Indigo Flowers Lacy Vest

[Partially cross-posted from my blog]

Currently I am into the concept of Contrast. Simplicity versus Extravagance. Casual versus Formal. Night versus Day. And the seemingly opposite elements must be united in one wearable design.

My first inspiration came from the Hermès SS07 collection. Below are some pieces that I particularly liked.


[The photos do not belong to me, and here they are used only for commenting reasons. And why do they look soooo depressed in such beautiful dresses?]

The first two handkerchief dresses are reminiscent of their SS05 collection As the river flows, an out-worldly ethereal collection featuring porcelain white chiffon dresses with fine indigo print.

Porcelain white and indigo: that's the second inspiration.


Fine china, my true love. Such intricate and beautiful tonal effects are achieved with a single color on a plain background. Another example can be seen here; they are basically the same.

The original name for the white porcelain with indigo paintings is Indigo Flowers. By the way, for some unknown reason the formal translation is Blue and White Porcelain, or White and Blue Porcelain. What unimaginative names...

Anyway, that's how I decided to make a long flowy vest with a simple cut. [Look at the third shot from Hermès, I want my cut be as clean. And the length should be shorter than the one in the fourth shot...not too long.] The Indigo Flowers porcelain will be interpreted by using a dusty indigo colored DK yarn (Calmer, that is) as the bones, or the background of the vest, and a silver/pewter colored lace yarn (Zephyr, in this case) to fill in as the flowers. The reason why I did not pick true indigo/cobalt blue and pure white is that I want the vest to be casual yet ladylike.

The idea of combining yarns of different weight is doable if the two can be worked on a same needle size. And I guess you've already got the solution: work the light one in a lace pattern. In this case, this is a perfect solution, for lace is what I want: light and cool to wear, elegant, stretchy. And a good lace pattern can mimic the filigree flowers on a porcelain vase.

The fifth Hermès shot echoed this idea; wispy lace looks lovely (and well protected) with a solid colored vest.


[Click to see a larger picture. Hey that's not me, I do not look like her!]

You see, I love the color combination--one can still see the reference to porcelain, but it's quite subtle and misty now.

The back is not shown in the sketch above; I plan to use a large area of lace. The vest can then be worn with everything backless or strappy, thus making a day-to-night transition smooth and easy. I'll see if I can get that shawl effect.

That's all I have for now. I'll be more than happy to answer your questions.

Barmaid Top

Here are a few progress photos, I had frogged back quite a bit because of the short row mishap. I sorta tried it on when I frogged too and I think because of all the increases that short rows will not be necessary.

I have also figured out what I'm going to do sleeve wise. I have been fashioning this top after a sort of image they always have of girls in old time movies, in the bars with the corset type tops over a poofy white shirt. Usually those girls are barmaids. So in honor of that I've named this the barmaid top. Anyway I did some picture research on what those shirts generally look like and they are almost always pretty low cut and have some sort of frilly or poofy sleeve. Soooo I am going to try binding off part of the sides and casting it back on for an opening. Then after the top is bound off I will reattach (at the underarm perhpaps) and make the sleeves. I'm still not sure EXACTLY what I'm doing but I've got two or three versions I'm going to sketch out and see what looks best. I'll keep you all posted!

This is my first post but I've been working on my project while following yours. I wanted to be able to show what I've done and not just tell.

First, I have to admit my lace-envy. I have a difficult time with my technique and it has to be a really important item to force me to take off each loop and twist it back on the needle. So, to compensate, I mastered colorwork. I've chosen to use Tahki Cotton Classic because of its strength and rainbow of options. I chose six pastels, kind of like jelly beans, for spring (not to mention this is what my LYS had in stock).

This was first pattern, done as I was housebound during a nor'easter. It must have been the Kaffee Fassett book I was reading and the snow making me think I could bang this out.

I don't have a problem with bobbins, there were 10 per row. I do have a problem with not making progress. This took a week of free time - for 10 rows?! It would take 100+ hours for this, so I gave up and regrouped.

So I kept the basic design of squares while doing the modular thing. I love this technique. I'd much rather get two completed squares out of 30 minutes than just one row. I think I'll get the same feel of the interlocking squares, especially when there's a lot of stuff in the bag and the weight pulls the squares into diamonds.

I'm not sure how the bottom will work out when all the points are turned inward. I'll deal with that when I get there. I think on the top I'll let the points fall outward for a jester hat effect. Maybe some beadwork on the points........

Dayflower Lace top

Well, I'm still waiting for the Premiere yarn I ordered, but there's been a change of plan: the pictured project, which I was hoping to complete in time to submit to Knitty--by today!-- has given me no end of headaches. It is far from being completed, as ripping is unfortunately required. And what do you know, it's in Premiere, color #5248. In short, the perfect project to post about here. (And hey, if this CAL does indeed go to September, I should have time to do another one--if my other yarn ever arrives.) I hope y'all don't mind that the first few posts about this sleeveless top won't be real-time; I started the actual knitting about the time the CAL started up, in mid-February.

However, the original idea germinated awhile ago, almost a year, in fact. I loved the Dayflower Lace stitch pattern in Barbara Walker's 2nd Treasury, and when I decided to design something using it, the first thing I did was Google to see if there were any other patterns out there--first, to see how others might have utilized it, and second, to avoid duplicating someone else's work. I found a scarf, a skirt, and a sweater, and I was interested to note that the latter, a V-neck cardigan with dropped shoulders, avoided any shaping, and thus kept the lace motifs intact (as did the scarf and skirt patterns).

It has been my experience with other curvy lace stitch patterns that mixing them with different stitch patterns must be done judiciously: part of their beauty comes from the undulations caused by the pull of the increase and decreases, and these are affected by adjacent stitches--or by trying to add shaping. So last spring, when I submitted a pattern idea for an empire waist top incorporating Dayflower Lace to Interweave Knits, I limited the lace mostly to the "skirt" portion of the top, thinking to tie the bodice thematically into the skirt by using faggoting--like that within the lace pattern-- to trim the neckline and armholes.

Needless to say, the pattern was not accepted, but I still wanted to pursue the idea, so a little over a month ago, I got out the sketch I had submitted, and started to think about how I might actually execute what I had drawn. By the way, this was one of my earlier sketches using Adobe Illustrator, and while my skills are still fairly rudimentary, one thing this program makes very easy is copying and pasting design motifs--such as if you want to communicate how a lace pattern stitch might appear across an entire garment.

So. Some of the considerations with this top were:
1. How to create the empire waist shaping. Decreases on several rows, like waist shaping but more drastic? Or decreases all at once, creating a gathered effect?
2. What to do for the band under the bust. Simple stockinette or other pattern stitch? Bind off( or not) and attach to band, perhaps knitted horizontally to decrease stretch? I wanted this part of the top to have zero to slightly negative ease, to avoid that tent look! Use a ribbon or twisted cord to make sure the top fits closely here? And if so, incorporate eyelet holes into the band, for threading the ribbon or cord?
3. Bust shaping. If the underbust band was to have no ease, then there would have to be quite sudden increases for the bust, either along the sides, or using short rows, or using increases only in the front, to form a subtle gathered effect (which is pictured in the sketch).
4. Neckline. I wanted to use some sort of self-finishing for the armhole and neck edges, but what then to do about the center neck, which is drawn showing a single lace panel which is bound off horizontally? I didn't think the plain bound-off edge would look finished enough, but if I was going to add an edge finishing, I figured I would probably have to do it to the whole neck edge, and maybe the armhole edges, for design cohesion. Applied I-cord? Crochet? The Dayflower Lace pattern has no purl stitches on the right side, so I was reluctant to introduce ribbing or garter or seed stitch as an edge treatment.

Gah! What to do when faced with so many decisions?! START KNITTING! Luckily the lower part of this top is simply rounds of lace. I made a gauge swatch, calculated 14 repeats for a lower circumference of 40-ish inches, and I was off.

P.S. Um, Julia, why doesn't Team Premiere have a button?

On sunflowers, swatching, and sanity (or the loss thereof)

While I wait for my Calmer to arrive (I went with Slosh, a dark slatey blue - at least according to my monitor), I've started to plot out my idea. My inspiration comes from a washcloth that I knit a while back:



That's the pattern picture, not my own version, but mine looked very similar. As I worked on it, I thought, "wouldn't this look great plastered onto the back of a cami?"

And so an idea was born. The washcloth is knit from the inside-out, and I've seen some sweater patterns that start as circles and grow out from there, but most of them are shrugs or cardigans, meant to be loose-fitting. What I want is a close-fitting top, where all the shaping is carefully planned and defined, and I don't think this would be possible if I knit the whole thing starting from a point and working outwards.

My next thought was that I could knit the cami in a standard, bottom-to-top manner, and leave an octagonal hole. Then I could knit the washcloth separately and seam it in. This would probably work, but the seaming could be tricky. I don't like tricky seams. Instead, I thought, I could leave the same octagonal hole, then pick up stitches all around the perimeter, and work the washcloth pattern from the outside-in.



This would require me to invert the pattern. I'm not sure why I thought it would be a piece of cake, but... really, not so much. I started by charting it as written. Then, as a first attempt, I rotated it 180 degrees, replaced all the decreases with yarnovers, and replaced the yarnovers with decreases, using left-slanting or right-slanting ones according to what looked correct on the chart. I resolved a minor issue of having to add additional "no stitch" boxes, and then I knit 2 wedges using some cheap acrylic. (I like to do technique swatches in scrap yarn, and save my good yarn for swatches relating to gauge, stitch definition, drape, etc.)



It's not bad, but there are quite a few things I'm not happy about here. (I added notes through Flickr, so if you click on the swatch picture, it will take you to the Flickr page and you can see my comments in more detail.) That's when the danger started. The more I looked at the original washcloth pattern, the more I realized that I wouldn't be happy merely with working it backwards. I imagined that the double flower resembled a sunflower, and wondered how I could make it more sunflower-esque. The simplest modification was to work the center circle in seed stitch to represent the seeds of the flower. (Seeds in seed stitch! Awesome!) The other modification I wanted to make was to separate the inner flower from the outer flower a little bit more; in the original, the inner flower is exactly the same shape as the outer one, only smaller. I wanted to reverse the swirly curve of the inner flower. Here's a bad sketch:



So I made swatch #2. Looking at it now, I guess I hadn't tried to flip the inner flower around yet. That came later.



At this point, I started to get incredibly frustrated. All my good ideas seemed doomed to failure. Nothing wanted to line up the way I planned. I made one more attempt; I changed the outer triangles from seed stitch to stockinette, and I changed the seeds to reverse stockinette. (It made me very sad to not use seed stitch for the seeds, but it's nearly impossible to hide all those decreases in seed stitch.)



Getting better... but still not great. I didn't like the line running along the left of the outer petal that continued down to the flower's center. Also, I noticed that through all my modifications, I had lost the swirly nature of the original washcloth; all my lines seemed to have straightened out, and it looked more like a bunch of triangles than a flower. I went from frustrated to downright angry. I came close to tearing up my notes, cutting my swatches into shreds (remember, cheap acrylic), and abandoning the idea entirely. In a last-ditch effort, I turned to Google, to see if something similar had been done before. I couldn't find a single flower knit from the outside-in - perhaps that should have been a sign - but I did come across this:



It's a snowflake that's knit from the outside-in, and it uses cables for texture. Cables! Brilliant!

I realized that I had become much more attached to the sunflower concept than I was to the swirly lace washcloth, so I studied some pictures of the flowers, tried to shove the washcloth pattern completely out of my mind, and made this sketch:



Using a combination of cables and decreases for shaping, I made a scaled-down swatch. I was downright sick of swatching (and if I never see turquoise acrylic again, it will be too soon) so not only is this not a full circle, but it also is much shorter than the actual flower on the cami would be.



Ladies and gentlemen... or only ladies, as the case may be... we have a winner!!

I'm not quite done with it yet; given the angular spread of this swatch, I think I might have to turn my octagon into a hexagon and switch from eight large petals to six. Also, each petal here produces its own point, so with 6 of them, I'd have 12 points total, and I don't relish the idea of planning a 12-sided hole. I might be able to block it to a 6-sided shape, or maybe I can slip the small-petal stitches on the first round? I haven't figured that out definitively yet, but I'll keep working on it while I wait for my Calmer.

I'm calling this my Sunflower Cami, for obvious reasons. And please, please, don't ask me what the front is going to look like yet. I will probably break down in tears and throw something at you.

(Kidding! Mostly.)

Modifications: A Designer's First Step

Right after I kicked off the createalong, I realized that before I can play with my design in earnest, I really need to get the current WIPs off my plate. Except for the Marseilles Pullover, they are all gifts and will need to be gifted soon. The Marseilles Pullover itself is best suited to cool weather, and since LA has such a short chilly season, I need to finish it if I am going to get any wear out of it this year. So while I am finishing what I started, I thought I would participate in the CAL by doing some posts on the creative process in general.

This post covers the basic starting point for most designs - modifications - and borrows photos and an example from one of our very talented CALer's, Samantha. Sam started making a version of the Daktari Skirt (Lacy Skirt with Bows) for herself, but quickly realized that a single panel of the skirt could be modified to make a dress for her daughter. The pattern is the same as the original, except that only a single panel is used and there are garter stitch straps added at the top. These are simple modifications, but brilliant - what a lovely transformation.

I was completely taken by Sam's dress idea. When I was Sam's daughter's age my grandmother had a very similar ingenious idea. She took some of her old slips, smocked them at the top to gather the fabric in, and sewed on satin ribbons for ties. I had several of these slip dresses that I wore as nighties and used to play dress-up. I still remember all the details of those little dresses - that is how much I loved them. (I know that my mother, who reads this blog, has a photo of me in one - maybe you'll send me a copy, ma? I don't know if she still has any of the nighties.)


I am sure that many of you have made some sort of modification like this. We all do a little bit of tweaking to change a pattern to suit our needs, even if it is something as seemingly simple as lengthening the sleeves of a sweater or adding short rows to the bust. Don't underestimate the power of these tweaks. They aren't just useful for the project you just finished - they can also be a springboard for the next project.

Having finished her daughter's dress, Sam can now go on to make other dresses using the first one as a template. She has the measurements from the Daktari dress to use as a baseline, so for the next dress she can use the same basic shape and change the patterning. Or she could go one step further and tweak the shape a little, too. What would the dress look like with a fitted bodice? What if she changed the length a little? A completely new and different dress can be designed using what Sam has already figured out here, and with a few little changes she will have stepped from modification to design.

The same is true of little sweater modifications. I try to keep track of little details that I add to commercial patterns, and I also follow which measurements will tend to work best for me in different circumstances. I've learned over time that a bodice twenty inches in length is my "standard," and will fit in such a way to keep my midriff covered (No muffin-top to be seen here people! ). A twenty-two inch bodice will cover the waistband of my trousers and give a nice elongated look to an outfit (which is why I plan for Mishka to be about twenty-two inches in length). Twenty-five inches will give me a tunic or coat length. Knowledge of these measurements gives me a good starting point for design. I am fairly standard-sized, so I can take my measurements and simply add to them proportionally (more on that later) to get the other standardized sizes in a range, but if you aren't standard-sized you can simply figure out how differently your measurements run from the standards proportionally and then make those adjustments across the board for all sizes in a pattern. The opposite approach works as well. If you are working from a commercial pattern and know that you need to take in two inches at the waist as compared to the usual standard size you can work out that modification before you start knitting so that the piece will fit you in a flattering way.

These are just little things to think of as you design. Don't undervalue your experiences as you go along - use them for the next step. Just look at that dress!

Reverse engineering an Estonian lace pattern

I'm ruminating some design ideas that I'm not prepared to detail just yet, but I had "an experience" deconstructing a lace pattern, and I thought it might be worthwhile to share what happened during the design process.

So... I originally was thinking about how one might knit a coral polyp in lace.

Image from here.

They're quite pretty, actually. I thought that the ends looked something like stars. Now I remembered Marnie knitting something she had described as "star stitch" and browsed her archives until I found it. Hmm... It was definitely pretty and star shaped, but it was a little small, not quite what I had in mind.

A few minutes of Internet searching later, I found the phrase "star stitch" in this description of Estonian lace. The author describes nupps and how they can be used as star-shaped bases for other designs. I'd heard of nupps before (well, I'd heard people complaining about knitting nupps), but I thought they were just bobbles with an Eastern European flavor. Then I saw this:

Image from here.

What a fantastically clever idea! The nupp is used as the starting point of a 3-petaled flower, and the decreases are gradually made over the next few rows. The flowers are tiled such that the increases in 1 repeat occurs with the decreases in the next repeat so the fabric doesn't buckle. I'd not seen anything like it before and was immediately intrigued.

I thought I could use a single "tile" (or motif) of this stitch pattern as my polyp, and I read anxiously through to see if directions for the stitch pattern were somewhere in the article. No such luck, although the author references a Estonian-language lace dictionary in that article. Sucker that I am, I found someone who carried it and ordered the book that day. But I didn't want to wait for a package to arrive from Germany (what can I say - I'm an American - I like my instant gratification), and I've deconstructed lace before. How hard could this be?

Well, as it turns out, it was kind of hard. Now, for the love of God, do not tell me that this pattern is widely known and available on some site that I've never encountered. You'll make me weep. I studied the picture and wrote down everything that I was sure was happening.

1. The base of the flower was 3 stitches.
2. Each petal was 3 stitches wide. Thus, the base had expanded from 3 to 9 stitches.
3. The center petal was surrounded by yarnovers.
4. Each petal ended with a 3-into-1 decrease (eg, sl2, k1, pass sl sts over).
5. The 3 st that formed the base of the flower were derived from the last stitch of the right-most petal of the tile to the left, the center petal from the tile below, and the left-most petal of the tile to the right.

I wasn't sure of the maximum width of the tile, the exact location of yarnovers, or the number of rows per tile, but constraits of The Maths said that the number of yarnovers would dicate the final width, and I would likely be knitting 1 row for every 2n decreases (I saw nothing that seemed like an unpaired decrease). As long as I had the same number of increases and decreases, the pattern would work.

I also had no frickin' idea how to chart a bobble. I emailed Kim and begged for help. She replied, "I don't know of any books in modern standard notation that show nepps clearly. Most avoid the whole bobble idea by just putting a 'there be bobble here' symbol in the main chart and offering up the bobble instruction elsewhere. " She suggested using grey boxes to indicate "no stitch" (tutorial here) and sent an example. Thanks, Kim!

I swatched and was able to make the main flower easily. I ignored the side stitches, figuring that they would be other tiles in the final iteration.

It was starting to come together, sort of. But I could not get the number of stitches to turn out correctly. In true OCD fashion, I spent all my nonworking hours thinking about how this could be charted. (It was like The Lost Weekend, except with yarn.)

Some problems and solutions:

1) The motif was too tall. I had ended the side petals long before I was ready to start the staggered motif on either the side, so I had too many rows.

Because most of my lace experience is with patterns that are straight knit or purl across the back, I hadn't considered doing some of the decreases on the private side. If I decreased on the front and back sides, I could squash the motif into fewer rows.

2) No knitter would have any idea which stitch aligns with which from the row below. Clearly, lots of grey ("no stitch") boxes are needed.

I struggled with where to put the grey boxes. In the example below, the red dots should have lined up with the tent-shape boxes (3-into-1 decrease) to the left and right boxes of the previous row.

3) The pattern would not tile. Remember, the center stitch of each side petal contributed to the flower base of the motif next to it. However, if I matched up the tile on 1 side (blue), it would not match on the other (red).

The pattern repeat as I drew it above has 7 rows. BZZZT! It works a little better if I use an even number.

4) Getting closer...

I forget what was wrong with this, but it had a problem. However, I was close - could nearly taste victory. I had a few other problems that are hard to explain, so I'm just going to gloss over them for now, but I had the final chart at 10 PM one night.

The next morning, I swatched on the way to work.

Got it!

Now I'm really looking forward to the arrival of my Estonian lace book! I feel like I'm waiting for the answer key to a pop quiz.

You can download the stitch pattern (.pdf file) here. (I also put it in the sidebar of my 'blog, if you want to access it later.)

Inspiration

I'm moving a little more slowly on this project than usual, as I am trying to take a moment to enjoy the process (rather than focusing on just getting it done and out the door).
With my lovely collection of Cotton Classic colors (say that ten times fast), I was certain early on that I'd be knitting my create-along piece in stockinette so I can focus on the color.
Then I saw this little number:


(Marios Schwab dress - photo swiped from style.com. All their rights reserved, etc., etc.)

For which I fell long and hard. While I am not feeling quite masochistic enough to try to recreate this exactly, I do think the color blocking (and neckline) are fabulous. Something of this garment will definitely be incorporated into my project.