Knot Knecessarily Known Knitting

For the record, I want to state that the easy part of the Forest Darkness has been the colorwork. You'll recall my challenge is the smallest size is too big for me. After more knitting and frogging and knitting and frogging, I thought I had figured things out. The instructions that come with the sweater kit have short rows as well as body and sleeve increases as you transition down the yoke towards the split for the sleeves and body. Some rounds/rows have both body and sleeve increases, and some have sleeve increases only. The short rows are turned at 5-stitch intervals, producing a gentle wedges on each side that reach from the underarm to the bust. I had already worked those instructions. I already knew they produced a sweater that was way too large for me. So I tried an alternative solution. I thought I might be able to extend the back and sleeves but not the front. The yoke is almost at my bust. I worked two inches of short rows using 2-stitch ...

It looks like we might hit our first freeze later this week. As the weather cools in Atlanta, thoughts turn to unfinished sweaters. There's a beautiful Bohus Forest Darkness that has been hibernating for awhile in my unfinished objects. According to my Ravelry notes, I started the sweater in the spring of 2015. The colorwork progressed nicely. The problem was when I got to the plain part. I worked the directions for the smallest size and discovered the smallest size is too big for me. I ripped back to the colorwork — thank goodness I put in a dental floss lifeline — and plopped the project back into a Longaberger picnic basket. I determined in order to finish the sweater, I would probably need a mannequin sized to my own body, so I could adjust fit as I knit. At one point Jenna from The Whole Nine Yarns helped me make a mannequin from an old t-shirt and duct tape. After my Aunt Carol passed away last year. I acquired her adjustable sewing mannequin. So ...

Last weekend I took Alasdair Post-Quinn's online "Double-knitting Off the Grid" workshop . While I don't double-knit often, I find it useful in certain circumstances. Alasdair's inventive exploration of the technique is always worthy of my time. Learning something new was a familiar pleasure, one I haven't indulged in much in 2020. The swatch took a couple hours to knit. Basically, the class was a deep dive into double-knit increases and decreases. The decreases are pretty much the same ones I use in versa lace. In double-knitting those decreases involve two colors not one, but are otherwise the same. Alasdair has an interesting way of working the swap between stitches #2 and #3 in a single decrease. And he has an unusual way of working the lifted increase. Also, I would have misread his charts if I hadn't taken the class.  The off the grid method allows you to create motifs that are more curved and refined, rather than pixela...

My latest pattern comes from an idea I had swatched a year or two ago. What brought it to the top of the queue was a need for grief knitting. My aerospace friend, Bob Greene, passed away from cancer in the early morning hours of Thursday 8 October 2020. He was in hospice care the final three weeks of his life. I spent a fair amount of those three weeks sitting bedside with him. I also drove out and back to Mississippi to fetch his granddaughter, and then did the same trip three days later to take her home. On my last day with Bob I downloaded the audiobook of The Martian and played that. Bob and I shared a love of all things outer space. I will miss him every time I see space news. I hope to live long enough to see humans walk on the moon again or even Mars for the first time. Bob dearly wanted to see that, too. The grief knitting turned out to be Penta Benda. The pattern is based on an interesting way of arranging right triangles, so they create an octag...

In this stressful year, I really need some mindless knitting. To be fair, a complex Aran cabled sweater may not sound like mindless knitting to you. For me, all I am doing is following someone else's pattern. I don't have to write down what I am doing. I don't have to shoot video. All I have to do is follow a chart and happily knit. The sweater is the DNA Pullover by Andrea Cull from the Winter 2019 issue of Interweave Knits. Of course, I'm going to work this in the round. It has advantages. I am happily knitting around and around. I can try on the sweater as I go. I don't have to sew seams at the end. And I don't have to worry as much about gauge issues between my knits and purls (which have somehow gotten worse not better). Those panels of stockinette should be even. Before I cast on the sweater, I needed to make a gauge swatch. What did it tell me? First, I cast on 110 stitches. Yes, that...

This year has certainly been the year of change and rethinking. I started off the year with a wonderful lineup of in-person teaching opportunities. Now I am ending the year with much less ahead —thank you, South Carolina Knitting Guild, for soldiering forth — and not a lot on the horizon. Kanuga, Carolina Fiber Fest, Unwind, STITCHES United, Blue Ridge Fiber Fest would normally be on my calendar. Some of these are canceled; some are planning but may be virtual. There is still a lot of uncertainty. I am slowly adapting to this new landscape. I've done some teaching online, most notably for virtual New York Sheep and Wool Festival. Back in the summer, one of my students contacted me for help altering a pattern. We were able to meet over Facetime; and that worked pretty well. I've been meeting some local students in person once a week. We wear masks and use hand sanitizer and generally try to be careful. I have a long list of videos I need to shoot and a new pattern is close to b...

Do you ever have a series of happenings where some theme seems to repeat? Maybe you hear about an old movie you've always meant to watch, and then it comes up in a random trivia question, and then you are flipping through the channels and there it is. Sometimes it is as if the universe is pushing something under your nose and urging, "Look, dang it!" For me that seems to be color. I keep bumping into books and articles about it. I'm thinking about painting some interior walls and wondering what color combinations will work best? I'm growing weary of a gray spinning project gone on too long and eyeing the crazy rainbow roving I bought in Pittsburgh. Here are some of the resources I've been enjoying. From a Mensa weekly newsletter was a link to this article on the Neuroscience News website about how colors have similar emotional associations in different parts of the world. There is some variance by culture, especially when certain cultures use specific colors ...

Alpaca slippers from Lanart                         One of the things I have missed in this year of no in-person fiber festivals is the marketplace. I haven't yet seen anyone reproduce online the random joy of strolling a fiber festival. For me, that joy is more than discovering new products, beautiful yarns, and clever businesses. I see many of the vendors over and over again at different venues. I may not know them all, but they are part of my community. They are like the identifiable cars you see on your morning commute. Maybe you've never met that person, but you know that red car with the zoo bumper sticker and the vanity license plate. You see it in traffic at least twice a week, driving some of the same roads you do. It is a kindred spirit. Sales figures show our shopping habits have changed. For example, p...

There's something about 2020. Everything seems to take longer. Everything seems to be just a bit more difficult. Back at STITCHES Salt Lake in October 2019, I realized I needed more samples in the market. I love versa lace. I need more people to see it. I noticed both Alasdair Post-Quinn and Xandy Peters have samples with several regular STITCHES vendors. Leading Men Fiber Arts kindly agreed to yarn support. I had already made Wonderful Whirled . And I already had an idea for another jacket, this time in the more complicated feather and fan pattern. I figured I had a good foundation ready to go. And yet, everything seemed to take longer. I had worked out the proper increase scheme for a center-out circle in versa lace. That math didn't work in this stitch pattern. And when I went to write the pattern, it was an uphill battle. I can't even explain why. I took notes along the way. The design was based on a previous item. Yet somehow, it wasn't as simple as just dropping ...

I think we are all learning that a mask can be a fashion accessory.  It took me a while to find one I liked. I started out with an accordion-fold mask, but it didn't quite accommodate my prominent pointy nose. Eventually, I found a hand-dyed cotton mask on Etsy from one of the teachers who was going to be at Blue Ridge Fiber Fest. (I think it was WAXON studio .)                         I did want to point out something about her design that I like very much — the single strap. The default I see commonly is two small straps that fit around the ears. While many people like those, I'm not a fan. After a little while, the elastic irritates the back of my ears. The one-strap design means the strap goes around behind my head. I find it to be much more comfortable. Another advantage is I can pull the mask on over my head and leave it hanging around my neck. This is handy if I am run...

The experiment with Jacquard acid dyes taught me one thing quite clearly — acid dyes are not great on Texsolv. I should have known this already, as I know acid dyes work on animal fibers (wool, silk) but not on plant fibers (cotton, linen). While acid dyes work on nylon (think sock yarn), they aren't great on polyester. Texsolv heddles and cords are polyester. So, maybe the answer was to find a dye that works on polyester? Of course, I started by looking at The Woolery, Paradise Fibers, Yarn Barn of Kansas, Susan's Fiber Shop, Earth Guild, and other usual suspects. Not a lot of luck. It turns out, the answer was almost in my own backyard about three miles away at Hobby Lobby and WalMart. Let me preface this by saying I rarely go in either of these stores. In particular, I probably hadn't been in that super WalMart in close to a decade. I'm almost surprised the bank didn't call to ask if my debit card had been stolen after I shopped in both places the same week. They...

As the change tsunami rolled through my life last year, it washed away many old things, but also washed in some new things. One of those is a 16-shaft 32-inch-wide Ashford table loom. When I first started weaving, I quickly realized what intrigued me was the complex structures. I am particularly fond of doubleweave and advancing twills. Complex twills are shaft-greedy structures. I soon upgraded my four-shaft table loom with an 8-shaft expansion kit. Then I discovered I always seemed to want to weave something slightly wider than 24-inches. So I bought the 32-inch loom and sold my 24-inch loom. But I still had only eight shafts. I even wrote to Ashford and asked if they ever made the 16-shaft model in the wider width. I only ever saw it offered in the 24-inch width. Well, apparently Ashford made a run of 16-shaft looms in the wider width in early 2018. And I, somehow, did not get the memo. By the time I learned about it, they were all gone. And then representatives from Ashford w...

A question was recently posted to the Ravelry double-knitting group . The knitter wanted to work a typical two-color double-knit fabric but did not want to manipulate two colors at once. She wanted to know would it be possible to work the fabric using the slipped-stitch method? While I think it is probably more efficient to work with both colors in one pass, it is possible to work each color individually. Some caveats: You want points at both ends — use double-pointed needles or circular needles. If you like reading your knitting, it is tricky to read that second pass. You might want to set-up each row by inserting stitch markers at each color change. This method is probably slower. On the other hand, if you really can't stand carrying two colors at once or you are getting very different tension with each color, then working one color at a time may be worth it. You might find you better match the tension in both colors. You will still need to move the yarn back and forth between th...

When I bumped into Cecelia Campochiaro at STITCHES Salt Lake, I mentioned how much I loved her 2015 book Sequence Knitting . I asked if she was working on another book that would explore lace sequence knitting with yarn overs and other maneuvers. She enthusiastically replied she was working on a book about marls and was having a great time with it. At that moment, I was a little disappointed. Marls? That's just holding two colors together to make a third color. I've done that in counted cross-stitch for years. How could anyone write a whole book about that? And it's such a simple concept. What could you find to say that would fill up a book? For most of us, the subject of marling could hardly be longer than a magazine article. But, of course, in Cecelia's hands, the subject has unanticipated depth, complexity, and design possibility. Making Marls is a large affair of the coffee-table book variety. There are plenty of photographs and charts. Most are large and easy-to-r...

Galina Khmeleva's Russian lace class was not the only lace class I took at Georgia FiberFest in 2017. I also took a class called "Introduction to the History, Methods, and Styles of Lace Knitting" from Franklin Habit. Franklin talked about the various traditions including Shetland, Orenburg, and Estonian. In the class handouts he included charts of a motif typical for each tradition. I keep notebooks of the handouts from the many classes I've taken. It is often useful to have swatches with those handouts. So, I decided to knit up samples from Franklin's class. The process got me thinking about lace in general. First off, there is sometimes a distinction between lace knitting and knit lace: knitted lace = action on both right side and wrong side lace knitting = action on right side; mindless wrong side Also, some laces are stockinette-based (knit on right side, purl on wrong side) and some are garter-based (knit on both sides). Garter tends to be bumpier, ...

I did have one "Hmmm, I wonder. . . " moment in Galina's Orenburg lace class. She showed us a Russian book of lace patterns. The patterns were charted on a grid, much like other lace patterns. The difference was the decreases were not shown on the chart. And the yarn-overs were shown in different colors, to indicate groupings. This got me thinking. It implies the Orenburg lace knitters understand their patterns. They work the patterns from memory. They know where the holes go. They know where the decreases go because they know where the holes go. How do they know? First off, Orenburg lace does not worry about direction of slant on the decreases. If you need to decrease one stitch, the answer is to knit two together. A slip-slip-knit decrease is not used. If you need to decrease two stitches, the answer is to knit three together. A centered double decrease is not used. Most of the time, the lace knitter is only asking: Do I need to decrease one stitch or two? Do I p...