Knitting Patience

Patience, the beggar’s virtue, Shall find no harbour here.

Philip Massinger

A New Way to Pay Old Debts

I am without patience today. Perhaps it’s the inevitable result of still having this upper respiratory bug from hell and coughing into the late night and wee hours of the morning that’s got me so cranky and impatient. Add to these troubles the front of the baby sweater and I am just simply out of all patience at the moment.

The back of the baby sweater is fine. It’s the front that is giving me trouble. I want to have a cable panel of sorts going up the middle front of the sweater. I thought it would break up the monotony of knitting pure stockinette stitches as well as add some visual interest to the sweater. I also want this “panel” to not be more than 13 stitches wide and not more than 6 rows—preferably 4 rows—long. The 13 stitches and 4 rows proportion goes nicely with the proportion of the sweater as a whole.

So I have spent, I can’t tell you how many hours, looking for a panel pattern that is like a cable but does not use cable needles—its pattern coming from the use of twisted stitches instead. Hours, coughing and looking to come up with nada, niente, nothing.

Why is it that the stitch patterns seen in stitch dictionaries look so utterly different when they are knit? It’s like visual delusion. Something happens that changes what looks like a nice stitch pattern into something I  would not have looked twice at if it had been photographed looking like what just came from my needles. Sheesh!

And so I am going to rip back yet again and continue to look for something appropriate between 10 and 13 stitches wide and 4 rows long. I am toying with the idea of a moss stitch panel or some other pattern combo of knit-purl stitches. In the meantime, I need to find some knitting patience.

Knit Baby Sweater Back Complete

Results are what you expect, and consequences are what you get.

School Girl’s definition

Ladies Home Journal 1942

The back of the baby sweater is complete. The neckline shaping was much easier than I thought it would be. No major calculus or trig skills needed.

Once I had the width of the neck and the widths of each shoulder I multiplied those figures by my stitch gauge to get how the number of stitches for each. Then I visually divided the piece into the three sections.

Once I had the number of stitches needed for the neck, I figured out the number of rows and the decreases needed to reasonably shape the back neckline. All resources I checked agreed that the center part of the neck, which is bound off first, is one-third the total neck stitches. I found the mathematical center and the one-third number and from there it was all pretty easy to come up with the number of rows I’d need to have a decent neckline while keeping the length of the sweater to 11 inches / 27.5 cm.

I am casting on for the front of the sweater today. I am toying with including an initial within a diamond shape on the front as part of the design.

Before I go, here is a fairly good close up of the ruffle hem. I am happy with the way it looks.

I can’t tell you how much I love this yarn and the colorway. Working with a yarn that I just love is wonderful. It is Cherry Tree Hill’s Supersock DK Merino in Wisteria. The colorway was a limited run just available for the summer. I have some available in my Etsy Store and you can click HERE to get there.

Knit Baby Sweater Construction IV

To find the length of an object, we have to perform certain physical operations. The concept of length is therefore fixed. When the operations by which length is measured are fixed: that is, the concept of length involves as much as and nothing more than the set of operations by which length is determined.

Percy W. Bridgman

The Logic of Modern Physics

If your eyes cross (like mine did) when you read that and wonder (like I did) what the heck it says, then you come close to feeling what some knitters (like me) experience when it comes to creating sleeves.

There is much uncertainty regarding the knitted sleeve: Length? Width? The dreaded armscye depth? The good news is knitting a baby sweater does not have to be like knitting an adult sweater when it comes to sleeves.

The dropped shoulder non-fitted sleeve gives a baby plenty of room for movement without constriction. The sleeve grows wider from cuff to shoulder and attaches to the body of the sweater. There are no body stitches to decrease to form an armscye and no real shoulder shaping takes place. An unstructured sleeve can make dressing baby easier. We all know how difficult it can sometimes be to ease those little arms through the armhole and then down the sleeve. An unconstructed sleeve allows the one dressing the baby to get his/her fingers in the sleeve to guide the baby’s arm.

The measurements I use for baby sleeves are:

3 months old

cuff width 6.5 inches / 16.25 cm

upper sleeve width 8.5 / 21.25

sleeve length 5.75 / 14.4

6 mos

cuff width 6.5 / 16.25

upper sleeve width 9 / 22.5

sleeve length 6.75 / 16.9

12 mos

cuff width 7 / 17.5

upper sleeve width 10 / 25

sleeve length 7.25 / 18.1

Both the cuff and upper sleeve widths have generous ease while the sleeve lengths are slightly shorter than the baby’s actual arm length. The shorter length helps keep the sleeves from getting in the baby’s way and stops you from having to roll them up constantly.

Tomorrow I hope to have a progress picture or two of the baby sweater. The back is almost done.

Knitting Is About Details

God is in the details.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

On restraint in design

NY Herald Tribune 28 June 1959

I was recently asked if I was as crazy as I appeared to be regarding the details of the hem and transition stitches for the baby sweater. If wanting to get it right from a design standpoint is crazy, then I’m crazy. Why would I want a sweater, or any other knitted project, to start out poorly? Should I spend all that time knitting only to hope it comes out well in the end? Now that would drive me nuts.

Knitting is about details. It’s about the stitch; putting one at a time together to create a design.  I like the idea of restraint in design, especially in knitwear. Some of the designs of today’s knitwear are busy, busy, busy. Lots of big cables, lace, bobbles and variegated yarn combined in one project makes for a very busy design.  The eye cannot see the whole because it is distracted by the parts. Is it a sweater? A wrap? Or just a sampler of big cables, lace, boobles and variegated yarn.

Life is overly busy and complicated. I don’t want my knitwear to be the same way. I want it to be calm like a deep breath. I want it to be simple in design like a zen garden. I want the design elements to come together and reinforce the whole.

In order to keep my design on track I create “story boards” of pictures taken from everywhere and of everything that fits in with the feeling I want my project to create.

Words.  My story boards are filled with words. The pictures reinforce the words. For the baby sweater I used the words simple and feminine. I collected colors, textures, stitch designs that I thought were good examples of these words. I swatched a lot to see how the stitches related to each other and to the whole I am trying to create.

As promised here is a picture of the beginning of the baby sweater.

Last night, while I was working on this a friend asked me to knit him a scarf in purple and yellow. I am having fun collecting a story board for the scarf project.

Knit Baby Sweater Design II

Mathematics…would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.

Fredrich Nietzsche

Human, All Too Human

I have admitted I am no mathematician. I believe my math teachers in middle school and high school passed me only because they felt sorry for me. No matter how much after-school help they gave, my brain blew a fuse the minute it saw xyz = a(c + b) find x. I didn’t fair much better with word problems either. Who cares what time a train leaving Chicago at noon and traveling 65 mph passes a train leaving Boston at 10 am traveling 50 mph?

But these are the types of things that come back to haunt me many, many, many years later in the form of a knitted baby sweater. I finally get what they were trying to teach: reasoning—logical reasoning. The how to methodically go about finding an answer and making sure it is the correct one in a world that, (speaking only for myself here), doesn’t seem to cherish the precise.

For example, baby sweater measurements.

It depends on where you look. For a 12 month old the width of the front of the sweater can vary from 10 inches / 25.4 cm to 11.5 inches / 29.2 cm. I know what you’re thinking: “Of course it varies depending on the sweater style.”  Wrong, my gentle snowflakes.  The sweater style was a constant, the numbers were the variables.

I thought about applying the same mathematical reasoning the Olympics used in scoring diving: Throw out the highest and lowest numbers and average what’s left. Not comfortable with this decision, I searched for standard baby sizes at various baby ages only to find that my basic thinking was misguided. There really is no “standard” size.  A range of sizes? Yes.  Standard, one size, one number, don’t-worry-this-one-will-work size doesn’t exist.  The standard size range for the chest of a 12 month old is 20 inches / 50.8 cm to 22 inches / 55.9 cm.

It took most of Saturday to come up with that range.  Saturday evening I reclined with a cool compress on my forehead in a darkened room in an attempt to lessen my migraine.

On Sunday I foolishly felt confident and decided to figure out and knit up the final swatch for the ruffle hem and transition area.  I had chosen to make the width of the sweater 22 inches / 55.9 cm total. The front part would be 11 inches / 27.9 cm wide, seaming would probably bring it down to a finished size of 10 inches / 25.4 cm or so. My gauge is 7 stitches per inch / 2.5 cm. All said and done I was looking at a cast on of 77 stitches for 11 inches / 27.9 cm.

Not so fast.

The ruffle hem I selected needed modification (more math). The size of the ruffles or bells had to be smaller in size to fit the scale of the sweater. My second migraine of the weekend began when I realized that no matter how I readjusted the size of the ruffles/bells (more math more math more math) I was racking up some pretty large cast on numbers that I didn’t feel comfortable with.

The ruffle/bell design is a “decreasing design”. Decreasing design is my term. The design is created by decreasing x number of stitches every other row to form the bell shape.

It took all of Sunday and Sunday night. My migraine still lingers. I know I came up with an acceptable cast on number, but for the life of me , I can’t find where I jotted it down. I hope to track it down before the end of today. In the meanwhile, here is a picture of the small hem swatch I worked last night with the transition rows. I am want to make another swatch today if I can find my figures from last night because I want to try out a different stitch for the transition rows.

Knitting Dilemmas and Simple Solutions

The problem is that we attempt to solve the simplest questions cleverly, thereby rendering them unusually complex. One should seek the simple solution.

Anton Pavlovich Chekohov

“Nauka”

Yes, I have finally found solutions to my most pressing knitting dilemmas.

First up the baby sweater. The problem was finding an edging that would work both at the sleeves and bottom edge of the sweater. I wanted an edging that was clearly feminine, would not require knitting gymnastics, or be overly frilly.

ruffle edge

The ruffle edge minus the eyelets and worked on a smaller scale goes nicely with the yarn and my gauge. The adjustments I made make it dainty enough to look good as a sleeve edging too. I have 2 patterns in mind for the transition from edge to sweater body stitch. I will have to see which works best. Both are very simple to knit yet visually interesting.

Before I cast on, though, I need to rework some of the numbers in the schematic.  Sleeve cap and armscye need to be recalculated.  I want to go with a fit-in sleeve so I need to redo the armhole depth, etc.  Do I feel a migraine coming on? You betcha! I am not fond of math and math is not fond of me. Put that truth together with this is my first time ever designing an armhole and sleeve cap and it’s an equation for trouble. But let me not project.

The second knitting dilemma concerned the mitered square baby blanket. It pretty much solved itself. I was debating on how to fit the squares together to create a nice color pattern.  I put the blanket squares aside to take the dogs for a walk. When I went to pick them up again I noticed the color pattern they were making. A little tweaking here and there and the issue was resolved. It is a simple but nice pattern.

These two dilemmas really kind of worked themselves out. But first I had to release my strangle hold on the problems.  I had to let go. A friend told me a long time ago that the way you work a knot out of your yarn is not by pulling it tight but by relaxing and loosening it. She said figuring out problems worked the same way. Relax and let go. The answer will appear.

Knit Baby Sweater Composition

Composition is, for the most part, an effort of slow diligence and steady perseverance…

Samuel Johnson

The Works of Samuel Johnson

The composition of the knitted baby sweater rolls forward slow and steady.  I spent most of last night swatching various edgings not liking any of them. The one thought I kept comming back to after each swatch was that this yarn is beautiful enough to stand on its own without a lot of fancy stitch work. In fact, fancy stitch work seems to mar its beauty.

In the meantime, I am awaiting the arrival of the second volume of Barbara Walker’s stitch compendium in which edgings are covered. I hope to have it in hand before the end of this week. (A week that has been and continues to be the week from hell.)

I have found some edgings of interest.

ruffle edge

I like the way the yarn itself doesn’t get lost in the ruffle design.  I think I may swatch this one tonight.

This one is an interesting way of introducing a second complementary color into the sweater design. A band just above the hem, repeated on the sleeves. Whatever I do on the hem of the sweater will be repeated on the cuff of the sleeves so it has to look appropriate in both places.

The two hems above will each impart a distinct “feel” to the sweater. And so the decision on the hem impacts the whole way the sweater will go. The ruffle is more feminine in “feel”; the complementary color block hem “feels” more modern, geometric, bolder. The type of hem design I choose will affect the rest of the sweater design.

I did manage to nail down the sizes for a baby 6 to 12 months old. I worked up a rough schematic of sorts.

In the schematic are the size of things. My yarn, the needles and the gauge in stockinette stitch are all noted. The question mark refers to the hem area and how wide it will be. Once I settle on the hem design I can firm up the body number.

The majority of the sweater will be knit in stockinette stitch…..I think. Depending on the hem I use I may or may not insert a small lace panel near the neckline.

The mantra I keep repeating to myself is “Simple. Elegant.” That’s the feeling I’d like the sweater to achieve. Frankly, the ruffle edge does not seem to fit that mantra. When I think “Simple Elegant” I envision clean lines, understated design elements that all come together in a timeless fashion.

Yes, composition is “slow diligence and steady perseverance.”