Mother of All Romance Novels

Whoo Hoo! Jane Eyre on PBS last night. I'm loving it. Of course, every filming of a favorite book has to bear comparison with one's own mental images. In this one some of the childhood scenes were a little more visually lurid than Yorkshire grim. But that's minor. And there is definitely chemistry between Jane and Mr. Rochester.....

But on to knitting. I'm so excited that Mmario modified the Progressive for a square shawl, and it came out just beautifully. With his permission, I'm sharing his picture.



Now he's working on a circular version. I can hardly wait.

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Christine asked if there is a way to modify the Tiger, Tiger to be done without grafting. Well, yes and no, I guess. The Tiger Eye pattern is highly directional, and I wanted both ends to match, hence the grafting. As Calamintha mentioned, it's possible to start in the middle with a provisional cast on and worked outwards, but in this case that would have changed the "flow" of the pattern. A real challenge would be to try to work the Tiger Eye from top to bottom so I could do that. My mind boggles a little at the thought of attempting it, but it would be a good design exercise.

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While I was down at the Argyle Fiber Mill picking up some nice alpaca yarn for a scarf, Elizabeth mentioned that she is interested in carrying knitting patterns by local/regional designers. If you are a Wisconsin, or even upper Midwest designer with patterns in hard copy format you might want to contact her.

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Also want to mention that on his blog, Mmario has a really nifty summary of various ways to shape shawls (and there are a lot).

And now that I'm on useful bits of information -

Marie has shared her technique for working cables without a cable needle. You have to scroll down a bit, but that will give you a chance to see her really pretty dayflower washcloth.

Fleegle has a different take on a provisional cast on. It looks rather brilliant to me, but I haven't actually tried it yet (on my "to do very soon" list)

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That's all for now. I have to go wind some alpaca.

And So It Begins,

the new year, that is.

New Year's Day was sunny (an amazing mood lifter) and began auspiciously with a first visit to friends who have recently moved to Madison. We got to see the house, which is charming, and more importantly, their grown children and beautiful new granddaughter. Marty made one of his specialties, split pea soup, which isn't quite Hoppin' John, but I figure it's close enough thematically (legumes & pork) to qualify for New Year's good luck. The ham came from a pig naturally raised not a mile from our house by someone I know. Not good luck for the pig, but a good break from the corporate food distribution system.

I don't usually make resolutions, but this year I'm setting a goal of completing four projects for organizations mentioned in Knitting for Peace that I haven't already contributed to. (Anything I knit for groups I have given to in the past will be gravy.) With a further goal of making said projects with material from the stash.

Today, the second and also sunny day of the year, I swatched some more on the Latvian project.




No, I didn't do all of that today. Just several rounds. The first swatch (yellow and white) was done on size 1 needles. It was a little too loose for my taste. It would be OK for a sweater, but I think mittens will be warmer if a little tighter. So the second swatch is on 0's. I think I'll felt the first one and turn it into a catnip toy.

While doing the scalloped bit at the beginning I discovered that it is really hard for me to knit tightly while working a pattern with yarn overs, especially on the first few rounds. This is going to take some concentration, and probably practice, before I launch into the actual item. I may switch to raised increases to tighten it up.

72 stitches gave a good size for a mitten. What I really want is fingerless mitts, which should fit more closely. I could use fewer stitches, but 72 is such a good number for fitting in patterns: multiples of 2,3,4,6, 8, 9 & 12. Will have to think on this for a bit....

Socks would also be an option, and they would be beautifully warm. But 1) the Palette yarn is not tightly twisted and has no nylon, so I don't know how well they would wear and 2) it's not machine washable.

Finally, I have put the pattern for the Progressive Shawl up on eBay. I'll setting up a link here for the pdf down-loadable version soon.

Odds and Ends

I've added a new link in the sidebar to my free pattern for Not Really Cable Socks. This used to live at the About.com knitting site, but disappeared from there when the old moderator left.

Mmario finished his test knit of the Progressive Shawl. Here's his pic of the finished results, pre blocking.


Ethereal, no? I will launch the pattern for sale (via this blog and maybe eBay) in January.

I found a new Jane Austen quote, and have added it the the comments in Literary Knit-erary.

Last item finished before Christmas. Wool Ease Thick and Quick, k1, p1 rib. Very fast knit. It's for the Red Scarf Project, of course.

And since yesterday was clip art sample day...




This One's for CatBookMom

Ta Da!

Well, here's the Progressive Shawl in all its glory.....

Initial Evaluation

OK, the Progressive Shawl is on pins and wires, and I have a chance to do a first evaluation. (The second will come after it's dry.)

First off, this baby is really big, too big for the bed. Wish I had those foam insulation boards that I couldn't fit into the car. One corner is pinned to the side of the mattress. Don't know what sort of weirdness, if any, this will produce. But big is OK .

There is only one glaring (to me) knitting error where the edging was knit on. You can't really see it in this picture. I could do a close up, but naaah.



As I suspected, the pick up ratio for the border could be improved. Just off the needles the garter center bulged noticeably in relation to the stockinette inner border. I've tried to compensate in blocking. It looks OK now, but I have the border stretched pretty hard, and I "hae me dooots" about how it will behave when the pins come out.

(Note to self: What if I had picked up at the same ratio, worked the first rows in plain garter with a few judicious increases before beginning inner border pattern?)

The texture contrast between the stockinette and the garter based portions of the border is less striking than I had hoped. On the other hand, the garter based pattern opened up very nicely.



Those double yarn overs in the edging really
opened up

The narrow edging along the top is either a series of really little points or a biggish picot, depending how you look at it. If I were doing it over I still might opt for a single repeat of faggoting with a smooth edge.

Hope this is dry before bedtime. If the sun is out tomorrow I'll get DH to take a shot of me in the classic "triangle shawl shot from the back with arms extended" pose.

Home Stretch

I've finished the outside edging on the Progressive Shawl, and now I'm working my way across the top.


This is going pretty quickly because it's a very narrow edge. I just wanted a little something to visually tie the different sections of the shawl together.

I'm not quite sure about where to block it. I have to block in a room that can be closed off, on account of the cats. Both of them like to sit on wet wool, but an even more serious concern is Baxter's obsession with pulling out pins. I have no idea why, but he takes them between his teeth and pulls them out. Pearl headed, T pins, it doesn't matter, he pulls them out. And while I haven't yet seen him try to eat one, this doesn't seem like a particularly safe form of amusement.

So blocking is best done behind closed doors. The sunroom is good for smaller objects because it's carpeted, all I have to do is lay a clean sheet on the floor. But the available floor space there isn't big enough. The bed is big enough, and would be my first choice if the project were lace weight. But I'm not sure this fingering/sport weight yarn will dry in the course of a day, which could make sleeping inconvenient. Maybe if I set up fans... The floor in what I still think of as Abbie's room, even though she has her own apartment now, would be ideal except that it's hardwood. Maybe it's time for me to get ahold of some foam core boards that I could use in there. I'm headed to Madison tomorrow. I just might add a stop at Home Depot to my list.

Rounding the Bend

As I was working the Progressive Shawl edging around the bottom point I added in some extra "ease". For roughly two pattern repeats just before and after the corner, I ended every other incoming row with K1 instead of the K2tog that would join it to the edge. I say "roughly" because, kiddos, I was winging it here. I didn't chart it out, and I didn't write down exactly how many times I did this on each side of the point. I'm hoping the blocking fudge factor godesses will be good to me.

If I ever get to the point of writing the pattern up, I'll have to be more precise. But if I go there, I think I'll be changing the pick up ratio for the border. The garter center is a little scrunched where it joins the stockinette based border. I'm still reserving final judgement until after blocking. But if my suspicions prove to be well founded, and the border numbers have to change, there no point in calculating an absolutely precise edging repeat here. (That's my story and I'm sticking to it.)

The Long Haul

I have started knitting on the edging for the Progressive Lace shawl, a process that always takes longer than one might think. But I have always had a fondness for edgings, attached or otherwise. Maybe it's because a little edging from the old "Workbasket" magazine is what really hooked me on lace knitting.



This one is not an original creation. I'm working from Sharon Miller's chart, but it's an old standard, and not complex, (so much for the shawl theme), though I suppose I could argue that it introduces the techniques of working with double yarn overs and knitting on.

I'll use this around the side edges. For the top (remember all those stitches waiting on the holder?), I'll use something very narrow, possibly just a single repeat of faggoting. I'll have time to think about it as I work my way around.

Onward and Outward

Well, as might be expected, progress on the Progressive Shawl is slowing as the rows get longer.



For this section, I switched back to a garter ground for two reasons 1) I hate working decreases in purl and 2) I thought it would give some textural interest and also make a visual reference back to the garter center. At this point I'm withholding final aesthetic judgment until it's blocked.

When I added the most recent ball of yarn I tried the join describe by Sharon Miller in "Heirloom Knitting". Basically, you tie a square knot leaving long tails, split the plies on the tails and cut off 1/2 the strands for each tail, twist the remaining strands around the working yarn and just knit them in. This is really intended to be used on a finer yarn, but the result was better than I anticipated even with this one. BTW, for some real eye candy, lace beyond my wildest aspirations, check out http://www.heirloom-knitting.co.uk (Sharon's website).

Anyway, this puppy is starting to get pretty big. I have a few more rows of this section to finish, and then it's on to the edging.

Border Patrol

In the middle of one night
Miss Clavel turned on her light
and said, "Something is not right!"
Ludwig Bemelmans, " Madeline"

If, while you are in the middle of a lace project, a similar feeling assails you: stop, do not pass go, drop everything and find out where the something went wrong. Because that feeling is always right. There's a mistake in there, and the sooner it's found and defeated, the better for all concerned. So count those stitches on the wrong side rows, learn to recognize the center point of each motif, beware of wily ring markers sliding through the middle of a stitch and coming up on the other side.



This is the border for the Progressive Shawl up to Row48. Row 39 was where I reached my personal "Honey, if you talk to me now I will kill you" level. That point might come somewhere else for you, dear reader. We all have our limits, but they vary. At any rate, I think I can fairly claim to be fulfilling my intention of having the shawl become more challenging as it progresses.
Row 44-48, however, were like butter, a piece of cake, a little breather before working pattern stitches every row. I'm going back to a garter ground, though. I'm not a total masochist.

Opening Gambit

The shawl border is starting out with repeats of Razor Shell (surprise) alternating with a plain stockinette ground. See? easy so far.



Now that Razor Shell is going to transition into a frame for something a little fancier.



I narrowed it down to one column of eyelets and positioned a Shetland Madeira motif between columns. Now it's going to widen out again, but not as Razor Shell. We're getting a little more complex here, but still not too bad. After all, at this point every wrong side row is still plain old purl.

"The sun did not shine.
It was too wet to play.
So we sat in the house
all that cold, cold wet day."
Dr. Seuss, The Cat in the Hat

These last few days have been of the damp and dreary autumnal sort. (There's promise of sunshine later today, but we'll wait and see....)

"We sat in the house.
We sat there we two,
And we said 'How we wish
We had something to do."

Unlike Sally and the unnamed narrator, I do have something to do. The garter center of the Progressive Shawl is done. I have placed the live stitches on some waste yarn for now (I'll knit an edging onto them after the border is done.)

I'm picking up stitches for the base of the border from those little yo loops. I am pleased and gratified to say that the formula I came up with worked. "How wide do I have to work the center section to end up with 50 loops on each side? Hmmm.....Let's try: (x-1)/2 = y, where x is the number of stitches on the needle and y is the number of loops per side. Eureka!" This works when you start with an odd number of stitches. I haven't attempted it with an even number.



If you try to do this at home, take note. The loops at the corners sort of stretch out and can be hard to see, but they are there. Also, I had to pick up thru the very first loop purlwise so as not to undo the last stitch on the holder thread. All the rest I picked up normally. If I had broken off the working thread between the end of the last knit row and the beginning of the pick ups, I could have done them all normally, but who needs more loose ends to work in?

In the meantime, in- between-time, I've decided the border pattern needs to be a bit wider, so: graph, swatch, mutter, rip, graph, swatch.....

Mittens, Meatball Geometry

MITTENS

I take back what I said about "Latvian Mittens" being overpriced. It's a fairly skinny book, but the color plates are worth it. There are over eighty mittens pictured (with black and white graphs for the motifs), and it is fascinating to see pattern and technique relationships with mittens from the Scandinavian and Baltic countries. One motif is the same as a design described as Swedish in an old Nomis booklet. Another (not surprisingly) can be found in Nancy Bush's Estonian collection. Several are almost exact matches to charts for Norwegian mitten patterns in Sheila McGregor, and I am sure another is a match to one from Gotland. (Now I want to haul out all those books and start close comparisons.) Fascinating, and beautiful. Not to mention impressive in the fine yarn/tight gauge used, and the fearless use of more than two colors per row. (I can knit with one color in each hand, but haven't mastered adding in a third.)

MEATBALL GEOMETRY

I've used up one ball of yarn on the shawl center, and so far it measures about 13" from the lower point to the top edge. How large can I make the entire shawl?



Fuzzy photo. I have a lovely scan, but can't get it to upload.

I used this little graph to do a rough calculation (wish I could remember what book I found the concept in). If one ball of yarn gets me one triangle's worth, 9 balls of yarn will get me a piece three times as long from bottom point to upper edge (red dotted line), which would be about 39". Sounds OK.

Of course, the garter center section won't be that big. In fact, what I have right now is almost large enough to fit the border as planned. I just figure the border and edging patterns won't eat up any more yarn per square inch than garter does.

Starting the Center - Progressive Shawl

Remember that this shawl is supposed to progress from easier to harder?

Well, my head is starting to hurt from "the math", so to give it a break I'm starting in for real on the easy garter stitch center section. This will also help me guesstimate just how far those 10 balls of yarn might be expected to go.




I'm doing my increases by making a yarn over at the beginning of each row. On the following row I knit into the back of the yarn over to open it up a bit (a trick picked up from Sharon Miller's "Heirloom Knitting"). When it comes time, I'll pick up stitches for the border from the loops. This gives a lighter, lacier join than just picking up from a plain garter edge.

Notice the little knitter's safety pin hanging from the bottom? I put it there to mark and hold the center stitch of my cast on. This will be very important later when I'm picking up those border stitches, because when you're working along and get to that bottom tip it can be really, really hard to tell which yarn over ends the one side and which yarn over begins the other. Besides, I think I will want to pick up a couple of extra stitches there to help ease things around the corner.

Knitter's (or coilless) safety pins are some of my very favorite, wouldn't want to do without, doodads. Good for all kinds of marking and even "basting" seams for sewing. But in this case you could substitute a split ring marker, or a length of contrasting yarn, or even a paper clip.

Shawl progress

The basic idea on this one is that it will progress from easier to more complex. So the center will be plain garter, and the first design challenge will be the border pattern.

Sketch, graph, swatch...fiddle with graph, swatch.



I think I have a basic border pattern down. Now about the corners.....
More charting (good thing I really do like graph paper)



What we're trying to do here is figure out where the cutoff for the corner will look best, and where to place the pattern repeat, and how many stitches I will need to pick up, so I know how big to make the center.

I think I'm almost there.

PROGRESSIVE SHAWL Original Knitting Pattern

This pattern is under revision and not currently available.

Errata (in progress) may be found here

I've called this Cindy Knits Original triangle shawl "Progressive" because it is designed to progress from easier to more challenging knitting as it grows. Some lace/shawl knitting experience recommended.

The center triangle is worked first in simple garter stitch. Then wide borders are worked on picked up stitches. The inner border is stockinette based, with patterning worked only on the right side rows. Patterning on both right and wrong side rows is introduced for the garter based outer border section. Then an edging incorporating double yarn overs is knit on to the sides as it is worked. Finally, a narrow knit on edging finishes the top.

The sample in the photo was worked with approximately 820 yds/750 meters of heavy fingering/light sport weight yarn on size 8/5mm needles, and blocked to a finished size of 81" across the top and 41" from top to the bottom point. A smaller, shoulder type shawl could be made with finer yarn and smaller needles.

The 11 page pattern gives written row by row directions and includes charts for the border and edgings. It will come as an instantly down-loadable pdf file (you will need Adobe Reader to open it.)

Price $5.00