gigantism

A co-worker gave me some yarn a few months ago. She's a loom knitter, but she hasn't had time for it lately, and was trying to clear some space at home.

Being given yarn can be a good challenge, especially if the giver works outside your usual zone. I received two skeins of chunky chenille, and four skeins (in two different colours) of chunky bouclé.

The bouclé was enough to make its own project from, but the chenille was difficult. Unlike the bouclé, the yardage wasn't that great, and all the patterns for it seemed to be blankets. Several people recommended making hats out of it, but in general kids don't like wearing bulky hats, and the colour strongly indicated making something for kids. 

Then I remembered this washcloth pattern. It's unusual in that it specifically calls for chenille. Even though the yarn was a lot thicker than what's called for, I used the recommended needle size and wound up with a dense, soft fabric. The finished cloths are about 25% bigger than the pattern predicts, but the central non-petaled part is about the right size for a washcloth, so meh.

Chenille can be weird to work with, and of course famously "worms" at looser gauges. These cloths should hold up nicely. 

I got some fruit-scented soaps to wrap the cloths around, and have designated them stocking stuffers for the nieces at Yule. Stash-busting and  gifts sorted out! Works for me.

practical whimsy

I suppose it's in reaction to the giant blanket I just finished (which, er, I haven't done a final blog instalment on), but I've been churning out all sorts of quick items, using up stash.

I found this blog post about pan protectors on Pinterest, and it just seemed like such a good idea. Not only will it keep the pans from scratching each other — although you can see it's too late for the sample pan in the top photo — but they won't clatter so much when I put them away.

The pattern is from Vivian Høxbro's Domino Knitting book. She starts the book by giving directions for a series of potholders, each focusing on a different domino knitting technique. I've always been fond of this octagonal one, but this is the first time I've made it. The yarn is just standard dishcloth cotton worked on 4mm needles. The pattern called for smaller needles and DK cotton, but worsted is what I had in stash, so that's what got used. Turns out I knit more tightly than the book's sample knitters, so my pot holder is the same size as what's prescribed in the book despite the thicker yarn and bigger needles.

I can see making more. All of the ends are woven in as one knits, and there are no seams. The only thing I don't like about this one is that I wasn't very picky about the size of the circular needles used for the edging, and I should have gone up a size instead of down:

I'm doing a bit of an apartment upgrade at the moment, but very much on the cheap. For instance, I finally found a set of glass mixing bowls to replace the icky scratched-up black ones that were given to me. I wear a lot of black, but I do not like it in my cookware! (All right, except for appliances, but there's not much choice there.) They're a clear set of nesting bowls, so I think they'll be getting protectors as well.

This could be a really fun way to use up stash.

fiddle faddle

Elizabeth Zimmermann had a way of giving the exact right name to categories of things, so much so that in the knitting world, a lot of the personal jargon she used in her books have become the standard terms. A favourite of mine is the "fiddle faddle" she dedicated a chapter to in Knitter's Almanac. In the book, Zimmermann provides patterns for little nets, used for holding oranges so they can adorn Christmas trees. There's also little knitted stars and other small, decorative items.

Zimmermann being Zimmermann, she also lists off some items which are fiddle faddle, but which, if anything, are less useful than Christmas ornaments. I remember this was the first time I'd heard of doorknob cozies which, sadly, seem to be becoming more popular again.

Coffee cup cuffs are a more recent invention for this category, and have a major advantage over doorknob cozies in that they are actually useful, protecting the user's fingers from discomfort and helping reduce waste by removing the need for cardboard equivalents.

I used a free pattern for a dress-up crown, and just reduced the number of pattern repeats until it fit around a standard take-away cup (20cm). The designer did a thorough job of writing out the pattern, but it hurt my brain, and I'm not sure the decreases are written out correctly, so I did some experimenting and came up with my own version... which looks exactly the same as her finished-item photos. I'm not sure I actually changed anything or not.

The leaf pattern is something I copied from a photo a while ago when I made a lot of cuffs at once. If you know how a basic aspen leaf motif works in knitting, it's not hard to reproduce. This cuff makes for a lot of ends to darn in (two per leaf), but it's not difficult to work and I like the finished effect.

The friend I gave the crown cuff to gave me a leaf charm she'd bought. She had several, and had intended to make a bracelet with them until she saw how big they were. I thought it looked like the dangle part of a bookmark, so I dug up some tatted and crocheted thread bookmarks on Pinterest and decided to try this graduated pineapple one (Ravelry, free pattern):

Mine is purple just because that's the first reel of crochet thread I came across that wasn't white. I figured white would just get grubby. The bookmark took the second half of Ant-Man and disc 2 of Archer season 3 to finish. It's a very straightforward pattern — once you see where the geometry is going, you hardly need to follow the pattern at all. It's also the first time I've done the very traditional pineapple pattern, so hooray for personal firsts!

Given how much stash yarn (er, and crochet thread) I have left over, I can see a lot more fiddle faddle in my future. Hey, so long as it's the useful, non-cringey kind.

superhero accessories

I finished the nieces' superhero knits a while ago, but I didn't get around to making the things that go with them until it was almost time to give them as presents. Niece the Younger very specifically asked for a cape to go with her Superman sweater ("so I can fly"). Niece the Elder didn't say she wanted a tiara like Wonder Woman, but she did want the Wonder Woman sweater, and if Niece the Younger was getting a cape accessory, I needed to balance things make something to go with the Wonder Woman theme. At least a tiara is canonically correct.

The cape is sewn, not knitted (it's lighter and less likely to stretch out that way), and I am terrified of sewing, so I did the tiara first:

There are lots of free crown patterns on the web, both in knit and crochet. I took this one and reduced the number of points to one, then embroidered the red star on. The yarn is leftovers from the Wonder Woman sweater itself, with the gold yarn worked double so it's stiff enough to hold its shape when worn.

The tiara only took part of one evening to make, which left me with absolutely no excuse to not start on the cape. I decided to just take it step by step: iron and cut the fabric one day, pin the next, sew the next, finish the day after that.

Olga from work is much better at sewing than I am, and kindly sketched out the shape I needed to cut on a spare piece of paper. I followed her sketch and what she'd given as instructions, measuring against the length of the finished sweater and its neck width to get the inner and outer curve measurements. I surprised myself by cutting straight the first time (I had more fabric ready if I messed up). The next morning, I pinned bias tape along the edges like my chiropractor had explained.

The sewing went better than I thought. I even remembered what my mum had taught me about stitch length. I did wind up having to redo the neck part, but that was okay, because as I was ripping off the original length of bias tape for the neck, I remembered that I should stay stitch the raw edge around the neck curve before applying the bias tape.

And yes, I needed advice from three experienced sewists to finish this thing, and I still felt anxious about it.

The last step was to sew buttons onto the tabs extending from the neckline, and create corresponding button loops on the wrong side of the sweater so Niece the Younger could attach and detach the cape as she liked.

The sweaters seem to have been well received, in that I've seen both nieces wear them more than once. The day after Yule, Niece the Younger put the Superman sweater on over her pajamas when she woke up in the morning:

Niece the Elder wore her Wonder Woman sweater to school the first day back after New Year's.

Usually I just let people put their own feedback in the comments, but this time I'm going to let Niece the Elder have the last word, and quote the comment she put on Facebook when she used my mum's iPad to look at the photo at the top of this post:

It. Is awesomely. GOOD!

So there.

double-knit coffee cup cuff

Yule gift-giving works like this in my family: everyone gets all of the kids something, but the adults draw names at Thanksgiving (which is in October, because we're in Canada), and then get the person whose name they drew presents. We have a dollar amount limit, but it gets broken regularly for "stocking stuffer" things. Basically, you spend the dollar limit getting what the person asks for, and then... top up a little if you find something you know they'll think is cool.

This year I drew my brother Steve's name, which was great because I'm always seeing stuff I know he'll like, but I never seem to get his name. He likes the band The Descendents, and passed me along a link to their 2014 Christmas sweater last year. We joked about making a handmade version that was less Christmas-y, and then the idea just sort of dropped.

I forgot all about it until I was packing up the other stocking stuffer things I'd got him. There wasn't enough time to make a whole sweater, but I figured I could dig out some sock yarn from the stash and make a coffee cup cuff.

I copied the motifs from the Descendents Holiday Mug. If you zoom in and squint a lot, the stitches actually work out — for once it seems that a fake knit design was created by someone who at least understands how knitting works. Steve likes knitted fabric with small stitches, so I automatically reached for my 2mm needles and worked out everything else from there.

Sock yarn on 2mm needles works out to a dense but thin fabric, and I wanted something reversible — because who wants to fuss with right and wrong sides when you just want to insulate a coffee mug? — so I went with double knitting. Double knitting carries a risk in that the method creates very wide, short stitches, so any motifs you knit in also come out wider and shorter than they would appear mapped out on, say, graph paper or cross stitch.

At first I just did a sample square of Milo to find out my gauge and to see how bad the distortion was. The square turned out with Milo looking like Milo, but it was enough work that I decided to just finish it off properly and make it part of the gift.

After that, it was a matter of doing some math, checking various free coffee cuff patterns for measurements, and knitting the cuff itself. I sewed the button onto the edge of the cuff so it could be closed with either side facing out, and made the button loop long enough to accommodate different cup sizes — if Steve wants to put it around a narrower cup, like a take-away paper one, he can just wrap the loop around the button a few times until it fits snugly.

The sample square was too small to work well as a coaster, so I looped a fabric-covered hair elastic onto it and made it a tree ornament.

Coffee cup cuffs are usually considered quick gifts, but this one took around eight hours. It was fun working through the planning and execution, though, so I think it was worth it.

surprise purple projects

My sister-in-law asked if I could knit the nieces some cowls. The brief was: make two the same so she wouldn't have to worry about which one went onto which girl, make them purple to match their winter coats, and make them snug-ish — the whole point was to replace dangly scarves and avoid a scarf's tendency to get caught on things, require tying/arranging to wear, or slip off and get lost.

I did some Googling around, and found this free pattern which comes in both children's and women's sizes. 9mm needles, bulky yarn, 18 stitches, and 72 rows. Graft the ends together and you're done. Both the cowls took about four episodes of Welcome to Night Vale plus a couple episodes of The Musketeers.

I got two skeins of yarn (acrylic — the nieces aren't ready for wool yet) for the cowls, and they took up just over half a skein of yarn each. That left me with stash, and I really want not to accumulate any more stash. I need slippers, and I had already found this free pattern for slippers that look like Ugg boots. Although sometimes I feel like the only woman in the Western world who doesn't like Uggs, I figured they would make good slippers.

I went back to the yarn shop and picked up two more skeins of yarn. There was enough left over from the cowls to make four sole pieces (I wanted a double sole), and the two new skeins of yarn made the uppers. I was done the slippers in time to wear them for the dinner party I had that night.

There were absolutely no mods to the cowl pattern, and the only thing I changed for the slippers (besides adding an extra sole layer) was that I used foundation single crochet to start each piece, used a standing stitch to start the leg parts of the uppers, and spiralled my way up the leg instead of formally slip-stitching and chain-one-ing at the end of each round. Instead, I just slip-stitched at the top of the boot leg and finished off.

Oh, and I slip-stitched the upper and sole layers together instead of using single crochet (!) like the pattern called for.

After all that, I have virtually no stash — just some odds and ends I'll use for provisional cast on sections on a project I already have in-flight. I'll have to blog about that one shortly.

Meanwhile, this is how the boot slipper soles look after just being worn for a few hours:

Now you can see why I wanted to make double soles. It should last me the winter, anyhow, and the yarn was on sale for Boxing Day, so there's that. They'll be fine. While acrylic is not as warm as other options and will need to be washed more frequently than, say, wool, my apartment tends to be warm anyhow, so I only need light foot insulation, and acrylic is easy to wash.

pow! almost ready for yule

After getting stuck for a while with a double case of Second Sleeve Syndrome, I finally finished the nieces' superhero sweaters. Niece the Younger wanted a Superman sweater, while Niece the Elder wanted Wonder Woman. 

Both the sweaters were made from free patterns. The Wonder Woman sweater comes from a full sweater pattern sized for adults, while the Superman one is a free colour chart knitted into a standard plain raglan pattern. 

The Wonder Woman pattern calls for chunky yarn. I made it in DK and followed the instructions for a size large to get a sweater sized for a seven-year-old. 

Both sweaters are made out of the same yarn (Mary Maxim's Ultra Mellowspun). I thought it was interesting how the yellow and red looks softer against the steel blue of the Superman sweater, as opposed to the royal blue of the Wonder Woman. 

Speaking of colourwork: for the record, these were all done in intarsia, using full balls for main colours (the blue on the sleeves, for instance), and lengths a metre or two for details (like the stars). So yes, there were a lot of ends, but I never find darning in ends that onerous. For one thing, I started darning in as soon as a piece was done, instead of leaving it until the bitter end. For another, ends has the fun of strategy to it. For example. a lot of the ends on the Wonder Woman sweater were left until after the seaming was done, so that they could be buried inside the seams instead of in the main fabric itself. Maybe it's just because it's something I learned how to do when I was about seven, but doing ends on colourwork always feels like a game.

The yarn is a nice, soft synthetic, and remarkably cheap, which is just as well, because I still have this much yarn left:

That is easily enough for another child's sweater. I have looked around my patterns library, and have a few candidates for a multicoloured sweater. Something to do when I take time off at the end of the year, I think.

easy vs. hard

This is one of those good news/bad news/good news stories.

The good news is that I calculated how much yarn I would need for the nieces' Yule superhero sweaters, ordered it from Mary Maxim, and received it in the mail. I don't know why it's so hard to find machine washable DK yarn suitable for kids' things in walk-in shops, but it is, so mail order is the way to go. This is Maxim's own-brand Ultra Mellowspun — it's synthetic, but it's soft, durable, and comes in lots of colours.

The yarn arrived just as I was finishing up (I thought) the cotton t-shirt that's been aggravating me all summer. I thought I just had to graft the fronts closed and sew the body onto the yoke when this happened:

Those are the two sets of stitches to be grafted, and as you can see, there are a lot more stitches on the bottom needle than on the top one.

At first I thought there might be a mistake in the pattern, because I've been counting my rows obsessively, but this morning I figured it out.

In my little corner of knitting, when a pattern wants to tell you to increase every row at one end, it says something like, "Inc every row at neck edge, 8 sts from edge of work for 24 rows." Get it? The increasing is happening every row, both right side and wrong side, it's only happening at the neck edge, and it's happening eight stitches in from the actual edge of the fabric. Also you need to do it 24 times total

Instead, the instructions said:

Inc row (WS): Purl to m, sl m, p2, M1P
Inc row (RS): K to 2 sts before m, inc 1, k2, sl m, k to end
Rep last 2 rows 11 more times.

I know they boil down to the same thing, but it's the extra atomisation of the instructions, plus not stating the full number of repeats ("11 more time" as opposed to "12 times total") that throws me off. I've made the same mistake already on this same pattern.

To fix this, I'm going to have to rip back to where I stopped the increasing prematurely (30 rows) and work up again. Meanwhile, I've already tried to do the grafting, so I have to make sure the raw stitches from the provisional cast on stay safe. Also there is the drop-stitch lace right in the middle of all the shaping to contend with.

I am not happy. This was supposed to be an "easy summer knit", and the dumbed-down instructions are driving me crazy.

Given that the summer is practically over and that Yule yarn has arrived, I decided to start Niece the Elder's Wonder Woman sweater from the free pattern I found on Ravelry. The original pattern is in adult sizes and uses worsted weight yarn held doubled. I'm making it in DK yarn to a child's size 8. According to my math, if I follow the largest size in the instructions and use the recommended needle size on the DK yarn ball band (4mm), I'll get a size 8 sweater:

And what do you know? It's working out exactly to size. What's in the photo only took me two days to do as well. Before anyone says, "kid's sweaters go faster", remember, I'm using the exact same stitch counts as for an adult's size large, just on smaller needles with thinner yarn.

It's been a nice reassurance that I can knit something correctly, so long as it's difficult enough!
 

nieces in knits

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My brother sent me a photo of the nieces wearing cardigans I made them. Niece the Elder's tiger jacket is almost two years old and still fits her (she just turned six), which is great, because it was a lot of work! It looks like it will fit for for a little while longer. As you can see, she is really into the whole tiger thing.

Niece the Younger's panda cardigan has only been hers for about a month, so it's just as well it's a bit too big for her. I'm glad the collar seems to want to stay down. She will be four soon, so she should get another season, maybe two, out of it.

Both of them got "pitched" on the cardis before I made them for them. I still maintain rule #1 with DIY gifts is to get at least some opt-in from the recipient before making anything, unless you are very sure they are going to like what you're making.

rapid prototyping

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Toronto is in the middle of the annual "deep freeze" part of the winter — where air masses migrate south from the Arctic and make the local temperature very cold. We've been in the -10C to -15C range for a week, with the wind chill making it feel more like -30C. It's finally warmed up to around 0C today.

But that got me thinking of slippers. My hairdresser has a basket of slippers by the salon entrance so people can remove their wet, slush-covered boots at the door and wear a pair of dry, comfy slippers while they're getting their hair done. I mentioned it to my chiropractor, since her office has hardwood flooring, and proposed I make some slippers out of leftover yarn for the waiting room.

The criteria:

• Use stash yarn only (so I clear more stuff out of my apartment — there's my selfish motivation in all this)
• Unisex styles and colours
• Durable (long lifecycle — I wanted to make them and then not have to worry about making replacements for a long time)
• Machine washable
• Last but not least, they had to appeal to people who are not necessarily into the whole "handmade" aesthetic. I didn't want anything that gave a first impression of, "ooh, saw something like that at a charity sale once. It was really ugly."

There are lots of slipper patterns around. Remarkably few of them meet the criteria, especially that last one. And while usually I'm all for vintage, a lot of these patterns were good reminders that not everything about the 1950s and 60s was chic and elegant.

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My first attempt were some "ballet flat slippers" that came out looking like Archie Bunker's grandmother made them as something for someone to wear as punishment. Partly it was the colour scheme I chose, partly the textured stitches (which leave big holes between rows when worn).

Also, even though the slippers were entirely crocheted, they didn't feel very substantial. I could see the soles wearing out very quickly.

Bottom line was, I just didn't like them. So they got ripped out, and I went pattern hunting some more.

Eventually I found a pattern for crocheted loafers with two-layered soles and parts of their construction modelled after shoe-making. I thought the results were acceptable:

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I like how the inner sole colour peeks out just below the upper. The pattern came in a wide range of sizes, and the results are shoe-like enough to calm everyone but the most pro-factory slipper-wearers.

Being crocheted, the yarn consumption is relatively high for the results. That's fine for the soles, which need the fabric density anyhow, but I wondered if there were other options for the uppers. I tried making a basic "kimono" upper, and was pleased with the results.

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Funny thing: the inner sole and the stitching holding the two soles and the upper together are recovered yarn from those ugly slippers I started with. These got worked on in public a bit, and I got some nice compliments on the colour combination. Maybe it was the pattern all along, or maybe adding the red helps.

The nice thing about the knitted upper is that it's just a plain rectangle, and only about twenty rows high, including the border. Although I think this prototype worked, next time I make slippers like these (um, next Tuesday night, most likely), I'm going to make the uppers about four rows higher so that the overlap at the front is more pronounced and so that there is slightly more coverage at the back of the heel.

I made the knitted upper so that the stitch gauge was approximately the same as the stitch gauge on the crocheted soles. That way, when I was slip stitching everything together, I could count on matching one knit stitch to one inner sole stitch to one outer sole stitch. There was a little bit of easing when I got to the toe, but not much.

The completion of the first pair of kimono slippers led me back to loafers. In the original pattern, you are supposed to make the top part of the toe box as a separate piece and then slip stitch it to the upper, easing to fit. It felt awkward to do, and was a little tricky since the toe doesn't actually fit in place.

On my next pair of loafers, I experimented, working U-shaped rows and matching decreases to the increases used while making the soles. It took two tries, but I was able to finish the toe box without breaking the yarn. I think I'm going to make all the loafer-style slippers this way from now on:

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In the meantime, while I was making all of these, it occurred to me that it would be good to provide a basket to put them all in. So I found a pattern on-line, grabbed four mismatched skeins of white acrylic yarn from my stash, and had at it. In about two and a half hours, I had crocheted as far as I could with the four skeins without running out of yarn:

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Now I just have to make enough slippers to fill the basket!

aswirl in spreadsheets

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I tried making a swirl jacket last autumn, and summed up my problems with the directions/sizing and decision to rip it all out in a blog post. This past week I've been off whilst recovering from surgery, so I decided to finish unravelling the work, make a new gauge swatch (more on that below), and sit down with the pattern book and a spreadsheet.

What I learned has put me off making any sort of swirl from the yarn I had set aside for it. The reasons why mostly have to do with what I found out from my spreadsheet, but also some "helper" information I found on the author's web site. My main take-away is that it would be very difficult to get predictable results if one went by the book alone. I would go so far as to say that making any adjustments for fit at all would require a virtual redesign without the information on the web site.

I didn't like the fabric hand of the original swirl jacket, so decided to go up to 5.5mm needles to get less springy fabric. The gauge swatch in the photo above is 50 stitches wide by 50 rows high. As you can see, the welted fabric (used on every pattern in the book) makes a horizontal rib. Horizontal ribs are pretty much the same width as a similar piece of stocking stitch, but their length/row gauge is going to change drastically depending on whether the fabric is unstretched, slightly stretched, or as stretched as it can be without distorting the stitches. I couldn't find anywhere in the book which actually says how much you're supposed to stretch the fabric to measure row gauge (there is an explainer on the web site since "knitters" were having trouble with it). In the book there is a lot of detail about making a larger-than-normal swatch, washing and blocking it, etc. etc., but never how to actually measure the thing. That seems like a weird omission for a ribbed fabric. Usually an author will at least put in the standard "slightly stretched" directive.

I took one stitch measurement and three row measurements based on different amounts of stretch applied (without reducing stitch width), and got for 10cm/4":

• 18 stitches
• 25 rows when pulled out to "maximum" (matches stocking stitch row height without distorting the stitch width)
• 30 rows slightly pulled out
• 45 rows fully scrunched (not pulled out at all)

Large, horizontally-draping parts of the jacket, like the lower back, will stretch from their own weight. Vertically-oriented parts, like the collar lapels, will hardly stretch at all. A big fitting issue I had with the original jacket I made was that while the back and shoulders fit well, the fronts could not be closed except by stretching the fronts to their maxium — not very flattering! It seems telling that most sizing photos show the jackets with the fronts open. If I'm going to make a large, A-line jacket, I want to know it can close. I know plus-sized people are supposed to resign themselves to cold stomachs and chests to look flattering, but I refuse when it comes to custom-made clothing. Especially clothing that claims to flatter a large variety of body types.

Okay, I had my gauge swatch — now what? I went through the pattern book, noting all of the patterns which had a similar gauge, their shape category, and the few measurements provided (just for my yoke size, size 3). The list included:

• Winter Waves (Centred Circle)
• Tangerine Rose (Centred Circle)
• Silken Dreams (Off-centre Circle)
• Strata Sphere (Off-centre Circle)
• Shades of Grey (Off-centre Circle)
• Plum Perfect (Off-centre Circle)
• Wild Thyme (Off-centre Oval)
• Coat of Many Colours (Off-centre Oval)
• Silhouette in the Sun (Off-centre Oval)

Note that none of the Centred Oval patterns were even close to the gauge swatch, because they were all made with much thinner yarns.

Now that I had the required gauge and measurements in a spreadsheet, I started calculating the other measurements I wanted to consider, using the following assumptions/calculations:

• the cross-back measurement: width of the non-collar stitches right before sleeve/upper back shaping began
• armhole depth: the number of rows from the first sleeve increase to the welt at the top of the sleeve
• body circumference: The cross-back measurement plus 2x the row depth of the fronts up to the sleeve/upper back shaping. Because the fronts/lapels hang vertically and therefore are stretched by their own weight less, I did this twice — once assuming slight stretch, and once assuming no stretch.

If my numbers are right, the swirls all seem to top out with an effective body circumference of 44 inches. That explains why the vast majority of photos of plus-sized people wearing them on Ravelry have them open, with the sides hanging well away from centre front.

For my own measurements, that means if the fabric has a loose enough hand, I'll just be able to find a swirl I can close, so long as I stick to shapes with more generous fronts. Therefore I focused on the Off-centre Ovals, since they have wider fronts.

Problem is, the book also says they have "more fitted torsos" and "slim, tapered sleeves". Okay, sleeves are easy to alter, but I wasn't sure what the "torso" part meant. The upper back, which is the only part that has any shaping? My spreadsheet was showing the smallest armhole depth to be a still-generous 14.1", so I really wasn't sure what this meant besides "not dolman sleeves".

And then I read this note on the web site about how gauge and fabric hand work together in a swirl. The 100% wool yarn I had set aside for the project was only useful for two jackets out of the entire book. Sure, I'd noticed there was a lot of cashmere and silk listed in the book, but I'd just shrugged it off — lots of books use luxury fibres in their samples. They photograph beautifully, and suppliers will donate them for the promotion the book will provide. I've made lots of natural-fibre sweaters which cost less than even one skein of a luxury-fibre yarn, though. I can almost justify a silk blend to myself, just because it's so hard-wearing, but cashmere? Nah. There were some mohair and alpaca blends listed as well, which can be more reasonable in cost, but still. This jacket was supposed to be a stash-busting project, not an excuse to get sticker shock over exotic yarn.

This time the silk and cashmere matter, because they're less stretchy than wool. Despite the welted fabric, the idea is to create a fabric that will stretch out and stay that way. Lesson learned: the welts are to:

1. create a reversible fabric so things like lapel fold depth can remain vague
2. create extra stretch in certain parts of the jacket (sleeve cross-measurements, those pesky fronts) to justify the hand-waving about "flattering a wide variety of body sizes".

Of the two patterns which were designed with 100% wool in mind, only one was an off-centre oval (Coat of Many Colours), and its gauge was two stitches per 10cm/4" smaller than my swatch: 20 stitches instead of my 18.

Okay, I'd already made a spreadsheet 19 columns wide; may as well see if I could follow a smaller size's directions and get the size I wanted. It's a common adjustment method, and one I've used many times before.

I entered the stitch counts for the longest sides of the body into my spreadsheet, then the goal measurement in inches I needed below that. Then I calculated out how many inches I'd get at 18 stitches to the inch, with the goal of seeing if any numbers in the smaller sizes matched what I needed in size 3.

What I found was a surprise: the size 3 numbers already matched. I figured I must have made a mistake, so I ran another row of the same calculations, using the pattern 20 stitches to 10cm/4". This is what I got.

(All measurements are in inches since that was all that was what was given on the book schematic):

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The numbers in the top three rows, in red, come from the book. The first row is how many stitches to cast on for the long side for each size (1, 2, 3). The second row is how many inches the side should be per the schematic, and the third row is how wide the mitre point strip should be (this is the same number of stitches for each size, so never changes). Each side of the body shape starts and ends exactly halfway through a mitre point strip, so the full width of the long side is really:

• long side length + (one-half left-hand mitre strip + one-half the right-hand mitre strip)

Add one mitre strip to the schematic long side length, and that tells me the length of fabric that should be between section markers. That's the fourth row, labelled "total side width".

Next, I calculated how big the section would be if I just cast on the prescribed number of stitches at the same gauge I got in my swatch. That's the row labelled "18", for 18 stitches per 10cm/4". The row below with the blue text shows the difference between my gauge calculation and the book-prescribed length. They're awfully close — it would be hard to alter to fix a .1" difference at this gauge, in a stretchy fabric like this. Even the .4" of the size 1 calculation isn't that far off.

But wait. This is the calculation from my gauge swatch, which is off from the prescribed gauge by two stitches!

So I did the same calculations over again, using the prescribed gauge (the last two rows in the spreadsheet). Unless I'm making a mistake somewhere, the prescribed gauge cannot make the prescribed measurements. The book is inaccurate with itself. I would be better off working with my bigger-needled, looser gauge swatch than what the book itself recommends.

Given that the prescribed gauge is off by about 2.5" for each size, and given that the mitre strips are 1.25", it seems the gauge was calculated from a finished garment without the mitre strips being included in the measurements. And given that there are 8 mitre strips accounting for a total of 10" of the total circumference of the jacket, that's kind of scary.

At this point, I checked for the errata. This pattern has had different errata for every single one of the four printings the book has had to date (I have a third printing). None of them mention the gauge discrepancy. To me, that raises the possibility that some of the printed errata are fixes for shaping or other structural issues raised by the gauge being off from the pattern. And the way the construction works on swirls, a knitter could be well into the pattern before they realise something is horribly wrong and they have to rip out several rows and do some of their own calculations.

As it stands, I've done more calculations for my swirl jacket than I have for sweaters I've designed myself from scratch, and still there are a lot of unknowns which I'd like to have settled before I started knitting. Like the sleeve shaping. I would have to add about four more columns to my spreadsheet to get the sleeve numbers I'd want before proceeding.

And this is the part where I give up, at least for now. Near as I can figure, swirls work because:

• Fit is only guaranteed around the yoke/upper bodice — anything else is handwaved with marketing words like "softly", "tapered", and "gently".
• Because it fits around the yoke, an area where wearers will notice binding or other discomfort, the jackets are seen as "fitting" when they don't actually fit in other areas. I've looked at hundreds of photos of swirls now. There's a lot of photos with cuffed-up sleeves (and I didn't even get to sleeves in this post) and fronts which are worn open because they cannot close comfortably. Swirls get around this by having cutaway-shaped fronts, which encourages people to wear them open.
• Because the fronts aren't pulled closed, the back drapes over the hips more generously than it normally would. There are a lot of photos where the wearers imitate poses from the book and are photographed from the back, holding up the fronts to show the swirliness of the fabric colour changes. Which is very cool, but no-one walks around holding up the fronts of the jacket.

Someday, I will be in a shop with a great sale on, and I will snag a "sweater's worth" of some handpainted stuff with silk in it because I can't resist the bargain. I will get home, set it out on the coffee table, admire it, and then kick myself because I have no idea what to do with it. Then this book will come to mind, and I will realise it is Time to Make a Swirl.

But it is not this day.

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Now, that raises a question. When making the original swirl jacket, I only had to break the yarn once, after the neck divide on the sleeves. The smaller bit of yarn I used for my gauge swatch for this exercise. The larger ball of yarn is about the size of a basketball, because I spit-spliced throughout.  What to do with it?

Something that doesn't mean I have to use a spreadsheet to fill in missing measurements and double-check prescribed gauges. Something that suits the 100% classic worsted wool (it's even called Classic Wool), and works with its many wonderful properties.

Something that makes me happy.

knitted vampire squid

My friends Cheshin and J-A both said that the last post about the swirl jacket made it look like a vampire squid. Right, even better than the black hole metaphor!

For reference, here's a video about vampire squid:

And here's the most recent photo of the jacket:

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Just to explain what's going on with the jacket: the slot in the middle is the lower edge of the neck/lapels. The part that's still on the needles is the upper back and the beginning of the sleeves.

I had the jacket with me while J-A and I went to Word on the Street last Sunday, and she remarked that the jacket looked small. I think it looks small too, and have been nervously pulling at the fabric every time I'm sitting with it but not actually knitting. I'm heartened by how the fabric's own weight makes the welts stretch out, and by how I can stretch each section to well past what its official measurements are supposed to be. Still, it's a bit of a nail-biter. I've decided to press on, because even if I wind up ripping it all out again (still not beyond the realm of possibility), I'll have a better idea of how the engineering works. I've made a circle-shaped jacket before (by Annie Modesitt), but that one was worked from the inside out and had raglan sleeves knitted out from the body. This is a different sort of construction altogether.

I checked out other projects of the same pattern on Ravelry. It was good to see how the jacket looks on women who are not professional models, and there was a lot of constructive commentary about the pattern itself. So far I have two issues with this and all the rest of the patterns in the book: although many measurements are given for various parts of the swirls, the two crucial ones that are missing are a) the diameter when worn and b) the armhole height. I'm making one of the swirls in the "centred circle" section, just because they seemed to be the most basic shape and the best place to start. I would like to make an "off-centre oval" swirl, because I want wider fronts and narrower lapels. The problem is, all of the off-centre oval swirls have "slim, tapered sleeves", which sounds an awful lot like "won't fit anyone who isn't a living stick insect." How slim is slim? How tapered is tapered? How do I stop it from being tapered if I don't want that? Can I just follow the sleeve part for a non-slim, non-tapered sleeved swirl instead?

I'll have to knit on and find out.

knitted event horizons

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The swirl jacket has been in progress for two weeks now. As I write this, the original 609 stitches have now been reduced to 432. That might seem like it's still a lot, but after working 11 rounds of 608 stitches, it feels like things are moving at light speed. 

The swirl is the knitting equivalent of a black hole. At first you use up yarn quickly (a 100g skein in 12 rounds), but it seems like things are moving very slowly. Where I am now, just past halfway to the centre, the rounds are getting completed quickly but yarn consumption has slowed. Because so much yarn got used so quickly at the start, though, the work's already quite heavy — 400g.

This was the tricky part.

The weight's an interesting factor. I'm counting on it to stretch the swirl out. Even though my gauge measured bang-on correct when I started (honest!), it's a little tight right now. Enough to make me worried, but not panicky. Each side of its octagon shape is supposed to be 43cm, but they're more like 40. I'm putting it down to being squished on the circular needle. Fingers crossed the fabric will relax to the right size (or slightly bigger) during blocking. 

I don't usually block non-lace items, but the construction method of the swirl seems to warrant it. For a pattern that's just knit/purl, increase/decrease, it does raise a lot of issues about knitting and geometry. 

serendipitous stash-busting

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One of my goals for this year was to use up the rest of the stash yarn I got when I was birthday yarn-bombed. I weighed the yarn, estimated the yardage (no ball band, so I'm not 100% sure what it is besides worsted acrylic), and decided there was enough there for something for Niece the Elder. She's 5 and likes anything "rainbow", so I knitted up a square and showed it to her. She said she Yes! she liked it, and Yes! she would like me to make something for Yule for her with it. I showed her a picture of the Flower Cardigan that J-A recommended to me, and Yes! Niece the Elder liked that too.

I must have caught her in a good mood. Still, I have buy-in for the present, and that's important. I don't like to work for hours and hours on something and then spring it on someone without being very certain they will like it.

The cardigan starts in the centre of that flower motif you can see in the photo above, and then expands from that point to create a raglan, cutaway cardigan. I don't have buttons for it yet, but here's the front:

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This took me almost exactly two weeks to knit. Most of the discussion on Ravelry has praised the directions. Personally I found them a little overwritten, but that's the trend these days. I skipped some sections and just did what I thought made sense, and 90% of the time that's what the directions said to do anyhow — when they didn't, such as the button band/lower border rib, you can't tell I altered anything. The biggest alteration was that I was using worsted weight instead of the stipulated DK, so I made a size 4 in order to get size 6 results. I just followed the size 4 stitch counts and the size 6 measurements, and it all worked out.

There's an adult version available, which will be tempting to do at some point.

Best of all, it used up almost all the yarn!

souvenir with some assembly required

I'd decided to get the yarn to make a shawl while I was in Iceland, and in an astonishing show of sticking to plan and reducing stress by doing planned things before spontaneous things, I had the yarn bought within six hours of arriving:

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The yarn came from a shop called Amma Mús, and it was just a ten-minute walk from my hotel. If you're in the area and need knitting yarn, needlepoint, or embroidery, they're well worth the visit. (And yes I know Isager is a Danish brand.)

The shawl is the Margrét pattern from Icelandic Handknits by Héléne Magnússon. The original shown in the pattern book is black with different shades of grey for contrast colours, but while we were on the bus between Keflavík and the hotel, my friend Kim kept saying I should include the moss green we saw on the lava fields. I think she was right:

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The shawl is coming out smaller than prescribed. Since I like the resulting fabric, I'm sticking with the gauge I have and just adding extra repeats of the trellis and ostrich-feather bands. I'm using up yarn at a far slower rate than the pattern expects (for example, it calls for 500m of the second-lightest grey, and even with the extra repeats I'll probably use less than 250m), so no worries there. The extra repeats of the green trellis pattern mean the ostrich feather bands won't line up, but the eyelet "interference pattern" in the centre of the larger band means they don't line up anyhow, so I decided to stop fretting about it.

I'm just hoping to get this knitted and blocked before the heat and humidity of the Toronto summer hits in earnest.

yarny retaliation

As you may recall from the last exciting episode of this blog, right before I went on vacation, my co-workers yarn-bombed my cubicle for my birthday.

Now: I absolutely cannot have more yarn in my apartment. It's already a major problem. I'm already enacting desperate measures to lessen the stash I have.

So I figured this was a good opportunity to use up yarn just come through the front door and stash-reduce a bit at the same time. I started before I went on my vacation to Iceland, got right back to it as soon as I returned, and worked throughout the week. And when I was done (about ten minutes ago), this was the result:

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What you see in the above photo are six leaf-shaped facecloths, six leaf coffee cup cuffs, and six broken-rib, buttoned coffee cup cuffs. The creamsicle variegated, cream with pastel flecks, and lavender yarn are all from the yarn bombing. The rest is stash-busting, and it would be nice to say it made a dent, but mostly it just kept things at the status quo.

The broken-rib cuffs are my own pattern, as much as such things can even be a pattern. I wanted something that was interesting-looking, quick, and not too stretchy, but a little bit. The "pattern" goes like this:

• Using worsted-weight yarn and 4.5mm or so needles, CO 15 sts.
• Row 1: K across.
• Row 2: K1, *yf, sl 1 pwise, yb, k1, rep from * to end. Note: yf and yb do not go over the needle, just between the points.
• Repeat Rows 1 & 2 for about 20cm (38 repeats for my gauge). Check against a sample coffee cup — this part should reach around the circumference with very little overlap. Note that the stitch pattern tends to be tighter at one row-end than the other — this is okay, since coffee cups are cone-shaped anyhow, and gives your cuff a shaped top and bottom.
• Buttonhole Row: K3, *sl 1 st pwise to right-hand needle, sl next st pwise to right-hand needle, lift first st over second st, rep from * 2 or 3 times, depending on your gauge and the width of your buttons. CO 2 or 3 sts (the same number you cast off) using the thumb or cable method. K3 or 5 (again, depending on how many you cast off for the buttonhole), then work another buttonhole. K3.
• Next row: work row 2 per normal, treating the CO sts just like normal sts (some will just be slipped. That's okay.).
• Repeat Rows 1 & 2 twice — 5 rows above buttonhole row. Cast off. I used a backstitch cast-off so the ends would match nicely.
• Finish ends and sew on two buttons.

Tomorrow all of these will get randomly placed on people's desks, and I'll send out an e-mail to the team explaining where they came from and how it's using up the yarn bombing. I still have about 300g of variegated acrylic to use up, but that hasn't told me what to do with it yet.

For those who will want to know: each piece takes about forty-five minutes to make. The broken-rib cuffs are slightly faster to knit, but have the extra time for adding the buttons on. The leaf cuffs are probably the fussiest, because each of the four leaves is self-finished, which means there are eight ends to darn in at the end, plus one seam to sew the first leaf to the last. Each 50g skein of Bernat cotton yielded one facecloth and two cuffs, with only three or four metres left over.

This little mini-project shows how much I'm into the aspen/birch leaf motif lately. I get the feeling there will be more examples to come.

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