Quilting Monday

I finished a flimsy.  After not going near the sewing machine since December, I finally worked on this quilt yesterday.  As you can see, it's pretty basic, and not one of my seams is an even 1/4", but it's good enough, and I like it.

The fabric is from Connecting Threads, Spring Terrace, and I used most of the patterns except for the gray ones.  I'm saving those for something else.

I may do a bit of fake hand quilting on it or perhaps tie it.  I'm not sure.  It'll be cute, I think, no matter what.

Knitting:  I'm still at it, but not with the same intensity as those 5 sweaters.  This is the Hubz' vest so far, about 6".  The fake cables are in force.  You'd think that I'd be tired of them, but no, I can knit them forever.

The actual color is very close to the top pic.  I lightened the middle pic so that the cutie patootie fake cables are visible.  He likes it very much, and it is mindlessly easy.  326 sts on a size 3 circ needle.  It takes a bit of time to do each round, but it is very very easy on the hands and wrists.  The yarn is Palette from KnitPicks.  I didn't want to spend a lot of money on the vest and I wanted skinny yarn, so Palette is is.  It doesn't have the spin of sock yarn, nor is it meant to be sock yarn.  Much too fragile for that, but for a soft, lightweight vest, it's perfect.

Finished! Designing and knitting a fisherman's sweater - part 7

 

Ta da!  One fake gansey finished!  The angle is a bit foreshortened, but you can get the idea of how it looks.  Oh, and the yarn is a bit more olive than the camera wants to show.

Here's what it looked like yesterday after I finished weaving in the ends and, obviously, before blocking.  Messy, no?  But that's what a wool sweater is before a tender blocking.

Isn't it weird how where and when I photograph the sweater the color changes?  The very top photo is the closest, but I'm posting these so you can see how nice everything looks once blocked.  Ah well, I'm not a photographer.

All of this magic takes place when you block a woolly sweater.  Here's how I do it.

I fill up a sink with lukewarm water and dunk the sweater into it.  You really have to push it down into the water because wool resists water absorption and wants to float.  So, gently, you push it into the water until it's thoroughly soaked.  Then, supporting the garment with both hands, you lift it out, drain the water, and very very gently squeeze the sweater all over to get rid of excess water.  Do this over and over, always supporting the garment as best you can.  This sweater weighed a ton before I started the squeezing process, but I got rid of a lot of the water.  The trick is "gentle".  This is not superwash wool, and it will want to shrink or felt.  Nope, don't want that.  So treat it like a delicate object and gently squeeze.

When you think you have gotten rid of the bulk of the sogginess, dump the sweater onto a bath towel, roll it up and push down on it to get the towel to absorb water.  Repeat with a couple of other towels.  Your towels will be totally soaked, which is what you want.

Lay out the largest towel you have.  Pick up the sweater by the shoulders, and it will lengthen like you can't imagine.  Take a deep breath, and give it a couple of good shakes.  Now your sweater will look like it would fit a giraffe.  That's OK.  What you've done is get all your uneven stitches to even themselves out.  It works, but you have this bizarre garment that you will now lay out on that large towel.

Now you shape the sweater.  It's still very wet and you can make it wider or narrower, make the sleeves look good, align the side and underarm fake seams.  In short, you make it look like the sweater you want it to be.  Takes a bit of time, but you need to do this so that it will look nice.

You'll need to change the towel under the sweater very often; it's absorbing all that dampness.  Each time you do this, reshape the sweater.  If you have a fan available, you can blow air onto the sweater and that will help a bit in drying time.  You can expect it to take at least 12-14 hours to thoroughly dry, and even more if you have a dense garment or heavy yarn.  A lace shawl will dry in 2-3 hours easily, but not a sweater.  Turn it over each time you change towels.

And that's it.  A lovely, soft, cuddly garment to keep the recipient warm and toasty.  Here in northern New Jersey, it's still cold enough to need a woolly sweater.  Mail out the garment to DD, who lives in the Frozen Northland, and then cast on for another sweater.  Email a pic to Miss P, the MN grand, and try to convince her that she needs a sweater next year.  Hah!  Middle school kids resist such stuff, silly kids.

A vest for the Hubz.  The Hubz is not a delicate little creature like I am.  I knit 36" sweaters.  This thing is 50" around.  Fingering weight yarn on size 3 needles.  It'll take forever.  But, he wants a vest, so no sleeves!!!!!!  I'm not in a hurry with this one, since he won't wear it any more this season.  But next fall, when it gets cool again, then he'll have it.

I think I'll put a bunch of my fake cables on it.  V-neck, because that's what he likes, and I also like knitting them.

Thank you all for your kind words.  Don't be intimidated by the gansey; I've been doing my own sweater thing for 45 years, so I can do it in my sleep.  But you can do it too.

Designing and knitting a fisherman's sweater - part 6

 

So, now the bodice is complete.  You can see the front, and where I'm working the sleeve.  Yes, it looks like a mess; blocking takes care of all that.  When you work a couple of purl sts between the various patterns, those sts act as ribbing, and to get the proper effect, you have to wet block the garment and smooth it out.

I've already done the neck ribbing.  It's so nice to get this donebefore you deal with sleeves.  This way, when you are finished with the sleeves, you are done! Finish in all the ends and then block.

Here's a nice close-up of the bodice.  I loved knitting this, and now have a hankering for an entire garment with fake cables and twist sts and lace.

The sleeve incorporates the fake cable and the twist st pattern, plus I added the diamonds, which are just a larger version of the cross pattern that separates the body from the bodice.  About 10" done, and I should be finished with the sleeves by early next week.

Are you ready? Wait for it. Yes, it's coming. Yes! It's here!

The annual spring poem

High up, over the tops
Of the feathery grasses, the grasshoppers hop.
They won't eat their suppers,
They will not obey
Their grasshopper mothers and fathers who say:
"Listen my children, this must be stopped.
Now is the time your last hop should be hopped.
So come eat your suppers and go to your beds."
But the little grasshoppers just shake their green heads.
"No, no," the naughty ones say.

"All we have time to do now is to play.

If we are hungry we'll nip at a fly,
Or nibble a blueberry as we go by.
But not now. Now we must hop.
And no one, but no one can make us stop."

 

 

Designing and knitting a fisherman's sweater - part 5

So, now the body is done up until about an inch or so from the armhole.  Here's where I like to put in a pattern that separates the body from the bodice, and that is that cute little diamond pattern.  I use this one a lot because it works very well.

Now I'm ready for the bodice.  This is the sweater from the beginning of the armhole to the shoulder.  I always work the back first so that I can see where I want to place the neck opening.  I like to put in a number of patterns here, just for the fun of it.  Typically I use a lace pattern, my favorite fake cable, a knit/purl pattern, and lately I toss in a twist stitch pattern.  This is where I veer away from traditional gansey patterns, and here is where I have the most fun.

 

These patterns are mostly from Japanese books, with the exception of the ladder one (the one on the far right and left. I usually pick out the lace pattern first, and then add the rest.  My one caveat is that there is no patterning on the wrong side.  All I want to do is knit the knit stitches and purl the purl stitches.  Life is too short for me to pattern on the wrong side, and I will completely modify a pattern so that I can do this.  So, when I have a bunch of purl stitches on the right side (look at the lace pattern), I know that I can just follow along on the wrong side.  Makes it easy and very pleasurable to knit.  (On the body and sleeves, however, because they are knit in the round, I will use any stitch at all since all the work is done right in front of me on the right side.)

That fake cable appears in everything these days; I love it that much.  The twist stitch pattern is between 2 of the fake cables.  No cable hook here; these guys are just twisted, and only on the right side.  What I love is that the outer edge of this pattern looks as if I'm manipulating something or other.  It's just a trick of the eye; you want to see it look like an outside edge, and it's not.  Just knitted along.

I'll work the back until I have approx 8-8.5", place the stitches on a piece of yarn and then work on the front. 

Designing and knitting a fisherman's sweater - part 4

Emily's gansey 

 Front (or back) view as of this morning.  About 8" done.

Side view.  You can barely make out the purl ribs and the "side seam" purl stitch.  This will block out fine.

I should get about 3" knit today.  So far, I'm very pleased with the sweater.  The yarn is OK, but I like the Filatura di Crossa better because it has a nicer hand.  But still, the Rowan is fine.  Clearly, I love to knit in sport yarn.

See the previous 3 posts for my process so far in designing and knitting this sweater.  Maybe you will get inspired, too.

Remember this mess?  Rachel's awful gansey?

Ta da!  Here it is all blocked and sweet.

Hard to imagine that they are the same sweater.  Wet blocking is the answer.  She wanted it long, so the sleeves look out of proportion to the length of the sweater, but it works very well. 

Designing and knitting a fisherman's sweater - post 3

Here's my progress on Emily's fisherman's sweater.  This is about 5.5 inches so far.  You can clearly see the 2 patterns and you can see how the 2 purl stitches separate the patterns.  One of the side benefits of those purl stitches is that it acts a bit like ribbing, pulling the sweater in.  In the past, I made my sweaters much wider, but now like them far more fitted.  Not body hugging, but more shapely.  This is, for me, a great way to shape a sweater without decreases.  The sweater somewhat molds itself to my (and my daughters') body shape, expanding at the hips, coming in at the waist, and then expanding toward the bust.  It's a great way to cheat on shaping.  When blocked, those ribs will open up, so that it will become a subtle shaping.

Another nice reason for the purl stitches is that I don't have to set off my patterns with a stitch marker; the purls do that for me.

Not the greatest picture in the world, but here you get a good closeup of the patterns.  The safety pin is my way of measuring how much knitting I've done each day.  I love to have goals, so this does it.  Most of my stitch markers are also safety pins, the plain ordinary ones, not the ones supposedly better for knitting.  I've done that.  Eh.  I also use pretty markers, although for some reason, I tend to lose them.  If you need to use a lot of stitch markers in a garment, safety pins are the cheap resource.  Pretty markers are pretty, but pricey.  On the other hand, they can be so pretty.  I've tried yarn markers.  Nope, they don't work for me.  They keep getting caught up in the knitting.

Take a look at how messy my knitting is.  Nothing at all looks nice and even.  I'm a fast knitter, and knit Continental style and am not particularly smooth.  But I have a secret:  I knit in wool.  When you wet block your sweater, all of that mess smooths out and you have a lovely garment.  Wool has this amazing property of memory and is just about the best material there is to knit.  It helps that I live in an area which has cool and cold weather.  I'm not sure what I would knit with if I lived in Florida.

So now I'll just keep knitting up the sweater until about 1 1/2 inches from the armhole.  I'm aiming for 15" on the body, so at 13.5", more or less, I'll stop these patterns.  That should take me about 3 days worth of knitting.  I'm a fast knitter and love to zoom along.  You may knit English/American style (throwing rather than picking), and that is usually slower than Continental.  I knit my way because my mom and aunt taught me, and they were both from Europe.  I can knit English, and do it in stranded knitting with holding one yarn in one hand and the other yarn in the other hand.  Another time, I'll do a post or two on this.

Rachel's gansey is finished but not blocked.  As usual, my sweater at this stage looks awful.

Is this bad or what?  Have no fear, it will come out just lovely.  It is very long, but she wanted a longer sweater.  Those skinny sleeves and that drawn-in bodice will block out beautifully.  I was going to blog about how I wet block, but I'll save it for when the green sweater is done.  I will take pics so you can see that this mess of a garment will look so nice when dried.