Mother’s Helena: What I Did

This is Clara's mother's Helena. I made Helena for Clara and knew it would please both Clara, and her mother if I made a matching sweater for mom. See Clara's Helena and Clara's and Mom's together below.

Step-by-step, here's how I made a Mom's Helena...

1. I babysit once a week, so on one of my babysitting days I found one of my daughter in law’s sweaters, measured the bust, arm length, sleeve depth and body length. My dil had a sweater with ¾ sleeves and a bit of swing so I was able to use those measurements. If you only have a traditional sweater to measure, the bust is the important measurement. You can guesstimate the others.

2. Generated a pattern for a top down v-neck cardigan with Sweater Wizard, using the measurements from dil’s own sweater. Size 7 needle; Cascade 220. Any top down v neck cardigan pattern would do.

3. Modified the sleeve increases so that the last four increases were spaced every four rows followed by 1 ½ inches without increases.

4. Modified my basic pattern to make it a Helena as follows:

Worked in stockinette 3 rows after separating for the sleeves.
Using size 5 (2 sizes down) needles worked raised band (k2 rows, p1 row, k2 row)
Back to size 7 needles
Increased to 200 stitches from 168 for bodice swing immediately below raised band
Worked lace pattern for 8 repeats
Switched to size 5 needles and worked 6 rows, then eyelet row, then four rows and bind off

5. Sleeves: I needed to go up a needle size to size 8 because I knit tighter in the round

6. Knitted on the 7 row garter stitch edging pretty much as directed in Helena directions. I used one button right below where I had finished the neck shaping. I put the button hole in the middle row of the edging, the 4th row.

The sweater was easy to knit and looks great. I’m pretty pleased with myself right now!

In Time for Christmas! Whew!

The Mother Daughter Helena's are done! I hope mother and daughter will model their new sweaters for the camera Christmas morning.

Mom' sweater is in Cascade 220 in a slightly muted pink, Clara's is in Berroco Comfort DK in bright pink. Close enough to satisfy Miss Clara, I think!

Mother Daughter Helenas

Here is Clara's Helena. I love the picot hem. I'd never seen it before but now I see it everywhere. It is so easy and so pretty! See my December 5th post for pictures before turning the hem under.

And here's Mom's! I have one sleeve, the hem and the edging to do. Hopefully I'll have pictures of that one soon. I started with a Sweater Wizard v-neck cardigan and modified it to be akin to the girl's Helena. I'll post the details when I get it done and know it works! Right now I best get knitting!

February Lady Sweater Hints

The February Lady Sweater is done and looks terrific on my daughter. I complained about this pattern as I was working on it but I stuck to the pattern, deviated not a wit, and the end result is just what I wanted.

That said, here are some hints for success:

· Everyone says the sweater runs big, or stretches. Pay attention to gauge and choose the finished bust size, not your ready-to-wear size. I made a small for a 41 inch finished bust.

· Mark the front of the sweater after the first row or two so you make sure to get the raglan increases on the right side – every time! With garter stitch it would be easy to get confused.

· Raglan increases: This is the one change I would make to the pattern. The pattern has you make raglan increases every knit row a prescribed number of times and then stop the increases and finish the yoke. But many knitters complain that the pattern results in folds in the underarm. I agree, although they looked better in the end than I feared. So: next time I am going to taper off my increases rather than end them abruptly. I’ll do the last three increases every other knit row rather than every knit row.

I did the M1 front and back increases as suggested. They give a nice look. If you aren’t sure what they are, check out the video at http://www.knittinghelp.com/videos/increases. BTW – I love all the videos at knittinghelp.com. I frequently turn to them when I become confused about something I think I should know or used to know and can’t remember.

· Eyelet increases: The pattern calls for a row of eyelet increases in the first knit row after the last raglan increase. I ended up with 12 rows in the yoke below my eyelet increases. I thought that was too much, just for looks. If I were to do it again I’d do the eyelet increases 3 rows up from the last garter stitch row.

Then the question is: to do eyelet increases or not. I thought they looked silly. My daughter thought they were a nice design element. Some knitters try to do an invisible increase but really, right across the yoke, any increase is going to be visible. I thought about doing invisible (knit front and back) increases in the last garter stitch row, right above the beginning of the lace, and think that would work.

· Buttonholes: I ended up with four. Three looks better. I had to do four because I made my second one too soon and there would have been too much yoke below the last buttonhole had I only done three. So don’t make your second buttonhole too soon.

And pay attention to which side you make your buttonhole on. It may not matter to you, but traditionally a woman’s buttonhole goes on the wearer’s right side. If you want it that way, make sure that’s the side you put it on. I used the buttonhole directions referenced in the pattern. It’s ok but I wasn’t thrilled. If anyone knows a better way or has suggestions I’d love to hear them.

· The rest of the sweater went together easily. I knit the sleeves at the end. Others have suggested doing the sleeves earlier so you don’t have so much sweater to maneuver. I wished I had until I finally realized (duh!) I didn’t have to keep turning the sweater everytime I did a round on the sleeve if I turned the sleeve instead. I’ll probably do the sleeve last again just because I always worry I’m running low on yarn and if I ever really am running low it would be easier to make the sleeves shorter than to make the body shorter.

Oops... I forgot to mention one intentional pattern modification I did make. On the sleeves, I decreased one stitch per lace repeat in the last row of the lace. Garter stitch is wider than the lace stitch and I didn't want the cuffs to bell out quite as much as they do on the pattern. If I were to do it again, I think I'd take them in even more. However, once again, my daughter preferred the slight bell aas written in the pattern.

All in all this is a lovely pattern, a quick knit and I’m going to make it again. Soon!

Another Hat!

My resolution to knit all my leftover yarn into hats to be given to charity at Christmas is not going to be completed this year. I'm afraid this will have to go on the list of resolutions for 2009!

Here's another hat in Plymouth Tweed and I still have enough of that yarn for one more! I love this yarn but I want it gone!

This hat is from the Maniacal Thrower. The pattern for her Slouchy Copy Cat Hat is clearly written, easy to follow and fun to knit. The mock cable rib provides a little diversion for the knitter and interest to the hat! I was pretty pleased with myself when I was done and now I'm wondering how I can use this stitch pattern in one of the sweaters I have planned.

I'm not an economist but...

We talked about the economy at knitting group this week. We talked about stores closing and retirement funds disappearing. We talked about cutting our own spending. We talked about the empty spaces at the new shopping center in our area, the one built to cater to the affluent, with a day spa, expensive lingerie store and two stores devoted exclusively to olive oil. Already a kitchen store and a stationery shop have closed. I don’t think either had been open a full year.

The shopping center was designed to look like a quaint French village, with a bell tower pealing church music, while the Mercedes dealership next door looked remarkably like a new church when it was under construction.

Today our airwaves and newspapers are filled with stories of low consumer confidence and a consequent drop in consumer spending. Economists debate what should be done while the government seems frantic to convince us to spend again.

I’m not an economist and I’m sure there is a lot about the situation I don’t understand. But what I know and what the women in my knitting group all understand is that we have created this problem ourselves and we aren’t going to fix it by doing more of what got us into the problem in the first place. We have to find economic fixes other than those intended to stimulate more over consumption.

Americans have proved ourselves quite able to spend more than we have but we can’t consume more than we have. Our planet simply won’t allow it. What we have is limited, limited by our natural resources, limited by the size of the planet. I’ve heard that if the whole world consumed at the rate of American consumption, it would take seven planets to fill our demands. I’m not sure the figure is precisely accurate but my common sense, my own looking at the world, tells me it’s not far off.

So why are we trying to get Americans to consume more? Yes, we know businesses close when spending is down. A lot of jobs are lost when Circuit City goes bankrupt. But at best, keeping these stores open, doing business as they have always done, is only a temporary fix, contributing to our trade imbalance and national debt.

As I said, I don’t pretend to be an economist. But I don’t think the economists understand this much either. My eldest daughter majored in economics in college. She tells me that when she entered the business world she quickly learned that most of what she had been taught didn’t hold up.

And, despite whatever holes there may be in my analysis, I’m quite sure my conclusion is true: There has to be a better way. We have to find a way to run our economy not dependent on over consumption and debt. I’m quite sure the future of our country and our planet depends on it.

My intuition tells me knitting is part of the answer. No instant gratification here! Instead the purchase of $50 to $100 of wool, a very renewable resource, yields hours and hours of pleasure in the disciplined creation of a unique hand knit item, perhaps a gift to be enjoyed for many years, rather than something to be tossed out at the end of the season.

And so I continue my current program of sweater knitting. The body of the February Lady is just about done, the lace before blocking is the usual heap of undisciplined yarn. I'll finish the edging and begin work on the sleeves today.

More Sweaters

Blocking Helena

Clara's Helena is blocked. Now to hem and add the border! The
hem is going to be so pretty! You do a row of (yo k2tog) and that becomes the turning row. When the hem is turned it will make a picot edge. How clever is that!








February Lady Sweater






While Helena was drying I thought I ought to start her mother's sweater. I wanted to adapt the February Lady Sweater to be more like Helena but I'd never made the February Lady and didn't trust my ability to visualize how the pattern would knit up. So I decided before I knit mom's sweater, I'd knit one as written. Here it is in green Cascade 220. I think the yarn is a good choice. The garter stitch has a tendency to stretch and a heavier yarn will help hold it in place.

This is a very simple pattern. So simple I thought I could knit without paying much attention and before I knew it I had had to cast on 5 different times! Yes, 5! The first time my brain was completely turned off and each round the increase moved over a stitch. I had placed a marker before the raglan stitch, right where the increase should go but I moved the marker before increasing. That meant that the next time around the marker came before the previous increase and not right before the raglan stitch. Wrong! Then somehow I put an extra marker in the middle of the back. How did I do that? I don't know, but I had knit several inches before I realized I was knitting a sweater to accomodate quite the dowager's hump. Then I was making the M1 increases backwards, knitting from the back on the right and the front on the left. I've written before of what comes from hurrying. Finally, when I was focused just enough to get it right, I found it to be a very easy knit and I'm just about ready to start the lace.

Mother Daughter Sweaters

Or why my daughter in law is the best mother for my granddaughter!

I’m probably going to make some people mad with this one…

A young mother in our area was arrested after leaving her baby in the car while getting her hair cut. Sounds awful right? The story reminds us of other stories of babies left in a car with the engine running and doors unlocked, babies left in the car while their mothers were inside drinking or partying oblivious to the child, babies left in a hot car with the windows rolled up. Some of those babies died.

But this mother thought she was taking care of her child. She was following the advice I remember reading from La Leche League when I was a new mother, “Never wake a sleeping baby.” The teething baby had had a rough night, had fallen asleep in his car seat and she didn’t want to wake him. She locked the car and cracked the windows on a day when all agreed overheating was not an issue. She was in a chair twenty feet away and reportedly could keep her eye on the baby. A well meaning stranger saw the baby, called the police and mom was arrested.

The women in my book club agreed with the district attorney’s decision not to charge the mother but thought the mother had been stupid. Someone could have abducted the baby before the mother could get to her car. While she watched, a child abuser could break the lock, open the door, and grab the baby strapped into the car seat secured to the car, all before she could get there. Really? If she were watching from only 20 feet away?

I remember being left in the car as a child. In other ways my parents were very protective, overly protective even. But leaving their children in the car didn’t feel neglectful. I was left in the car while my father went into the bank or the grocery store. Once I awoke in what felt like the middle of the night locked in the back seat of the family car with my two sisters in front of a restaurant on Highway 99. My father had tired while driving and needed a cup of coffee. Did they leave us alone in the car too much? Perhaps. But the danger we felt was abandonment not any being abducted by strangers. Parents didn’t worry so much about child abduction then and locked car doors was thought adequate protection.

When a child was abducted in northern California when I was a child, my parents held us tighter, watched us more closely for awhile. As the horror slipped from the front pages of the newspaper and the front of their consciousness, they relaxed. Today there is no relief for a parent. A child is abducted in Michigan and it is headline news in California. But how many children really are the victims of the scary stranger abduction that is every parent’s worst fear? More than in the past? So many more that a parent can’t leave her child twenty feet away from where she is getting her hair cut?

I needn’t worry about my daughter-in-law leaving Clara in the car. She is the best of mothers and I have none of the criticism I hear from other mothers of sons. And my son is a wonderful father. But he is a worrier and hovers too closely over three year old Clara.

“Relax,” I tell him. “She’s fine.”

And she is. But Clara is a bit of a worrier too. It runs in our family. My own father, yes, the one who left us in the car, was overly protective and fearful for our safety. “Don’t do this.” “Be careful of that.” I’m a bit the same way and my son undoubtedly learned it from me. Thank goodness for my daughter-in-law whose calm, assuring protective encouragement is exactly right for both my son and my granddaughter.

Clara, of course, is very attached to her mother and wants to be just like her. So, for Christmas they will get mother daughter sweaters. Everything has to be pink for Clara these days! Preferably hot pink. But, although she would probably wear it to please Clara, I don’t think Mom wants a little girl’s hot pink sweater. So, the sweaters won’t be exactly alike, but close enough. Clara’s Helena will be knit with Berroco Comfort DK in a warm pink. Mom’s February Lady Sweater will bea slightly muted pink in Cascade 220. I’ll modify the February Lady Sweater to use the same lace pattern that is in Helena.

More Hats and Why I Don't Like Kureyon!

Three more hats for charity! I finished off the Kureyon and started in on the baby yarn. All the patterns were free downloads found on Ravelry. I'm getting a little bored, so the next ones will probably have cables. The trick is to keep my interest, knit fast enough to get them done by Christmas and still get some other Christmas knitting done. We shall see.

I am not a fan of Noro Kureyon! Fortunately, it’s all gone now, the last of it used in this charity hat. Right now I don't think I'll ever buy more. I finished the decreases at the top of the hat, pulled the yarn through the last six stitches, gently pulled it tight, and it broke! Only a half inch frayed strand remained attached to the hat, not enough left to weave in. I suppose I should have unknit the last few rows, attached a new piece of yarn, and reknit. Instead, I put a dab of Fray Check on the bit of yarn left and pulled it to the inside with a crochet hook. It should hold.

My biggest complaint about Kureyon is that the yarn is poorly spun. It varies significantly in thickness from thin and tightly spun to downright pouffy. Now I know it is also very weak. It kinks more than any yarn I have ever knit with. I was constantly trying to straighten out the kinks in the yarn coming off the skein as I knit.

There is a lot of vegetable matter in the yarn but I can live with that, a small trade off for the beautiful colors.

Yes, Kureyon colors are beautiful. That’s why I bought it! But the colors lost their appeal for me when I knit the yarn into this simple sweater in the round, a very poor choice for this yarn. A more experienced knitter would have known better. The striping in the body is narrow and busy. And because the sleeves are narrower than the body, a color goes around more times and the stripes in the sleeves are wider than the narrow stripes in the body. Not an attractive look.

The narrow modular scarf and hats knit with leftovers were much better suited to the yarn. Entrelac would also be nice.

Charity Hats From Stash

Hat #1 blocking on a balloon

This was Plymouth tweed leftover from a sweater I knit for my sister. I knit the hat too big and had to felt it down to a reasonable size.





Hat #2

Noro Kureyon left from a sweater. This is much better in a hat than in a sweater. I knit the sweater in the round and the striping was narrow and busy.






Hat #3

Yarn left over from a sweater for my granddaughter.

Where did I get all this yarn?

There are various motivations for knitting. Most of the time I knit something because I covet whatever it is I decide to knit. I see myself wearing that elegant sweater or beautiful shawl and I buy the yarn fully intending to wear it. More often than not, I end up giving away what I make. But, even so, it is covetousness pure and simple that initiates the project. Other projects begin with a more generous attitude. A pregnant young woman takes the seat next to me in a class for hospice volunteers and I resolve to make something for her baby. I see the Statue of Liberty done in intarsia on the front of a sweater and resolve to knit one for my son, an immigration attorney (I don’t think he reads this.) But my most recent knitting project is a product of embarrassment I felt when I realized the amount of yarn I have accumulated.

When my mother moved out of her house, I took her blanket chest, a very plain old pine box-like trunk. Its straight rectangular lines, hand cut dove tailing, simple lock, and the name and address written on the bottom suggests it carried its owner’s belongings to California many years ago. My parents found it in 1945 in San Jose. It lay discarded in the storage shed behind their first house. My father cleaned it and for more than sixty years it held my mother’s blankets. Now it would hold my yarn.

I placed the familiar old piece in my office, feeling smug that my yarn would be neat and orderly, all in one place, and began pulling yarn stashed in fabric baskets on my bookshelves, in a carpet bag brought back from a trip to Turkey, in plastic bins in my closet, and in bags on the floor. I had yarn set aside for three sweaters. I had lace weight yarn for at least five shawls. I had baby yarn. I had the yarn for the Masters swatches. Not to mention that Peaches & Crème I just bought! Nor all the skeins left over from completed projects because I’m deathly afraid of not having enough to finish. I didn’t even get to the yarn in my sewing room! There was more yarn than the chest would hold.

It’s time to get this under control. My hands can’t knit as fast as I can dream up projects and buy yarn! It’s time to knit down my stash. I’ve made two resolutions: (1) I’m going to knit those bits and pieces of left over skeins into hats to give to charity at Christmas. By Christmas they all have to be gone! And, (2) I’m going to knit one project from stash for every project for which I buy new yarn.

Now…what about all that fabric in my sewing room?

The Company of Women

Yesterday afternoon was the second meeting of our new knitting group – 15 women getting together once a month just to knit. More than half of the group are beginners. They were told to bring size 8 needles and worsted weight yarn. One member, a retired yarn shop owner, taught them the basics, casting on, knitting and purling. The rest of us brought works in progress.

The group came together through our church. We are Catholic and so don’t talk much about religion. For us, it’s more a private matter. Instead, as the beginners fussed over dropped stitches and the difference between knitting and purling, and the experienced knitters offered encouragement, we talked about the things all women talk about: husbands, whether at home, dead or divorced; children and grandchildren; the work we did and do, the goings on in our community; the things that make us happy and the things that annoy. We nibbled cookies and we knit.

Women need the company of women. In another time, when families were larger and less mobile, women grew up surrounded by older women who taught them to knit and sew and talked about life. Younger women learned about marriage and childbirth from women who married and had children before they did. They watched the older women lose children and husbands and learn to laugh again and they knew that they too could learn to laugh again. They watched their grandmothers, mothers and aunts age and die and understood that they, too, would age and die one day. Now our communities are too often segregated by age and we are denied access to the wisdom of those who go ahead of us. Childbirth is feared rather than celebrated. A mother is never good enough. And aging must be denied.

Our knitting group brought women together again and became the means for sharing the wisdom of our experiences again. The oldest knitter told us the yarn she was knitting into a poncho was yarn she had first knit into a sweater while sitting with her husband before his death. She didn't like the sweater and was knitting the yarn into something new. She told us about the yarn and we learned about the days she spent at her husband's bedside. We learned another woman had had cancer as she showed us the chemo hats she was knitting. The youngest knitter, a mother with school age children, told us about her daughters as she knit a backpack for her daughter to give as a birthday gift.

And so it went for two hours of knitting and chatting. After two hours we packed up our knitting, put away the tables and chairs, and lingered just a bit. Someone said we should have our meetings more often. And everyone agreed.

I said I’d never make a dishcloth!

Why would anyone want to knit a dish cloth? Knitting requires time. Each stitch is worked individually. You don’t sit down at the sewing machine and knock off a dish cloth in a few minutes. I don’t know how fast others knit, but the simplest little dish cloth is going to take me a few hours. Then after it is done, what? It gets used! Thrown in soapy water, sloshed around, mangled and soon, stained. It seems like a waste of effort. Knitting should be something to be oohed and ahhed over, something to be worn and attract compliments, a shawl or a sweater perhaps. Who is going to admire a dishcloth?

Nor do I remember the women in my family knitting dishcloths. Perhaps other grandmothers did. The cotton dishcloths sold when I was a girl in the 1950s were loosely woven. Were they based on dishcloths some women had made? I don’t know. I remember my grandmother and older aunts using rags, never a hand knit dishcloth. If knitting dishcloths was something passed down through the generations, it skipped my family.

But I had a little hemp yarn left from the Cool Hemp Ponchette, not enough for a bag. I know from my own experience that hemp is very strong and gets softer the more it is washed. And I’ve read that it has antibacterial properties. I needed a mindless project, something to work on while watching the evening news or visiting with family.

I need to improve some of my knitting for the Masters program. I have to learn to make a seed stitch without holes, cables and decreases without stretched stitches. Hemp isn't the best fiber for working on tension, it has a will of its own. But it is good practice. So I knit a dishcloth.

To make it more interesting, I knit it on the diagonal:

Cast on 3
Knit 2 rows,
K2, yo, seed stitch until 2 stitches before end, k2,
Repeat until half of yarn is used, then start decreasing,
K1, K2tog, yo, seed stitch until 2 stitches before end, K2,
Repeat until 3 stitches remain, knit 3, turn and bind off.
And because I still had yarn, I added a border in single crochet.

Easy enough!

I don’t do anything half way. I jump in with both feet. So, when I decided to knit one dish cloth, I also decided to order some Peaches & Creme to knit more. There were so many colors to choose from and I figured shipping was less per ball the more balls I ordered, so I now have 24 balls of Peaches & Creme.

This fall I’ll be working on the quality of my stitches while making dish cloths to wrap Christmas cookies and breads to give as little gifts. Unfortunately I didn’t buy any Christmas colors. I have to order those now.

Basics Basics Basics - Lesson 3 - Gauge!

Lesson 3 requires knitting 5 swatches, all in the same yarn and with the same needles, in 5 different stitch patterns, garter, stockinette, seed, cable and lace, and then comparing the gauge. This was a l iberating assignment! My head is full of ideas for sweaters combining different stitch patterns. But I’ve been reluctant to tackle them because I wasn’t sure how the gauges in the various patterns would work together. I knew a cable required more stitches than stockinette and that seed was different from both and I wasn't quite up to sitting down and figuring out how to combine them. The answer, of course, is simple! Make a swatch, measure, then add or decrease stitches accordingly. After this lesson, I have the courage to do it.

The last and optional swatch required choosing a cable, knit a swatch and write the pattern for the swatch pattern. I was surprised how difficult that was! There are so many details to include. A careful pattern writer earns every penny of the cost of a pattern. Deciding what to knit is the easy part. Writing it down for someone else to follow – that is difficult! Hopefully it will get easier with practice!

Basics, basics, basics gave me a excellent foundation for growing as a knitter. There are areas where I need to improve. My seed stitch still has holes. My cable still has the occasional stretched stitch. But I have a much better sense of what I need to do to improve.

More importantly, I’ve found a new confidence and willingness to try more difficult designs. And I'm ready to tackle TKGA's Masters Program.

Basics Basics Basics - On to Lesson 2

Decreases!

Like most knitters I had done many knit-two-togethers and slip- slip-knits. But I had never really studied them. I’d never asked myself what makes ssk the closest mirror image of k2tog. Nor had I really thought much about what made a decrease full fashioned. I just followed the pattern, using the decrease the pattern directed for the left and for the right . I never really thought about why. I had used several of the alternate decreases when that was what a pattern called for but I hadn’t examined whether I thought they worked as well opposite k2tog. This was Lesson 2.

Again, I fussed about tension. In her comments, Arenda suggested I worry less! But she did point out that my left slanting decreases stretched. She suggested knitting decreases on the tips of my needles. Her commend made me realized how much I had been manhandling my yarn, oblivious to how I was stretching the stitches, and this affected their appearance. This insight was a big step to significant improvement in my knitting!

Finally, perhaps because I have been knitting lace recently, my lace swatch was the best of my swatches!

Basics Basics Basics - Lesson 1

Lesson 1 of the Basics Basics Basics Course got me started with casting on, binding off, garter, stockinette, ribbing and four different increases. Like most who take the course, these were not new techniques. But the class required that I look carefully at what I did, how it looked and consider which of several techniques look better in which circumstances. For instance, I’d always know the long tail cast on creates the first knit row but I’d always relied on the pattern to tell me whether the next row should be right side or wrong side. After taking this class I’ll make that decision myself.

My first difficulty was figuring out how to work each of the increases. I knew how to make them but I didn’t know which was which. The names aren’t standardized. So I did what I tell anyone getting started or back into knitting to do: check out the instructional videos at KnittingHelp.com. Once I figured out that the bar increase is called KFB (knit in front and back) and the Make 1 increase is called either KRL (knit right loop) or KFL (knit front loop) on KnittingHelp.com, I had no problem making the increases.

I did have problems making them well and really struggled with the Make 1. The instructor sympathetically assured me many knitters find it difficult. The increase is made from the row below and when that bar is pulled up it affects the tension of the row below. The suggested inserting a yarn over in the row below the increase where increase will be made and use the yarn over yarn for the increase.

TKGA teaches weaving in the ends with duplicate stitch. Try it! This alone made the course worthwhile. Woven in this way the end disappears never to be seen again.

I wanted these stitches to be perfect but they weren’t! Despite pulling the yarn tight on the beginning of a new row, my selvedges weren’t as neat as I would like them although careful blocking did help considerably.

Finally, I decided the swatches were as good as I could make them. I sent them off and within the week had them back from Arenda. She complimented my garter stitch, the placement of my increases and the way some of the increases were made. She pointed out with threads drawn through the swatch where my tension wasn’t even and gave me pointers for how to make it better. And she pointed out I had misread the directions for the swatch 5. Don't look at that one as an example for what it should look like!

I resubmitted my M1 increase swatch with lesson 2 but it still needed improvement. This is a learning class, I didn’t have to prove I’d mastered it. I’ll practice this one on sweater sleeves soon. I will have to get it better for the Masters.

Basics Basics Basics

While on vacation in Banff I admired beautiful qiviuk yarn at $138 for 2 ounces, about 200 yards. The small knitted items were soft and light with a beautiful halo. The yarns may well have been the most beautiful yarns ever and, even at that price, I was tempted to buy enough for a small scarf.

But I knew my knitting wouldn’t measure up to that yarn. It’s not that I am a perfectionist! But I want to be a better knitter. I want my knitting to be worthy of beautiful yarn. I want the things I knit to have the look of “hand made” not “home made.”

And so I came home and signed up for Basics Basics Basics, a correspondence course offered by The Knitting Guild of America, TKGA. The course was recently revised by Arenda Holladay, who now acts as the instructor. The three lessons covering pretty much everything necessary for basic knitting: casting on, binding off, garter, stockinette, ribbing, lace and cable stitches, four increases, four decreases, gauge and basic pattern writing. The pattern writing is an optional assignment for students who want to continue on to TKGA’s Masters classes. The student knits swatches for each lesson and sends them to Arenda for a very thorough evaluation. Arenda is amazingly quick to send the swatches back with both compliments and suggestions for improvement. If a student is having difficulty with a particular technique Arenda invites, but does not require, her to try again and send another swatch in for review. I had difficulty with the M1 increase and repeated that swatch for review.

The Basics course does not require the student to master each of the skills. I wanted my first swatches to be perfect. They weren’t! Despite knitting and reknitting, they just weren’t perfect and when Arenda sent them back to me, she had pointed out where I needed to make improvement. Interestingly, the spots pointed out by Arenda were not the ones I had stressed over. Lesson learned! The next two lessons I made a good faith effort to knit my best but sent them off knowing they Arenda would return them with suggestions for how I could make the stitches better.

Probably the most important thing the class taught me was to look at my knitting not just critically, but with an eye for why something I didn’t like was happening. Why is a stitch stretched out? Why is there a hole where there shouldn’t be a hole? I didn’t learn to fix everything immediately but I learned to think about it and had suggestions to practice that would fix it. In the end I knew I’d learned a lot when right after sending off my last swatches I cast on the ribbing for a sweater. Thanks to what I had learned in Basics Basics Basics, my ribbing looked so much neater than any ribbing I had ever knit before. Thank you, Arenda!

In my next postings, I’ll photograph the swatches from the three lessons and share some of what I have learned. But right now I’m off to sign up for Level 1 of TKGA’s Masters Knitting Program!

If It's Worth Doing, It's Worth Doing Right!

A strong streak of perfectionism runs through the women in my family.

If you were to visit me and see my housekeeping you might be dubious when I tell you I am a perfectionist. It’s just that I don’t direct my perfectionism to being a perfect housekeeper. My grandmother was! It wasn’t hyperbole to say you could eat off her floor. You really could! But, of course, she would have been aghast at any food falling on her floor. My mother complained that Gram’s housekeeping came before everything else when she was a child, that when the family headed out the door for fun they often had to wait while Gram finished cleaning.

My mother rebelled before me. She went to college and to work. Although she told us she didn’t want to be like her mother, we cleaned the house every Saturday morning. She never had any reason to fear a drop-in visit from the minister, or anyone else for that matter. The unexpected guest was always greeted with a clean house. One afternoon Mrs. M__, who lived across the street, gossiped to my mother that another neighbor washed her kitchen floor but never washed her baseboards. My mother laughed thinking she didn’t wash hers either.

“Oh, but you work!” Mrs. M__ was quick to recover.

I saw my mother washing the baseboards after that.

Before my mother went back to work she stayed home, hung starched and ironed ruffled unbleached muslin curtains in the living room, refinished antique furniture and embroidered. She did a sampler in cross stitch when I was very young which hung over the small kitchen table where my family ate most of our meals all the years of my child hood and all the years of my children’s childhood.

Now she is moving out of the house where the sampler hung and whose baseboards she washed into a one bedroom apartment. She wants her daughters and grandchildren to take her things, hoping we will value the things she valued.

I read the embroidered words,

“Hearts are happy, health is good, where loving hands prepare the food"

I told her I had always liked it, that it was a warm memory from my childhood.

“Here, take it now,” she handed it to me.

I held the wooded frame in my hands and looked at the stitching. It was not well stitched. I felt a moment of embarrassment for my mother. She had not known to carefully separate each of the plies of the embroidery floss before stitching with two or three to prevent the threads from twisting. Nor had she known to make sure all her stitches crossed in the same direction. The sampler had hung next to a beautifully stitched sampler a friend gave to her on her retirement. Had she known her own work was of an inferior quality? Did it bother her?

After she went back to work she decorated with the knick knacks, paintings and other souvenirs she collected on her travels rather than with things she had made. Those aren’t the things I want from her house. I want the sampler. That it was not well made did not make me value it less. It spoke to me of home, of a good time that is now gone. I took it for my son and daughter-in-law and now it hangs in their kitchen.

I wonder if my mother gave up hand work because she didn’t have the time or interest to do it better. I wonder if she felt that if it she couldn’t do it right, she shouldn’t do it at all.

Thoughts on Ene’s Scarf: It's too much work!

During my week in the mountains I finally finished my Ene's Scarf. And, if I do say so myself, it is a beautiful shawl and will make a lovely gift - unless I keep it for myself.

The Nancy Bush pattern printed in Scarf Style from Interweave Press begins with casting on 375 stitches with the yarn held double. I didn’t realize that until I started to knit. It is a bottom up pattern and I’ve always done top down. I was ready to quit before I started! 375 stitches!

I started out with blue lace weight yarn but the 375 little stitches in blue lace weight yarn are very difficult to see on KnitPicks Harmony wood needles. The 750 strands of yarn, scrunched together on the needle were impossible to see against the variegated colors of the wood needles – especially when knitting in the evening with my older eyes. I started over with heavier yarn, Elsebeth Lavold’s silky wool.

My suggestions for a beautiful Ene:

Cast on with a larger needle. I knit the shawl with a size 6 needle but cast on with size 7. Cast on rows tend to be a little tight and I needed a little give. Using a larger needle for the cast on also allowed me to block the edging to a sharp point rather than to a soft curve. The edging, with the candle flame like points, is what sets the Ene apart as a beautiful scarf.

When casting on, I placed markers every 25 stitches and counted each time I placed one. I also placed a hook-on marker in stitch 188, the half way point.

The first row sets up the pattern and the only way to make sure to get it right is to count and count again. There is nothing to look at to tell you if you have miscounted or not. I put a marker in every double decrease and counted to make sure there were 14 stitches in each pattern repeat. And counted again. I used a 41 inch circular needle. After the first row was knitted I laid it out flat, noted where I thought the center was and matched up markers on each side to make sure it really was symmetrical and I hadn’t ended up with 12 repeats on one side and 10 on the other. That would have been very easy to do. Fortunately, with the marker in the center stitch, I got it right the first time.

Chart 1: The outer border of the shawl, is not difficult, indeed after the first two rows, the pattern is visible and mistakes would be easy to catch if they were not hidden in the sheer mass of 375 stitches. Just keep an eye on the yarn overs and all will be well.

Chart 2 is very easy, four rows of garter stitch, followed by a row of yarn overs and knit 2 togethers, followed by four more rows of garter stitch. But watch out for the additional decreases in three of its ten rows.

Chart 3: Enjoy! The rows are getting shorter fast and the knitting is easier. Just enough concentration is required. Although chart 3 is 23 rows, it is really just two different stitch patterns, each with two alternating sets of three for a 6 stitch repeat. I counted out the pattern to myself as I knit and checked myself by saying it backwards on the purl row. I sometimes dropped a yarn over or became distracted and knit one of the three-stitch halves of the repeat twice. But any mistake was easy to see. The double decrease sits neatly in the middle of a set of three stitches, either between 2 knit 1s or between 2 yarn overs.

Bind off: This is wonderful! I had never done a three needle bind off before and was thrilled. It came together easily and perfectly!

If I were to do it again…

I’d pull out Evelyn Clark’s Knitting Lace Triangles, pick a nice lace pattern for the body of the shawl, start at the top and when I had the right number of stitches add the two borders from Charts 1 and 2. No more casting on 375 stitches for me!

Finally, why is it called a scarf?

According to Merriam-Webster on-line the difference between a shawl and a scarf is subtle:

Scarf: A length or square of fabric worn around the neck or head. Probably based on Old Northern French escarpe, probably identical with Old French excharpe ‘pilgrim’s scrip’.
Shawl: A piece of fabric warn by women over the shoulders or head or wrapped around a baby. From Urdu or Persian, probably from Shaliat, a town in India.

The Ene is a shawl.

Family Needlework and Arthritis

The arthritis suggesting I give up hand appliqué is still just a quiet voice reminding me gently now and then of my place among the women in my family. My mother was about the age I am now when arthritis caused her to give up sewing doll clothes for her grandchildren.

My grandmother made beautiful crocheted doilies, tableclothes and bedspreads. Her standards were always exacting and the pieces I have are seemingly without mistakes. One lies on my dining room table. The layette set she made for me, her first grandchild, is done in tiny stitches, no bigger than the width of the white and blue thread she used. Later, when she went to live with my mother because she could no longer live alone, her knuckles were gnarled but she sat quietly on the sofa for hours, embroidering pillow cases. My mother bought her embroidery floss and stamped cases from the variety store. She couldn’t see to divide the threads and so used all six strands of the embroidery floss to make long, uneven stitches. I don't know how she threaded her needle. Fortunately, dementia allowed her to enjoy embroidery despite the quality of her work.

My mother’s Aunt Hett was a much younger woman when arthritis interfered. In the early part of the 20th century, she sought help from the doctors at the University of California medical school in San Francisco. On the first visit, the doctor looked at her hands and ordered amputation of one of her fingers. When her arthritis didn’t improve, she went back. This time Hett looked carefully at what the doctor had written on the order before going upstairs for a second amputation. The doctor had written “for research.” Hett turned around, climbed back down the stairs, walked out the front doors and didn’t go back.

Clara's Organic Cotton Blanket

Where's Clara? Clara will be three in August and sometimes still plays peek a boo. Here she is hiding under the blanket I knit for her before she was born. I used Pakucho Certified Organic Cotton. The blanket is one of her favorites. It's been slept with, played with, picnicked on. Clara's mother throws it in the washer and dryer and the blanket is only softer and prettier than it was when it was new.

You don't need a pattern. Those of you who knit dishcloths will recognize this:

Row 1: Cast on 3 stitches

Row 2: Knit
Row 3: Knit 2, yarn over, knit to end
Row 4: Knit 2, yarn over, knit to end
Continue repeating row 3 until you have a triangle big enough for half of your blanket (or think you are close to having used half your yarn) then start decreasing:
Row X: Knit 1, knit 2 together, yarn over, knit 2 together, knit to end.
Continue repeating Row X until you have three stitches on the needle. Cast off.

The yarn overs created an eyelet edge. I threaded a ribbon through the eyelet holes and tied it in a corner. And I added a simple crochetted picot border. Something like: double crochet all around, with three stitches in each corner stitch. Next row: single crochet in first stitch, single crochet, chain 3, single crochet in next stitch, single crochet. repeat around.

Here is a similiar pattern. The border is more complicated than what I did but it doesn't look too difficult.