Into the yoke

I've been working on the cardigan a lot lately and am well into the yoke and have the cables established. I'm delighted with the transition between patterns.

I don't know why the color of the yoke looks different from the body in these photos. It doesn't in person. I switched the direction of the cables at the center back:

Tonight I should be able to get to the first decrease. I'm going to decrease both within the cables and within the garter sections. And I'm getting antsy to sew the seams and close up the armholes. That always makes such a big difference. Like I'm working on a sweater, not constantly adding to an amorphous lump.

I'm still here!

Even though I haven't been posting, I *have* been knitting.

The back and both fronts are done to the underarm. I stalled on doing the calculations for the sleeves for a while because the measurements I need don't fit neatly with repeats of the lace pattern. I considered scaling the lace down, so that each motif would be six stitches instead of eight, but I thought it might get muddy when I joined all of the pieces. I wanted an odd number of repeats so the lace would be centered over my hands, but three was too small and, while five will work for the upper arm, it would be much too wide at the wrists. So I'll keep the extra stitches at the sides in garter stitch and start additional repeats when I have enough stitches. I'm working on both at the same time so I can be pretty sure everything will match up.

I'm still enjoying the lace pattern, but I'm getting antsy to start on the yoke and see if it's going to work out the way I'm hoping.

Lessons Learned from Cropped Crochet Cardigan

I have added three more photos of my finished cropped crochet cardigan in Premiere. Julia suggested that I add some thoughts on the finished garment, so here is a brief summary of my lessons learned from this design!
Front


1) This was my first top down crochet garment, so I basically learned how to design a crochet garment from the top down.
2) I would have liked the garment to have a bit more of something...more interesting finishing or some more technical construction elements. But since this sweater was my first top down in crochet, I kept the stitch pattern and the shape simple. Now I am ready to tackle a top down design with some shaping and more complex stitch pattern(s)!
3) The yarn restrictions actually forced me to finish this garment. My original design was for a square neck (top down) blouse style top. I chose to use Premiere as well as solid stitch patterns, which did not support a "drapey" top. If I was not part of the CAL, I probably would have changed the yarn and continued down my quest for a blouse style garment. Instead, I stayed the course with Premiere (and my stitch pattern) and came out with a completely different garment! But now I feel more confident about designing my "blouse" style garment with a more complex stitch pattern and some shaping.

Side


Whew! That is it for now, and I hope to move on to my Splendour sweater soon! Thanks again for the CAL's input on my cropped crochet cardigan.

Close-up of Stitch Pattern

PEACE Cardigan

I am having trouble up-loading the sketch, so as soon as I can figure out how to get this done--i will have a sketch of my design.
Three Swatches 10, 9, 7 needle. I went with the 9 needle for the
Puff Ribbing Pattern 1-Multiple of 6sts + 3.
K3W-knit 3 sts wrapping yarn twice around needle for each st.
1st Row: (wrong side) P3, *K3W, P3*
2nd Row: K3, *P3, (dropping extra loops), K3*
It's EASY to remember and a fun stitch to work and it looks totally different with each yarn you work in with. I love this Stitch Pattern and I want to use it for everything now (I'm like that). I am not sure what I am doing for the bottom part of the sweater-I think the Stockinette Stitch. The top is going to have a knit lining in a contrasting color of Rowan Kid Silk Haze.
I am 3/4 of the way finished on the Front.

Swatchfest '07

So I think I've picked a lace pattern for the body of my cardigan. And, as so often happens, it's not only not what I was picturing and planning, it's something that I'm sort of surprised even appeals to me.

My original plan was something along this (Arrowhead Lace from BW1): open and geometric and clean-lined and an interesting foil to the curvy, voluptuous cables that will make up the yoke.

It's just wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. And I hate it. I do want a functional cardigan, after all, and something this open on my arms and body isn't going to work for me. So I went back to my stitch dictionaries, feeling like a particularly bratty Goldilocks: this pattern is too big, this one is too small, too pictorial, too abstract, too open, too vertical, too diagonal, too flowerly, too geometric, too boring, too elaborate. Nothing was right. Nothing was ever going to be right.

I despaired.

But then I realized that every time I flipped through the books, I stopped briefly at the Lucina Shell Pattern (BW2) and figured there was no harm in swatching it up. And I really kind of love it. It's fun to knit—you increase on each side of the shell parts for several rows and then decrease them all at once later. The pattern calls for knitting four stitches together through the back loops, then knitting four stitches together. The k4tog isn't bad, but the k4togtbl is really almost impossible to pull off when the yarn is this inelastic. You can see how much it stretches the stitches out in the bottom right shell, where it comes together at the top. I switched to slipping two stitches together, knitting two together and slipping the slipped stitches over. It's still a left-leaning decrease, but much easier to execute and looks just as good, if not better.

The real test, though, is whether the pattern will look good with the cables. I had knit up a small cable swatch so I could lay it out with all of the patterns I'm considering. I thought I'd be considering a lot more.

I'll have to play around with the numbers and how many purl stitches go between them, but I should be able to make the cables grow more or less organically out of the shells. The pretty edge is a bonus; it'll look good at the lower edge and at the cuffs. Since the fabric is so solid, I don't think I need a cable band at the wrists to balance the yoke. And one thing that's super-nice is that since one of the patterns has garter stitch in it, I can do a garter stitch buttonband without it looking like it came from outer space.

Now I need to figure out gauge and sizing. I'll have time this weekend to sit down with scrap paper and a calculator and work it all out. One roommate is out of town, the other is mega-booked and I have a fabulous weekend ahead of me, neatly balanced between social and crafty. It's about time; I've honestly believed it was Friday literally every day this week — to the point where I sent a co-worker an email this morning saying how weird it is that the book launch party we're going to tonight is being held on a Friday since they're always on weeknights.

Intro

I'm still waiting for my yarn to arrive (Cotton Classic in pewter), but figured I'd introduce myself in the meantime. My name is Stephanie and I'm a writer/editor living in Brooklyn. I have a craft and food blog here.

My design process tends to be very product-driven. A lot of the time when I knit other people's patterns, it's because they look like fun to knit or I just really like the look of the thing. But when I start from scratch it's usually because I have something specific (sometimes, like now, very specific) in mind that I want to add to my wardrobe.

For this project, I'm going to make a cardigan. I wear them all the time but my handknit sweaters are overwhelmingly pullovers and don't get worn as much as my storebought cardigans. No good. I tend to wear solid colors, mostly black, grey, blues and purples, and I want a gorgeous cardigan I could throw on over a lot of what I wear normally. The pewter color of Cotton Classic should work with just about everything. I'm a lot more attracted to texture than color and I like projects that mix textures in an unexpected way.

I have a clear mental picture of a cardigan with a lace body and sleeves and a round yoke with graduated cables. The yoke decreases will be done in the cables themselves (probably 8 to 4 to 2 stitches, but I'll see how the numbers work out). I'm thinking that I'll use some kind of decorative braid to separate the sections—the kind you see on fancy-pants mittens—though I might just end up throwing in a garter ridge or two instead. I even have a clear mental picture of the lace pattern I want to use: not too open, enough of a vertical line to be harmonious with the cables, complicated enough to be an interesting foil for the solid yoke. I'm also thinking about having some cables at the wrists before starting the lace to balance it out visually. At this point, I think that I'll probably knit in pieces up to the armholes so I can block the lace well and have the structure of seams, but join them when I get to the yoke and do it in one piece. And I definitely want buttons.

I'll do a sketch that I'll post soon, but I don't draw well at all and really just use them as schematics so I have all of the measurements set ahead of time.

I'm really looking forward to being a part of this and seeing what everyone else is working on. I love the workshop-y nature of a CreateAlong—what a great idea!