Knit for Winter

I've been asked to knit something for a charity campaign, "Knit for Winter", which aims to provide small woolly items that will be distributed to elderly and vulnerable people next winter by the Salvation Army.   The organisers have sent me a pattern for a cowl, and the yarn to knit it with, in a lovely blue/green mix.  I have decided to start it straightaway, because I'm going to Glasgow tomorrow, to speak at the Knitting in Wartime study day, part of the Glasgow University Knitting in the Round project.   The train to Glasgow takes 4 hours each way, so I should be able to get a good part of the cowl knitted before I get home again - it's chunky yarn, knitted on 9mm. needles.  So far, I have done a tension swatch, to check that the suggested needles are right before I leave - what a disaster to embark on 8 hours of knitting and then find you had the wrong needle size!  

Seed stitch and Stocking stitch

Seed stitch is what I and other British knitters call moss stitch, but in this post I'll be quoting an American writer, so for the duration of the post, I'll refer to it as seed stitch.  (I'm not going to be consistent, though - I cannot bring myself to call stocking stitch 'stockinette', so I won't.)

Back in 2010, not long after I started knitting again, I came across a quote from The Principles of Knitting by June Hemmons Hiatt:  "Seed stitch is 30 percent shorter than Stockinette, and 18 percent wider."   As well as introducing me to that wonderful book, the quote was an amazing revelation.  I knew that rib is used for welts because it's stretchier than stocking stitch, but apart from that, it had never occurred to me that different stitch patterns behave differently - I thought that the choice of stitch pattern was all about what the resulting fabric looks like.  I knew that seed stitch is slow to knit, because of the constant switching from knit to purl, but I hadn't really understood that it's also because it takes more rows to the inch than stocking stitch.   (Yes, I know I should have.)

Since I came across her quote about seed stitch, I have read June Hemmons Hiatt 's book, and bought my own copy of the revised second edition.  And I have generally been much more aware of the characteristics of different stitch patterns.

Just recently, I have been thinking about various stitch patterns, and decided to do some experiments of my own.  I knitted swatches of different stitches, all using the same yarn, same number of stitches, same needles, same length of yarn.  Here are two of the swatches, in seed stitch and stocking stitch.
  

Seed stitch

Stocking stitch

I have pressed the stocking stitch swatch very lightly, just to stop it curling up a lot, but otherwise they are straight off the needles.  You can see from the ruler that both swatches are about 13 cm. wide.  So for me, seed stitch is not wider than stocking stitch, although it is definitely shorter. The stocking stitch swatch is about 30 rows to 10 cm., whereas seed stitch is taking about 38.  (That's near enough 30% extra.)

It's easy to understand why seed stitch takes more rows per cm. than stocking stitch - the vertical lines of stitches (wales) are kind of concertinaed, producing a thicker fabric.  I can't really see why it should be wider (but then as it isn't, for me, I'm not well placed to understand it).   So I don't know why there is such a discrepancy between my swatches and the account in Principles of Knitting.    Perhaps different knitting methods affect the width (i.e. yarn in right hand v. yarn in left hand, picking v. throwing, or whatever you want to call them).  Or perhaps it's just that different people knit differently.  It's intriguing.

I knit with the yarn in my right hand, the throwing method (aka English style).  If any reader knits seed stitch that is wider than stocking stitch, please tell me what knitting method you use - I'd love to know.

Two-Colour Moss Stitch

I was in John Lewis Sheffield a couple of weeks ago, looking for a new pair of jeans, when I noticed a jumper with what looked like an interesting stitch pattern.  I examined it closely.  It was hard to tell how it was done, because it was a very fine machine knit, but I thought that it was possibly a version of moss stitch (aka seed stitch), knitted in two colours.  I've since knitted a swatch to try out a couple of ways of knitting stripes in moss stitch. 

I tried stripes of two rows in each of two colours first.  It gives a nice tweedy effect. 

The other version I tried has one row of each colour (and I think that was the stitch pattern I was trying to match).  To alternate the colour after each row, you need to use a circular needle. One colour is always at the wrong end of the row when  you want to use it, but with a circular needle, you can just slide the knitting along the needle and knit two consecutive rows in the same direction. 

   
Moss stitch has the advantage of being exactly the same on both sides, and also lies flat, unlike stocking stitch, so it's useful for scarves and the like.  Both of these striped moss stitch patterns would be nice in a scarf - the one row stripe has the advantage that both edges are similar, whereas in the two-row stripe, one edge has loops at one edge where the colour not in use is carried over two rows of the other colour.  

A stitch I have previously considered for multi-coloured scarves is linen stitch.  It lies flat, both sides are attractive (though not identical), and it looks good in narrow stripes.  But I have only tried swatches of linen stitch, because it is very slow to knit.   Moss stitch grows much faster, though slower than  stocking stitch.  Worth trying. 

And back in John Lewis, I did find a nice pair of jeans - reduced, too.  

 

A Little Bag in Shadow Knitting

I started a little stripy bag in shadow knitting back in October, described here. I finished it this week, as a birthday present for a friend who is 11 today.  Happy Birthday, Sarah!

I had to make the handles stripy as well, because I was running out of the navy blue yarn, but I like the effect. (It's moss stitch, two rows of each colour.) And I lined it with fabric in a sort of batik print. 

Late 60s Knitting

I borrowed The Best of Vogue Knitting Magazine again from my local library this week, and realised that the history of the magazine, in the US and the UK is more complicated than I had thought.  In the US, it first appeared (as the Vogue Knitting Book) in 1932, but then publication stopped in the late 60s, though I can't find out exactly when.  Maybe this explains why the issues that I bought in Cottage Grove in May, dating from the early 60s,  seem so uninspiring - it was a magazine in decline.  It restarted in 1982, and  The Best of Vogue Knitting Magazine  was published to mark its 25th anniversary in 2007. 

What was happening in the UK?  A British version of the Vogue Knitting Book was also published  - the Skiff Vintage Knitting Patterns site  lists several issues from the 50s and 60s, up to issue 68 in Spring/Summer 1966. (At two issues a year, that would also correspond to a first issue in 1932).  But then...  it re-started publication in Spring/Summer 1967 with issue number 1 (again).  It seems that, in this country at least, knitting was still popular enough to warrant a re-launch.   I have two issues of the new series that I bought in 1969  (numbers 7 and 8), but I'm not sure that it survived into the 70s.  The Spring/Summer 1969 issue contains some wonderful patterns,  and consequently my copy is very dog-eared, with the cover in two pieces.

Kaffe Fassett's Moroccan jacket

It is particularly notable for a Kaffe Fassett waistcoat.   I think this was the first knitting pattern that he published.  An article in Let's Knit magazine in March 2008,  reprinted on Kaffe Fassett's web site, says  "I discovered knitting yarns in a mill in Inverness and got a fellow passenger to teach me to knit on the train ride back to London. I put all 20 colours of Shetland yarns I had purchased in the same sweater and took it straight to Vogue Magazine to ask them if they would be interested in featuring it. Reticent English, I wasn't!! That was about 1969 and all the colour in a very landscape Stripe attracted the attention of Judy Brittain the Editor of Vogue Knitting Magazine. She commissioned me to knit a waistcoat in Fair Isle for her next issue."   The waistcoat is knitted in William Fuller's Silver Cloud Shetland wool, though 10 colours rather than 20.


This is also the earliest knitting pattern in a magazine that I have seen which names the designer. Now the practice is almost universal, but not then. The designer is not credited for any of the other patterns in either of the 1969 issues.  I think that naming the designer became more common in the 1970s, when designers like Patricia Roberts were becoming well known.  For instance, the Over 21 Fashion Workshop  magazine, published in 1973, has designs by Bill Gibb, Zandra Rhodes, Patricia Roberts and Susan Duckworth, although several others are anonymous.

I never knitted the Kaffe Fassett waistcost, though it was very tempting.  The fact that it was designed for a man was a bit off-putting.  I did knit one of the designs from that issue. It has lots of  moss stitch ( I still love moss stitch)  - cuffs, waist band and a square neck.  It looked good, but didn't get as much wear as it should have.  I knitted in it nylon yarn  - a mistake - and the neckline was perhaps a bit too high at the front so that the edge rubbed and was uncomfortable.  Pity.  Maybe I should knit it again in better quality yarn.

A lean-look sweater with square neck and moss stitch bands outlining the waist

 (The linen trousers in the photo are from Jaeger - £7.25.  That's inflation for you.)

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.    

    

Collar Decisions

The Eco wool cardigan that I am knitting has a big collar, knitted separately rather like a sailor collar, and sewn on afterwards. The  instructions are for two versions, one in bramble (or blackberry) stitch and the other in garter stitch with the yarn doubled.  Given my opinion of garter stitch, knitting a collar in over-size garter stitch would be like saying I'M NOT VERY GOOD AT KNITTING, so that's out.  I started knitting the blackberry stitch collar, but the slightly fuzzy yarn combined with the variations in colour meant that the texture of the stitch wasn't apparent.  After knitting about an inch, it was starting to look a bit like lumpy porridge - not a good look for a collar (or even for porridge).  So I switched to moss stitch, to match the cuffs, button band, etc. and that is looking much better.

The first attempt at the collar, following the pattern, was also ridiculously wide.  The instructions don't say how wide it should be, but from the photo, it appears to be wider than the shoulders of the model.  That's much too wide, I think, so I have reduced it by about 25%.    I have started stitching the body of the cardigan together, so that I can see how long the collar ought to be - it's looking good.

(later)  It's finished! All I have to do now is finish sewing the whole thing together. 

Me and Garter Stitch

The cardigan I'm knitting has garter stitch cuffs, bottom edge and front borders in garter stitch, as well as one of the two alternative collars. I have a strong aversion to garter stitch - I think it's because when my mother taught me to knit (over 50 years ago! I am so old!), garter stitch was the very first stitch I learnt to do. So as far as I'm concerned, garter stitch is what you knit before you know how to do anything else. It's childish and unsophisticated, to me. So I've used moss stitch instead, and I think it looks much better.

Another change is that the instructions call for the front borders to be knitted separately, once the bottom edge (4cm in garter stitch) has been knitted. The borders are knitted afterwards, to fit the edge of the front when slightly stretched, and then sewn on afterwards. That seems an unnecessary seam to me. What's more, with this shaded wool, it would be better to get the colour of the border to match with the main part of each front, which wouldn't happen if they were knitted separately. So I knitted the borders in moss stitch at the same time as knitting the rest of each front in stocking stitch, and that seems to have worked very well.