More Fireside Ogling: Buttons!

My colleague from Los Angeles says that photographs taken from above have a slimming effect.  I'm not sure it shows off the knitting to best effect -- and what's more important? -- but maybe it provides an interesting perspective.  I would like to note that standing by a window on a sunny day after it's snowed means there's a lot of light and an English Rose like me can look realllllly washed-out.  It's winter in Vermont, and I guess I'm going to pretend that I have amazing porcelain skin.

Okay, moment of vanity over.

That last post about Fireside didn't have any pictures of the buttons.  Here they are -- leaves!  I'm thinking about putting one more button on and making a hidden i-cord for a buttonhole, because my instinct when I put on this sweater is to button it up higher so it feels cozier.  Since I actually bought seven buttons (for five buttonholes--whoops), I may add a completely useless button above the one I'm thinking of adding for increased coziness, just as a fun design detail and so I don't lose that extra button.

Thoughts?

Fireside Details

It occurs to me that the only picture of the finished(ish) Fireside Sweater that I've put on here was from relatively far away.  Here's a closer picture, although it's from before I put on the buttons.

And I neglected to post pictures of the fabulous back cables that I totally made up all by myself.  So here you go.














Here's a close-up of the upper back cable and the fabulous Kitchenered-cable neck.

Intro to Fireside

A couple of friends and I decided this spring to do a cabled sweater as a knit-along.  Not a big deal, nothing formal, just a "hey, let's each knit the same sweater pattern and see how the finished products come out different" experiment.  I'm not quite sure how we settled on the Fireside Sweater (Rav link), because I came late to this game, but I appreciated not having to participate in a lengthy deliberation process.  All I had to do was grab some Lamb's Pride Worsted from my stash and get to work.

Fireside is a gorgeous cabled concoction with a sumptuous collar.  Turns out, though, that the pattern's a bit of a mess.  It's just not very well-written (it's clearly-written, but not well-thought-out in a few places) and I'm very glad that I spent a good bit of time on Ravelry reading about the ways other knitters had modified the pattern.  For one thing, this is the designer's first pattern.  Or first sweater pattern, maybe.  Anyway, there's a hint of not-knowing-what-she's-doing to it.

This not-knowing-what-she's-doing is most clear in the way she has written the upsizing: the designer happens to fit a size XS, and she made the sweater for herself... but her solution to upsizing was to add extra inches of reverse-stockinette between cables and cable-panels.  So for those of us who are not size XS, the extra "empty" space simply makes the cabling look sparse -- so the bigger you are, the farther-apart the panels are... that is, the wider you are, the wider you look.  (And seriously?  I'm knitting a size medium.  I can't imagine how an XL sweater would look, but it seems like there'd be more reverse-stockinette than cables.)  This is particularly an issue for the back of the sweater, which has a giant swath of rev-st that's just supposed to get wider the wider you are.  Not flattering!  It looks like everyone who's bigger than an XS has modified the sweater somehow to deal with this issue.  Most of the good mods I've seen are either additions of cables in the places that called for wide swaths of reverse-stockinette, or an increase in the size of the original cable panels.  I'm doing the former, adding cables in the center back and on the sides.

I added this cable in the center back at the bottom.

There will be a complimentary one at the top, too, when I get that far.

I also decided to knit the sweater in one piece rather than in two front panels and a back.  I'm more likely to finish it that way.  We all know that.  So I added cables on the sides under the arms where a seam would have gone, partly to fill up the reverse-stockinette space, and partly to add some of the structure a seam would have provided.  I've got a little i-cord edging happening on the front panels, too.  It looks a little funny right now, but once I block the whole thing I think it'll work out.

So far I've got a body and two sleeves -- up to the point where I'd join them to knit a yoke and do it all in one piece, but I think I am going to sew the sleeves on as written.  I've got to knit in inch or so more of the body before attaching the sleeves and attempting to, but I wanted to get the sleeves done first so I could figure it all out, and I'm glad I did because it turns out I had to modify the sleeves even more than the body (thanks to the poorly-thought-out upsizing, if I'd knitted the sleeves as written they would have been suuuuuper wide)... and, well, I think these decisions are good fodder for a future post.  Stay tuned to find out what I decide.

Mitts for Jamie

I made mittens for my neighbor DSB, and quickly realized I needed to make something for his girlfriend Jamie, as well. They are sweethearts, and it's a little weird to give Ben "thank-you mittens" but not give Jamie something -- as they BOTH care for our cat when we're away. But I did need to come up with something fairly quickly, as I don't want to run into Christmas and have them feel obligated to give us a gift in return.



Fortunately, I found two balls of gorgeous-aubergine Jo Sharp Silkroad Aran Tweed in the sale bin at a LYS, and although I really like this yarn and wanted to make something for myself with it, I also knew that this was the perfect color and tweedy-delicious texture for fingerless mitts for Jamie. She's a hardcore gardener and actual florist (I would say her nascent floral business is "budding," but that's just too much), and fingerless mitts will be just the thing for keeping her hands and wrists a bit warmer while still being able to dig in the dirt.

Also, she has a pretty rockin' floaty-girly-layers personal style, and some sweet cabled mitts will fit in perfectly. So I found the free pattern Natalya on Ravelry, and cast-on Monday night... and finished on Wednesday. Perfect.

I plan to deliver both pairs of thank-you mittens today. The wind has picked up quite miserably, so I have no desire to leave the house, but fortunately, they just live around the corner. After I deliver them, I'll re-cozy-fy myself with a nice cup of hot chocolate, and figure out what I'm going to knit next.

Good Cable, Bad Cable

See this cable here? The one my finger is pointing to?

You wouldn't know it unless I told you, but that is a mis-crossed cable. The cable that's crossed over the top is supposed to be underneath, and vice versa.

Oh, and it's two rows down.

I mis-crossed this cable on all 20 pattern repeats. Because I'm awesome. Sigh.

Rather than rip out several rows of cabling, thereby risking untold numbers of dropped stitches and losing my place in the chart (there were 400-some stitches per row at this point!), I decided that it would be better to do a micro-fix of each mis-crossed cable. First I took out the four stitches above the mis-cross, and dropped down to where the cable-crossing actually happened.


Using an extra DPN of the same size as my main needles, I picked up the four offending stitches and crossed them correctly, then (using a second extra DPN) re-knit the next stitches up one-by-one, very carefully.




Then I continued knitting along until I got to the next spot where I needed to drop stitches and start over. I did this on all 20 mis-crossed cables, so my Tangled Yoke came out perfectly. (The misadventures along the way are half the fun of the knitting, right?)


Et voilà! A correctly crossed cable!

My Tangled Yoke Cardigan has now made public appearances in both DC and Vermont. If by "public" you mean "a friend's living room." I have yet to get someone to take an actual picture of me wearing the darn thing, though. Still, it has been OOHed and AAHed over appropriately, so I ain't complainin'. I have a nasty head cold right now, so it's not like I'm really out and about anyway.

WIP Wednesday: Tangled Yoke Cardigan

The "WIP Wednesday" thing is a bit gimmicky, but whatever.

I bought a giant cone of anonymous wool sport/DK-weight yarn at Vermont Sheep and Wool this September, $15 for 2250 yards! It's brown with a gray halo, well-spun (2-ply) but not thoroughly washed, so full of lanolin. I think I like that, but it's a little bit weird to have two lightly-waxed fingertips on each hand.

Usually when I buy yarn, I sometimes have a vague idea of what I want to do with it.... but I'm not one of those people who has the self-discipline to buy specific yarn for a specific project and that's it. I buy stash yarn, and then knit from my stash. But with this yarn, I knew exactly what it was for: the Tangled Yoke Cardigan from Fall 2007 Interweave Knits.

I began working on a sleeve during a three-day conference/continuing-ed retreat at the end of September, and got about 8 inches done. Perfect gauge, first try, no fiddling at all. Love it. I also love going to three-day-long meetings where it’s okay to knit and learn things at the same time. The world needs to be like that more often. I also went to Boston the next week for an overnight and did a bit of subway knitting while I was there.

I made little progress until the end of October/beginning of November, when an unexpected family funeral gave me two five-hour-or-so plane rides to fill, and I got both sleeves done and the first couple of inches of the body started.

Then I took a month-and-a-half break. I had a couple of smaller projects I needed/wanted to do for Christmas (like socks), and Christmas is generally a busy time for pastors anyway. BUT... two days after Christmas, I was back at it. I spent several days knitting seriously (particularly New Years Eve and Day, when we watched three or four movies in a row and I didn't change out of my pjs that whole time), and within the first week of the new year I had the body done, the sleeves attached, and about 2" of yoke completed.

And this is where I had to admit to myself that, well, the cable chart looks kind of scary. I wanted to do a more challenging cable than I'd done before, but still. I was feeling a bit nervous. I'm also well aware that looks can be deceiving when it comes to knitting, and the chart's bark was probably worse than its bite. I was intimidated, but figured I'd just have to get over it.

I was right.

Something wasn't right in my counting in the decrease row, so the set-up row of the chart took me forever. I had to keep ripping and reknitting these two rows several times -- two Gene Kelley/Fred Astaire movies back-to-back, and all I had to show for my time was those two rows. But they are well-done rows, let me tell you! And I figured out that all the WS rows of the chart are just plain-ol' purl-back rows. I was WAY less worried about this cable when I realized that. Hello.

I set a goal of knitting up one RS chart row and its purl-back WS row every day. Since each row is 300-400-some stitches, that's still quite a lot of knitting.

I'm currently ahead of my goal, because I did four or five rows while watching the Golden Globes on Sunday night. But I had to stop for the night when the muscles in my hands really started to ache -- too much holding-tight-while-cabling! First time that's ever happened, but it's really not surprising. I put the heating pad on my lap and my hands on the pad, and then the cat sat on my hands for a while. Fun! Then I went to bed, and when I woke up my hands felt fine. No worries.

So now I'm about halfway through the cable, and have realized that there's nothing in this chart that is scary at all. I'm so not intimidated by this cable anymore, and that was the point of tackling this project! Well, that and getting a new sweater.


Oh! I also kitchenered the underarm seams already, so I don't have to deal with that later. Also so I could avoid the cable chart for one more night, which I was fully capable of admitting to myself and to Husband. Doing the underarm seams early has the added benefit of making it easier to try on the sweater in progress. Yes, this photo is terribly unflattering. I'm okay with that. Like my cloud pjs?

PIDGE!

I hope your Christmas was lovely. Mine was pretty great, complete with successful Christmas Eve services, a delicious oyster omelet on Christmas morning, great presents from Santa (gold eyeliner! Just what I've always wanted! Santa reads Vogue, you know.), and dogsitting my sister's awesome dog for nine days. Hilarous photo of the dog in front of the Christmas tree will happen sometime after I get the file off of my phone and onto the computer.


I've had some pretty strong urges toward Startitis lately. While knitting the Cloud Socks, I also made a pidge in two days out of some lovely Blue Sky Alpaca Super-Bulky Hand Dyed wool that I bought at the Kaleidoscope Yarns Anniversary Sale this summer. Gorgeous slightly-irregular blue.

What is a pidge, you ask? I definitely had to ask. I'm glad I did, because "pidge" is now my new vocabulary word for the winter. I thought I knew about most items of clothing, but a pidge is something new. It may be a New England thing, I'm not yet sure. Anyway...

A pidge is kind of a cross between a cowl and a scarf. It's a rectangular, like a scarf, but so short that it has to be buttoned around your neck, close like a cowl would be (except that a cowl is cylindrical). My friend Aubrey-who-never-updates-her-blog-anymore introduced me to the concept, and now I am seeing pidges everywhere I go. LOVE the pidge! (Also, "pidge" is fun to say. Pidge pidge pidge!)

There is a kitty in this picture. He's yawning, which is pretty funny. Also, Husband likes to take pictures of ME rather than pictures of the hand-knits, so...yeah.

I modified the GC Cowl pattern (Rav link), and used some hand-turned buttons that I bought at the Vermont Sheep and Wool Festival this fall. I crocheted little button loops so as not to have to figure out how to put a buttonhole inside the cable. I was knitting with super-bulky yarn on too-short metal needles, and that was irritating enough without trying to make vertical buttonholes inside a cable in addition.

Oooh, pretty buttons.

The finished pidge used two skeins plus about two yards of a third skein of the Blue Sky. It's seriously irritating to graft on a new skein just so you can finish the bind-off row.

I've wet-blocked the pidge once already, and it's still fairly curly. I may wet-block a second time and actually pin it a little bit stretched-out, or I may just let it go.

PIDGE!