KPP Fair Isle Cardigan Knitalong

Anxious to get started

Thanks Laura and Penny for letting me join. I received the pattern and yarns last week and am looking forward to getting started, it will be a slow go as I travel for a living and will be back and forth to Europe until Fall.
The problem is that it is a tremendous amount of yarns to take on the road plus knitting needles are not allowed on flight out of European airports which is when I do my best knitting - on the daytime flights home.

Anyway, I hope to get going in the next 2 wks but am going to make a change or two such as making set-in sleeves. I have really enjoyed reading all of the post and seeing the photos. I have learned a great deal as well.

Finished!

I finished, and I love my cardigan!  I actually finished nearly two weeks ago, but it took a good two days to dry after wet blocking.  Then I was, and still am, working insane hours, so no chance for outside daylight shots, until tonight.  Blocking made all the difference in the world.  I was worried it was a little two small when I cast off the last stitch, but it blocked to size perfectly, and all the stitches evened out. 

Modifications:  First off with the ribbing, I used Meg Swansen's "Purl when you can" method.  I also knit an extra plain row between the color bands on the body only to add a little length.  On the sleeves I started knitting with one color band higher than recommended on the pattern because I was afraid of the sleeves being too short - as you can see by the bunching around my wrists, this extra color band wasn't needed :)  I also did a three-needle bind off on the shoulders. Finally, I did an I-cord bind off on the cuffs, neck band, and front button bands, and liked the finished edge so much, I picked up stitches around the bottom ribbing, and did one there too.  It did eat up a little bit of the color work on the button band and neckband, but that doesn't bother me.  If I had it to do over again, I probably would have knit a row or two in black after the color work and used the last black row to attach the i-cord bind off.    

I think that's pretty much it - I have a ton of yarn left over, so I'm looking forward to lots more color work to use some if it up.  But first, I'm going to knit a few other sweaters that I've been itching to start (watch my blog for progress on those).  Feel free to contact me if you have any questions about my cardi, and I'm definitely keeping up with the KAL here.  I may even show up again in a few months to work on a fair isle vest or two!

That curling checkered band

Happy news, gang. I've wet blocked my beautiful sweater and that red and blue checked ribbed section is lying very nicely flat and doesn't look like it will curl at all.

I intended to post photos today but I left the cable at home.

:(

I will remember tomorrow. I actually wet blocked the sweater before I tacked down the facings, sewed on the buttons or made the final decision about putting an i-cord trim around the bottom edge. That last feature is what drove my decision because I couldn't decide if I wanted the i-cord or if I wanted some other finish. I wanted a clear vision of what the sweater was going to look like before I put any additional trim on it. I wasn't sure I would like a tiny brown i-cord at the bottom - if it would like strange. Since blocking, I think it will look strange if done in brown and I'm going to do that bottom finish in black. In fact, I am probably going to do it in a little single crochet edge because I want to wear the sweater on Wednesday and I won't have time to do an i-cord edging in such a short time-frame. If I don't really like the crochet edging I can always take it out and do the i-cord.

Other news about this sweater is that it blooms beautifully when blocked. Particularly if you've lugged the poor thing around as I have, and knit on it in a wood stove heated living room, and it's just plain dirty, do consider wet-blocking instead of steam blocking. I always worry that I'll steam in dirt that won't ever wash out when I steam block something. Probably not the case, but it's just a little quirky worry of mine.

If your sweater has felt all scrunchy and soft and puffy - wet-blocking will surprise you by flattening it out beautifully. The fabric has lots of mobility in it - you can block it a little wider if you think you've knit a bit skimpily - or longer if you think it's a bit too wide or too short. In fact, if I were advising anybody about using this yarn I would tell them to knit a swatch and wet-block it just to see how the fabric behaves. (Not that I do this, oh no. I just start right on knitting and trust to Athena to watch over me.)

So. Happy news. Photos tomorrow. Debut on Wednesday.

NEEDLES

Hello ladies!  I am cast on.  My Addi Turbos were too slippery so I ordered Addi Natura's bamboo circulars.  The join is terrible (a problem I do not have with the Turbos).  Any suggestions?

SLEEVE CAP JOY

On Sunday morning I had a bad reaction to some medicine and was a little wobbly all day. Then, when I finally sat down to work on TheKipFee I discovered

GASP -

Horrors!

A Math error. I knew that I had only 14 sleeve cap stitches left to consume, but I kept figuring the row number as if I had 16 stitches left. I kept thinking of those decrease stitches as sleeve stitches even though I knew they were body stitches. So all the lovely back of the sweater had to be ripped out. I didn't discover this till I'd knit the right front shoulder, when the hole at the top of the sleeve cap popped up and laughed at me.

I took Monday off from all knitting and this morning....

Eureka!

Even for TheQueen of Loquacity, there are times when pictures are worth so much more. Today I give you:



Two shoulder views - the first one is an enhanced photo that has slightly more true colors. The second one shows the little blips where I did short row wrap&turns. They are not wanted, and will not show up when worn and besides, I think they'll also block out completely. I just wanted them visible for the record.


Here you can also see where the short rows occured and the shape a couple of pairs of those magic babies creates. You see how the sweater widens on both sides of the seam. This will make it conform to the slope of the shoulder from neck towards arm. Lawsee I love short rows!


Here you see the last front and back stitch on the body eating up the sleeve. Notice the slope in the lavender and yellow areas. Those end stitches stop angling and lie flat as they consume sleeve stitches when the colorways turn to the plain buff, striped tiger brown and gold and plain buff color again (Twig,Fawn, Yellow and Twig).


Here they are meeting in the middle.

Another shot.

Can you imagine how pleased I am with this? This is the point in my knitting where a sweater often defeats me and retires to triumphant, but wretched misery to become future nourishment for guilt and moths in the UFO bin. I knew the knitting should turn out this way, but after Sunday's mind loss and the subsequent discovery of a Math Error I could feel the insidious creep of doubt and fear pushing up tendrils of defeat into my normal confident frontal lobe.

Happily I was triumphant instead and The KipFee will be all the better for it.

Two tips though, for anyone wanting to try this method.

First off – don’t be lazy and leave any dormant stitches on loose circular needles. The wise thing to do is to thread a long piece of yarn through all those loose stitches and tie it into a circle. I seldom do this because I resent having to pick stitches off of yarn and back onto a needle. It’s a tedious process that you can by-pass if you leave your dormant knitting on needles. The down side is that all those wretched needle tips flop around and catch in your knitting, tangle in the working yarn, tangle in any loose ends that you haven’t woven in. Leaving your dormant stitches on needles is the lazy man’s way and it’s always more work in the end than doing it the wise, but slow, tortoise way.

Second tip – do the 3-needle bind off with a separate fairly short double point needle. 8 inches long would be good. My other bad lazy man’s way is to use the dangling end of one of the circular needles in the stitches being bound off. With worsted weight at 4 or 5 stitches to the inch you probably only have 15 or so stitches to do and the thicker yarn is less prone to slide off a needle when you’re manipulating the other end. At 8 stitches to the inch I had durn near 40 stitches and they were as recalcitrant as naughty 2 year olds. Again, I was too lazy to stop and go hunt down another needle. Especially when I already had a lap full of them!

Left shoulder front to knit and attach to left shoulder back and I am done with all but the bands. This is a happy day.

Collar Steek Worries

Hello all! I've just joined the KAL, and as I told Penny when I asked to join, I'm desperately in need of some motivation and moral support to finish my Palette Sampler. I've loved all the knitting of it, and can't wait to wear it...but...All that's left to do now is the collar and front steeks, and knitting the collar and button band. And I'm terrified. The straight steeks don't bother me anymore - the armholes went fine - but the curved ones for the collar have paralyzed me. I crocheted one-half of the collar before going away for the holidays. I think it's fine (famous last words, ha!), but it took  a whole long evening of intense concentration, by the end of which I was a quivering mass of very nervous jelly. The thought of doing it again - and making it match exactly! - has kept me from picking up the sweater again since then. I'm working under a tight deadline right now, so setting aside several hours of peace, quiet and good light while I'm awake enough to handle this has also been a problem, and it may not happen right away. But I need you guys to keep me thinking about it, and wanting the sweater, so that the poor thing doesn't end up banished to the closet forever. On a brighter note: I had a wonderful time knitting the rest of it, and I can't wait to play with all these leftovers! The whole sampler set looks scarcely touched, so I'm expecting to make quite a few more things out if it. I've loved every second of playing with all the colors - which was the point of buying this set - so it's already been worth it. I posted about some of the details of knitting it on my blog here and here. I wish I'd thought of altering it for raglan sleeves, as Bess did, although I'm not at all sure I would have been able to pull it off, so I think I'll just watch Bess and learn, so I can do it next time I attack a Fair Isle sweater!

Thanks so much to Penny and Laura for setting this up!

Photos!

Hmmm. I posted this a.m. but must have done something wrong since it doesn't show up. All the better, though, since now I have pictures.

I made it through the next colorway!! The last complete colorway, in fact. I have 8 more rounds of knitting to do, but here is where I must divide and knit front and back flat. I haven’t done stranded colorwork from the purl side in, oh la!, not since I was in high school! Well, there will only be only 2 rounds worth of that kind of knitting. It can’t be but so bad.

You can see I got better with handling the color of those decreases as I went on up towards the top. If I still can't stand the little odd color blips when I've blocked this sweater, I can cover them up with duplicate stitch.

Another development popped up to surprise me. When I tried on the sweater last night - to see if the flat, top part of the sleeve cap came at the right place (it did) - I realized that where the knitting ended in the front was a very nice place for a neckband to begin. Oh ho! Ought I to knit a right and a left front and start knitting the last colorband 3 inches in from the center on each front part? Instead of cutting away the knitting in the front, as the pattern has you do? It means even less knitting, even less colorwork in purl. Hmmmm. There would need to be a tee tiny bit of shaping in the front but it’s easy shaping. Hmmm. This is very, very tempting. Too tempting, in fact. So. All that talk about snipping away at fine fabric might just turn out to be moot. I don’t have to.

What I will do is a little short row shaping in the back. And maybe a little in the front. I’m such a sucker for short rows and I can do them in a solid color, at the very last. What else I’ll do is to knit the back first and then do the front pieces just to get comfortable with the short row shaping.

Color Changes and Shoulder Math

This sweater has an overall bluish cast. This makes sense, especially if you subscribe to Bess’ Theory of Blue, which states that in anything artistic, all else being equal, people will like the blue one best. There is, however, a subset of people like me, with yellow or golden skin and green eyes, who, though they too might like blue best, like themselves even more and know enough to Not Wear Blue. Particularly next to their faces.

KnitPicks colors are all very clear and bright. They don't have an olive green anywhere in their entire catalog and only one gold that I can remember. This Pallette collection is all clear colors. And overall, the cool colors dominate in this sweater, though it has enough warm colors to make it work for us yellow skinned folk, with some minor adjustments.

My color adjustment mission was to swap out the baby pink and blue band for a warmer one. I held up different combinations to the sweater till I found one that really excited me - that made my eyes sparkle and my lips turn up in a smile. Petal and Peach. Bingo. I sat by the window watching the snow fall yesterday as I knit away with those two colors, feeling smug and creative and excited all at the same time. I completed that pattern and moved on to the next.

It was at this point I began to grow anxious that I may have miscalculated the math for the shoulders. I always grow anxious at this point - in every sweater except those circular yoke sweaters. I set the sweater aside, spread out on the dining room table, and went to get another sweater to measure it against and when I came back, the first thing that hit me when I walked into the room was that P&P color band. Pow! Right between the eyes! It popped out at me like the proverbial sore thumb; only, it’s prettier, of course. It really is a wonderfully nice colorway. It’s the kind of colorway that will tempt me to make More Purchases of KnitPicks yarn. But is it something that will also give people a headache when they see me in this sweater? Will its pulsing energy slam people in the eyes with A Brightness that doesn’t fit? Will people (including me) think "what’s wrong with that sweater?"

Of course, it just may be me and my picky old Virgo anxiety fussing around because I didn’t follow the instructions, in a pattern I know is wrong for me, even if it was designed that way. Or, like all those lesser astrologers would say, maybe I just doubt myself because I am so critical I am even critical of me! It may just be that I need to look at it a while. Think about it a bit. Stare at it. Decide if that added colorway is just what this sweater needed. And that I did the math, if not exactly right, at least right enough to be able to finish this sweater.

And I enjoy working on it so much I wouldn’t mind ripping out and knitting it again - if that would make it better, make it more perfect. (You really must laugh at that thought)

And I am such an ENFP - one of those people who grieve, instead of rejoice, at completion.

And my dears. I am only inches away from the end. So close. So very, very close.

So. Today will be a rest day from KipFee knitting. Feel free to comment about this color choice if you can see these distinctions on your monitor and have any reaction to it at all - pro or con, since my feelings can’t be hurt about this.

One Down, Two to Go

Although technically, I think the neckline gets steeked, doesn't it? So, that makes three to go.   Yes, I cut my first steek ever this weekend.  I did a lot of research and reading before, and chose to go with a crocheted reinforcement, following Eunny Lang's instructions.  Here are pictures of the knitting pre-steeking, and then of me crochet up one side, down the other, and finally cut open. 

Oh, one thing I did differently from the KPP FIC instructions, was instead of casting off the body all the way around, I instead knitted to the first armhole steek, cast off those ten stitches, and then once the steek was worked, I did a three needle bind off for the shoulder seam.  My shoulder seam was to be 6 1/2 inches, and I'm getting 8 stitches to the inch, so I knit 52 front stitches to 52 back stitches for the three needle bind-off.  Then I'll bind off the center back stitches, work the remaining 52 stitches before the next armhole steek, bind off those ten stitches, work the steek, then do a three needle bind off for the other shoulder seam.  Then I will continue binding off the center front stitches, since that neckline will be steeked anyway. 

I didn't really do any research before I started the knitting, so the number of steek stitches and the way the color changes were worked in the steek didn't match what Eunny suggested, but it still worked out okay.  Once I picked up the stitches and knitted a row around the armhole, this promptly got cast aside for another project - hopefully a quick one!

One month update

Well, a couple of days late, and not much progress since my last post, but this is officially how much I've accomplished on this project in the last month.  (And yes, there are other projects in my life, like it or not.)   Because I think the inside is as interesting as the outside, I've included a picture of it inside out as well :)