Shaping up

I’ve been working from home today, so no outfit photos. I was thinking about getting the sewing machine out after I finished working and using what would normally be my commuting time to get on with my Market Top, but somehow after a day’s work that didn’t seem quite so appealling, so I think it can wait until the weekend. I haven’t been completely idle, though; instead, I did this:

I’m determined to learn to make cardigans that actually fit me, and while I love the look of the Soay pattern I know that without some bust shaping it probably won’t look very good on me. So I printed off the pattern (which has the great bonus of a really detailed set of measurements) and the measuring guide from Little Red in the City, grabbed my tape measure, tied bits of yarn round me at strategic points and started measuring.

The results were really quite interesting. I have always thought of myself as having a fairly straight-up-and-down body, with narrowish hips and not much in the way of a waist, and a large bust, so that overall I’m fairly top-heavy and look a bit like a stick figure with boobs. It turns out that this is not actually the case. Yes, I have a large bust (it would have been difficult to be wrong about that!) and the narrowest part of my torso is my underbust (which I also knew), but it turns out that I do have a waist (about two inches higher than I thought it was) which may not be particularly slim but is still 11 inches smaller than the fullest point of my hips, and just under 10 inches smaller than my high hip measurement. Oh, and my hip measurement is actually five inches larger than my full bust measurement. So, not all that top-heavy after all, then!

Anyway, after allowing for a bit of negative ease at the bust and a bit of positive ease at the waist it turns out that the 40.5″ bust size of Soay will be a reasonable fit, though I might need to move the waist up a little and I’ll definitely want to add bust darts to stop the front pulling up, which really wouldn’t be good with a cropped, fitted shape like this. I’m going to use some bright pink organic cotton DK I got on sale in John Lewis last time I was in Norwich, and I really hope it works out as I think if it does it will be a gorgeous little cardi.

I’ll be interested to see how the Market Top turns out; again, my measurements more or less corresponded to a single size on the pattern and when I pinned the front and back together after sewing the bust darts it didn’t look too bad on (though I’ll baste the side seams and try it properly at the weekend), but I suspect I really need to learn to do a full bust adjustment on patterns in future. At least I think I can understand how that works now!

Ease-y does it

I finally cast off the collar of my Featherweight Cardigan last night, and as I’m working from home today I had time to weave in the ends, soak it and lie it flat to block before starting work.

Unfortunately, I think that the result of almost five months of knitting (admittedly a bit on-and-off) and two skeins of gorgeous Posh Yarn Diana merino/silk laceweight is going to be a cardigan I don’t wear very much, because it’s just too big.

This is entirely my own fault, and is down to a combination of poor body image and simple failure to think. The pattern (or the version I started knitting from – it has been updated and more sizes added) is sized S, M, L, XL and XXL, with finished bust measurements of 36 (40, 43, 47, 50)”. My full bust measurement is 42″, in between the M and L sizes, and I decided to knit the L with a finished bust measurement of 43″ (having measured the cardigan while laying it out to block, it’s come out at almost exactly that).

Why did I choose the L? Well, partly because at a UK size 14-16 I’m an L in so many shops it seemed inconceivable that I could be a medium. And partly because of the little voice at the back of my head which makes me take size 18 clothes into fitting rooms ‘because those will be sure to fit’ (funnily enough, they don’t) and stops me trying on things in a 14 even though half my wardrobe is size 14 clothes, and which told me it was much better to make a cardigan that would be slightly bigger than my actual bust measurement than risk having one which was a bit tight.

Of course, what I forgot is that a lightweight cardigan knitted at a loose gauge in a fine yarn is going to be very stretchy and that the nice fitted look I admired in pictures of other people’s finished projects on Ravelry was almost certainly the result of their cardigans being knitted with negative ease – in other words, slightly smaller than their actual measurements. And that the cardigan is designed to be worn open, so the finished measurements given aren’t actually for the full body circumference – looking at the schematic on the pattern it’s obvious that the fronts don’t meet in the middle, so the back must be wider than the combined width of the fronts. And I also forgot to allow for the fact that my 42″ bust measurement is courtesy of my FF cup size, which means that (a) my back measurement is considerably less than half my full bust measurement (about 19″ out of the 42″) and (b) given that most patterns are designed for a B-cup or thereabouts, my measurements everywhere else aren’t going to match the measurements for my full bust size.

All of which means I should have knitted the M instead of the L, and that as it is I have a cardigan with a back measurement five inches larger than my actual back measurement and sleeves which are much bigger than my upper arms. The pattern doesn’t have any waist shaping; looking at photos it’s clear that the drapy fabric is supposed to follow the wearer’s curves without the need for shaping, but I suspect that because the cardigan is so much too big it’s just going to look boxy on me.

Anyway, it’s blocking now, and you never know, that may work miracles, but if not I think this cardigan may well be looking for a new home.

Look at me, I’m all pink and fuzzy

A couple of years ago I went to the Knitting and Stitching Show at the NEC with some friends, where I was seduced by the beautiful colours of a bag of Lang Mille Colori. It sat in my stash for about a year, and then I decided I ought to do something with it and cast on for Imogen. After knitting the back and sleeves I decided that I wasn’t happy with the way it was knitting up, so I frogged it and decided to knit Mya from Noro Catwalk instead.

I cast on for Mya in January last year. It ended up being one of those projects which keeps being put aside in favour of other things; it spent all summer hibernating while I worked on more summery knits and I didn’t really pick it up again until December. By then it had been lurking in a bag for so long I really wasn’t sure I was going to want to wear it even if I did finally finish it, but my husband opined that it was nice so I persevered.

I’m glad I did, because when I finally finished sewing it together last night I realised that I really like it.

It’s a very straightforward pattern to knit – possibly too straightforward for anything but TV knitting, though there is quite a lot of shaping. I fell between sizes and made the larger one as my gauge was 15 stitches to the inch instead of the 14 specified in the pattern, which seems to have worked perfectly as it fits like a dream. It’s incredibly warm and snuggly, though I’m a little worried that the yarn will tend to pill – it’s a fluffy, loosely spun single – but I’m very pleased with it.

Finished

I’m on a bit of a finishing kick at the moment. I have finally finished my February Lady Sweater:

I can’t say I enjoyed knitting this very much. I liked the pattern; it was easy to follow and the lace pattern was interesting but easy to memorise, and I do like being able to try things on as I go. However, I really didn’t like the Rowan Summer Tweed; it’s stiff and unyielding and I really felt I had to force my needle into the stitches, especially the decreases – and there are a lot of decreases in lace! I definitely wouldn’t use it again (in fact, I have a couple of skeins I bought to make a Gretel which I’m now destashing, along with a few other yarns I don’t think I’ll ever use).

I’m very pleased with how the cardigan turned out, though. After looking at finished projects on Ravelry I decided that it looked best when people had made it with zero or negative ease over the bust; versions with positive ease on the bust tended to make the wearers look swamped. I ended up with a couple of inches of negative ease over the bust, and blocked it out quite aggressively because I was worried it would be too small, but I think it’s just right. I also didn’t add the extra stitches under the arms because the last top-down raglan I knitted ended up a bit baggy at the underarms; I’m not completely sure it wouldn’t have been better to add the extra stitches and decrease them on the sleeves, but I think it’s fine as it is.

The buttons are from Textile Garden and are really pretty:

I also finished the pair of Coriolis socks I was making for T:

This has all left me a bit short of WIPs. There’s a wintery cardigan which I’ll probably pick up again when the weather gets a bit cooler (it doesn’t have much left to do, as I’m on to the sleeves already); a crochet scarf which is probably going nowhere because it’s more ‘woolly outdoor scarf’ rather than ‘lacy scarf which can be worn indoors’; and a Multnomah shawl which I’ve been knitting away on all week and which is now nearly finished itself. I was at a bit of a loss as to what to knit next, and then someone linked to a knitalong for the Acanthus shawlette (Ravelry link) which seemed like a good way to get over my fear of laceweight (something I really need to do given the increasing amount of laceweight in my stash), and Kirsten Kapur put up her new pattern Roma which seemed like the perfect project to take with me when I go to Italy in a couple of weeks’ time. So I guess what I’m knitting next is mostly going to be shawls…

Going loopy

After three and a bit months, I have finally made it onto the second sleeve of my February Lady:

If I knit solidly through Sherlock tonight I might even get it finished today; at any rate it looks as though I should have a summery cotton/silk blend cardi before we completely run out of summery weather for me to wear it in (although I think I could wear this all through autumn over a long-sleeved t-shirt).

The eagle-eyed among you may have spotted that instead of the usual two loops of cable poking between the sleeve stitches in the picture, there’s only one. Magic Loop is my preferred technique for socks and gloves, but I’ve never liked it that much for sleeves, mostly because if I’m working sleeves in the round it’s usually because I’m doing a one-piece garment and flipping the whole thing round every time I get to the end of a needle is a pain. I was browsing Ravelry yesterday and came across a post that mentioned the ‘Travelling Loop’ technique, so I googled and found this tutorial, and thought I’d give it a go for the second sleeve.

The name is a bit of a misnomer; the loop doesn’t actually travel, although from the perspective of the knitter it moves around the needle, starting to the right of the tips and ending up back at the left of them. It allows you to use a shorter cable than you would need for magic loop (in fact, it’s perfect if you have a circular needle that’s only slightly too long for the circumference of your knitting), and I definitely find it slightly easier for sleeves because instead of knitting half the stiches, turning 180 degrees, and knitting the other half you knit round the needle turning gradually and then when you get to the end of the round and the loop comes free you can just turn back to where you started and begin again.

I don’t think Travelling Loop is going to replace Magic Loop in my affections, but I will definitely bear it in mind for sleeves in future. Meanwhile, I just have to get on and finish the cardigan, and then work out how to block it. How would you block a one-piece cardigan?

Finished objects

Now Christmas is over and all the presents have been unwrapped, I can actually blog about what I’ve been knitting recently. I gave quite a lot of knitted presents this year, and was working on them almost exclusively for the last couple of months, hence the lack of content here.

I made two sets of Turn a Square hats and slightly modified Noro fingerless mitts:

For my father, in Debbie Bliss Donegal Aran Tweed and Noro Kureyon.

And for my friend C, in Cascade 220 and Noro Silk Garden.

I made my mother a Tiger Eyes Lace Scarf (Ravelry link) using the Knitting Goddess‘s 4-ply sock yarn in ‘Walnut Grove’ (the October 2009 sock club colourway):

For my nephew I made Jacqui Turner’s Spring Chicken in dark brown Rowan Felted Tweed with orange highlights to look like my parents’ chickens:

I thought I wasn’t going to be able to make anything for my husband, as I couldn’t knit presents for him at home without him seeing them, but Dashing is a quick enough knit I managed to make a pair despite only being able to work on them at knitting group and on the bus to and from work:

They looked huge while I was knitting them, but turned out to be a good fit – I always forget how much bigger T’s hands are than mine!

I finished the second one in the pub after my work Christmas lunch, which my colleagues were very impressed by! The yarn is Debbie Bliss Donegal Aran Tweed again – I was pleased to be able to find some that was a fairly good match for the Lamb’s Pride Worsted I made T a hat and scarf out of years ago.

And, last but not least, I made my brother a Dalek using Penwiper’s Extermiknit! pattern.

The Dalek was fun to knit, although the bobbles were a bit fiddly and the yarn (Paton’s Wool Blend Aran) was quite scratchy and not particularly nice to knit with.

After all that I’m looking forward to spending January knitting things for myself (and socks for T, which I’m working on at the moment). I spent Christmas week making the Knitting Goddess Shawl, which I’ll post pictures of once it’s blocked. I also ended up frogging the Imogen cardigan because it just wasn’t working out the way I wanted. The colours were gorgeous, but I was becoming increasingly unsure about the pattern and when my picked-up stitches for the front ended up looking incredibly sloppy I decided to call it a day. I don’t think a plain chunky cardigan like that is really something I’d wear – the cardigans I love and wear a lot are Liesl and Hey Teach which are both lacy, and I think that something more along those lines would be better, although I’m not sure what would work with the stripes. No doubt something will come along, and it’s better to have frogged the cardi halfway through than carried on knitting something I didn’t think I was going to wear.

If you want to get ahead, get a hat

My Ishbel beret is finished:

It’s ended up much slouchier than I’d expected, although looking at the photos on Ysolda’s blog I think it’s much the same size as hers really. If I make another one I’ll probably make the next size down (this is the medium), but I’m happy with this one and will definitely wear it.

The yarn is Fyberspates Scrumptious 4-ply. It’s not the easiest of yarns to work with; I found that it was quite loosely plied and had a tendency to split, but it’s gorgeously soft and shiny and I really like the way the variegation works with the lace of the hat. In places it’s ended up looking almost speckly, like a bird’s wing. More pictures on Flickr if you’re interested.

The hat took less than half the skein, so to use up the remainder I’ve cast on for a pair of Veylas:

And, to prove that I don’t only knit Ysolda’s patterns, I have also cast on for Perl Grey’s Imogen cardigan* in Lang Mille Colori:

The cardigan is knitted sideways, starting with a rectangle for the back which the sleeves and fronts are knitted on to from either end. To do this, the pattern starts with a provisional cast-on. For years, my favourite provisional cast-on has been the crochet chain cast-on; I tried the open cast-on over waste yarn and couldn’t quite get my head round it. When I came to cast on for the Ishbel beret, though, I was on holiday and didn’t have a crochet hook with me, so I had to use the waste yarn method and found that several years’ more knitting experience made it seem very straightforward, so I used it again for Imogen, except that as I was transferring the stitches from the waste yarn to a needle for Ishbel it struck me that it would have been so much easier if I’d just used a spare cable from my interchangeable needle set instead of the waste yarn. So that’s what I did here. It did make knitting the first couple of rows a little more awkward than it would have been with waste yarn, but not impossibly so, and when I come to work on that side of the cardigan I can just put the needle tips on the cable and I’ll be good to go.

I’m a little puzzled by the pattern, though – according to the measurements given even the small would be a generous fit on me, and I’m definitely not a ‘small’ normally. I suspect it may be that the pattern is written as a chunky jacket to be worn over lots of layers, and I definitely want a more fitted look. I have cast on according to the directions for the small as I certainly don’t want it any longer, and I’m planning on knitting the back until it’s wide enough for my back and then knitting the front until I get the fit I want – at least the design makes it easy to tweak the sizes!

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*It was surprisingly hard to google this to find the link, as it turns out that there was a character in the Forsyte Saga called Imogen Cardigan.

Can you have too many cardigans?

Hey, Teach! is finished:

I’m really pleased with the way it turned out, and I suspect it will get a lot of wear. Having started off worrying that I might not quite have enough yarn, I ended up having a ball and a half left over. If I made another one I might make the body a bit longer, but the length is fine really.

It only took three weeks from cast-on to sewing on the final button. I’m amazed at how quickly I seem to be knitting these days, especially when I remember that it was only three years ago that I finished my first cardigan (and four years since I started it).

I’ve also been working on the Mystery Lace Shawl. I’ve finished the first section, and am waiting eagerly for Monday to find out what to do next.

In progress

I have been too busy knitting to blog much over the last few weeks. Mostly, I have been working on this:

Hey, Teach! from last summer’s Knitty, in RYC Cotton Jeans, of which I bought ten balls for £20 in the sale at House of Fraser in Worcester when I took T to the cricket for his birthday. I cast on two weeks ago, and finished the second sleeve this afternoon. Partly this astonishingly speedy knitting is due to spending five hours last Sunday watching Torchwood: Children of Earth, which got me through the last couple of inches of the back, the left front and the start of the right front and then having a crafting afternoon with friends today, but I also think the cardigan is a pretty quick knit, and the pattern is fairly easy to follow. The only tricky bit is keeping the lace pattern straight through the armhole and neck decreases, but after a while I got very good at reading the knitting and seeing how it should work.

Now I just have to weave in the ends (fortunately there aren’t too many as I used Russian joins for new balls of yarn in the middle of each piece), sew it together and add button bands. Suddenly I remember why I’m such a fan of top-down raglans! I’m planning on wearing this cardigan for my nephew’s christening next month, so at least I have an incentive to get round to it before then!

I was trying to get the knitting for Hey, Teach! finished this weekend, as I want my 5mm Harmony tips back for my next project:

This is my swatch for Socktopus‘s Mystery Lace Shawl knitalong, which she’s running via Twitter, in the semi-solid copper BFL 4-ply I bought from the Knitting Goddess at Ravelry Day. The next clue (cast-on, presumably!) will be up tomorrow at 10pm, and I wanted to be able to use the Harmonies – my Denises are OK but because the yarn’s so fine it did catch on the joins a bit when I was swatching.

If at first you don’t succeed

Back in 2005 when I started knitting again I ordered seven balls of Rowan Cotton Glace in lilac to make the Little Black Top from Stitch’n'Bitch, which looked like a fairly achievable project for someone who hadn’t knitted for years. It didn’t take me too long – only a couple of months – and I diligently seamed it and wove in the ends and even blocked it. And then I tried it on, and realised that a high-necked, close-fitting knitted top in a light colour was a really bad choice for a short, busty, fairly round person. It made me look as though I had breasts which started just below my chin and finished somewhere around my waist. It was also too short in the body and gaped at the armholes. Basically, it was an utter disaster and it got frogged fairly quickly.

Next, I decided to use the yarn for Wendy Bernard’s Essential Stripe, so I bought a few balls in a contrasting colour. I knitted a few inches of that but had neglected to make sure that the cable connectors on my Denises were locked in place; the cables came apart, as did the jumper, and by that point I’d lost enthusiasm for the project and couldn’t be bothered to start again.

Then I started making Picovoli but came to grief over the stitch counts after separating the sleeves. And then I tried a Shapely Tank Top but after knitting the front and half of the back I dedided that actually, I was never going to wear it.

I was on the verge of offering to swap or sell the yarn last spring when I found myself tired of sock-knitting during a Bank Holiday weekend spent watching DVDs, and wanted to knit something on bigger needles for a change. Without really expecting it to go anywhere, I picked up a ball of the Cotton Glace and cast on for a top-down raglan. Rather to my surprise, I kept going. It felt as though the yarn had finally told me what it wanted to be; a short-sleeved, slightly cropped cardigan, with a contrasting crochet edge.

The button is from a craft shop in St Ives; I spotted it when we were there in September and realised it was exactly the right colour for the cardigan. The edging is two rows of double crochet; unfortunately it hasn’t really stopped the stocking stitch curling, although I have managed to tame it with the iron for now. Not sure how long that will last, though. Still, it’s a nice little summer cardi. Now I just need a summer to wear it in (it’s so cold today our heating actually came on!).