Rag Rugging

On Saturday I went to a Rag Rugging workshop at Spun, the yarn shop in town.  In fact, we were working on cushion covers rather than rugs and using chunky yarn rather than rags, but the idea was to teach us the techniques so that we can move on to proper rag rugging if we want.

I wanted my cushion to be in dark reds and blues, and designed a kind of heraldic rose.  A rose should have five petals, but I gave it four because the cushion is square,  so it's a quatrefoil, I suppose.

The backing is hessian - when rag rugs were commonly made in this area, I suppose hessian sacks would have been easily available, but now you have to buy it from craft suppliers.  By the end of the workshop, I had finished the outer petals and the centre of the flower, and was trying out a blue for the background.

 
The petals will be finished in a lighter red, and the background will be done in squiggles of two shades of dark blue,  to give an intermediate colour and a livelier effect than using all one shade. (And the loose ends will be trimmed off, of course.)

It is quite a quick technique, and I am pleased with what I have done so far.  It was interesting to see how different the results were around the workshop - ranging from extremely neat and even, like a carpet, to deliberately uneven and shaggy. And the designs were very different, too, of course.

The teacher (Claire Lea) brought in some rags (strips of wool cut from a machine-made jumper) so that we could try them out.  She had brought in one of her rugs to show us, and it was very attractive.  The different fabrics she had used give a lot of variation in texture as well as colour.  It's also a very practical technique - her rug is ten years old and has been used on the floor all that time,  but doesn't look worn.  And it's easy to mend a rag rug just by re-doing any damaged bit.  But I don't think I will abandon knitting for rag-rugging.  I just wanted to try it out, and I think that one cushion will be enough for me. 

Anniversary

My first post to this blog was one year ago today, so to mark the occasion I lit this candle.  My sister and brother-in-law gave it to me for Christmas because they thought that the decoration made it look sort of knitted.

I was going to write something thoughtful and profound about the experience of blogging for a year, but  I'm feeling really tired.  So, not today.

I have been working at the Knitting and Crochet Guild store yesterday and today, to help sort out the mess following the burst pipe after Christmas.  I really don't know how I used to get through the week when I was working full-time, because after two days of (admittedly quite hard) work, I feel worn out.  But we are making progress. Today we had a skip and cleared out a lot of things, so the store is looking much more organised.

Old Moor Progress

I have started knitting the Louisa Harding Old Moor jumper with the Rowan Felted Tweed yarn that J gave me for Christmas, as I wrote about here.   I have got to about halfway up the body.  So I have finished the band in herringbone stitch that forms the hem, which Louisa Harding says "takes its cue from the traditional woven fabrics produced in this area of Yorkshire".  On each row, you knit 2 stitches and then slip 2 stitches, taking the yarn across the front of the fabric.  The herringbone pattern is formed by the staggered horizontal lines of yarn as they are carried across the slipped stitches.

Because of the slipped stitches, the herringbone band is a much firmer fabric than the stocking stitch used for most of the rest of the jumper.  The slipped stitches mean too that there is not an abrupt change from green yarn to grey yarn; it takes three rows to work all the stitches in the new colour.  I like that, and I think the whole band is very attractive.

The pattern is written with the back and front of the jumper knitted separately,  but I decided to knit them in one piece, in the round, on a circular needle, to avoid breaking up the herringbone band with side seams.  Another advantage is that then the yarn carried across the slipped stitches is always on the nearside of the fabric, so that you can easily see whether the zigzags are developing correctly.  If the herringbone stitch is knitted back and forth, then on the alternate (purl) rows, you have to carry the yarn across the far side and it would be harder to spot mistakes.

 This is my second project knitted Continental style, after the Baby Sophisticate  jacket.   Now that I am past the herringbone band, I have a long stretch of stocking stitch in the round up to the armholes, which of course is miles of knit stitches.  So I shall be very good at knit stitches, Continental style, by the time I reach the armholes.  That could be problematic, because after the armholes I shall have to switch to working back and forth and purl alternate rows, and purl stitches are trickier than knit stitches in Continental knitting.  But I think I shall be OK, because I did both knitting and purling in the Baby Sophisticate jacket and my tension seemed to be the same for both.

 I did write in  an earlier post that I was finding knitting on circular needles awkward and slow, but Continental knitting has solved that.  With my original style of knitting, on straight needles, I hold the right needle under my arm, and my right hand holds the yarn and takes it round the needle to make the stitch.  On a circular needle, my right hand has to hold the needle as well as move the yarn, and so I have to keep switching from one to the other.  With Continental knitting, though, you can keep hold of both needles; the left hand holds both the left needle and the yarn, but the stitch is made by the right needle picking up the yarn.  So in theory, there are fewer steps involved, and in practice, hopefully, it will be quicker. 

And I bought myself a set of interchangeable KnitPro needles (i.e. cables and tips), which was an extravagance, especially as I wasn't sure whether I could adapt to Continental knitting at that point, and so how much I would use them. But they are a pleasure to knit with.  

Christmas 1940

A friend read that I recently bought a 1934 copy of Stitchcraft magazine, and sent me a Stitchcraft from December 1940 that she found amongst her mother's things. So exciting! It gives a fascinating view of how people in this country were living at that point in World War II.

There are patterns for two jumpers, including the one on the cover, and some small items suitable for Christmas presents. Clothes rationing was not introduced until 1941, though I assume that materials were already in short supply. There are frequent mentions of using up small quantities of wool, as in the coloured cables in the cover jumper.

The magazine had a continuing feature on knitting for men and women in the services. The Dec 1940 issue has a balaclava helmet. The pattern is for two sizes, to fit both men and women, though it must be said that even with make-up, it's hard to make a balaclava look glamorous.

In the same feature, there is a pattern for a pair of mittens with two layers, an inner layer knitted in wool and an outer layer crocheted in string. The idea is that the string layer gives a good grip on wet ropes, etc. on board ship. Quite ingenious, I suppose, though it makes me think of how dreadful it would have been to be on deck in a North Atlantic storm in midwinter, with U-boats after you.

There is also an ad for Lux soap flakes with a nice photo of a smartly dressed young woman wearing trousers and carrying her gas mask case, with the caption "Prepare for action in this cosy knitted Norfolk jacket". You could send off for a free pattern for the jacket. It's knitted in camel hair wool for warmth and softness, though you would think that camel hair might have been hard to find by then.

Stitchcraft had a cooking column, too, though it seems a bit outside its remit.  In this issue, it is mainly concerned with how to do your Christmas baking without the ingredients you would normally consider essential, like eggs, butter and sugar.  There is a recipe for a Christmas cake "using no eggs or sugar". It uses a small quantity of margarine or lard instead of butter, and some black treacle and quite a lot of dried fruit for sweetening - a very meagre mixture.

Alongside, there is a half-page ad from the Ministry of Food, exhorting people to eat healthily, by eating lots of the vegetables we can grow in this country, with small quantities of protein. A sort of medieval peasant diet, with added potatoes. I especially like the little rhyme:

Those who have the will to win

Eat potatoes in their skin

Knowing that the sight of peelings

Deeply hurts Lord Woolton's feelings.

Lord Woolton was the Minister of Food at the time, famous for giving his name to Woolton pie, consisting of vegetables mixed with a little oatmeal and with a pastry topping, which sounds very bland and stodgy. He would have been very pleased at the current popularity of baked potatoes, I suppose, though the fillings available now would have been far too rich for 1940.

I wonder if Sue's mother ever made any of the things featured in this magazine?

Keeping Pattern Correct

I wrote last month about my cardigan in Rowan Cocoon, to Sarah Hatton's Elise pattern. I should write about a modification that I made, that I didn't mention in my earlier post, because it is a change that I would suggest to anyone knitting this pattern.

 

Clearly, the cables are the main feature and because it is a V-neck cardigan with set-in sleeves, there have to be decreases at the armhole and neck edges that might overlap the cables. The narrower cables, over six stitches, are fairly easy to deal with. The cable at the armhole edge (in my size anyway) becomes a strip of stocking stitch alongside the sleeve seam, and the other one disappears fairly neatly and quickly into the neck decreases.

I assumed that the widest cable, over 14 stitches, would continue up to the shoulder seam, although you can't tell from the illustration in the Cocoon Collection book, because the model has long hair that hides the shoulders of the cardigan. So I was dismayed to discover on working through the pattern that in fact the decreases at the neck edge reduce the width of this cable by 2 stitches, several inches below the shoulder seam, and from then on the neck edge continues straight.  I don't know how you are supposed to adapt a cable that is designed for 14 stitches to look right over 12.  The pattern gives no help - it just says "keeping pattern correct"  (or actually "keeping patt correct"), and then tells  you how often to decrease at the armhole and neck edges. (That's not a peculiarity of this particular design, of course - it is usual for pattern writers to leave it up to the knitter to work out how to incorporate decreases or increases into the stitch pattern.)

The knitters that have posted photos of their finished Elise cardigans in Ravelry have all managed to reduce the width of the cable panel quite neatly, I must say.  But I couldn't see how it could be done well enough to look good and I didn't want the headache of trying.  What's more it seemed completely unnecessary.  Why not just make the shoulders three stitches wider, so that the 14-stitch cable panel is kept intact as far as the shoulder seam?   (The third stitch is for the selvage, or in my case to separate the cable from the button band, because I made a built-in button band.)   That works perfectly well - the shoulders are not too wide, and of course, the cable panel looks right throughout.

So my recommendation to anyone knitting this cardigan would be to do the same thing:  make the shoulders 3 stitches wider, so that you can stop decreasing at the neck edge on the fronts when you reach the widest cable panel. It will look much better for a minimal change.

Sophisticated Baby

Over the holidays I knitted a cardigan for a friend's baby boy, due just before Christmas. Daniel arrived on December 26th and I went to see them today and handed over the cardigan.

I had forgotten how tiny new babies are, and I really cannot remember my daughter being so small.  He is, as his mother says, a poppet.  The cardigan is supposedly the 0-3 months size  and looks much too big at the moment, but he'll grow fast and I expect it will fit him before spring arrives.

The pattern is Baby Sophisticate by Linden Down  (free from her web site or via Ravelry).   It's a quick knit in Aran weight yarn.  It's knitted top down - no seams, which is great.  I found the pattern really well thought out.  For instance, the shawl collar is made by picking up stitches all the way round the edge of the cardigan, and I usually hate picking up stitches.  But that's because usually you are only told how many stitches to pick up on each section, and  you have to work out the spacing for yourself (and often get it wrong first time).   Here, the first stitch of every row in the body of the cardigan is slipped, and then you pick up one stitch in every slipped stitch.  Dead easy.  I like the shaping of the shawl collar using short rows, too - sophisticated but easy to follow. 

This project was also my first serious attempt at Continental knitting (holding the yarn in the left hand). I saw someone knitting that way a few months ago, for the first time, and she was so fast that I was amazed. I decided that I should try it - I'm hoping that if and when I can knit easily in the Continental fashion, I will be able to knit faster than before. It's obviously not sensible to switch knitting styles in the middle of a project, because your tension might change, so a small project seemed like a good one to find out whether I could do it or not. This was also a good choice because it is all in stocking stitch and garter stitch - I haven't attempted rib yet.   It seemed very clumsy and awkward to begin with, but I am getting better at it.  My tension seems to be fairly even, somewhat surprisingly.  I'm not very fast yet, but I'm sure I will get faster with practice.   I'm now working on a bigger project - more on that later.
       

Happy New Year

2011 already!  Best wishes for a good year to everyone.

I spent several hours yesterday at the Knitting and Crochet Guild's warehouse near Holmfirth - there was a burst pipe a few days ago in the unit above, and so there was water pouring into one end of the warehouse for quite a while until the leak was discovered.  Fortunately, only a small proportion of the collections were affected.  Also, it was clean water and the cardboard boxes that things were stored in protected some of the items to some extent.  But there has been a lot of rescue work to do - a team were working there on Thursday before we got back from Berkshire, and evidently did a huge amount of work.  Yesterday, we were sending a van-load of things off to a freezing facility to stabilise them and prevent mould developing.

After the van had gone, I emptied some slightly damp boxes of assorted periodicals, to bring them home and see what could be retrieved.   At the bottom of one box, I found some magazines dating from around the First World War, which were very wet.  They seemed important enough to try to dry them out.  We have had them all over our bathroom floor, interleaved with newspaper, which is not the ideal material, but it was the only thing we had available that would absorb moisture.   It seems to have worked very well, and they have almost dried out.  They were not in very good condition to start with, in fact, but I don't think they are significantly worse now (although of course, I didn't see them before they got soaked).  

I hope that someone will be interested in the instructions for  Crochet D'Oyleys, because frankly I am not, although the idea of a d'oyley (or doily) is fascinating in a "What on earth?!!"  kind of way. There is even a pattern for a cheese d'oyley, i.e. a doily for your cheese plate, which is wedge shaped.  Why would you cover something that is easy to wash (a cheese plate) with something that is harder to wash and needs ironing, and probably starching, too?  I guess because there was a servant to do the washing, while the lady of the house sat crocheting doilies.   And the Victorians and Edwardians had a mania for covering, trimming and decorating anything that didn't get out of the way fast enough.

Etymological note:  according to Wikipedia and my ancient Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, the original  spelling is doily. Its use to mean "a small ornamental napkin used at dessert" dates from 1711 (OED).   I guess that the spelling D'Oyley seemed posher.


 Some of the magazines do contain patterns for more practical things,  e.g. (as you would expect) Weldon's Practical Crochet. The cover shows a lady wearing a "Sports or Aviating Cap"  and a "Hood and Scarf for Motorists or Evening Wear".  The other bonnet shown on the cover is "A practical and becoming bonnet for motorists, or for wear in the country, for travelling, evening wear, etc. "     Of course, they were all designed for huge Edwardian hair styles.  (I think this magazine is pre-WWI).  





There are also one or two magazines on knitting, though on the very limited evidence of this selection of magazines, crochet seems to have been more popular at the time.