I have since then, however, finished more lovely knitted things, namely shawls: lace shawls ... and a lace shrug. Let’s look at that one first, shall we?

I have a friend who is older than I by about six years, which makes her nearing retirement age rather quickly; however, she has a super young attitude, a petite figure, funky dyed hair and a hip fashion sense. We are about the same size (I’m also quite petite) but, where I choose to wear jeans and T-shirts, she wears mini-skirts and form-fitting lacy tops. There is one area which she doesn’t generally expose, however: her upper arms. She feels that they look like old lady arms. I have seen her bare arms and I disagree (but then, perhaps I, too, have old lady arms and am in denial) and likes to wear something with sleeves on top of her summer dresses to hide them. I got the great idea to make her a shrug that she could wear in the hot weather, so I did my research and came up with Matrimonio Bolero, a free pattern easily found on the interwebs. Since I had so much of the natural crochet cotton left from the tablecloth, I used that, and went down a needle size. I also knit the sleeves in the round so I saved myself a couple of seams. The pattern calls for a crocheted edging and I do not crochet easily or happily. I’m afraid my attempt doesn’t look anything like the pattern page photo, but my friend won’t know the difference and it does what it’s meant to: give the edge a nice finished look.

Next (but finished earlier as I wore it to my niece’s wedding) is a test knit for my favourite New Zealand designer, Mary-Anne Mace. She combined cables and lace to tell a tale of corporate takeover, or the cables devouring the lace, and called the result The Lace Eater. At the last Toronto Knitters’ Frolic I had bought two skeins of Lino, a 65% silk-35% linen lace and they were just begging to be knit into her design. So I held them double to approximate fingering weight and it worked out quite well. Here she be:

This shawl is super comfortable in warm weather and I have been wearing it a lot.

Mary-Anne asked us (her fawning fans) how she could promote her shawl. We suggested she hold a KAL, which is underway as I type. I decided I had to make another and had the perfect yarn in my stash: Qiviut Queen Superwash Merino by Cottage Craft Angora (70% merino-10% qiviut-10% silk-10% cashmere). It was utterly divine to knit with and I even prolonged the process by experimenting with the pattern and then ripping out my experiments and going back to the charts. I do believe Mary-Anne has made a perfect shawl here. It doesn’t require any beads or alternate decorations to be better.

I went down a needle size and I’m very glad I did, as it stretched quite a bit in the blocking. This is going to be my “Rhinebeck sweater”.

I also completed one other shawl, another test knit, Mûrier Noir by Carol Sherman. I was digging through my stash for something else when I came across a skein of 100% suri alpaca I had bought quite some time ago from a local woman who used to raise the animals. This wasn’t from her stock, but I couldn’t resist it. It has a buttery feel to it and is exceedingly fine. The end product is very light but warm and squishy. The pattern itself consisted of nine repeats of a boring lace design (boring ≠ unattractive, let it be noted) with a central panel, edged by an open-work leaf pattern. The hard part was making sure not to drop any stitches in the edging. I had to rip back to the end of the main body and put in a lifeline (if you knit this, make sure to put in a lifeline), which I ended up needing at least once more before it was done. There are YOs and slanted decreases on both RS and WS, and if you should happen to let one of those decreases fall off the needle, all the ones underneath it will unravel and you will be left with a horrible mess. But the finished product is absolutely lovely.

I have a friend whose son is getting married next year and I am sending this to her to wear on that occasion.

On the needles are a couple more shawls, one a test knit and one from my friend Joanna’s August subscription box. I suspect I won’t be able to resist casting something else on very, very soon.

A tablecloth fit for a Crown Prince

My niece is getting married in a mere ten days and her wedding present is finally completed. It only took four months to make a FO that really only required a month of actual knitting, but as you will see, the knitting was the least of it.

Ever since I bought Nancy Bush’s Knitted Lace of Estonia, I have been fascinated by the Crown Prince Square Shawl pattern. So many nupps! As I mentioned in a prior post, nupps haven’t always been an easy part of my knitting technique repertoire. I’ve knit an awful lot of them, though, even before I attempted this particular pièce de résistance. But I needed a reason to make this shawl, and one serendipitously presented itself. I knit an afghan for one niece because I liked the pattern and thought that I should do the same thing again. I determined to make this bride a tablecloth from the Crown Prince Square Shawl pattern.

Certain modifications were of course necessary. It had to be a close fabric without much give, so I chose KnitPicks Curio crochet cotton in natural, and went down from the specified 3.5mm to 3mm needles. There was a pretty steep learning curve as I went along.

The pattern itself is not really difficult. My mother used to say that if you could read and follow directions, you could do anything. Luckily, I am one of those people. Knitting nupps with cotton yarn was not as difficult as others had led me to believe, lacking stretch as it does. Instead, the smaller needles made it much easier. Here’s an example:

The nupps make the outline of the Crown Prince motif, which is a six-pointed star/snowflake. Here’s the bottom bit held down by chessmen:

I began this adventure on the penultimate day of March and had it finished by the end of April. There was a stretch in there when my husband and I went to Florida to bring his parents home from their half-yearly sojourn in the sunshine state. I flew home with his mother and had a lot of time to knit while we waited for her husband and son to arrive with the car. Here’s the bound-off body:

It wasn’t finished yet, though. The pattern included a chart for an edging to be sewn on after. Two were to be knit separately, then attached in a very complicated way so that the corners lay flat. I threw up my hands in exasperation and declared I would make mitred corners, like any good carpenter.

Thus ensued much doing of math to figure out the appropriate number of stitches to cast on. I got one strip finished before realizing that it was enormous. A bit of recalculation got me a better size. The knitting of the strips didn’t really take that long. I could knock one off in a day if I dedicated myself to it. But I was ambivalent about sewing them onto the body of the tablecloth. They stayed in my knitting bag for over a month before I finally steam blocked them to uncurl the upper edges and then pinned them all around. In order to make it less tedious, I brought it to knitting group and stitched while my friends knitted. Even that took two sessions because I couldn’t bring myself to work on it when I got home.

It is finally finished. I washed and blocked it, liberally dosing it with spray starch. The result is magnificent. See for yourself.

I sincerely hope my niece and her husband-to-be like it. It was an enormous amount of work and I may never make another.

A shameless plug for a friend’s new business: totally knitting related.

Hi there. I am shamelessly going to plug my friend’s new business venture in this post. Please don’t hang up; and don’t worry, this call is not being monitored for quality control.

My daughter has a friend who has become my friend, a professional graphic artist whose real love is the fibre arts. Her name is Joanna and she is happily married to another nerdy artist and they have between them a toddler who is, for the most part, cheerful and affectionate. Joanna started out sewing mostly, and her first website reflects that: The Happy Seamstress. She has since branched out to her other love, yarn, and everything that yarn entails: spinning, dyeing, knitting and designing knitted things. I, personally, have made at least a half-dozen of her knitted beards. They make great gifts.

The above was made for an acquaintance who took part in a Santa Shuffle to raise money. It was my contribution in lieu of a monetary donation.

Joanna has recently started a subscription box service. The deal is you give her your credit card number and every month, or other month—your choice—she sends you a box filled with goodies. I have signed up for the every-other-month service myself because I’m not usually at a loss for projects, but this would be perfect for the knitter who doesn’t know what to make next. She has been in touch with a number of yarn companies to try to get discounts on their products so that her boxes will be reasonably priced. She’s also finagled the best price she can on shipping, which was not easy.

August’s box, the introductory one, is discounted and the shipping is free. It contains this lovely beaded shawl pattern, plus all the yarn and beads you need to make it (and a bonus surprise or two).

I know that it’s beautiful because that’s my arm underneath that lovely drapey fabric. The yarn is Sweet Georgia Merino-Silk lace. The colour above is one of the possibilities, but there are also skeins in purple and a yellow-green. You don’t get a choice, as distribution is random, but I’m sure they’re all lovely. I can’t wait to get my box so I can start knitting that shawl.

If you are interested, and I hope you are, you can get all the information you need at Yarn Crush. Please support my friend. She’s worth it!

A tale of three shawls

I have completed three shawl test knits already this summer, which is pretty crazy, even for me. The first is Mad Blood by Mary-Anne Mace. I adore Mary-Anne’s lace shawls. This one is no exception. My version took one skein of Sweet Paprika Messa di Voce in Georgian Bay, a 3-ply yarn of 100% merino wool. I am exceedingly pleased with the results.

The second shawl is Heather Anderson’s The Turtles’ Journey, a crescent shawl that tells a tale. Hers calls for a 4-ply sock yarn and I was all set to dive into my stash but couldn’t find a colour suitable to baby turtles making their way across the sand to the sea. So I went to my local yarn store and bought a couple of skeins of Julie Asselin Piccolo, 80% merino, 20% nylon, in Ooak, a colourway that doesn’t seem to have any consistency. Mine was variations on brown. It reminded me of how a beach looks after a rain. Also, I messed up one turtle’s shell and didn’t want to rip back to just reverse a couple of knits and purls; so I decided to give it red beads for eyes to show that it was different (and possible evil). While looking for my red beads, I came across the leftover coppery ones I’d used in my Serendipity and realized they were the perfect colour for the other turtles’ eyes! The result:

Heather is hosting a KAL in September as part of her group on Ravelry for this shawl and I have received over 600 views because she linked to my page for people who are interested in adding in the beads for eyes.

The third test-knitted shawl was a “gift” from my friend Bonnie who had just finished a test for a designer and pointed out that she had another to be tested right away. I loved the shawl Bonnie had worked on and had asked for an earburn when it was ready, so I jumped at the chance to try out the new one. The designer, Yellow Mleczyk, wanted a very open knit with big holes which she created with a series of double yarn overs. Her result is the Double Bubble Shawl.

I found this to be a very challenging knit. English is not the designer’s first language, so there was a bit of a hurdle getting past her quaint terminology. There were errors in both the written out directions and the charts, which we caught as we went along. After all, that’s what test knitting is all about. She has allowance for a stockinette section before the lace begins, but I just jumped right into the lace to knit it as she had done, with five iterations of the first chart before beginning the next. I used a single, 100 gm. ball of Saki Bamboo by Wisdom Yarns with about three grams left over.

The first chart, eight RS rows of lace (WS rows are all purled), does not look difficult. However, the rows are all very similar and it is easy to think you’ve knitted the second one when you haven’t. That’s what happened to me in the first iteration. I left out a row. I did not realize this until I got to the second chart (with over 250 stitches on the needles already) and my stitch count was wrong. You see, it’s a crescent shawl that increases by six stitches every two rows. By missing out that one pattern row, I was short six stitches and the pattern in the second chart was in multiples of 12. Not good at all, and nothing I could just fudge by adding stitches. So I ripped back to almost the set-up row and started again. This time I kept track of every single row, with stitch counts, and it all worked out perfectly. But this error of mine showed up a serious problem in the draft pattern: for the stockinette section, the designer had said that one could start the first pattern chart on any RS row. If there were not a multiple of 12 stitches between the edge stitches, then the knitter would run into the same issue I had when she reached Chart B. So I alerted the designer to this and she was thoroughly mortified. Hopefully it will be corrected when the pattern hits the stands. Here’s my Double Bubble, Toil and Trouble:

2015 Toronto Knitters’ Frolic

Score!

Clockwise from left:

Sweet Paprika: Messa di Voce - “Georgian Bay” (100% superwash merino)
Hand Maiden: Lino - “Morning Mist” (65% silk, 35% linen)
Fleece Artist: BFL 2/8 - “Blue Lagoon” (100% blue face leicester)
Raventwist: Neith - “Dragon Gold” (70% baby alpaca, 30% silk)
Sweet Georgia: Toughlove Sock - “Berry Tart” (80% superwash merino, 20% nylon)

A new technique: Mosaic knitting

Recently I volunteered to test knit a pair of fingerless mitts for Greenethumb on Ravelry, her Frozen Mitts, which she designed and knitted for the same stash-busting knit-along for which I designed and knitted Kristina’s Pink Piano Mitts. They involve a colour-knitting technique called  “mosaic” or slip-stitch knitting. There’s a very good article in Knitty magazine which I read before I began. The technique involves alternating two rows of each colour and slipping the stitches of the previous contrasting-colour row. In the third row, those slipped stitches are knitted and previous-colour stitches are slipped. It’s much better explained in the article than what I’m doing here.

It turns out I had done slip-stitch knitting before with Ashley Rao’s Biarritz Cloche to create the houndstooth look of the body; so I was not a total stranger to the technique.

Ms. Greene’s instructions are excellent. She includes two charts in the pattern, one with just one line for the repeated pattern rounds, and one with both, using carets to distinguish the slipped stitches from the knitted ones. I followed both charts (one for each mitt) and found them to be very clear. I had only one issue with her instructions which caused me some grief.

The pattern calls for fingering yarn. I used Phildar Preface in cream for the main body and Spud & Chloë Fine in purple for the contrasting design. For the test, the specified needle size was 2.75 mm throughout, gauge 9 st/inch. The designer did suggest that tight knitters might use a larger needle size for the mosaic pattern, since it is by nature tighter than regular knitting.

I did not test for gauge. Mea culpa. I am also, apparently, a rather relaxed knitter. The small size, which I tested, called for 56 stitches to be cast on. I should have smelled something fishy right then and there, since I generally knit fingerless mitts for myself with 2.5 mm needles on 48 stitches. I think you can see where this is going.

I finished the first mitt and thought it looked pretty, but it fit terribly. The wrist was nice and snug, but the hand pouched and was enormous! As you can see from the photo below, the knitting tightened up again at the band of mosaic before the ribbing, but the ribbing becomes too loose afterward.

Not to be undone by this failure, I cast on for the second mitt with the 2.75 mm needle and proceeded as per the first one to the last row of the charted main colour. For the solid purple band, I switched to a 2.25 mm circular and proceeded to follow the directions for the thumb gusset and hand, switching back to the 2.75 mm needle after the first solid purple rows of the next mosaic pattern, and back to 2.25 mm for the closing purple rows. This produced a much tighter tension for the plain knitting which resulted in a nice snug fit for the hand.

I was so pleased with the new mitt that I unravelled the old one to the top of the wrist and reknit it as per the one I had just finished. Voila!

The designer and I have been in correspondence and I have strongly suggested that she specify changing needles for this problem to not be a problem.

I now have only one complaint about the pattern, and that is that the thumb gussets are knitted at the sides, meaning that the pattern is not centred when worn. I have a lot of the purple and a little of the cream left over. I may knit them again in the inverse, but this time make right and left mitts by moving the thumbs toward the palms.

Pink Sundae Camisole Compleat

I finished it a while ago and took it with me on holiday to the Dominican Republic. I even wore it a couple of evenings but, sadly, no one commented on what a beautiful garment it was. This is not unusual. I see women wearing gorgeous clothes all the time and say nothing. But a knitter would have noticed. Believe me.

I did not knit the lace upper border separately and then attach it via 3-needle bindoff as specified in the pattern. Instead, I did an applied edging as I absolutely hate picking up stitches and avoid it whenever I can. It worked out fine. I also did not make i-cords for the straps. I wanted something a little more substantial, so made something up that was decorative as well as sturdy. Buttons are mother of pearl gifted by a friend. What do you think?