whitknits

Before I get to the knitting, I just want to make note of the fact that Friday was our fourth wedding anniversary, in addition to being the Equinox, and our cats’ birthday (the coincidence of those three events is not an accident!). What a four years it has been, full of changes both good and bad, for ourselves and for our country. We had a lovely dinner together that night, and plan, as our gift to ourselves, to make this the year we really fix up our garden (the traditional gift for the fourth wedding anniversary is “flowers”, after all!). Having been married on the Equinox, we celebrate our marriage at every turn of the seasons (the more celebrating, the better, right?), and I’m hoping that by the time the Solstice rolls around, we’ll have our garden looking much better. 16 seasons together…here’s to many, many more, my love.

And now to the knitting! Despite a nasty sweater-reorganization injury yesterday, I did manage to cast-on for something new:

It’s the beginning of a Tangled Yoke Cardigan. I’d been debating what to cast on for next, and just couldn’t make up my mind. On Thursday, I saw one of my students wearing a Tangled Yoke to class, and I had to resist the urge to squeal and embarrass her in front of a class of 100+ students! But my mind was made up: a Tangled Yoke would be the next sweater on my needles. I actually injured my finger trying to find the yarn I’d set aside for it awhile ago! I am loving the way the Silky Wool feels so far, and am also loving the garter rib. Which is a good thing, considering that I’m going to be doing lots of garter rib on the sweater I’m designing for my swap with Chawne!

Holy cow, Stripes! is popular…every time I check on Ravelry, even more people have made it a favorite and more people have commented. I totally didn’t expect that! Thanks, everyone, for your lovely comments on my last post…I’m trying to respond to each of them, but have been crushingly busy this week.

Several people have inquired about whether I would make Stripes! into a pattern, and put it up for sale. I have to admit that I am somewhat hesitant to do this. Not because I don’t want other people to knit it up…I’d actually be quite giddy if tons of people were walking around in stripey yoked sweaters! It’s more that I feel like my sweater is, when it comes down to it, just such a basic yoked sweater that it’s hardly worth pattern-izing. Yes, my basic yoked sweater diverges in a few key ways from the classic EZ one that originally inspired it, and there are some particular techniques that make Stripes! look the way it looks, but it’s still just a yoked sweater.

But then I had an idea. What if I worked through the numbers for a few sizes, but then wrote up the pattern as more of a yoked sweater tutorial? A pattern where the whys and hows and which number do I use wheres of knitting a yoked sweater, generally, are worked out in great detail, in which the goal is to leave the reader with the ability to construct a yoked sweater of their own, with whatever mods they’d like? I realize this already exists in at least one form: namely, the EZ books I learned from. But would people like to read about it in the context of Stripes!? Because I do so love explaining things and teaching things to people, and since I appear to have become something of a yoked sweater evangelist (which is terribly funny if you know me well!), I think it might be a really great way to introduce people to the construction. What do y’all think? What would be a reasonable price for such a thing? (I’ll be honest…if it’s “free”, well, I don’t have loads of free time and might not find the time to put into making a nice pattern/tutorial, not because I’m mean and selfish, but because it’s a lot of work!). I’m open to suggestions!

(I’m cross-posting a version of this post on the Yoke Appreciation Blog, which has not gotten nearly enough attention recently.)

Two days ago, I finally used up the first skein of Cascade Eco Wool, only inches shy of finishing the yoke on Stripes!, and had to ball up a new skein. The yardage is insane!

By yesterday, I was furiously finishing Stripes!, ripping and reknitting the collar three times until I was happy with the look and fit.

It was all worth it, because after a good soak last night, and an overnight blocking, I have a beautiful, beautiful new sweater!

I could not be happier with how it turned out. Before I share more pictures and details, here are the vital stats:

Ravelry Project Page
Pattern: My own, based loosely on EZ’s percentage system.
Yarn: Cascade Eco Wool, just over 1 skein. Noro Kureyon #165, 2.5 skeins.
Needles: Size 8 Denise Circulars and Knitpicks Harmony dpns.
Time to Knit: Feb. 8th – March 14 2009.

So now, some details on how I did the yoke: I stopped knitting the body and sleeves when there were two (of four) rows of Eco Wool in the stripe. When I joined everything together, I knit one row, and then did two sets of shortrows, at 6 and 3 stitches past the point where the front of the sleeve was joined, respectively. This gave me a larger grey stripe in the back than in the front of the sweater, but also raised the back of the sweater a bit, which is important!

I decided, for the yoke, to change the Noro stripes into garter stripes, knitting one round in Noro and then purling the next. I also shortened the height of the grey stripes from 4 stitches to 3. Every other grey stripe, I did a decrease round: the first two rounds were *k3, k2tog*, and the second two were *k2, k2tog*. Before the final decrease round (which was just before the collar), I did another two sets of shortrows, in the same manner as before (since I’d left stitch markers in the spots where the arms were joined, it was easy to find where to place them).

For the collar, I went back to the 1×1 corrugated rib that I’d used in the hem and cuffs. I really struggled with figuring out how to bind off; I wanted the collar to be fairly snug around my neck, but I obviously also wanted to be able to pull it over my head easily! After several tries, I wound up using the kitchener bind-off from Nancie Wiseman’s “The Knitter’s Book of Finishing Techniques”, which worked beautifully! So incredibly stretchy!

You might notice a row purl bumps just below the bind-off. I was attempting, as best I could, to mimic the look of the Twisted German Cast-On I’d used at the hem and cuff. It didn’t quite work, but I loved the look of it. The book says the kitchener bind-off can only be used with 1×1 ribbing, but it worked just fine, and with added decorative detail, on a row of purl stitches. It’s a slow bind-off, but totally worth it!

I am so absurdly happy with this sweater. I love the bright rainbow stripes, I love the way the Eco Wool and the Noro both feel after they got a good soak, I love the texture I added to the yoke, and I love the collar, even though it took forever to get right.

My Spring Break is over now, and I’m not sure what I’ll be casting on for next on the sweater front. My plan for now is to start swatching for the quilt-swap sweater and continue working on my mom’s scarf, and just see which yoked sweater next captures my imagination.

We had a wonderful time with my grandparents, and with my aunts and uncles and cousin who also happened to be in town. We saw great museums, watched fun movies, cooked delicious meals, and just relaxed together. It was fantastic.

But we had to fly back home yesterday:

I mentioned in my last post that I would be bringing a more portable knitting project, since Stripes! was getting rather unwieldy to bring on a plane. So, for all of you who were wondering, here is the mystery portable project:

One half of a Flutter Scarf for my mom; the yarn is the leftovers from my Icarus shawl, and the pattern turned out to be absolutely perfect for plane knitting.

We got back very, very late last night. So I am extremely tired now, between that, and experiencing DST and a 2-hour time difference all in the same trip. But at least I have Stripes! to console me:

And now I have 1000+ things in my Google Reader to catch up on, so if I’ve missed something terribly important, please let me know…I may have to do the dreaded “mark all as read”!

…I could just be knitting and knitting on Stripes!. But alas, this has been one heck of a busy week, and I’ve got a full day of work to do today, and then packing, and then we leave before the crack of dawn tomorrow morning to fly down to Albuquerque. So the knitting is not so much happening. And Stripes! is too big and unwieldy at this point to bring along on a plane trip, so I won’t be knitting on it until next Thursday at the earliest. Instead, I’m hoping to cast on for a more portable (which is another way of saying “not a sweater”) project tonight, which I will leave a mystery for now, except to say that I have mentioned that I would be knitting this more portable project at least once on this blog.

I’m glad everyone is loving Stripes! I was playing on Ravelry the other day and noticed that Stripes! had been faved 40 times! Talk about pressure! I certainly don’t want to screw up the yoke, knowing that so many people are already in love with the sweater. You might notice in that picture above that I started turning the stripes into purl bumps at the yoke (I’m knitting one row in the Noro, and then purling the next, to avoid the weirdness of purl bumps at a color change). I hope this works out well. I also hope that the change in texture mitigates the slight weirdness that happens because of the shortrows (there are more rows of grey between the rainbow stripes on the back of the sweater right above the yoke than on the front). We’ll just have to see.

And with that, I’m off. No promises as to when I’ll post next, but I do promise to try to have a wonderful time down in Albuquerque, and hopefully take some pictures to share after I get back. Farewell!

Oy, this semester has been rather exhausting so far! I spent all of last weekend (literally: about 18 hours) grading that huge stack of exams in my last post, and then most of last week meeting with students about said exams. In a class of 108, even having only 10% of the class show up for office hours (all at once, of course!) can be quite overwhelming. And of course, all of my tutoring appointments at the Writing Center have been filled, and the Symphony I’m in had our first of two consecutive concerts yesterday, so I’ve been quite the busy bee.

We played Mahler 1, which I absolutely adore (I’ve had the 3rd movement running through my head all day, and it makes me want to dance around the house), and a suite from Harry Potter, which I do not so much enjoy. We’re giving the concert again on Tuesday, out of town, which means that I will have a killer 14+ hour day between my normal Tuesday schedule and the evening concert. Yikes!

I have managed a little bit of knitting on my beloved Stripes!, though. Most of it was accomplished today, during a marathon of Planet Earth watching, thanks to Netflix. So here, in all it’s nearly-ready-to-be-joined glory, is Stripes!:

Just a couple more stripes to go on the second sleeve, and then it will be time to join everything for the yoke. I’m 99% certain that I will be turning the rainbow stripes into purl ridges on the yoke, but reserve the right to change my mind on a whim, as I often do when it comes to such things.

The last bit of crafty business I got around to this week was sketching out some ideas for a sweater that I’ll be knitting for a friend in exchange for a quilt (yes, a quilt-sweater swap! I’m absurdly excited about it). Here’s what I’m thinking:

A fairly plain v-neck, with garter-rib accents, and a garter-eyelet trim on the v-neck (and possibly at the bottom of the sleeves, if there isn’t going to be ribbing). I’m really eager to start swatching for this…I’ll be using the same yarn (right down to the color!) that I used for my husband’s sweater, which I very much enjoyed knitting.

Anyhow, that’s what I’m up to. This time next week, I will be down in Albuquerque, visiting my grandparents during the first half of my Spring Break. I’ve not been down there since almost a decade ago, so I’m quite excited about this! I’ll try to post again before we take off, but I’m not making any promises, given what a crazy week I have ahead of me.