Britt's Blog

It took forever, I unraveled it an re-knit it twice, and I had to send away for another ball of yarn to get it done, but it is, indeed, done.

The pattern is the Wildflower Sweater from Handknits For Kids by Lucinda Guy.

The yarn is Shine Sport from Knitpicks in Green Apple, Marmalade, and Butter.

This was my first real intarsia project (with large blocks of color) and it was not, in retrospect, a good choice to learn a new technique because of the complex shapes and multiple colors. I thought I had enough experience in colorwork, because I’ve done quite a bit of Fair Isle… but then again, I’ve always kinda sucked at Fair Isle. :)

I left off the additional embroidery on the flowers, because I thought they stood up just fine without it. The puckers that are due to my bad technique actually don’t look too bad in a flower-like context. And I love the faux smocking at the top.

It was a lot of work, but I’m better at intarsia now, all the ends are worked in, all the seams are seamed, and the sweater is delivered to its intended recipient, who, thank heavens, did not outgrow it in the year I spent knitting, unraveling, and re-knitting it.

When I was in junior high, Swatch watches were the big thing. Everybody was wearing them. Rich and popular kids wore several on each arm. It was madness.

It is probably surprising to no one that I did not have one.

One could argue that this has contributed to the swatch-knitting aversion of my early days, but I have finally learned my lesson. I have weird, very loose gauge when working with most fibers, so I really do have to swatch to figure out what needles to use. Following the recommendation in the pattern is almost never going to work.

But then, there are fun swatches, like this one:

The yarns are Stroll (formerly Essentials) from Knit Picks: Cartoons hand-painted and Ash Tweed.

The socks are inspired by my colleague Katie’s awesome mittens, which I am totally obsessed with, and the book Knit One Below, which I picked up at the library on a lark a while back.

The swatch was worked in the round, so all rows are RS rows.

The bottom pattern on the swatch used the Knit One Below K1B stitch, alternating with regular knit stitches: *K, K1B* with MC for one row, *K1B,K* with CC for the next. This creates excellent vertical stripes that look especially striking with the handpainted yarn.

The middle section was an attempt to reproduce Katie’s mittens with K, *K1B, K3* with MC, followed by *K3 K1B* with CC. It makes an interesting pattern, but nothing too exciting.

It is the top section, which is K *Slip 1, K3* with MC and *K3 Slip 1* with the CC that reproduces the excellent raised columns that I fell in love with on Katie’s mittens.

Unfortunately, the slip-stitched fabric is pretty tight, as the Slip 1 has the effect of tightening the neighbors of that stitch on the previous row quite a bit, whereas the K1B technique leads to a much stretchier fabric which might be more appropriate for socks.

So, I’m not thrilled by the middle section, but I’m going to have to swatch some bigger pieces before I can decide between the bottom and the top.

What do you think?

J suggested a present with a Celtic theme for John and Mel’s baby gift, so I found this nifty Celtic knot cable. As recommended, I followed Grumpertina’s directions for cables without a cable needle, which are excellent, and make cabling even more fun. (I’m starting to get a yen to tackle EZ’s Aran Sweater…)

Cables “pop” best when they can cast good shadows, which requires a lighter colored yarn. Berroco Comfort in “Lovage” provided a nice green color without so much saturation as to swamp the cables out. Plus it’s machine washable, which is critical for baby projects. I used exactly (and I mean exactly) 4 skeins, 14 oz or 400 g.

This is my first knitting project from a Creative Commons license. I wonder if I should put a label on the blanket? Instead, I’ll state here that the license is Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike. This license allows me (hereafter “End-User Lass”) to share the work (which I guess I did by making the blanket, and talking about it here, though I’m not reproducing the pattern here) and “remix” or adapt the work (check), as long as I attribute the source (check), don’t sell the result (check), and release the resulting work under the same license. I didn’t really make up a pattern of my own, but here’s how I modified it: I added five stitches of seed stitch at both edges and between cable panels from the pattern. I also added several rows of seed stitch at the top and bottom. (It was something like 10. I ran short of yarn and there might not be quite as many on the top.)

Here’s a view of the whole thing. You can see at the upper right that the wrong side doesn’t look too bad.

I screwed up a couple of the cables by crossing the wrong way, but I kind of like leaving a mistake here or there, in homage to the needleworkers who would leave a mistake in each sampler, to discourage the sin of Pride. (Also, I noticed the mistake many, many, many rows back, and I found myself unable to resist the Sin of Sloth.)

Peter was kind enough to take the blanket (and some Jihad cards) from us at Origins to deliver to Ithaca, and I hope that John and Mel find it useful!

Surprise! It’s a baby jacket.

This is the Elizabeth Zimmermann Baby Suprise Jacket from The Knitting Workshop. It’s a weird little exercise in purl-free knitting. Viva la garter stitch!

Believe it or not, it’s worked all back and forth, in one piece, and its squareness and sleeves and cool rectilinear stripy-ness all come from strategic increases and decreases. It looks like a big floppy nothing in particular until you fold it in a fairly nonintuitive way, and sew two (count ‘em, two) seams across the top of the sleeves.

Is it retro? Has it come around to being modern again? Whichever, it’s a really striking pattern, and definitely stands apart from your run-of-the-mill baby clothes.

The yarn is Lion Brand Microspun, which I bought a ton of to make the Lion Brand Baby Corn Bunting (which is actually adorable and was very fun to make) and socks (gad!) when I was a novice knitter and didn’t know what was good for me.

I do not recommend this yarn. It is evil, evil, evil. Very hard to work with. If you’re kind, you won’t squint and see all the flaws. It’s not at all tightly wound, and naturally slippery, so it’s easy to miss a few strands or accidentally split the yarn—especially on this project, as I was working in an especially tight gauge.

I’m pleased with the color combo, though. And the yarn is nice and soft.

A long, long time ago, this double-knit scarf with stars caught my attention. I immediately thought “baby blanket!”

It was probably because of the blue and pink color scheme, but I also think that Elizabeth Zimmermann had a hand (as so often she does). In The Knitter’s Almanac, she says:

Double Knitting…always seems to me, though fascinating, a great waste of time…The knitting public, however, is intrigued by Double Knitting, so, as one of its members, you shall be given Double Knitting. Never one to waste time and effort, I have tried to incorporate four advantages, to make the undertaking worth while. First, Double Knitting is for some reason very light, relative to its bulk, and soft as a cloud if you make it in light, thick wool…with large needles. It makes a splendid pad when you lay the baby down on the hard floor for its kicking exercises. Second, it is the warmest of covers—warm as two blankets, which, of course, it is.

EZ goes on to give a third reason (specific to her project and thus irrelevant to our purposes here) but, curiously, no forth reason. Presumably, the reader is left to “unvent” a reason of her own. My own reason is that double-knitting is lots of fun.

EZ describes a method by which you knit across, slipping every other stitch, turn, and knit across the previously slipped stitches, slipping the previously knit stitches. I’ll agree with her that this method is frustratingly inefficient.

I prefer (as does, apparently, almost everyone else on the internet) the more modern method, which requires that you manage two strands of yarn at once, and knit the “front” stitches with one strand and purl the “back” stitches with the other. This has the same rhythm as a K1-P1 rib or seed stitch, which I find inexplicably soothing. No need to go over the row twice.

EZ also neglects the real charm of double knitting which is that by using two different colors, and working a color changes by switching front to back or vice versa, you automatically get a back that is precisely the inverse of the front.

This blanket is done in Caron Simply Soft Eco, which is nice and soft, cheap, machine washable and available the excellent deep purple and bright yellow colors I was looking for. As an added bonus, the blanket actually contains 3.6 recycled beverage bottles!

I made mine basically the same way the scarf is described, but bigger, with a moon thrown in for visual contrast.

If you’re interested in trying a tamer double-knit baby blanket, there’s the one mentioned above in the Knitter’s Almanac, under February, and there’s also a very charming dk blanket pattern at knitty.com.

My sister-in-law requested a hat and scarf for Christmas. Yes, I know this is rather late; see Grandma’s Shawl. In order to assuage my guilt, and also because I’m a big believer in overkill in general, I decided to make some mittens, too.

She has a silver coat and a black coat, so I thought some nice wintery blue or green would look good with both. I acquired some of my favorite yarn, Paton’s Classic, in Faded Denim.

I thought the Wavy Scarf designed by Sarah Smith and published at knitty.com would do nicely: very interesting but not too fancy for everyday.

A few tweaks: I was concerned what the edges would look like, so I added a stitch at either end, knit the last stitch of each row, and slipped the first stitch of each row. I also did a tubular cast on and tubular cast off, which took quite a bit of squinting and fiddling to work with a K3-P3 rib, but was well worth it. It looks awesome. Next time you do any project with a ribbed edge, try it!

After finishing the scarf, I was an expert at the Wavy Pattern, so the next logical step was to try it in the round, on the hat. Again, I did a tubular cast on (since it is awesome.) The decreasing at the top took some careful planning.

Finally, we come to the mittens. Again with the tubular cast-on (at which I am now an expert.) The wavy K3-P3 rib makes for a fine cuff. Because the merino isn’t superwash, it will felt up a bit when you get the wet and wear them and stuff. (Shoveling snow is an excellent mitten-felting activity.) As a result they’ll actually take on some shape and develop handedness (i.e. the left mitten will fit funny on your right hand.) That being the case, I decided to give them a distinct palm and back, and ergo a distinct handedness, by continuing the wavy pattern up the back of the hand only. (Doing it all the way around would start to get a little crazy in the thumb gussets, anyway.) I did a 180° phase shift between the left and right so they’d be symmetrical. (For non-math-nerds, that means I started in the middle of the wave pattern on the right-hand mitten.) They look a little flat and goofy without a hand in them, but very nice on:

Me: Oh, goodness. It is possible that I have cut off my yarn too short to graft together the end of this mitten, even though I usually leave pathologically long tails on everything. Perhaps I should just put this down until morning.

Mitten: I, your almost-completed mitten-end, taunt you!

Me: Curse you, foul mitten! Your taunting compels me! Yes, indeed, I will graft you! O, the grafting you shall have!

Mitten: Heh, heh, looks like you only caught that stitch once there, you sad and pitiful excuse for a knitter!

Me: You cannot stop me, vile mitten! Lo, I go back and start again.

Mitten: Bah! Your graft is too loose! Your skills are weak! WEAK! Kitchener is spinning in her grave!

Me: Silence, mitten! You will be grafted, yea, loosely for the nonce, but as God is my witness, I shall pull you snug! O, yes, snug indeed!

Mitten: You are running out of yarn. I predicted this. I am smug. Smug, I tell you.

Me: The snuggening! Bow before the snuggening! Now look upon it and see, that there is a great abundance of yarn!

Mitten: O, lo, I am snuggened, and there is yarn enow… but wait… what is this… Extra stitches on the front needle? Bwah ha ha ha, you are undone!

Me: Be silent. There are always extra stitches on the front needle.

Mitten: Yeah. Maybe you ought to look into that, genius.

Me: Oh, sneer and taunt all you wish, for I am done! A great graftening has been wrecked upon thee, today, O mitten! Yes, indeed, and you are now sealed snuggly against the winter’s cruel chill, and I declare thee to be warm! Warm and comfortable, even when wet, for thou art woolen.

Mitten: Uh, yeah, except that I don’t have a thumb!

Me: …

Mitten: You could totally put a thumb on me in, like, 15 minutes.

Me: …

Mitten: You know you want to.

Me: I’m going to bed.

Our friend Alex was kind enough to send some images of his daughter Chloe in a sweater that I knitted.

I must confess, this is my very favorite baby sweater to knit. I think I’ve made five or six by now. It’s the “Baby Sweater on Two Needles” from The Knitter’s Almanac. Every time you make it, you can try a different, simple lace pattern, so it never gets boring. This one is the pattern suggested in Almanac, just ’cause I hadn’t done it in a while.

The smell of wet sheep… about a hundred rust-free T pins… It can only mean one thing: a blocking is afoot.

Or under foot, as the case may be.

Yes, it’s that magical moment when the ruffly, lumpy, entirely dubious-looking object becomes flat, and smooth, and geometrical.

Of course, Susan was on hand to help with the unpinning.

The basic pattern is the famous Elizabeth Zimmerman Pi Shawl from Knitting Workshop. I pretty much winged the eyelet patterns as I went along, and the edging is the “Openwork Edging” from the inimitable Barbara Walker’s Second Treasury of Knitting Patterns.

The light pink wool is hand-painted 100% merino. (The saleswoman at Unique Yarns said brightly “We usually use it for socks!” but who makes socks they have to hand wash???) I ran out of the pink, and since I had bought every single skein that Unique Yarns had, and since we were headed for Janesville anyway, I dragged J into Dragonfly Yarn to procure the dark pink angora and the cream Cascade Heritage (which as a 75/25 superwash merino/nylon would make a perfectly sensible sock). Jason as always gets props for his eagle-eye for perfect color combos.

Tomorrow the shawl becomes a Christmas present for my grandma.

Hand-knitted footie pjs on an adorable baby, of course!