Cast Away!

Last week, we had the monthly meeting of the Huddersfield Knitting & Crochet Guild branch.  The theme this month was casting on and casting off, hence the title: Cast Away!  (It works better in British English than American English, where the theme would be casting on and binding off.)  Angharad taught us some specialised methods, including tubular cast on.  That's a method that I have heard of and wanted to learn, but it sounded far too complicated.  But now I've tried it, and my cast-on edge is very neat - I feel quite proud of myself.

The first photo shows the tubular cast-on still with its provisional few rows of stocking stitch in waste yarn which you use as the foundation - the second row shows the finished edge after the waste yarn is removed.

   

I am sure that I have seen tutorials on tubular cast-on in magazines and totally failed to make head or tail of it, but with Angharad showing us how to do it, it turned out to be very straightforward.  And she directed us to this YouTube tutorial by Eunny Jang as backup:

It makes a very stretchy start for single rib (and that's what my swatch is).   And there is not a definite edge as there is with the usual cast-on methods - it almost looks as though you just leap into knitting single rib with no preamble.

I finished off my swatch with tubular cast-off - Angharad's instructions were based on Montse Stanley's The Hand-Knitters Handbook (which I have).   It's a sewn cast-off, and I found it not so easy to keep the edge even and neat.  Needs more practice.  

Angharad also covered grafting and three-needle cast-off, but I decided that successfully learning one new cast-on and (not so successfully) one new cast-off was quite enough for one evening.  In any case I have done a three needle cast-off before.  I was even wearing an example (the shoulder seams of my Boardwalk pullover) - although I didn't remember that until much later.

Altogether a very productive meeting.  Next month:  Granny squares.  

A Small Treasure

I said a while ago (here) that sorting publications at Lee Mills had progressed to the point where all the many boxes of "Patterns Unsorted" had now been through at least the first stage of sorting.  Although that was a good thing, a downside is that we are much less likely to come across unexpected treasures.  A box labelled "Patterns Unsorted" often contained a complete mix of all kinds of papers - magazines, patterns torn out of magazines, newspapers cuttings, etc. -  as well as pattern leaflets. And occasionally, something really special.   Now we have been through all those boxes once, so we more or less know what we have, and there won't be any more surprises.

But there are still a few treasures that have been forgotten.  Last week, one of the other volunteers was looking through a bundle of letters and found a  postcard, inside the letter from the donor.   It's a birthday greetings card and was sent to a girl called Mildred by her "Auntie and Uncle" in 1933.  Presumably, Mildred liked to knit. Or wear stripy jumpers.   (The original photo was black and white, or rather sepia, and was coloured by hand, so the lurid yellow, green and orange colour scheme may be just the colourist's imagination.)  And she must have kept the card, probably for a long time - it was eventually bought by the donor at a fair some 70 years later.  

I know that Montse Stanley collected postcards with a knitting theme.  (Her collection of all kinds of objects related to knitting is housed at the University of Southampton, while the publications in her collection are a component of the Knitting Reference Library at Winchester School of Art - I visited the Knitting Reference Library while I was in Winchester for the In the Loop conference in September, but I have not seen the rest of her collection.)   In an article in The Knitter, Linda Newington (librarian of the Knitting Reference Library)  explains that Montse's  husband Thomas Stanley had a postcard business, and she started her own collection through going to postcard fairs with him.   But as far as I know, this one is the only postcard in the Guild's collections.  We shall certainly treasure it. 

Century

This is my 100th post since I started this blog in January last year. So it's time to review, sum up, look back, take stock, etc.

When I started the blog I had been knitting again for a while, but in hindsight I wasn't yet taking it very seriously (i.e. it hadn't yet become obsessive). I had only just joined my first knitting group, for instance. I had been a pretty good knitter and I was just getting back in to the habit of knitting, and beginning to get more ambitious. When I look back over the past year, I can see that I have actually got a lot better at the craft of knitting. I have learnt a lot of new techniques to improve the quality of what I'm producing - several new cast-on methods and a better way of making buttonholes, for instance, from Montse Stanley's Handbook of Hand Knitting.  I have got better at sewing up, and learnt Russian grafting so that I don't need to do so much of it. I have also started knitting Continental style, though I'm still not as fast with that as I would like, so that needs more practice.

And a big thing that has happened, of course, is that I have got involved with sorting out the Knitting and Crochet Guild store at Lee Mills.  So now I am spending a lot of time working to build a magazine collection out of the huge mass of material there - and along the way learning a lot about how knitting developed in this country over the 20th century.   And finding some inspirational designs, and some totally ridiculous but entertaining ones.

So now for the next 100.....

Zigzagging

When I finished the Badminton jumper, I had three other projects already in progress.  One is the Marion Foale cardigan in 3-ply  - I am working on it regularly, but it isn't going to be finished any time soon.  The other two are a bit problematic for various reasons and temporarily shelved.  So I have started a new project.  It is a pattern I saw some time ago in Marianne Isager's Classic Knitting. 

When I first saw it, it immediately appealed to me because it is such a clever design - as well as looking good, of course. I love the way that the structure of the top just arises naturally from the chevrons. Evidently other people have thought the same way -  of the 25 patterns in the book, this one has been by far the most popular, judging by the number of projects reported  in Ravelry.


It's a summery pattern, and the yarn I am using is pure cotton from Araucania in very bright summery colours - pink and orange.  I bought in last December in York, at the yarn shop in the Shambles (the last time I was in York, it seemed to have closed down, but I am told that it has re-opened under the name Ramshambles). It was a cold and dreary day, and I bought the yarn in the hope that one day there would be bright sunshine on a day warm enough to wear a sleeveless top outside.  I wasn't actually intending to buy anything at all, but J left me there too long while he was in  the secondhand bookshop near the Minster.

I don't usually wear such bright colours, especially not orange.  In fact I don't think I have ever worn orange. (Except that I vaguely think that I once had an orange cagoule?  You'd think that I would remember.)

Marianne Isager has a clever approach to gauge swatches too - she gives you instructions for a piece of knitting that includes all the stitches you need for the garment, and there is a photo of it in the book of the exact size you should aim for.  You lay your swatch over the photo and it should match.

      
You can also use the gauge swatch to start knitting the Zigzag top.  The garter stitch square sits on the top of the shoulder and you knit the front and back starting from that square. But I wanted to start again  - I thought that picking up stitches along the side of the square could be neater.  I didn't like the fact that the selvages are different along the two sides of the shoulder straps, either, so I consulted the excellent Handknitter's Handbook (Montse Stanley) and made them to match.

  
You knit two front straps, then join them by casting on extra stitches to form the front and back V-neck, and then eventually the front and back are joined at the armholes and the rest of the top is knitted downwards in the round.  The neckline is a bit floppy at the moment, but the last step is to pick up stitches around the neck and armholes and knit a few rounds on smaller needles, which should correct that.  Hopefully, the good weather we are enjoying just now will not be the last of the summer - I want to do some lying around by a lake,  in my Zigzag top, like the photo. 

Casting On

I recently found a copy of The Handknitter's Handbook by Montse Stanley in our local Oxfam shop (£3.99 - a bargain). I hadn't heard of it, but it is an excellent book,  that covers everything you can think of in amazing detail, and is also entertaining. (Not sure if it's still in print - it was first published in 1986, and later reissued as just The Knitter's Handbook. There is a book that seems to be doing a similar job by the same author called Simply Fabulous Knitting  - much shorter (164 pages v. 318), but definitely in print (and cheap too).)  Now that I am knitting again, I thought that I should go back to basics and make sure that I am doing things properly.

 I've been casting on for years and years in the way I was originally taught, although at some time I adopted a variant of that method, and I have always considered that my method was just the way to do casting on. It turns out that there are dozens of casting-on methods listed in the Handbook - the method I use is called (by Montse Stanley anyway) cable cast-on, and she says of it: "A firm, cord-like edge. Not very elastic." Hmmm. She makes still more disparaging remarks about using cable cast-on with single rib: "It would be acceptable on aesthetic grounds if a definite edge was required, but functionally it is a disaster." I have been using a disastrous cast-on all this time! I didn't read this in time to use a different method for the back and fronts of my cardigan, but I have tried one for the sleeves. She says that alternate cable cast-on is better for single rib (and I think for moss stitch for the same reasons) and it does indeed give a neat and elastic edge. Essentially, while with cable cast-on you create a new stitch by knitting into the last stitch, with alternate cable you alternately knit and purl (and then on the first row, you knit where you created a stitch by knitting and purl otherwise).

Alternate cable with single rib:

 

Cable cast-on with single rib:

As she says, cable makes a very definite edge of both sides of the work (though the two sides are different), and it is relatively inelastic;  with single rib, alternate cable is much less obvious and both sides look the same.  (For the samples, I used some nasty cheap acrylic yarn I bought at the yarn stall in the local covered market - £1.20 for 100 g./300m.  I bought it specifically for knitting samples and  I will never ever knit a garment in it.)

Montse Stanley is not entirely dismissive of cable cast-on - she lists it as a method for "ordinary edges".  My next project (a shoulder bag) has a cast-on edge to stocking stitch, so it will be fine for that, I think.

I've also been reading The Best of Vogue Knitting (borrrowed from the local library), a fascinating collection of articles from Vogue Knitting (American edition), published in 2007 to celebrate its 25th anniversary.

There are several articles on casting on, including one by Meg Swansen that describes both methods that I have used in the past as the two versions of Knitted-On Cast On. And I learnt something new from that article too. She says: "When you have achieved the wanted number of stitches, you may be displeased with the way the final cast-on stitch slants to the right on the needle and how the bottom of it merges with the penultimate stitch." Well frankly, I had never thought about it, but she's quite right: where you start casting on creates a nice right angled corner eventually, but the other end is rounded off rather than square. She suggests a simple remedy. Just before you put the last stitch that you cast on onto the left needle, you bring the yarn to the front (so that it emerges between the last two stitches). And it works! It's amazing how much there can be to learn about the simplest things.