"Assembling sweaters correctly is tedious monotonous work. If the work is done in a hurry you can easily ruin an otherwise beautiful sweater...."

-Gertrude Taylor, America's Knitting Book, 1968

Ms Taylor is a firm and exacting teacher, not exactly Knitting Without Tears (which may explain the wild popularity of Elizabeth Zimmerman when she hit the scene). But Ms Taylor is also often right.


Sigh.... Finishing.... I don't mind weaving in ends, though there often seem to be more of them than can logically be accounted for. Weaving in is rather soothingly boring as long as I'm patient about it. I can do a decent vertical seam in mattress stitch without thinking about it too much. But setting in sleeves is nerve wracking, even little sleeves.

I mark the center stitch on the sleeve and match it to the shoulder join. I whip stitch baste the sleeve top to the armhole edge.






I mattress stitch the two pieces together.





And darned if nine times out of ten I don't end up picking out some or all of it, because even with the basting I've eased too little or too much.




Sometimes I just say "the heck with it" and backstitch from the inside. For some reason, I find matching the pieces simpler that way. But it's a bulkier seam, and less elastic, so it's a trade off.

*************************

Back to the "have/haven't done" meme

I have done mittens from the cuff up and Norwegian knitting.

The sweater is a very basic "Louse Coat". I made it with yarn and a pattern that my Mom brought me from her first trip to Norway (she asked what I wanted....). The pattern was in Norwegian, but that didn't really matter, because it was pretty fully charted, and I had books* that described the construction and assembly techniques.

I charted out the mittens myself from pattern graphs in some of the same books. The green and white pair are an object lesson in "color dominance" in stranded knitting. It wasn't until I finished the second mitten that I realised I had carried the green with my left hand on one mitten and with the right hand on the other. I have craftily laid them out in the photo so this is not quite so obvious, but if you put them next to each other right side up, it's pretty blatant. On the other hand, I don't think anyone has ever looked closely enough at my hands to notice when I've actually worn them.

* Books

Dale Yarn Company; Knit Your Own Norwegian Sweaters

Gibson-Roberts, Priscilla A.; Knitting in the Old Way

Lind, Vibeke; Knitting in the Nordic Tradition

McGregor, Sheila; The Complete Book of Tradition Scandinavian Knitting

Pagoldh, Susanne; Nordic Knitting

and of course Zimmerman, Elizabeth; Knitting Without Tears and A Knitters Almanac

Despite this wealth of source material, I do rather find myself craving a new book that just showed up on the Knit Picks site: Selbuvotter (The name just means Selbu Mittens) (and Selbu is the district they come from) by Terri Shea.

Edited to add: Oh yeah, I've never knit mittens from the top down, but I'm not ruling it out.

Childhood Sweets (of several sorts)

The May blog-along theme at Blogger's Paradise is "memories of sweets you loved as a child". The intended meaning of "sweets", for us non-Brits, is candy, so that's where I'll start. I don't remember the name of one of my favorites, but it consisted of little tiny wax bottles that were filled with brightly colored, extremely sweet liquid. You bit off the top and sipped out the liquid. Then I, at any rate, chewed on the wax for a while - not quite gum, but part of the experience. In my memory the little bottles were shaped just like a Coke bottle (this was before soda pop came in cans), and came in a tiny version of the cardboard six packs that held the real thing. Maybe I'm just imagining this, though. At any rate I do remember that a large part of the appeal was the miniature nature of the little bottles. On the other hand, the wax must have been a draw, too, because another favorite "sweet" was the wax lips that appeared in the Ben Franklin every year a couple of weeks before Halloween. You wore them clamped between your own lips for a while, then again chewed them like gum. They smelled wonderful to me, and tasted almost as good as they smelled. Of course I also chewed on birthday candles, and occasionally took I bite out of the bar of paraffin my Mom kept in the kitchen (presumably for topping jelly jars, though I don't recall her ever making jelly). Hmmm, as I write, I'm starting to sound to myself like a strange child with a wax fixation.

**********************

Another sort of "sweet" I adored as a child was the scent of lilacs. There was a hedge of five or six bushes along one side of our back yard.

I do believe the lilac bush was one of the major reasons we bought this house. Right now, I have all the windows at the back of the house open, and the scent gusts in with the breeze. Heaven can wait.

****************************

Stretching the definition even further, to pull in at least a little knitting content, I'm thinking the third baby blanket is looking rather sweet if I do say so myself.

I have a passion for tulips. Even in a good year, it is a dilemma whether to cut some and bring them into the house or leave them alone for full outdoor display. This year, with the lengthy late freeze followed by heavy rain, the "display" is sadly reduced. Should I let the poor stragglers be, or still bring some in? I decided to cut at least a few, because 1) between the weather and the knitting project, I'm not getting a lot of time outside and 2) part of what I love about tulips is the way they slowly and subtly transform in shape and color. When I have a vase of them in a spot I pass many times a day I can watch the transformation. So this morning I raided the yard, going mostly for stems that were already pushed down so low the flowers hardly showed from any distance.




Speaking of the knitting project, I have finished the first set (sweater/blanket/bonnet) and have started on the second.



Someday soon, I would like to use this stitch pattern on socks. In fingering/sock weight I could just fit four repeats around. And while I'm thinking of socks, does anyone know of a good source for solid colored sock yarn (the standard wool/nylon blend) in a wide range of colors, including brights?

Last night we watched the Masterpiece Theater version of The Wind in the Willows. I kept trying to really like it, but in the end was just disappointed and sad. It was if someone had said to a child, "This is a rose" and handed her a very well made plastic flower. The production was sprightly, well done in its way and completely without the subtlety and lyricism of the original. I don't know that it's entirely the producers fault. I'm not sure that the original is translatable to the screen. Possibly with animation of a painterly sort. I would like to see the folks who produced The Snowman give it a try.

*********************
On the other hand, I was quite delighted with the Knit Picks catalog that arrived this week. It focuses on lace, and the things I like about it are:

It has pictures of projects from several books, worked of course, in their own yarns. I like seeing the garments on a "real person" type model (meaning someone closer to my size than to a size 0).

It has a good tutorial on knitting lace from charts. I'm a confirmed chart user myself, and believe it offers real advantages to the lace knitter, but from discussions on some of the forums this seems to be a stumbling block for a number of new lace knitters. So it's good to see the basics nicely laid out, with a free charted pattern for a little lace purse for practice.

There is also a tutorial on dyeing a lace scarf in graduated color, something I have thought about doing myself (the dyeing, not writing up the tutorial), and an overview of different blocking methods, including a link to a page on their website with instructions for building a blocking frame. Not being handy with tools myself, I won't be attempting this one, but maybe Mr S......

(Personal disclaimer: I was also excited beyond measure to see I Can't Believe I'm Knitting Socks appear in the book section.)

***********************
Speaking of lace, I'm using Little Leaf Stripe in the first of the baby sets and I'm reminded again what a very good beginning lace pattern this is. It's quite pretty, very easy (only two pattern rows) and uses/demonstrates three basic decreases.



So an idea I will file away for future reference: scarf pattern with variations - just Little Leaf Stripe, LLS with wide border at each end, LLS with knit on narrow border all the way around.

What I will be doing

Two big boxes of yarn have arrived. I will be busy for the next month and a half writing patterns and knitting models for 3 baby sets (cardigans, bonnets & blankets). I've done one hat and started in on the first of the cardigans. These are due at the end of May, so I have enough time, but no time to waste. The first challenge was grading the little sweater to fit 3 sizes while maintaining the Little Leaf Stripe pattern. I think I have that licked, but I'm never really confident until I have actually knit the item.

*******************

We have had hard freezes the last two nights, and the poor tulip leaves, which were so flourishing, have been flattened. I still have hope that they may recover. I've learned after all these years that Spring in Wisconsin is never a steady progress, and also learned to accept what comes. If the tulips don't make it, there will be the peonies and early daylilies a little farther on. Still, I've got my fingers crossed.

*******************

In the meantime, Happy Easter.

swatch til you're crosseyed

That's how I'm feeling right now.

It's too cold to go out if I can help it, so the last two days have been spent adding to the pile o' swatches. Funny how often something that looks good in your head, or even on paper, doesn't always work out right when translated into actual yarn. Well, there's something a little head-clearing about ripping out six inches of work. The pile would have been bigger if I hadn't done so much ripping.



The company I want to submit the design proposal to has specified yarn that is easily available from the large craft/hobby/fabric stores. So I picked acrylic yarns from three different makers. All of the labels say 22 sts + 4 inches. Not surprisingly they are all slightly different thicknesses, not to mention different textures. Well, they are all essentially smooth yarns, but one is a sort of fluffy smooth, one mid-range, and one downright slick. Which is to say that the "recommended gauge" on yarn labels is more of a broad suggestion based on a chart somewhere, than something any real person sat down and figured out with needles in hand. So there were the initial plain stockinette gauge swatches, not necessarily to try to match the labels with 100% accuracy, but to find what works for me.

Then I started playing around with motifs. The general idea here is to come up with three baby blankets with coordinating sweaters and hats, using lace/eyelet stitches. I have sketches for concepts. Swatching is one way to decide that certain concepts aren't workable. It is also a good way to get ideas to replace those unworkables. It's like making sketches before slapping paint on a full sized canvas. At least one of the sets is going to be quite different from my original scrawl.

But darn, it's a slow process.

What's Up?

On Sunday morning I drove up to Madison for brunch with my lovely daughter. She's working two jobs these days, so we fit it in before she had to head out to the bookstore. Her company is always a treat. After we ate, we headed over to Jo Ann's Fabrics where I picked up



a pile o' baby yarn, which led to Monday's work on



the beginning of a pile o' swatches (displayed against the Kerry Blue shawl which has reverted pretty much to it's pre-blocking dimensions).

No, I haven't got anyone near and dear expecting. I'm going to try to work on some design proposals.