KPP Fair Isle Cardigan Knitalong

What I'm doing with those sleeves.

> Comment:
> I couple of questions...are you following the pattern, but just from the bottom up? That's what I thought I'd do. Are you knitting the tapered sleeve?

I am certainly following the sequence of the charts.  But no. I'm not following the pattern - if you mean the shaping etc.  I want my sweater to fit more closely around the shoulders and I don't want that huge wad of knitting under my arms. It's not flattering look to me.

So. What to do?

I'm knitting a 40" sweater
I'm using the Elizabeth Zimmermann percentage system for figuring out how to knit sleeves.

figure out how many stitches you're knitting around the body.  (320)

cast on  20% worth of stitches. That equals 64 stitches.

knit the ribbed cuff.

The first cuff was too dull and flat so I added the yellow and red stripes to it.

when I had a nice cuff depth I increased to 80 stitches which is divisible by 10 - the number of stitches in the orange and green charted pattern, the second pattern up.

After that I have been increaseing 6 stitches on each solid band.

When I have 128 stitches which will be about 40% of the sweater width - I'll stop increasing. I ought to have about 17" of sleeve knit by then - and be somewhere around the petal/sky checkerboard design. This is where I am with the sweater body.

Of course, there's room to fiddle with these numbers and charts somewhat but that's the basic plan.

I will then join all sleeves to the body a la Elizabeth Zimmermann EPS design, but instead of making a yoke sweater I'll knit the set in sleeve shoulder. You do this by decreasing body stitches till the front and back are shoulder width (say, 15" x 8 stitches to the inch ... 120 stitches for front and 120 for back) and then you decrease stitches from the sleeve at a regular intervals till there are no more sleeve stitches left. Gotta know our row guage then, but it's just math. Of course,  I haven't worked the math, but I'll be at the shoulder seams by thetime I have no sleeve stitches left. If I want to fill in that little triangular gap between neck, sleeve top and front opening, I can put in a little bit of short row shaping - which I may do in solid colors or may play around with a pattern, depending on how adventurous I feel.

I've done this before so I know it works, though I may not have explained it well. I'll keep good math records though, and share them with the KAL.  What I know is that the sweater will look a lot more like the photo if I do this.

And yes. I am making the tapered sleeves - I live in the upper south and I'll probably use this sweater as something of a jacket rather than as a sweater. I sure am enjoying making it.

One month of knitting

Here is a photo of my sleeve, knit from the cuff up - as of yesterday afternoon.

Here's an action shot of that sleeve.

But here is what I'm most proud of.

It's a color card of all those pallette yarns so I can tell the tan from the twig!

Progress, finally!

Here is my progress so far - it seems like once I've been able to get started on it, it has really flown by.  I can't wait to see what the next pattern will look like knitted up!  I have just started the second band on the second chart.  My only change so far (other than the ribbing I blogged about a few weeks ago) is I am knitting three rows of the solid color rows instead of two rows between the pattern bands, to gain the two extra inches in length as mentioned in the pattern.  Bess, yours is looking great.  How is everyone else doing?

Woo woo!We have liftoff! Here are two photos I took with my New (to me) digital camera. I actually clicked the shutter last week, but I have been experimenting with the computer part today. I'm a bit further along now and, in fact, am fooling around with sleeves this week.

Tension issues but progress

Howdy all.

I promise - my next post will have photos. I'm getting a digital camera tutorial on Tuesday.

I had my first really frustrating correction to make this past week. Somehow my tension got wonky on one of the slanted purple rounds and I had to snug up the yarn on all 330 stitches! I used a soft tipped Bryspun dp needle to pull up the loose stitches and gently drew the yarn through and around the needles. It took forever, but it's done now. I wouldn't have bothered to fix it if it had been somewhere in the back down around my hips. Nobody looks at that part of me closely enough to notice. But this would have been right up near the underarms and quite visible.

Let's hope that's my last big booboo.

I'm going to knit the next checkerboard pattern and then stop to knit the sleeves. At this point I'll be diverging from the pattern rather a lot. Not only am I changing the shoulders, I plan to start the sleeves with 2 inches of ribbed cuffs AND I'm going to change the color of the neckband and button band to match the cuffs. I wish I'd been thinking more clearly when I began this sweater and swapped out the black for the Bark. That's such a better color for my face and my wardrobe. I've really worried about this for a long time. Black makes me look so jaundiced and though I'd thought the neck band was thin enough to not matter, it suddenly occurred to me that the change in color matters less to the overall look of the sweater and matters a heckuva lot to my face!

So. I begin a sleeve today or tomorrow with 2 inches of Bark colored 2x2 rib. And Tuesday I may have photos!

Good knitting to you all.

Moving on up that sweater

Hello and happy hump day to you all. I am making my way up the second chart pattern and am almost at 14". I haven't yet figured out how to use my new digital camera so I'm still posting slices of sweater. I hope next week to be camera literate and will show things from a different viewpoint.

I'm also about to diverge from the printed pattern. I am not making a drop shoulder swater - I would look like Mt. Everest in stripes if I did. If you look, you'll see that the sweater you are knitting won't look anything like the photos in the pattern unless you tuck it behind you, hold all the excess fabric with clothespins and wear a belt around your waist. And sit in dark chairs a lot.

I plan to start knitting my sleeves soon, from the cuff up and probably skipping the red and blue checkerboard section. I'll have to measure first, but I don't think my arms are 14" from underarm seam to wrist. when I get the sleeves done, I plan to join them a la Zimmermann seamless set-in sleeves technique. It will be an interesting math project but most of all, the sweater will look better on me. But I may not get in all the color bands that are in this pattern.

I'm okay with this straying from the printed pattern and it will keep it all an interesting project. There will also be a whole lot of yarn left over. I will certainly make some matching socks - and maybe some other little things to give as gifts.

Woops. I seem to have lost my .jpg. I'll post it as soon as I find it.

Gone missing?

We are all quiet lately, aren't we?  I can explain my absence - I just finished knitting my fastest finished object ever, except for maybe socks.  Read all the details on my blog.  I'll just say, it was an excessively long and boring strip of ribbing, and I was afraid if I stopped working on it, I'd never pick it up again.  I have to say I do love the finished result!  And, now I can focus on my Fair Isle!  Currently I'm in the middle of the purple/yellow checkerboard band, and hope to make significant progress this week!

Ahoy oh quiet ones

I see by your blogs you are all busy - and that some have had more time to knit on that sweater than others. Here's my second slice of sweater - I'm motoring on up the second chart now.

My biggest problems with the sweater are the set up rows at the beginning of each new pattern. They aren't hard to do right, but I tend to day dream while knitting them and count wrong. Still and all, they're easy to fix and I certainly am enjoying this project.

BTW, I intend to completely redo the sleeves. I look like Mt. Everest in a drop shoulder sweater, especially one that drops as far as this one does. I plan to knit circular set-in sleeves. But that is a good month away.

Hope your week is shaping up well. Cheers

A slice of sweater

I don't have a digital camera (yet - will have one soon) but I do have a scanner. Here's what my knitting looks like so far. Yes yes, I know, that first round of green and peach colored yarn is a bit pathetic. Blocking will work wonders. Creative ignoring will cover the rest. I call it car-gauge.

Ribbing Swatch

OK, as promised, here is a picture of my ribbing swatch.  Please excuse the poor picture quality, I took this VERY late last night, and couldn't get the settings right on the camera. 

Anyway, the section at the bottom of the swatch is regular K2 P2 ribbing.  I don't care for this section, I think it looks messy.  The middle section is Corrugated Ribbing.  I like this look, but not in these colors.  I think the values are too similar and the red and blue compete with each other too much.  Perhaps if one color were lighter or darker than the other, as is usually the case in the examples I seen, but I don't want to change the colors in this section.  The top section is my personal favorite.  I used Meg Swanson's Purl When You Can method, and I think it makes it look nice and crisp.  On the first row of the color changes I knit every stitch and on the second row I K2 P2.  Then on the following row where the colors switched positions to create the checkerboard, I knit every stitch again.  I agree with Bess, I think this is the method used in cardigan pictured on the Knit Picks pattern, even though the pattern doesn't say so. 

I hope this helps anyone who may be considering different ribbing options!

Penny