Whatever happens to strike my fancy, but surely some sort of fiber content.
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| Like The Queen Whatever happens to strike my fancy, but surely some sort of fiber content. |
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0 Comments:Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom] Wednesday, March 05, 2003  Last night's class ended up being a sort of talk session. One student was out of town. The other two were at widely different places in their sweaters - one had finished and was struggling with her second sweater. I say struggling because they were having an awful row, that knitter and her sweater. She had wanted it to be a circular sweater with set-in sleeves a la Zimmermann and like my golden girl. She also knit it quite oversized. Perhaps too oversized. She had actually finished it with a big cowl neckline and hated it. Big problem - the front of the neck was way too high. When we talked about it last weekend I suggested that she rip back a few inches below the under-arm and make regular and judicious decreases at the sides so that when she got to the underarm area the sweater would fit her more naturally. It would give the sweater something of an a-line tunic look but the overall fit would be better. She decided not to do this but to finish the shoulder area as a yoke sweater like her first one. She already knew she would need short rows in the back plus some fairly severe decreases across the back of the neck before knitting her collar treatment but she forgot to do both techniques, knit and ripped out the collar, knit it up again, forgot again and at that point she said she was ready to take scissors to it. Instead she put it away, went into a dark room for 5 minutes and breathed deeply.
This is a woman who likes to come to completion and I am not sure what she will decide to do, but my suggestion to her was to pack it away for a while and work on something else. She is swatching some lovely merino which she may knit into a vest. My other student was not as far along with her sleeves as she wanted to be. She did not want to master double points, so was knitting them back and forth on straights from cuff till she had enough to put onto the circular needle. I had not explained the increase sequence well enough last time so she was a little confused about her increases. And she was worried about forgetting which round she was on and not making the increases at the correct interval. Fortunately I had my golden girl with me (see? I am relenting in my attitude about the gold UFO - and so you can guess things are going along fairly well with her now) and could show her how badly I had miscounted both row and stitchs on the sleeve increases and how little it was going to matter in the end. She was able to join one sleeve and continue knitting in the round on it. She had started another sleeve but it had an error on it that she was truly unhappy with so in the end she will have to rip back about 2 inches of sleeve knitting. Fortunately these inches are very near the cuff and so she is not loosing too much work. And her knitting is absolutely the most even, perfectly tensioned knitting I have ever seen. The original class schedule was to have students ready to attach sleeves and begin work on the yoke portion during this 4th class but I have always been ready to adapt the schedule to fit the class. We have our regular Tuesday night knitters group next week and I hope my sleeve knitting student comes with sleeves done so we can get her going on the yoke. I will do nothing with Sigvaldi till at least next week so I can have two sleeves ready to demonstrate how to attach them to a body. And that gives me time to work on the golden girl. I have not really had opportunity to knit since I finished the short rows on the right shoulder. Last night I put in a few rows across the back, eating up the sleeve stitches at each end, every knit row. (remember, at this point I am knitting each front and the back as flat knitting, knit one row, purl the next) I have one more row to do eating up the sleeve stitches and then the 4 pair of short rows must be knit to give the shoulders in back a slope that matches the right front. I thought at first I would then put short rows in the back to raise it but when I laid out the sweater last night to discuss what I was doing, I realized that, by lowering the front neck so much, I didn't need to raise the back neck. I plan (and you know about the best laid plans) to finish the short rowing on both shoulders which will put me at the end of a knit row. If things look neat and tidy I will: *Do a 3 needle bindoff on the left shoulder starting at the sleeve and binding off towards the neckline *Drop the yarn *Using a second ball of yarn do the 3-needle bindoff on the right shoulder from sleeve to neckline *Staying on right shoulder I will knit across the back, decreasing some pre-selected # of stitches *Pick up stitches down the front of the neck, including the center front stitches that are on a holder, and back up the slope part of the front neck and join at the right shoulder. *Work a stand-up collar with popcorns from the hollow oak cable and i-cord trim Report back here. Heh. Good knitting to you all. posted by Bess | 6:47 AM |
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