At the Convention

Last weekend, I was at the Knitting & Crochet Guild's annual convention, this year at the University of Warwick.

2018 is the Guild's 40th anniversary, so of course we had a birthday cake.

Because of the anniversary it was a very special convention. Sasha Kagan, who is one of the Guild's patrons, gave the keynote speech.  Another speaker was Pauline Turner, a founder member of the Guild, a pioneer of crochet, and the 2018 inductee into the Crochet Guild of America Hall of Fame.

We had half-day workshops on Saturday and Sunday, led by Guild members.  Another of our patrons, Debbie Abrahams, taught a workshop on finishing techniques.  I didn't manage to get to that - there were a lot of enticing workshops on offer.  On Saturday, I did a workshop on making a tiny version of Elizabeth Zimmerman's baby surprise jacket, either crocheted or knitted.  The idea was that after trying it out on a small scale, we would be able to make a bigger one, maybe with some variations. Here are the ones we made in the workshop - mine is the one at the bottom.

The workshop I went to on Sunday was on Estonian colour work knitting, taught by Rachel Lemon. Here is the sample I knitted (finished off on the train home, so if I got anything wrong at that point, it's because Rachel wasn't on hand to consult).

It was fascinating - very unlike other stranded knitting I have tried, because it has a lot of texture from using purl stitches.  The bands of stranded knitting are separated by braids, too (narrow raised bands of knitting) - I was particularly intrigued by the vikkel braid, which is the band of navy and white arrowheads pointing to the right, towards the bottom.  Difficult to grasp at first, but OK with some help.  Impossible to imagine how anyone could invent it.

My  workshop knitting was sort of intended to be one of a pair of cuffs or wristlets, but it's not good enough for that - it's just a practice piece. (Also, it's very difficult to get my hand through, which is rather a disadvantage for a cuff.)  I do intend to explore Estonian knitting further though. 

Kaffe Fassett is also a patron of the Guild, and although he wasn't available, he did send a lovely stole knitted in Kid Silk Haze, to be raffled.  And on Friday, before the start of the convention proper, Brandon Mably taught a one day workshop on using colour.  I attended it and it was amazing - I've never been very adventurous about putting colours together, and the workshop led me to look at combining colours in a different way.  Brandon showed me that startling colour mixes can sometimes work very well, and may not appear at all startling from a short distance.  And sticking to 'tasteful' and safe colour combinations risks looking just dull.

Here's the swatch I knitted in the workshop:

The first poppy, at the bottom, seems a mix of soft yellows and greens, but in fact one of the yellows, picked by Brandon from my neighbour's collection of wools, is a really bright lime yellow. In the mix with the other colours, though, it perks them up without being overwhelming.  Further up, there's a bright blue among the dark shades that has a similar effect.

Here are the swatches that the workshop participants knitted during the day, still on the needles at the end of the workshop. (Mine is the one at the top left.) It was wonderful to see the beautiful results that everyone produced.

This is an approach to using colours that I really want to explore more - it feels so exciting. Unfortunately, as a side-effect, it did also make me feel like buying lots of different colours of wool, immediately.  So I'm not quite sure yet how to proceed.  Because I don't need more wool.

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!  

Miss Ellaline Terriss in a Cardigan

We went to an antiques & collectables fair at Doncaster Race Course yesterday, and I bought a few knitting-related things, including a postcard of an actress, Miss Ellaline Terriss, wearing a knitted garment of some sort.

I think the postcard dates from around 1900-1910.   Miss Terriss was born in 1871, lived to be 100, and was "best known for her performances in Edwardian musical comedies", according to Wikipedia.  In this postcard, she is shown in casual dress, I'd say - the hat is rather simple and understated by Edwardian standards, and a knitted jacket at that date tends to signify sports wear.

If you're more interested in knitting than Edwardian musical comedy actresses, the postcard is worth examining for the stitch pattern and the details of the construction of the cardigan.   It seems to be shaped to the waist, and is possibly double-breasted, from the position of the button.  It has a garter stitch belt and collar, and I'd guess is quite long, with buttoned cuffs.  I'm sure it's hand-knitted, but probably not by Miss Terriss.

I have attempted to recreate the stitch pattern - the swatch is as near as I have got.  It's a 2-row pattern, over a multiple of 8 stitches, plus 1:
Row 1:  (K1, P2, K3, P2) to last stitch, K1.
Row 2:  (P1, K7) to last stitch, P1.  

(I have omitted the 2 edge stitches either side that are in the swatch.)  

 Much more interesting than the frilly dresses that Edwardian actresses were usually portrayed in.

Name that Stitch

I went to Sheffield last week, bought myself a new top and while I was looking around the fashion floor, saw an interesting stitch pattern on a sweater.  This is getting to be a habit -  it was seeing a sweater in John Lewis that led me to experiment with two-colour moss stitch.  The latest stitch pattern seemed to be a slip stitch pattern, with the yarn carried across the front of the fabric.  

In fact, if I've got it right, it was a mixture of linen stitch and stocking stitch.   On an odd number of stitches:
Row 1 (right side): (Knit 1, slip 1 with yarn in front) to last stitch, knit 1.
Row 2 (wrong side) Purl.  

On the right side, it looks a bit like single rib, but is less stretchy. The sweater I saw was in a flecked yarn that made the horizontal 'bars' more obvious - I think it would be interesting, too, to try it in two colours, one for the knit rows and one for the purl rows.  

The wrong side is also quite attractive - like a slightly corrugated reverse stocking stitch.
  

  
It makes a nice fabric - softer and much less dense than linen stitch.  In comparison with stocking stitch, it's thicker and doesn't curl up, though it does still curl inwards a bit.  Is it a standard stitch, I wonder?  I have been thinking of it as the fatface stitch (it was a fatface sweater) but clearly that won't do, especially if it has a name already.   

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.  

 

Swatching

I have had another attempt to find a stitch pattern for Rowan silk-wool DK yarn.  I am thinking of knitting a cardigan in the 6 balls of yarn that I bought last year, as I described in a previous post.

I have been trying out lace patterns that will fit well with the raglan increases in a top-down cardigan.  The stitch pattern in the centre of the swatch is the Vertical Lace Trellis from Barbara Walker's A Treasury of Knitting Patterns.  I increased one stitch at each end of the centre panel on every right-side row, and the extra stitches are incorporated neatly into the lace pattern. 

 
I have done the side panels in plain stocking stitch, because I am still experimenting with needle sizes and tension for this yarn  It is allegedly DK yarn, and the recommended needle size is 4 mm, supposedly giving a tension of 22 stitches and 30 rows to 10 cm, which is of course perfectly standard for DK yarn.  However, I have used 5.5mm needles for this swatch, and the tension over the stocking stitch is about 18 stitches and 22 rows to 10 cm.  The resulting fabric looks fine to me - not too loose.  So the yarn seems to me to be behaving a lot  more like Aran weight than DK.

 In comparison with the  Felted Tweed DK that I am using for my Old Moor jumper, the Silk-Wool looks much thicker.  Felted Tweed has 2 strands of yarn, quite loosely wound around each other  (there are probably some technical terms to use here that I don't know)  whereas the Silk-Wool has 4 strands of yarn and is more tightly wound, and the yarn looks and feels much denser.   
 
Such huge disparities in yarns that claim to be the same weight make it potentially very difficult to substitute a different yarn for the one that a pattern is written for. I guess the lesson is not to go by what the ball-band says, but look at the yarn itself and how it feels. In my case, I don't have a pattern, except for Barbara Walker's general guidelines in her book Knitting from the Top.  So all I have to do is find an appropriate gauge for this yarn, and a good stitch pattern for what I want to achieve.  I think I have done both of those with this swatch.   

Knitting Scales

I have been musing on what to knit with the 6 balls of  bronze-y coloured Rowan silk-wool yarn I bought  recently.  I have borrowed a copy of Barbara Walker's Knitting from the Top, so that will give me the structure of a raglan-sleeved cardigan that I can knit downwards until the yarn runs out, but I still need to choose a stitch pattern.

Because of the slightly metallic sheen, I've been thinking of fish-scales and the sort of armour made of small plates.  So on a bus journey yesterday, I tried some possible stitch pattern that might look vaguely like that.

 
(For anyone who thinks, like my husband, that the photo is upside-down, it's not. I'm going to knit top down, so I want to see how the stitch pattern will look that way up.)

I started (after the moss stitch band) with the Openwork Diamonds pattern from Walker's A Treasury of Knitting Patterns.  But a lacy stitch doesn't seem appropriate if you are thinking of fish scales or scale armour.  So for the rest of the swatch, I filled in the holes in the lace pattern (on the row after a yarn over, I purled into the back of it, to twist it rather than leaving a hole).   I think either of these stitch patterns would work well with the raglan increases for the sleeves and would look neat. 

But now that I have tried knitting with this yarn, it seems quite thick for double knitting, and it's producing a denser fabric than I expected (on 4mm needles).  So I'm not sure it's going to be suitable for a light evening cardi.   Maybe a more open stitch would be better, maybe some sort of mesh.  That would be kind of chain mail, rather than scale armour or fish scales.  

And since I'm going to unravel my swatch, maybe I could measure the yarn I've used and estimate the required area of a small cardigan and see if I'm going to have enough.  The plan is to stop when the yarn runs out, but I don't want it to look stupidly short.  More investigation needed.        

Neat Shoulder Seams

This post is quite a technical one about knitting, so for any non-knitters who happen to see this - I wouldn't bother reading it.

I recently borrowed a copy of The Principles of Knitting, by June Hemmons Hiatt - a wonderful book.  I learnt such a lot from it, even about simple things that I thought I knew all about. It's unfortunately out of print and secondhand copies are very expensive - I have heard that Simon and Schuster, who published it, have been planning to reissue it, and I wish they would.   It is so useful - she has thought about every little detail involved in knitting, from the basic principles onwards. One of the many, many things that have caught my attention in the book is in the chapter on short rows, where she says that one application of short rows is to make the slope for a shoulder seam, and that it gives a much smoother line than the usual method of casting off in stages.  That seemed an intriguing idea so I have knitted a sample to try it out.

I'm going to describe the technique here, mainly for my own future benefit - I shall forget if I don't write it down. It might be useful to other people too, though of course it's easy to find tutorials on short rows.

I knitted a small sample with 21 stitches, and I'm pretending that the left edge is the armhole edge and the right edge is the neck edge.


The usual method for sloping the shoulder would be something like: cast off 7 stitches at the armhole edge on the next row and following two alternate rows. So the leftmost 7 stitches are worked once, as you cast them off, the middle 7 stitches are worked 3 times, including the casting off row, and the final 7 stitches are worked 5 times including casting off.

Using short rows, we start shaping instead at the neck edge, and knit the first 7 stitches. Then we turn, without knitting the rest of the row. To avoid creating a hole between the 7th and 8th stitches, I use the wrapped method, as described by Hiatt. The yarn is taken round the 8th (unworked) stitch before turning the work to purl the 7 stitches at the neck edge.
   

Once the work is turned, the first purl stitch should be pulled tightly so that it is as close as possible to the wrapped stitch.











Then purl to the end of the row (the neck edge) and turn to work the next (knit) row.  This time, I am going to knit the first 14 stitches.  But I need to do something about the loop of yarn that is still wrapped around the 8th stitch.

The aim is to hide the extra loop on the inside of the work.  It will be treated as an extra stitch that will be eliminated by a decrease. The 8th stitch is slipped temporarily onto the right needle, and the wrap loop is picked up with the left needle.








The wrap loop and the 8th stitch are knitted together.  Because of the way that 'knit 2 together' works, only the 8th stitch is visible on the outside of the work,  and the wrap loop is hiden behind it.

On this row, I turn after knitting 14 stitches, again wrapping the yarn around the next (15th) stitch to avoid leaving a hole, and then turn to purl these 14 stitches. Finally, the next (knit) row is worked over all 21 stitches, again dealing with the loop of wrapped yarn by picking it up and hiding it on the inside of the work. The final result is that since the start of the shoulder shaping,  I have worked 1 row over the leftmost 7 stitches, 3 rows over the middle 7, and 5 rows over the rightmost 7.   So this is an equivalent slope to the casting-off-in-stages method, but much smoother (and of course, I haven't yet cast off). The places where I turned after working part of the row are hardly visible.

The corresponding shoulder slope that will be joined to this one is done in much the same way except that the wrapping and  subsequent picking up of the wrap loop are both done on a purl row.  To hide the wrap loop on the inside, the wrapped stitch has to be twisted first by slipping it knitwise, and then the loop and the stitch are purled together through the backs of the loops.  ( I can't remember all that  - I just stare at the two stitches that have to be purled together and think about which one has to be in front and then work out how to do it. Sometimes by trial and error. Of course, if you were doing reverse stocking stitch, you would want to hide the wraps on the 'knit' side, so the number of variant rules in quite large.)  

Finally, we have two smooth shoulder slopes to be seamed together somehow.   Of course, you could cast off, front and back, and sew the two pieces together, and the result would be neater than the usual method. But why do that?  Much better to either cast them both off together, using what Hiatt calls a joinery cast-off, or to join them by grafting. Since I found out about Russian grafting, I have been using that technique whenever I can, so I'm going to use it to join my shoulder seams. I'll write about that in the next post, because the way I do it is slightly different to the method in the tutorials I have seen.

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. 

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.