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.