Knot Knecessarily Known Knitting

It's that time of the year. No, I'm not referring to Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, the great triumvirate of cool-weather dark-day holidays. No, it's time to start signing up for all the great knitting offerings in 2011. Registration has just opened this morning for STITCHES South 2011. Because of where Easter falls on the calendar, STITCHES South will be a week early on 14 through 17 April. Good for us, as the spring flowering trees should be in even better blossom than the previous two years. XRX will be setting up the party at the Renaissance Waverly Hotel & Cobb Galleria Centre, just off I-285 and I-75 on the north side of Atlanta. (Clicking the link at upper left will take you to the STITCHES main portal page. Clicking the link at the top of the sidebar will take you to the description of my class.) Once again, it is my privilege to teach at STITCHES South. I'll be teaching "More Than One Way to Skin a Sweater." This is an overview o...

The last sweater in this series is another inspiration from the brilliant mind of Debbie New. For the labyrinth sweater, I stayed fairly close to her pattern. Of course, I used different yarn (Cascade 220 and Schaefer Miss Priss in the Margaret Sanger colorway). That pretty orchid purple (color 8901) is the cast-on edge. The marigold yellow (color 7825) is the cast-off edge. The cast-on started in the straight area in the lower left of the back. It took about 4 hours to cast-on -- many, many stitches and many, many stitch markers in two colors. And much double- and triple-checking. And do not, do not, DO NOT, twist the cast-on before you join it. No need to ask me how I know this. Once the cast-on is done, then the fun begins. I think I only knit about 9 or 10 rows total. Granted, all the rows were very, very long. Each colored marker represents either a double-increase or a double-decrease. So, you knit a few stitches, work the appropriate increase or decrease, work a few more stitche...

The last two sweaters I'm posting in this series both come from Debbie New's wonderful book Unexpected Knitting (Pittsville, WI: Schoolhouse Press 2003). This is knitting for PhDs. And do not try to read the whole thing at once. Read one chapter. Give it time to digest. Then read another. Do be nice to your brain. The same sweater, above and below. The magic of double-knitting! I decided that I wanted to try the ouroborus sweater. Ms. New works hers from the center outwards, using double-increases. As tidy double-increases are not as easy to work as tidy double-decreases, I did the math to work mine in the other direction. The yarn is Takhi Cotton Classic left over from a flamingo-patterned sweater that I made for ZooAtlanta's 2004 Beastly Feast. The fair isle heart pattern is of my own devising. And, silly me, I couldn't decided whether I wanted white hearts on pink or pink hearts on white, so I compromised and double-knit the whole thing. It is reversible...

This is the classic pattern by Elizabeth Zimmermann. The cast-on edge is at the cuffs and across the back. Double-decreases lead to arm shaping on the back side of the sleeves. Then double-increases lead to shaping on the front of the jacket. There is a little bit of neck shaping by casting-on and off stitches. Extra rows are worked at the back for length across the diaper-clad tush. Buttons and button bands are at the end. The last step is one seam -- the top across the shoulders and sleeves. And the whole thing is in garter stitch. If you haven't knit one yet -- why not? This is one of the classic, top 10 patterns of all time. This is my second baby surprise jacket. Last year I knit both a baby surprise jacket and an EZ surplice baby jacket (see Vogue Knitting, spring/summer 2007, pp. 28 & 30) for a friend who was expecting twin boys. For this second time around, I used a provisional cast-on so that I would have live stitches for the i-cord edging and seam at the end. The c...

This pretty lace cardigan is my own design for my niece, Bailie Jayne. It took three skeins of Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sport in the Happy Valley colorway. If you look very closely, you can see that one skein was from a different dye lot. The shop in Pennsylvania where I found this yarn sold it primarily as sock yarn, to the point that the skeins were tied together in pairs and most of their inventory was two skeins total of each colorway. I didn't realize I was going to need three skeins until later and, knowing that I had bought the last, had to settle for finding a skein of a different dye lot in a shop local to me in Georgia. Most of the colors were identical, but the green was visibly different. And I used a skein of the matching angora for trim, just because I wanted an excuse to play with angora. The sweater was knit in blocks in just the right width to cause the yarn to flash. I cast-on at the bottom and worked the first skein, back and forth, in feather & fan stitch....

The pattern for this adorable baby sweater comes from Suzan Mischer et al Greetings from Knit Cafe . In fact, I bought the book simply for this one pattern, "Judy's Grandmother's Baby Sweater" by Judy Spector, pp. 60-63. Proof of the quality of the pattern -- Ms. Spector includes the cable cast-on and the slipped selvedge stitch in her instructions so that the ties look very nice indeed. I knit this simply for the pleasure of knitting it, using some stash yarn orphaned from a larger project. I have no clue whose baby will eventually wear this reversible sweater. It is a charming example of a sweater that is knit cuff to cuff in a combination of honeycomb and garter stitches. In this case, it is cast on at the end of one of the ties, worked sideways with appropriate increases or decreases, and cast off at the end of the other tie. I used waste yarn to leave openings for the sleeves, which were added after the body was finished. The pattern called for seaming the sleeve...

This Valentine-themed gansey is my own design. My resources were Beth Brown-Reinsel 's Knitting Ganseys from 1993 and the Barbara Walker Treasuries . Ms. Reinsel's book is very well-written with all the information that might be needed about how to construct a gansey. She also has some wonderfully classic sample patterns, including some children's patterns for those who would like to try a gansey but are not quite ready to go after an adult-sized challenged. I should add that I took Ms. Reinsel's Swedish Cast-Ons class in March of 2007 and can recommend her as an instructor. (Her blog is here .) Like the yoke and Aran sweaters, it was knit in the round beginning at the bottom. At the underarms, the work was divided into front and back and continued flat (with neck shaping) on separate needles and with separate balls of yarn to the top. In order to make the saddle shoulders, I provisionally cast-on stitches to bridge the shoulder/neck gap, put those two groups of stitch...

This was my first sweater. It wasn't knitted from a pattern, but it wasn't my own design. It was copied -- cloned -- from a commercial sweater that a college friend had handed down to me. I had worn the original until the cuffs were becoming threadbare and I was wondering if it could survive one more trip through the laundry. I decided that, well, it was knitting not brain surgery, right? With my trusty Reader's Digest Complete Guild to Needlework , I cast-on with practice yarn and knit until I thought I knew what I was doing. Today, I'd recommend Priscilla A. Gibson-Roberts & Deborah Robson Knitting in the Old Way expanded edition from 2004. Like the yoke sweater, this one is cast-on in the round at the bottom and worked upwards with little or no shaping. Were I to knit it again, I'd put the patterning on both the front and back. As this is a copy of a commercial sweater, the back and sleeves are all seed-stitch. I'd also drop down onto a smaller needle for...

Remember that beautiful snowfall a couple months ago? Well, my North Georgia Knitting Guild presentation was supposed to be the following evening. As the name implies, that guild meets north of the city. It was a wee bit cooler there and the snow a bit heavier, so the meeting was cancelled. I'll be doing this presentation at the April meeting instead. In the meantime, I thought I'd post most of it here. This is a series of illustrated examples of how to make sweaters without knitting separate flat pieces that are then sewn together. My first example is a yoke sweater. This particular yoke sweater I knit maybe five years ago for my gaming friend Karen. Karen was going to an anime convention and wanted to dress as a particular character, Yukari. I started with a picture of the character and a little knowledge about yoke sweaters. (For more reference on this type of sweater construction, read Elizabeth Zimmermann Knitting Without Tears , reprinted 1995 or Susan Mills & Norah G...