the girl from auntie

Well, the cashmere double-twist loop is back to its original state (a misshapen ball of four strands of cashmere held together). Despite the fact that it had been knit up for close to half a year, when ripped the yarn wasn’t as kinked up as I might have expected. Could it be the fibre, or all the oil in it?

When I got to the last (first) two rows, I saw that I had even used that trick for avoiding twists when joining in the round. You know the one where you work the first bit flat, and then join in the round? In theory, because you have a few rows of fabric flapping off your circular needle, you’ll be able to see whether you have an inadvertent twist or two when you join for working in the round.

Yeah, well, here’s a hint: work more than two rows flat before joining in the round. Also, consider using a long enough circular needle so that your stitches aren’t crammed together so tightly you can’t distinguish twists from ruffling. I think I had 40+ inches’ worth of stitches in aran weight packed onto a 24 inch circular, so the cast-on edge ruffled up and down, and I missed the place where it ruffled all the way around the needle’s cable the two rows I had worked didn’t stick out far enough to be obvious.

Andrea (in the comments in the last post) took comfort from that flub. Uh, I also have this one hanging around:

(the fabric is not my bedsheet, it’s cotton voile from Emma One Sock)

I think this one predates the cashmere. It was supposed to be ribbing for a hat. After I noticed the twist, I decided to keep going and steek it (just the ribbing, not the whole hat) because it was too big, anyway.

(Also, Rachel, on the mismatch between a bottom-up body and top-down sleeves: well, it doesn’t bother me… it may depend on the stitch pattern, but it doesn’t seem to be glaringly obvious here. I think it bothers me more with colourwork.)

I love top-down set in sleeves. After the initial effort of figuring out how to pick up the stitches along the armscye and working out any decreases that are needed before I hit the bicep line (I think I pick up the stitches at a different rate than suggested by Barbara Walker in Knitting from the Top), which isn’t painful at all, there’s the fun of working short rows. And even though the short rows continue to increase until they reach the full width of the sleeve, that’s not painful either, because the rows will never get too long and unbearable, because hey, it’s only a sleeve.

And then throwing in some cables is not only fun, but it impresses yourself because it’s just so neat that you’re working a short-rowed, cabled, set-in sleeve knit from the top down.

(Okay, it doesn’t look like much, but the recipient is at least acting like he’s pleased.)

This is a cabled pullover or jacket knit gansey-style, with the body worked from the hem to the shoulders. The jacket will have no side seams, and the pullover body is worked in the round for one neckline (crew/turtleneck), and flat for another (shawl collar)… I had wanted it all to be in the round, but the shawl collar neckline begins below the armhole bind-offs, and the alternatives didn’t seem to be much more fun (either steek something — and this is an aran-ish gauge — or begin rounds on the body front, or break yarn after the tubular part is finished and rejoin at the neck edge).

I started one in Colourmart cashmere mill ends, four strands in natural-ish colours. The yarn had an oily yet acrid smell (the yarn was meant for knitting machines, after all), but I could deal with that because I knew just how soft it would become after laundering.

It was going to be nice. Was . See the problem?

Maybe another picture will help…
(more…)

Finally — and actually, it’s been sitting on the server for a while, now — here’s the table comparing the pattern measurement/drafting instructions from the hand knitting design books listed in this post. The table also includes Righetti and Mary Thomas’s Knitting Book from 1938, which I didn’t have at the time I started compiling this information. I have also since acquired Elalouf’s The Advanced Knitting Architect, but I haven’t checked whether it gives the same drafting instructions as his first book.

As I said in the first post, I compiled the information when I decided to write about ease. I can’t remember if that’s completely accurate; either I decided to write about ease, or I needed to figure out what kind of ease to use myself. Whichever. I also used this information to learn out how to draft the typical set-in sleeve of a knitted sweater, but in the end figured out that I preferred a more mathematical approach to the sketch-on-graph-paper (such as Thomas, Vogue, and Michelson & Davis) or the knit-until-it-fits-together (such as Duncan and Elalouf) — hand knit sweater sleeves generally being designed with front-back symmetry (even though our bodies aren’t), it’s easy to compute the numbers for pattern instructions in advance.

There’s an obvious trend in the amount of ease recommended overall — as we progress from the mid-20th century to the early nineties, sweaters get looser, reflecting the styles at the time. Righetti even mentions including sufficient space for shoulder pads; the styles depicted in the 80s-era books include gathered sleeves, which I always associate incorrectly with the “Princess Diana Black Sheep Sweater” (a stranded colourwork sweater in red, patterned with an array of sheep, all white, with the exception of one black sheep). Once Diana appeared in public with that sweater, it got knocked off right quick. I had one of those knock-offs (somebody bought it for me, I didn’t choose to get it); while I don’t think the original had puffed sleeves, for some reason the tween-sized version I had did.

The looseness of the fit determines the shape of the set-in sleeve cap. For example, Newton gives a final bind-off of 4 to 6 inches, which is frankly huge and appropriate only if the sweater is rather loose fitting; having such a wide final bind-off implies a relatively shallow sleeve cap. The fit of the sleeve around the bicep is loose, since she suggests the same amount applied to the body (4 to 6 inches). She also says the sleeve bicep measurement should be about twice the sleeve cap height plus 1 inch, which is a bit odd: Newton says the set-in sleeve armscye depth (the vertical measurement) should be 2 to 3 inches less than the drop-shoulder armscye depth of 8 to 10 inches; this gives a maximum value of 8 inches for the set-in sleeve armscye depth. She also says that the height of the “classic”-fitting sleeve cap fitting into this is about 2/3 the armscye depth; that’s 5 1/3 inches. But twice this height plus 1 inch is 11 2/3 inches. That’s nowhere near the same amount as a bicep measurement plus 4 to 6 inches, which suggests there’s either an error in my notes, or Newton was referring to the bicep measurement of a drop-shoulder sleeve, or she was referring to the bicep measurement of a set-in sleeve but really meant to say that the finished bicep measurement of the sleeve is supposed to be twice the armscye depth plus 1 inch.

If I had to recommend only one book for use in drafting knitting patterns, it would be Righetti; it actually deals with different body shapes and teaches fitting techniques (e.g., short rows) to accommodate larger bumps and curves. My second choice would probably be Michelson & Davis. Both Righetti and Michelson & Davis offer a “worksheet” method for computing pattern instructions (they work through examples, and present the process in a sort of fill-in-the-blank way), but for those who are really arithmetic-phobic, Michelson & Davis do demonstrate the graph-paper method of drafting. Righetti, of course, has the advantage that it is still in print.

When I set out to write about ease, I decided to survey a small number of books in my knitting library to see what they had to say on the subject of “average” or “typical” ease when designing a hand knit garment; specifically, how they translated actual body measurement to garment dimensions. I actually took notes — I recall making notes from one book while I was on a train (somewhere along the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal corridor) while the person across from me exhausted his laptop battery playing some video game.

The books I surveyed were:

1. Ida Riley Duncan, The Complete Book of Progressive Knitting (Liveright, 1940) and Knit to Fit, 2nd ed. (Liveright, 1970)
2. Sion Elalouf, The Knitting Architect (Knitting Fever Inc., 1982)
3. Vogue Knitting: The Ultimate Knitting Book (Random House, 1989)
4. Carmen Michelson & Mary-Ann Davis, The Knitter’s Guide to Sweater Design (Interweave Press, 1989)
5. Deborah Newton, Designing Knitwear (Taunton, 1992)

As you can probably tell, only two of these books are still in print. The other three I bought second-hand at various times. Obviously my design instruction library is seriously focused on the 80s and 90s; not too long after the survey, I finally bought Maggie Righetti’s Sweater Design in Plain English. At the time I did this survey, I also had (and still have) Ann Budd’s The Knitter’s Handy Book of Patterns (that’s the first one in the series) and Barbara Walker’s Knitting From the Top; I didn’t consult them for the survey, I think because neither discussed ease or measurement in absolute terms the way the other books did. Budd’s “Handy” series, of course, isn’t really directed towards designing your own patterns, but rather provides a framework for basic knitted garment shapes. All three of these books are still in print.

Before I go on, I’ll say that while I’m happy to own all of them, I find I’m most inclined to go back and re-read Walker, Righetti, and Newton. With Walker and Righetti I’m likely to read out of idle interest; from time to time I agree, but I do find myself disagreeing with points here and there. I just read Newton over because of her description of her creative process — not because I’d do the same thing, oh, no! I shudder a little when I look at the lavendar cabled motorcycle jacket. But it’s interesting that Newton wrote a book with concrete examples about how she translates her ideas into swatches and garments. Walker’s book, of course, is most unlike all of the others I’ve mentioned here, because it goes into great detail about knitting many garment shapes from the top down. (I also own stitch dictionaries, including Walker’s four treasuries, but I tend not to use them. I look at stitch dictionaries from time to time, note interesting patterns, but then… tend not to use them.)

The book I’m least likely to consult out of the numbered list is Elalouf; while that is in part because I can never find my copy (but it’s available for free from Knitting Fever on its website! it’s not a big book; rather, it’s a cerlox-bound booklet), it’s also because the designing methodology is covered in significant part by Michelson & Davis. both Elalouf and Michelson & Davis explain pattern drafting with a similar chart format and with worked examples, too, Michelson & Davis has better diagrams and provides worksheets and formulas to follow when doing your own calculations. Both books also cover different sleeve shapes; the content of both books is similar, but Michelson & Davis has more detail. If you’re hunting for books on drafting knitting patterns and are wondering whether it’s worth the effort to hunt down Michelson & Davis, then look at Elalouf’s book online, ignoring the section on “constants” (this is Elalouf’s way of explaining certain constant-but-still-variable numbers in a pattern, like a 7.5 inch armhole depth for a size 38 sweater; Michelson & Davis do a better job of explaining where numbers like that come from). If that kind of methodology works for you, but you want a different (or better) explanation, you might be happier with Michelson & Davis.

Both The Knitting Architect and The Knitter’s Guide to Sweater Design stick with hem-to-neck construction. I’ve never seen Elalouf’s second work that goes into different construction methods, The Advanced Knitting Architect; evidently it’s back in print now, because here’s a review. But the information in the first Elalouf book is generally covered in Michelson & Davis, and Michelson & Davis has more content.

Next, once I format the tables: a survey of how these books identified body measurements and instructed its readers on ease.

Elizabeth’s Percentage System, nothing.

Kathleen Fasanella just posted pages from The Science of Gynametry by Mrs. M.V. Coleman, published in 1887. Instructions on drafting a (sewing) pattern based on a single body measurement: your wrist! When I have time, I’m going to try this out to see how it works with my body.

ETA: I started going through this very late last night. My text notes, on review, are indicative of the lateness of the hour, but I’m going to keep ‘em as is when I post them. For now, I’ll note that after deciphering half a page of instructions, despite her introductory claim, Mrs C did not derive every single dimension from the wrist measurement; she had to account for the variation in our relative amount of flesh, so she divided bodies into “classes” and “orders” based on back waist length and waist measurement. Ha!

It’s time. Now that Amy’s baby, No Sheep for You has been published, and she has started the round of speaking engagements to promote the book (and, most coincidentally, I received my comp copy in the mail yesterday), it’s time to write about labour pains. Not Amy’s, but mine, in the creation of Morrigan.

Braxton-Hicks in knitting form.

Morrigan’s pictures are relatively elusive on the net. Here’s Wannietta’s first photograph of her.

The story is a bit long (the fact that I stop halfway through to rant about yarn doesn’t help), but if you take nothing else away from this post or its sequel, remember these things:

First, Jenna and meeting knitting deadlines are mutually exclusive.

Secondly, Wannietta is the most beautiful, talented, and wonderful knitter in this eight-planet solar system.

Thirdly, to date I have not actually seen this sweater in person.

Yes, you read that correctly: between the commencement of this project and the publication of the book, we lost a planet.*

Oh, and after Wannietta finished knitting Morrigan, it went straight to Interweave; I have handled the disembodied sleeves, but that’s all of the finished garment I’ve actually seen. I haven’t tried it on, so I don’t know how it fits me (it’s the smallest size in the book, and I may be too small to wear it). I know how it fits the model in the book — it doesn’t! She’s definitely too long in the waist and arms for the sample — possibly too skinny, as well.

(more…)

Well, not really insanity, just mild stupidity.

Worsted weight silk-wool twisted single + 2.5 mm needles + lots of twisty little stitches, all alike = not very clever.

Since, of course, silk-wool singles like this — while they may not pill as soon as you look at them — do tend to at least fuzz up to some degree while they’re being manipulated on the needles, I planned to knit the yarn at a denser gauge than its weight ordinarily called for.

That was only half-clever, because the increased handling as a result of the denser gauge (and the texture design) seems to have negated that advantage.

And possibly adding to the problem is the fact that forming the traveling stitches can remove the twist from individual stitches, making it harder to catch every last fibre in the strand. Especially when you don’t use a cable needle.

Not to mention the twisting of the individual stitches themselves, since all the RS knit stitches are through the back loop. That undoes some of the twist, too.

Still, I love the feel of this yarn when knitted up. I just wish the texture didn’t remind me of the tasseled cords used to tie back my parents’ living room curtains, circa 1977 (mmm, rayon tassels!). At least the colour’s not the same.

[It's a cardigan. Never mind her working name, because she doesn't look like her name. Tubular cast-on to 1x1 rib, extends to small cables leading into ogee arches. I've been working at it on and off for a few months, and I'm not even done the short row shaping to bring the back and front to the same depth before reaching the shoulders. Because of the shaping, the repeats actually vary in size -- smallest in front, and larger in the back. They work up into having the same width (i.e. stitch count) by the end of the short rows, but have different heights. Estimated completion date: uh, whenever.

The yarn is eggplant over brown aran-weight (I call it worsted weight) silk-wool blend from Sundara. I have to sit on my hands when she updates her site. I go so far as to compose an e-mail listing everything I want to order, and then I tell myself sternly that I have plenty of yarn, and I usually listen and delete the message. I don't feel bad, though, because when I check back ten minutes later, the yarn is all gone.]

The online catalog for New School Knitting: The Influence of Elizabeth Zimmermann and Schoolhouse Press is here. Many of the sweaters photographed will likely be familiar, but the materials also include that first U.S.-published aran that EZ knit to Vogue’s pattern that launched her mail-order knitting supply business.

(There’s a magnification feature for the pictures, but regrettably the feature seems to just resize the original picture, which isn’t at a high enough resolution to begin with to allow you to see the stitch definition up close. Drat.)