Knitting Techniques

It’s been a week of sweater surgeries both at work and at home. I had to cut the sleeve off a customer’s sweater, shorten sleeves on another customer’s finished sweater, and repair a hole in a 3rd customer’s sweater (aside: Please cut knots out of your yarn as you get to them! You don’t even want to know what this woman’s sweater looked like and what it was like fixing it).

My own personal sweater surgery was done on Adam’s Cobblestone, which turned out to be 2″ too short. There was no way I was ripping out the yoke to lengthen the body, so I decided to cut off the bottom garter stitch and knit 2″ onto it, then graft it all back together. I photographed it all and made a tutorial, which I’ve added the Chiagu Resources page (meager though it is so far).

Hope you find it useful, although I sincerely hope you’ll never need it!

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So here’s the teddy bear:

Isn’t it adorable? One of String’s customers makes bears completely by hand, sewing and embroidering and everything. She comes to String to buy Koigu to make sweaters for some of the bears! It’s the cutest thing I’ve ever seen. Every time she comes I look through the bears she brought and this one spoke to me, so I just had to have it. Now, I won’t be starting a bear collection anytime soon, so don’t worry. This little guy sits on top of the TV and won’t be joined by any others!

The bear company is called Minikins and if you want to get in touch with her, comment or email me and I will give you her contact info. Unfortunately she doesn’t have a website so I can’t link to her (I keep telling her she needs a website!).

And now for what you came her for:

Sorry this is so overexposed, I couldn’t get any texture to show without turning on the flash. The sweater’s still black, not grey!

That’s the finished back and the start of the right front of Katherine Hepburn. I used almost exactly 6 balls finishing the sleeve and back, so that means I am about on track to need 12 balls total (because two fronts and a sleeve will use the same amount as a back and a sleeve). I might end up needing another ball to do the buttonbands since they are pretty wide, but I don’t mind buying another one.

What’s weird about this yarn breakdown is that the back used about twice the amount of yarn for the sleeve, even though it’s a 3/4 length sleeve. The “standard” breakdown is that the back is 1/3, the front(s) are 1/3, and the sleeves together are 1/3 of yarn usage. So logically you would expect a 3/4 length sleeve to eat LESS than 1/6 the total yarn, but somehow I ended up with the same proportion.

This is one of those knitting mysteries that I try not to think about too much or I end up with a headache and an unbearable need to rip the project out to stare at it trying to figure it out . . .

Anyway, onto things I do understand. You can only kind of see it in the picture, but I added waist shaping to the body of KH. I decided to take 4 sts from each side, which means 8 sts total, or just over 1″ of fabric, away from the waist to give it a little more shape. I knew I would decrease 4 times and increase 4 times, so that means 8 shaping rows (with decreases/increases at each end of the row).

To figure out how often they should occur, I divided the body length (13.5″ to armhole) by 9, is 1.5″. Why 9, you ask? Because you need to have space above the last shaping row, otherwise it would fall on the armhole shaping row, so you’d be increasing and binding off the same stitches which isn’t possible OR pretty. So I knew I had to work a shaping row every 1.5″, so I multiplied 1.5 by my row gauge, which is 8.5 rows per inch. The final vedirct: I had to work a shaping row every 12th row.

Enough math for one day, I’m going back to knitting. I bought more yarn yesterday, maybe I’ll show you tomorrow. That, or the finished Kersti sweater . . . happy Monday everyone!

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I finished the first sleeve on the Katherine Hepburn cardigan, and it turns out my stitch and row gauge are spot on. How often does that happen? I’m so happy to just blindly knit the pattern without thinking of adjustments all the time, it’s a nice rest from my usual self-designed knitting.

The other nice change is being able to talk about the process as it’s happening and more in depth. This pattern, like many commercial ones, tells you to increase at both sides of a RS row but leaves it up to you to decide what increase to do. Normally I would always champion the M1 lifted increase. But since it’s so hard to see the stitches and rows on black (thin!) yarn, and since the sweater is highly patterned anyway, I decided to do a knit into the front & back increase, worked 1 stitch in from the edge, instead. I don’t like this increase in stockinette because it results in a purl bump, but in this highly textured pattern it melts right in. And it’s much easier because you don’t really have to see what you’re doing!

The other pattern instruction that gave me pause was to work the seam stitch in garter stitch. I normally do edge stitches in stockinette, having tried other methods and found that stockinette is the easiest to seam, doesn’t leave holes (like slipping the stitch does) and doesn’t cause the fabric to buckle at the edge (like garter stitch can). So when I first read that part of the instructions, I thought for sure I would change it. But I decided to try it, figuring that if it would work on any sweater, this would be the one, given the dark color and the super-textured fabric.

I found out that I was half right and half wrong in my assumptions. The edge is fine for most of the sleeve, but when it got to the sleeve cap there is definitely some buckling of the edges. Which is what I had feared, since garter stitch has a very tight row gauge it tends to pull in more than the surrounding stitch. No biggie, though, since this yarn is so stretchy I will just block that tendency right out with a steamer. But it’s nice to have tried it and found it works sometimes. If this sweater were stockinette I definitely wouldn’t have done it, but in this instance it’s pretty much OK.

In other news, this sweater is eating up yarn like CRAZY. I used almost 2 full skeins for this 3/4 length sleeve! I bought 12 and I may end up having to get a few more. I’ll know for sure once I finish the back, which I’ve already cast on for but haven’t even gotten out of the ribbing yet.

Oh, and the Kersti sweater is really close to done. The 2nd sleeve is a few inches from completion and I already sewed the first one in. I hope to get a picture up before the week is over.

OH, and I’m this close to done with the pattern for Laura. I decided to offer a wider range of sizes than I usually do because this cardigan would work on various sized people, unlike many of my other designs. So it’s taking a little more work to size and edit, I have to go over it more than usual to make sure all the sizes are right. Maybe I’ll put it up for sale next week!

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