An Inspirational Pattern

This was supposed to be a post for Knitting and Crochet Blog Week, back in April/May, but because we were on holiday, I didn't manage to get most of the posts for the week finished.  For An Inspirational Pattern, I was planning to write about a project that I was then about to start, and had a very preliminary draft written. Now that I have got quite a bit of it knitted, I should update the draft and post it.

The brief for the post was:
Blog about a pattern or project which you aspire to. Whether it happens to be because the skills needed are ones which you have not yet acquired, or just because it seems like a huge undertaking of time and dedication, most people feel they still have something to aspire to in their craft. If you don’t feel like you have any left of the mountain of learning yet to climb, say so!

The background:  A while ago, I was in Richmond-on-Thames and happened on the Margaret Howell shop.  She is a designer whose clothes I really like when I have seen them featured in magazines, though way beyond my price range.  So I went in to take a look (no harm in just looking).  There were also a few of Marion Foale's  hand-knits in the shop - as readers will know, I am a great fan of her designs.  They were amazing - so well-made, in very fine cotton or wool, beautifully detailed.  They  had wonderful subtle shaping - lines of increases and decreases forming a kind of knitted dart.    I have read a couple of recent interviews with Marion Foale since then - for instance she did one for Rowan magazine, that describes how she designs this tailored knitwear by making it in jersey fabric first.

Fontaine

When I got back home, I searched the internet for patterns for any Marion Foale designs similar to those in the shop.  She has produced a few designs in recent years for Rowan, and two, Veronica and Fontaine,  were featured in the Rowan's Greatest Knits book.  Those two were jackets, though, and I wanted something a bit lighter - though I think Fontaine might be a future project.  It seems that Marion Foale did at one time sell patterns via a now-discontinued web site.  There were also tantalising mentions on various sites, message boards, discussions groups, etc. of patterns for Good Housekeeping, Woman's Weekly and other magazines, but none easily locatable.

But then...  someone left a Woman's Weekly Knitting Special magazine in my local yarn shop, and there on the cover was a photo of what looked like possibly a Marion Foale design - and it was!  (I must admit that I would not normally look at Woman's Weekly.  My Grandma used to read it back in the days when the front cover was printed in blue and peach, so it has a very old-fashioned image to me.  And then of course there's the Victoria Wood song. But I already knew that Marion Foale designs had previously appeared in it.)  

Casual elegance

Woman's Weekly calls it Casual elegance.  It is a cardigan with moss stitch shoulders, cuffs, collar and button bands (I love moss stitch) and waist shaping back and front using a dart, of the kind I saw in her ready-to-wear knitwear. It exactly demonstrates the description in the Rowan interview "her designs are, as they have always been, reliant on apparent simplicity and textured stitching."

It is knitted in 3 ply (light fingering weight) wool, which is not easy to find in general, but it's obtainable from Foale Ltd. There isn't a web site, but you can phone or email them, and they are very helpful in sending out samples.  I have chosen Pearl, a kind of lavender grey.

I usually tinker with patterns a bit (or a lot), but this one I am knitting exactly as the pattern says.  Fortunately, it is quite long - I usually want to make tops longer but here I don't have to.

So this seemed an appropriate project for the day's topic, because it does seem "a huge undertaking of time and dedication".  Starting the back was quite a task - casting on 209 stitches on 2mm. needles.  It seemed impossibly fiddly at first (though I must have knitted on that size of needles in the past, because I already had them).  But now it's going well, and the back is nearly done. The challenge, apart from the sheer number of stitches it's going to take to complete, is to keep the knitting even.  I am not very good at that, I have to confess, so I hope that the blocking will help me out a bit.  I'll post a photo of the back when it's finished and blocked.     

Who's for Badminton?

My updating of Marion Foale's Badminton jumper is now finished (though it's not actually warm enough to wear it at the moment).  I'm very pleased with it.

It is closer-fitting generally, and especially around the sleeves, than the original.  I wouldn't describe it as "a long slender shape" as the book did, but that's mainly because I'm not.  I think that it does reflect the ideal version of Badminton that I have had in my head all this time, that has mutated over the years as jumper shapes have changed. 

I like the way that the neckband has turned out.  I managed to work it out so that the only loose ends were at the armhole edge, so that neckband as you see it is exactly as I finished knitting it (except for sewing on the buttons, obviously, and sewing together the two layers of the front opening at the bottom).    It took some careful thought to achieve that - for instance, the casting off of the two sides of the front opening is done from the top of the button band towards the armhole, to avoid having an awkward loose end there. Hence, the casting off is done in opposite directions on the two sides.   Which means knitting the left front back to front, i.e. wrong-side rows become right-side rows.   It seemed to me worth the effort to work all that out, but I don't think that many designers bother.   Loose ends seem to be  the responsibility of the knitter, which is reasonable when they are the result of changing balls of yarn, but when they are caused by some feature of the design, I think that sometimes the pattern could be devised to deal with them neatly.

Shoulder Seams

I have just joined the shoulder seams on the Badminton sweater.  A recent post on the Fiona's Knitting blog mentioned Russian grafting and recommended it for an unobtrusive join  (she used it on double moss stitch).  I had not heard of it, but she has an earlier post that gives very clear directions.

I don't think I have achieved quite as neat a result as she did, but I'm pleased with my effort. It is a very flat seam, and I think is about as unobtrusive as I could hope for, especially on the neckband. Since the original pattern avoided shoulder seams altogether, it would be a pity if my modifications made the shoulder joins very obvious and lumpy.

 Just shows that reading other people's blogs can be really useful.

Badminton Progress

I have nearly finished the (modified)  Badminton jumper from Marion Foale's Classic Knitwear, which I described in a previous post.  As a reminder, the photo (taken from the book) shows what the original looked like.

So far I have finished the back and the front.  That is already a radical change from the original pattern, because the back and front were knitted in one piece, starting at the bottom of the front, dividing around the neck for the shoulders, and then rejoining the two sides to continue down the back.  I can see why it was designed that way:  the square neckband is knitted at the same time, and knitting the back and front together avoids a shoulder seam in the neckband.   However,  I thought that the front (knitted upwards) and the back (knitted downwards) would look significantly different at the cast on and cast off edges, so I have opted to knit them separately, and I plan to do some sort of grafting to join the shoulders.

Another change involves the moss stitch neckband.  Although it is knitted with the rest of the front and back, the pattern calls for it to be knitted on smaller needles.  I did try a test swatch, and knitting straight rows while changing needle size part-way along the row is horribly awkward - the needle you are not currently knitting with has nothing to support it (unlike in circular knitting on double pointed needles) and so it waves about and gets in the way.

I could not see the point, either, of changing the needle size - another test swatch with moss stitch knitted on the same size needles seemed to work reasonably well.

I also discovered,  in Liesl's Knitting Therapy blog, a quote from The Principles of Knitting, by June Hemmons Hiatt, that "Seed stitch [aka moss stitch] is 30% shorter than stockinette and 18% wider".  It's clear from the test swatch that the moss stitch band on the right is significantly shorter than the main fabric.  (Liesl is another Marion Foale fan and a moss stitch fan too.)   Knitting the neck band on smaller needles would surely make the match with stocking stitch worse rather than better, overall.

I am quite pleased with the neck-band so far.  I used a sewn cast-off method which gives a nubbly edge and looks quite similar to the moss-stitch selvages.  The corners are not perfectly square, but it will I hope be better once it's pressed.

 
I have adapted the armhole shaping on the front and back for set-in sleeves, and I am now trying to adapt the sleeves to fit.   And then it will be nearly finished.    

    

Updating a Classic

I have had a copy of Marion Foale's Classic Knitwear for years (though I think that strictly speaking it is my sister's and I have it on long loan).  It was published in 1985, when I was not knitting, so I have never made any of the jumpers in the book (although I did persuade my mother to knit one for me).   Since I started knitting again, I have had it in mind to knit one of them some time. 


The jumpers and cardigans in the book are quite simple designs, and the stitches are not complicated.  They are all knitted in one colour, too. But they are all, I thought, very wearable - classics, in fact.


However, when I came to look at the patterns in detail, with a serious intention to knit one, I saw that they won't do.  The shapes are wrong for today - they are mostly very loose-fitting, in the body and the sleeves, and they all have dropped shoulders, which makes for bagginess around the armholes. Many of the jumpers have a close fitting rib, followed by an increase in the number of stitches, as well as a change to a larger needle.  That means that the waist is much wider than the hips - nowadays we make jumpers much more close-fitting.     


The jumper I wanted to knit, Badminton, is actually described as "a long slender shape", though to a modern eye it looks very roomy, especially around the waist and armholes. The waist is 6 inches bigger than the waist size it is intended for, and the tops of the sleeves are very wide too. 

But it still is basically a very appealing jumper, I think.  I love the  vertical lines (each is a single stitch in moss stitch (aka seed stitch)), and the square neckline, also in moss stitch.  So I am attempting to knit a slimmer version with set-in sleeves. I am using a straightforward modern pattern for DK yarn, and morphing that into Badminton. 

 The yarn I am using is Wendy Supreme mercerised cotton (DK weight)  - thicker than the yarn originally  intended.   The colour is a sort of blue-green (teal?). I'll report progress later.