Working out Kinks and Fingering Yarn

I finished the Mr. Greenjeans Cardigan last week. While I was trying it on I realized that in five years of knitting, this was the first sweater that I have made for myself that I’m actually going to wear. This makes me really happy. This sweater is a top down raglan with a cable and rib section on the body and on the sleeves. I think it will be a great casual sweater to wear with jeans.

. I made this same sweater a few years ago out of an acrylic yarn. I wasn’t happy with the button band and the whole sweater needed serious blocking. In my beginner state I didn’t know that acrylic is basically impossible to block. This time I used Boroco Ultra Alpaca. It’s 50% wool and 50% alpaca. It has a much better drape than the acrylic sweater had. I also used a larger needle for the cable and rib section instead of the smaller needle it called for. It just didn’t make sense to me that I should use a smaller needle that would necessitate more blocking when I could use the larger needle and do less blocking. Now I’m just hoping for some cooler evenings so I can actually wear this cardigan before this fall.

I immediately cast on another cardigan. I was so pleased with the first one that I thought I would try another one and see how it went. This time I chose the Sitcom Chic Cardigan. It’s mostly stockinet with a garter and eyelet strip around the yoke. It has ¾ length sleeves and one button at the center of your chest. It was a fairly simple knit and worked up pretty quickly. I had a lot of knitting time last week since I skipped all the housework and knit instead. It’s just too bad I can’t get away with that every week. I’m done with all the knitting for this cardigan. I just have to do the finishing work and I’ll have a cute little cardigan to wear over summer dresses. It should be a little cooler than the other since it’s made out of a 75% cotton and 25% acrylic yarn.

Most people who know anything about what I’ve been knitting lately know that I’ve been working on a sweater for my mother for a while now. Since May of 2010. I wrote another post about it here.

After a mistake last November I decided to take the advice of friends in the BlindStitchers group and put the project away until I wasn’t so frustrated with it. Just before New Year’s I pulled it back out with the intention of going into eat, sleep and knit mode so I could finally get it done. Well, I knit like crazy for a week and a half. I got quite a bit done. So much done that I was having daydreams about handing it over to a friend of mine to be sewn together.

That’s when my needle broke. The cable just came loose from the needle and there goes about 20 stitches. 20 stitches in the diagonal ribbing section. With size 3 needles and fingering weight yarn, I’m just not looking forward to trying to fix it. Nevermind that I knew I should put a lifeline in. I was just too lazy to do it. Nevermind that I knew the needle was weakening in that spot. Oh, it won’t break. I’m just being paranoid.

All this makes me think that I’m bringing the problems with this sweater on myself. There’s a point where you just have to face the facts and admit that bad things do happen to good knitting. If I can manage to fix this sweater again without having to knit practically the whole back piece over again, I’ll be inserting a lifeline immediately. Lesson learned, finally.

I started working on a pair of socks a few weekends ago. I wasn’t very invested in the project. There was a splitty linen-nylon yarn I wanted to get rid of, a pattern stitch I wanted to swatch, and a comparison of short-row heel techniques I’ve been too lazy to make, so I combined the three in a pair of socks that weren’t especially attractive.

The stitch I was swatching is definitely worth repeating (twist-stitch Diamond from Barbara Walker’s Second Treasury)—a reverse stockinet background, the outlines of large diamonds in stockinet with the outlines of smaller diamonds inside—but the moss stitch I added didn’t grow on me any more than it ever does, and neither did some of the tweaks I’m doing to the main pattern stitch. (Admitting I’ve never really liked moss stitch feels wildly rebellious.)

At first, I was continuously fighting the impulse to frog and try again after swatching for real and rethinking the moss stitch, but I knitted on, fearing I would get myself caught up in one of those endless knitting-frogging-knitting-frogging-knitting cycles that would give Penelope a run for her money.

Once I suppressed all good knitterly habits, however, the experience of knitting crappy socks became fabulously liberating. I could try twisting the stitches that are where the diamonds flare the most, what I think of as the elbows, or I could try starting or ending the inner diamonds with knits or twists as the spirit moved me, or I could stretch or smash the diamonds by adding or subtracting the nonpattern rounds, or I could work popcorns into the corners or centers, and I didn’t have to worry about all the time wasted, the potential stitches lost, or the resultant yucky yarn if I had to frog back. I could freely knit away as I thought about the new computer system I had to set up, the new class I had to design lesson plans for, the diet and exercise regimen I’m forever putting off, and the pile of papers and other miscellanea, dubbed Desk, which I always put off cleaning.

It was wonderfully satisfying, more so than a plain old swatch, since I could imagine, when I wasn’t planning dinner or having wicked thoughts along the lines of my last trashy read, that the thing in my hands really could be a sock I’d wear: by the time I worked my way up from the toe to the cuff, I’d have worked out the stitch, and no one would be the wiser, right? That kind of thinking, of course, put me in mind of the generations of knitters who had to crank the socks and sweaters out by winter, some pieces receiving their full attention and skill while others, only the scraps of time allowed by the stove, the crying baby, the next chore on the list, and I thought that sloppy knitting, the kind of knitting that turns mental chaos into order, certainly deserves its own tribute.

Eventually, when I was less than half a pattern repeat from binding off, I pulled the needles out and ripped away at the work, starting immediately on a sock I liked in a variation of the stitch that was just exactly what I had in mind. The experiment worked right the first time, and my hands new the stitch so well that I could do a round or two while the computer booted up or while I sat on hold, and I could get a whole pattern repeat in while in the throes of a good book. Perfection is a goal, but so is crappy knitting, and knowing when to do which is one of the greatest gifts from the fiber gods.

I am very happy to announce a new page on our blog. It’s a page where we can collect written versions of charts. We all know how frustrating it is when there is a pattern we would love to knit and it has a chart. On the page you will find a link to the original pattern along with a download link to an accessible pdf of the written out chart.

We will continue to take requests for charts to be translated so the next time you run accross a pattern with a chart that you would love to knit, just let us know.

The new page can be found at the top of the blog under the link labeled “Written Charts.”