Knitting for baby

One of my best friends is pregnant. This is fantastic news - they had been trying for months before they got the good news, and I know they will be fantastic parents. Notwithstanding some of the names the prospective father has suggested …

Anyway, for me this means the chance to try my hand at knitting baby clothes. And as luck would have it, just as I was finishing up my lacy t-shirt (designed by me, don’t you know), Knitting magazine showed up in the post box complete with a pattern for a lovely, simple baby cardie.

All five pieces had to be threaded onto the circ. Preferably without dropping any stitches.

Substitute
As a Debbie Bliss pattern, it calls for Ms Bliss’s Baby Cashmerino. But I’m all for supporting local businesses, so I went along to my friend’s SoSusie Yarns stall at Archway market. She doesn’t stock Debbie Bliss, so I had to for something else. Baby Rooster is 100% merino, machine washable and soft as the fur on a kitten’s nose. It’s cheaper than Baby Cashmerino and comes out at the same tension. It’s also lovely to knit with. In short, buy some. From SoSusie.

Now the wonderful thing about baby knits is just how quick they are to make. I did one of the cardie fronts in a couple of hours at a knitting group. Amazing! I started the cardie at the beginning of this month (July) and I’ve already nearly finished. And that includes putting it aside for about a week because I simply couldn’t understand how the yoke worked.

Panic!
Yeah, that yoke. I was convinced there was a mistake in the pattern. I’d happily (and correctly) made all the separate pieces - back, two fronts, two sleeves - up to the armhole shaping and then transferred all the stitches to a holder. Next it was time to transfer them all back to the needles. There were 188 of them - I bought a circular. Then it was time to knit the yoke, decreasing all the time to the collar.

Sounds simple, and it is. But I just couldn’t see how the armholes would be made. I looked on Ravelry, I looked in the next two issues of the magazine, I looked on the magazine’s forum, I searched the whole internet. Nothing. It took a very clever knitting Badger to explain it to me. It works. But I’m not sure why.

It’s not important. I’m racing through the yoke now, and it’s surely only a matter of days till the cardie is finished. And in plenty of time for baby’s birth.

Close up - see how even those stitches are? I put that down to the yarn. And my own greatness, of course.

A belated update

Pattern: Candy reconstructed


The problem with a craft blog is that there’s not much point updating it until you’ve got something to show off. And when you’re making a jumper without a pattern it takes a long time to finish. When I started this jumper, my first that I’ve designed myself, I had every intention of posting regular updates - a record of what I got right, what I got wrong, what I did to fix the mistakes, the changes I made to my original idea. In short, everything I learned about designing my own knits. But when it came to it, I was far too busy knitting to write.

Finished object
The important thing, though, is that my jumper is finally completed. And you know what? It looks pretty good! There was a lot of trial and error involved. Making sure the sleeves fit the armholes was particularly onerous, and I’m still not sure I quite understand how this works. I was going to do a ribbed collar, but once I’d done this and cast off, I couldn’t get my head through the resulting hole. So a simple double crochet finish has had to suffice. As it happens, I really quite like the new collar.

And all of this was part of the learning process. I now know to leave a bigger gap for my head, and to cast off very loosely! I’ve learnt how to make frills, and I love that effect around the cuffs. I’m also knitting a lot more quickly than I was at the beginning of this project.

Work in progress
The other thing with crafting is that, even before you’ve finished a current project, you’re thinking about the next. And true to form, I’m already on my next design. This time a cropped t-shirt with what I’m calling a ‘climbing vine’ lace pattern. I say I’m already on it, what I mean is that it’s nearly finished. Which will give me the topic of my next blog!

Off the cuff

Pattern: Cold Office Cuff

This was inspired by two things. The first was coming into the office on a Monday morning to find it bitterly cold. That ‘the heating’s been off all weekend and it’s going to take all day to warm up’ sort of cold. I wrapped up in my cardi and put all the heaters on, but my poor hands were turning blue. I couldn’t wear my gloves, because then I wouldn’t be able to use my computer. I needed something that would keep my hands warm without covering up my fingers. Hmm.

Second was a jumper. The first jumper I ever knitted, in fact. At the time I was hugely proud of myself. Now, though, the cheap acrylic had stretched to the point where the jumper was just a shapeless mess and the bright purple was doing nothing for anyone. I really don’t know where I was going with that colour. I suppose I was thinking something like: purple is good, therefore lots of purple must be even better. I was wrong. A paler purple, lilac maybe, might have worked.

The yarn makes more sense. It was my first attempt at making a jumper - I was hardly going to make it in cashmere. So it was time to recycle the jumper, giving me lots of acrylic to play with. And so the Cold Office Cuff was born.

Easy does it
It’s incredibly simple. Essentially 1x1 rib for a bit, 2x2 rib with some increasing, 2x2 rib straight, 2x2 with some decreasing, 1x1 rib, cast off. Sew up, leaving a gap for your thumb. Repeat.

Originally I was going to do some cables, but I couldn’t find the pattern I wanted to base the cables on, so I gave up on that idea. Also, I wanted something very quick to knit up - these most certainly were. My cuffs are now kept at work, and as the last few mornings have been pretty cold, I’m rather pleased with myself.

Next I shall work out those cables and maybe figure out a way to make a thumb.

The Cold Office Cuff - my first ever design!

Beginnings and endings: a closer look at making a lace hat

I love knitting - I love leafing through magazines and books to plan what I’ll make next; I love going to yarn shops to choose wool, thinking about colours and textures, how something will feel and look; I love the act of knitting in hand, watching the fabric grow; I love learning new things to do with those two simple stitches that all knitting begins with. What I don’t love, however, are the beginnings and endings - casting on and sewing up.

Casting on should be fun. It’s the start of a new journey - it’s getting in the car that’s going to take you somewhere exciting. Or at least it should be. Not to me, though. To me it’s time consuming and dull. You spend all that time casting on and there’s hardly anything to show for it. Then you have to count all your stitches, which I do two or three times just to be sure. Possibly that’s overkill.

A question of cast-on
Really, however, there’s much more to casting on than I realised. First, I thought you just learned a cast-on technique and that was you set for life. I was wrong. When I learned to knit, using Debbie Stoller’s fantastic Stitch n Bitch: The Knitters’ Handbook, I followed her method for casting on. It’s called the long-tail cast on and while it looks quite complicated it really isn’t. It also makes a lovely, neat edge.

I used my usual long-tail method to begin my lace hat. And it turned out that this was a mistake. The technique simply doesn’t have enough stretch in it for a hat. It took two attempts to work this out, of course, which wasn’t helped by the fact that I was knitting so tightly I was actually hurting my hands.

A new method was called for, so I tried the knitted method. As the name suggests, this involves knitting into the stitch that’s on the needle and transferring the new stitch onto the left needle. The resulting edge is lot looser and stretchier than that produced by the long-tail method, but it’s not as neat or nice-looking.

I’m not going to attempt to explain how to do the two cast ons I used here, but if you want to give them a go, head over to YouTube and do a search - there are loads of tutorials.

Blockheads
I don’t really get blocking. I mean, I get what you do, obviously. That’s easy - pin out the knitted pieces, wet them and leave them to dry. But I’ve never really understood why. I’ve blocked all my pieces and none of them have looked any different afterwards.

Pre-blocking. I was going to give up on lace after seeing this.

But that was before I knitted lace. When I finished my hat, it actually looked a bit of a mess - holey, not lacy. Blocking is supposed to fix this, so I made sure I blocked properly. I pinned out that hat section by section, ensuring that each was fully stretched out, spritzed with water and left to dry. It took more than a week. But you know what? It was worth it. It’s now lacy, not holey.

Careful, section-by-section blocking. It took ages.

Sew, sew
I don’t know why I dislike the sewing part. But everyone does, right? This should be the exciting bit. The knitting is done, you’ve blocked all the pieces and now you’ve just got to sew them together before you can wear your new hat/jumper/shrug/whatever.

But before I go any further, a word on weaving in ends. One of the best pieces of advice I’ve been given on this is to weave in ends as you go, so that you don’t have an overwhelming number of them to sort out at the end. I even did this once, and it really does help. So have I done it since? Of course not! The moral there is listen to good advice and keep on following it.

But back to the sewing. My theory on why we hate the sewing up so much is that we’re all worried that our terrible sewing technique is going to ruin our beautiful knitting. So we put it off and put it off until it becomes A Big Thing.

Time to let you in on a secret: sewing can be undone. You know how you forgot that yarn over four rows back and you’ve got to back to fix it? Sewing is just the same! Cut the thread and unpick it - no harm done.

It might take a long time, you might not be the best sewer in the world, but the more you do it the better - and quicker - you’ll get. And before you know it, sewing will just be very little thing.

I always think I’m rubbish at sewing, so I avoid it. But you know what? I sewed that hat up in about an hour, and you can’t even see the seam.

And finally ...
Remember that ‘Break yarn, thread through rem sts, draw up and fasten off’ instruction was concerned about? It’s easy! I left a nice, long tail to make blocking easier, and then just used a crochet hook to thread the tail through each stitch and then let it drop off the end of the needle. The long tail ensures that the stitches won’t fall off the yarn during blocking.

Once the blocking was done, I pulled the thread tight and sewed a nice figure of eight to secure it, and then used the remaining yarn to sew up the hat.

Hat in use! Lace is my new favourite.

The frill of it

As you know I’m currently working on my first design project - adapting Candy, a pattern that featured in the May 2008 issue of Let’s Knit (it’s on Ravelry here, for those with an account).

The changes I’m making aren’t huge - a V neck rather than scoop, 4-ply yarn instead of double knit, changing the colour of the yarn at the stocking stitch part to match the accents around the hem, cuffs and neck, and putting in a frill at the hem and cuffs. But I think that’s enough for a first foray into design.

Taking the measure
Now, I’m usually a ‘chuck it all in and hope for the best’ kind of girl; a philosophy I apply to everything from packing to cooking. It’s always seen me good in the past. So I was rather surprised at my methodical approach to this design. I decided exactly where I want the hem to fall - a couple of inches below the waistband of my jeans - measured myself, knitted a tension square and measured the width of a top that was the right length to be sure of the size. Using all this information, I calculated exactly how many stitches I’d need.

Next, I wanted to make the hem looser than the ‘bodice’ as it were (the 2x2 rib). I thought I’d achieve this with a 3x3 rib. This meant that my stitches had to be divisible by two and three. Luckily 144 is and it’s very close to the number I’d found I needed. Time to start knitting.

It didn’t work. The 3x3 rib certainly wasn’t looser than the 2x2, if anything it was tighter(see Exhibit A below). This wasn’t going to work at all. So I took some spare acrylic and started experimenting. How about a 1x1 rib? No. How about casting on with bigger needles, knitting one row and changing to the smaller needles? Nearly, but not quite.

I was going to have to try something different. What would happen, I wondered, if I cast on several more stitches than I needed, knitted a row and then k2tog every fourth and fifth stitch? It worked. In fact, to make the frill even more, well, frilly, I cast on and knit the first row using big needles then changed to the small needles for the decrease row. Experimentation over, it was time to start again.

And we're off ...
Problem: I didn’t know how many stitches I’d need to cast on so that I’d end up with 144 after decreasing. Divide 144 by four and add the result, 36, to 144 seemed the right thing to do. I still don’t know why this is the right thing to do, but it really is because I counted the whole thing out on paper. To complicate things further, the cast on and first row had to be in colour 1 and the decrease row (and all following rows) were to be in colour 2. But after all the maths, remembering to change colours was easy.

Of course, it’s not all been plain sailing since then. Only last night, having done some 15cm of knitting, I found a mistake about halfway down. It wasn’t a huge mistake - a couple of places where I’d purled instead of knitted and then corrected myself. But I knew it was there, so it had to go. This meant ripping out 7.5cm of knitting, just to correct two wrongly purled stitches. Being a perfectionist isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

And that’s where I am at the moment: reknitting all those ripped out rows. Yes, it’ll take ages, but for me it’s worth it.

Exhibit A. Sorry for the quality of the photo - done at night on my lap.
But you can see the lack of frill.

Much better! Just look at the frill. Frilling! And other bad puns.

Knitting up north

It's taken months to get this far. No, really.

Holidays are great. I’ve just come back from a week 'oop north' and I’ve had a fabulous time. I knitted, wrote, ate, walked, read, drank wine and watched some birds.

On the knitting front I finished a hat that’s taken me far too long to complete (lace am hard), did some of a gorgeous red slouch and started out on my first ever design project. Well, I say design project, it’s more of a redesign. I’m taking a pattern I’ve made before and adapting it. I decided that would probably be the easiest way to get into designing my own knits. So far I haven’t managed to quite get things looking the way I want, so currently I’m testing out various techniques in order to work out how to get the hem right. At the moment stocking stitch on giant needles or attempting a frill are the front-runners. I’ll let you know how I get on.

But it’s the hat I’m really pleased with. This hat has been a nightmare knit. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had to frog and redo it. Partly this is my own fault - I didn’t swatch and it turned out my tension was much, much too tight, and it soon became obvious that the hat wouldn’t fit round my head. In my defence, though, the tension square was in the complicated lace pattern, rather than a nice, sensible stocking stitch, and I just couldn’t work out how to count the damn thing!

I started again on bigger needles, much bigger needles. But I was still knitting very, very tight. So tight in fact that moving the yarn on the needles was actually hurting my fingers, and several times when arduously pushing stitches along needles I pushed too hard and the stitches popped of the end. That involved much swearing and dropped stitches, I can tell you.

So then I learned to knit continental. Sounds a bit dirty doesn’t it? Unfortunately it’s not. This has cured my too-tight knitting problem. Honestly, it’s fantastic - it’s practically impossible to work too tightly. Continental knitting is great and I highly recommend it. In fact I’ll probably blog about it in the very near future.

However, a new knitting style meant starting that hat again. You might be surprised to hear that I still didn’t do a tension square. But guess what? It worked anyway! The hat is knitted. It only took two false starts, not to mention the time I took it to the pub and talked/drank so much that I lost a stitch and had to undo the whole thing. Or the many unknittings that took place due to dropped stitches or missed yarn overs.

The knitting is indeed done, though, and I’m very proud. Now I’ve got to block it and do something that says ‘Break yarn, thread through rem sts, draw up and fasten off. Not entirely sure what that means but I’m sure I’ll work it out, and when I do I'll post photos of the completed piece.

Lace detail. I admit you can't really see it. You'll just have to wait till its blocked and off the needle.


The Slouch. More photos when it's done.

Bead queen

One of the best pieces of advice Emma gave us in the bead jewellery class was to practice what we'd learned sharpish, before we forgot it all, and so I had earmarked yesterday (Sunday 5 September) as my day for beading.

After the class I had bought everything I needed to make a 12-strand bracelet - hundreds of little beads, some thread and all the sterling silver fixings required. I gathered this all together, along with the pliers and clippers I'd bought from Buffy's Beads, and sat down at the kitchen table ready to start stringing.

First came the maths; I had to figure out how long the strands should be and many beads I needed for each strand. The first bit was easy: measure the circumference of my wrist. It's 5.5"; obviously I didn't want a skin-tight bracelet so decided the strands should be 7". To work out how many beads I'd need I strung an inch-long strand and counted. There were 14 beads, giving me 98 per 7" strand. So I counted 100 into little pots.

Everything you need to start beading!

To string each strand you need to cut a length of thread, tie a knot in one end and start sliding the beads on. The strands should be several inches longer than you want them to end up. It will become clear why next ...

It was all going swimmingly well until I got to the tying up bit. I tied all six strands together. And then realised I should have put the calotte on first. I had to cut the knot off; lucky my thread was so long. Mistakes aren't the only reason for extra thread, it makes all the knots easier. Crisis averted.

First six done, on to the next set.

But things were to get worse. The bracelet is made in two sets of six strands, each set is attached to a soldered ring and the rings are then attached to split rings, one of which is also attached to the clasp. The first set was perfect, not withstanding the knot problem. Then it happened. While tying the first knot on the second set, I let go of the ends. Beads went everywhere. I picked them up, threaded them back on and tied my knot. Phew.

Can you guess what comes next? That's right, things got even worse. When tying the second knot it's important to get the beads tightly packed, otherwise you can see the thread. I worked the beads down, pulled the thread tight, worked the beads down, and so on. It looked great. I tied my knot. But somehow it ended up in the wrong place - there was spare thread on three of my strands!

I tried undoing the knot. No joy. I tried easing it further down the thread. I had some success with this, but not enough. Three of my strands were just too long. But there was nothing more I could do, other than cut it all off, waste those sterling silver fixings and start again. In the end I decided to finish it off. This was my first ever solo attempt after all. In fact it looks OK. With all 12 strands afixed you can't actually see the three that went wrong.

It gets worse though: despite my careful measuring the bracelet is too long for me. The various rings and clasps added at least another inch to the bracelet and it just slides over my hand and falls off. Bugger. So if you know anyone with a 6.5" inch wrist and a liking for shiny purple things, let me know.

It's not all bad, though. I learned some important lessons, practised bracelet-making techniques and I've got plenty of beads left for another go.

The finished article. So who wants it? You can't see the mistake, honest.

A close-up of the beads.