Knot Knecessarily Known Knitting

More than a decade ago, I posted how to make what I called an origami cardigan. It was a way to work with a color-pooling yarn while keeping the stitch count the same across the whole garment. A few years later, I made something similar using another variegated color-pooling yarn. A few days ago, baltimoreknits on Ravelry asked me if there is a pattern for the second jacket. Well, no, I didn't write up the pattern. However, it did get me thinking about this construction method. And I realized in trying to answer her question, that it would be easier to shoot video. I have not yet tried this with a piece of woven fabric, but I am guessing it would work?

I wanted to have something a little special to show in my "More Than One Way to Skin a Sweater" class back in April. This plain cropped jacket has an unusual construction method which I call "origami" because it can be represented by a rectangle that is cut and folded. You'll recall this jacket is worked in linen stitch. I only had the one large skein, so I weighed it. This allowed for me to make calculations as I knit. How much fabric did I have? How much yarn had I used? How long could the sleeves be without running out of yarn? These questions can be answered with some confidence if you weigh the skein before beginning and at intervals as you knit. I crochet cast-on at the bottom edge and treated the bottom part of the jacket as a rectangle. I planned and used about 35-40% of the skein. When I got to the underarms, I folded the rectangle as if it were the bottom of a cardigan -- right front, back, left front. I was at the beginning of a right-side ...

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....