Today's sweater, take 2

Subtitle to post: Yes Gertrude, gauge does matter.



What you see above is my Today's Sweater for P3, so-called because I cast on the day of the Today's Sweater presentation. I dutifully knit my way through half of the colorwork chart for the bottom hem before I got home, and was very pleased with how things were turning out.

But when I got home, I put the sweater down for  a few days, and when I picked it up again, I began to have the sneaking suspicion that all was not well in River City. I knit a few more rows, all the while knowing, without a doubt, that I was going to have to rip out the entire thing and start over again.

Why was I going to have to rip out? I hear you asking. Well, dear readers, the answer is: swatches lie.

Now, perhaps they don't lie if you do a proper swatch, aka cast on 40 stitches, work in pattern for 6 inches and cast off, block the swatch, and then allow it to hang from one side for a few days so that the weight of the piece can work whatever voo doo it will do on your knitting. However, if, in a fit of wool fever, you knit a swatch that is approximately 2 inches by 3 inches while on the train to a knitting retreat, then block it by hastily wetting in from a bottle of water in a deserted Welsh train station while waiting for your connection and then have a complete and utter brain fart regarding the actual required gauge of the pattern of interest (note: 6 stitches per inch is in no way the same as 6.5 stitches per inch, just for the record), you may have problems such as the one I encountered.

My supposed-to-be 42 inch sweater was actually closer to 48 inches around, giving me approximately 8 inches of ease. And even for a comfy, oversized sweater that is destined to be worn as outerwear, 8 inches of ease is too much. Waaaay to much. So, with much muttered obscenity and a few tears, my 4 inches of Today's Sweater became piles of loose yarn, and I retreated to the comfort of Open Office spreadsheets to figure out what to do. I'm already knitting on US 2 needles, and I have absolutely no desire to go down a needle size, so I plugged in my gauge and the stitch counts, and have figured out that I can knit the next size down and get something that will fit. Hooray!

You may also notice that I've changed from a ribbed bottom edge to garter stitch. It just seemed better that way. Onward to rustic wooly goodness!

Leaf Peeper Cowl

Some of you may know this already (ha-bloody-ha!), but I really, really like knitting with handspun yarn. I mean really, really like it. If given my druthers, I'd probably never knit with commercial yarn again. So it seems only reasonable that I might start designing some patterns for handspun yarn, right?



Meet the Leaf Peeper Cowl (attractive posed amongst the dead ferns in Richmond Park). Knit from side to side out of just under 100 yds/92 m of bulky weight handspun yarn for a cowl that is about 18 inches in circumference unstretched. If you want a longer cowl, simply keep going until it's the desired size. When it's long enough, graft the ends together and voila! Instant neck cuddles.

The sample was knit out of 3-ply BFL from my shop, in the Leaf Peepers colorway. The fiber was split into three equal lengths before spinning, and then two of the pieces were split further lengthwise. Final yarn was 95 yds/3.5 oz, or approximately 450 ypp.

This is the perfect quick cowl for holiday presents - I think mine took me a couple of nights to whip up, and the stitch pattern, while it may look complicated, is pretty easy to follow once you get going.

Pattern can be found on Ravelry in my store, or you can get it here for $5.00.

Neglected FOs

OK, school has started, some of the school run bugs have been worked out, and I suddenly have a bunch of hours in my day when I'm not being called upon to feed anyone or read books or mediate in the latest round of she-took-my-toy-she-touched-me-she's-looking-at-me! There are a number of things that I finished up over the summer but never blogged about, which does tend to make me feel like they're not actually really finished.

Up first, Lady Stark's Clapotis.


So named because of the colorway of the fiber.

Yarn: handspun BFL/silk from the Hello Yarn Fiber Club (July 2011 offering), colorway "Night Gathers" (Thank you GRRM!), 460 yds of DK/sport/fingering weight singles (8 oz).
Pattern: Clapotis by Kate Gilbert
Needles: US 7/4.5 mm, I think. I forgot to put that little detail into my project page on Ravelry, and I finished the darn thing three months ago, so I have no idea.
Start/finish: 17 May - 3 June 2012.
Comments/mods: this is the second time I've knit this pattern. The first time (also in handspun) I did some mods as recommended by the intarwebs (i.e. knitting the first and last stitch of each stockinette band through the back loop to keep it tighter). I did a similar mod this time around, although only on the right side. I worked the increase section, weight the yarn, worked straight until I had enough (by weight) to work the decrease section, and ended up using every last inch. Mostly I spent my time hypnotized by watching the colors appear...






Is that too many pictures?

Button, button, who's got the buttons?

Last night I finished off sleeve #2 of my Garter Yoke Cardigan, out of the Timber Romney I spun during last year's Tour de Fleece (thanks very much BBC online rebroadcast of the men's triathlon!). Today I laid that puppy out on the coffee table and had a good long think about buttons.

I pulled out my (admittedly not very large) button stash and pawed through for some possibilities. First up was the way plain option.

Plain, purple buttons. These look pretty good - they match the darker purple stripes pretty well, and are a good contrast with the more yellow bits.

Choice #2:

Some domed brown buttons with a stripe. Also a good choice, but a bit too big for the buttonholes. Onward...

Some engraved metal buttons. A better size choice, but I don't like the metallic against the handspun. The sweater is such a warm, autumnal palette, that the metal clashes pretty badly. One more option:

These are some gorgeous glass buttons that Mermaid gave me a while back, and they work surprisingly well (at least I'm surprised). They are mostly blue, with bits of pink, purple, green and grey. I really like how these look, and they are the best of the whole lot. However, there is one wee problem...

That pile there is the sum total of these buttons that I've got in my stash. Said button band requires ten, count 'em, 10 buttons. Bollocks! I guess this is a good example of an instance in which blindly following the pattern spacing for buttonholes is not necessarily the best plan if you have limited buttons in your stash.

The upside of this whole fiasco? I get to go back to the local button store tomorrow...result!

Next verse, same as the first

I realized that for those of you not caught up in the ridiculous spinning/fiber-photo frenzy that is the Tour de Fleece, the next few weeks may be really, really, boring. I will try to do my bit to blog about something other then spinning - day after day of pictures showing miniscule incremental progress on natural colored fleece is about as exciting as watching paint dry. Here, have some knitting instead!

It is still knitting with handspun, but I'm 12 rows from the end of the body of my Garter Yoke Cardi, knit out of the Timber Romney I spun up last year during TdF.

Every time I knit with handspun, I am swept away by watching the color changes, and the way the different plies play off of each other and transition from one color to the next. These pictures are not quite right colorwise, but it's late and I can't be bothered to go back and redo the pictures tonight. I'll get a better color balance next time...

PS - here's today's spinning tally: