Mariah is Finished!
The sweater is done. The hood is done. The hood is not great but it looks fine hanging down my back, so that’s okay. I don’t have a completed picture for you right now - I’ll get one when Jeremy gets home from work. It’s really nice with a pair of jeans and a white tank top underneath.
I love the sweater…it’s probably the first sweater I’ve made for myself that I’ll wear regularly. But as with every other sweater I’ve made for myself, I’ve used the wrong yarn. Let’s sum up, shall we?
Ah, Banff. My first completed adult-sized sweater. It’s beautiful and it should be, I practically knit it 3 times to get it right. My first lesson in gauge. My first lesson in scratchy wool. I knit this using Alafoss Lopi and I’m so sorry. The sweater is really warm and it has become my drive-in sweater. At the beginning and end of the drive-in movie season, it gets damn cold. This sweater over another sweater under my coat keeps me very warm and comfortable, except for the horrible, horrible itchiness around my neck and wrists. I could not bear to wear it without a heavy top underneath because the wool is so scruff it feels like a coarse-hair shirt and I’m being punished for my sins against God.
Here we have the Everyday Cardigan from Peace Fleece. It’s beautiful and it turned out really nicely. Peace Fleece is the recommended yarn, obviously, since it’s their pattern, but I would love this cardigan so much more if the wool was softer to wear against the skin. The cardigan has also grown a lot because I didn’t do a finished gauge swatch, so I had no idea my 4 sts/1″ was going to change into 3.75 sts/1″. The cardigan is now way too wide. I love the Peace Fleece, don’t get me wrong. It’s that I planned to wear the cardi with t-shirts and it’s really uncomfortable that way. I guess Peace Fleece will now be reserved for strictly outerwear projects, like coats.
Here’s Mariah with the zipper pinned. Since I’ve finished it, I’ve worn it twice: all day Saturday and for a few hours last night. As you may or may not know, I knit it with Elann’s Peruvian Highland Wool. As you may or may not know, I hated every second of knitting with the yarn. As you may have heard, this yarn is infamous for pilling. My sweater already looks like it was knit 10 years ago. Gah. I guess I’ll have to get a sweater stone and try to keep on top of it. I still have a bunch of this yarn in a different colour and I’m debating whether I want to knit a simple pullover in a much tighter gauge or just keep it in the stash and use it for felting. Meh.
Visual Idiot
I feel really rather dumb. When I bought the zipper for Mariah I brought the sweater to Wal-Mart with me and measured right there, with the zipper. So why is it that last night when I was ready to baste it in I realized it’s actually three inches too long? Three whole inches! Oh, so frustrating. But now that I have it I’m just going to have to knit a cute little coat to go around it.
The hood is looking really great. Binding off and picking up was exactly the right thing to do and the sweater looks fucking fantastic! I’ve knit about a third of the hood and barring picking up a new zipper, spending a couple of hours knitting and grafting the top of the hood and fiddling with my sewing machine will give me a finished Mariah. Hopefully by tomorrow afternoon at the latest.
One final thing…when I began knitting, the first thing I knit was the right sleeve, which turned out a little bit loose gauge-wise. The left sleeve I knit twice as fast and my gauge was right on. I decided not to redo the first sleeve even though they were a little bit different. Now that the sweater is seamed up and I can get my arms in there, the difference is slightly apparent. It’s more readily felt than seen, but I see the tendency for Elann’s Peruvian Highland to pill in a looser gauge. The looseness of the first sleeve was due to my lack of confidence knitting those Celtic cables. I’ll be able to fudge the difference in the blocking, but it’s a lesson learned.
In other crap, I’d decided to knit Lucky from the SNB Nation book as soon as I saw it, and I had ordered Filatura di Crosa’s Zara just for it. Even though I love the wrap cardiness of Lucky, I don’t love the pattern. The sizes are not really developed using our logical earth proportions. Find me a person whose upper arms are 12.5″ around while their bust is 50″ and I will give you a shiny nickel! I haven’t decided if I’m going to make the largest or penultimate size, but I have to rework the raglan shaping to reflect an upper-arm circumference of 19.5″ and a yoke depth of 10.75 inches.
I also have to rework the numbers for the rest of the sweater based on gauge…working the Zara to the recommended gauge makes a fabric that’s way too stiff to drape properly as a wrap. I’ve achieved 24st and 32 rows to 4″ which isn’t a whole lot different and the resulting fabric is still pretty dense, but due to the fact the lace will need to be blocked open and flat, I’m going to gain a bit of drape.
I’m not joining the Lucky KAL because I’m reworking the entire pattern.
Can you believe I’m actually planning to complete my swatch, wash it and pin it out to dry before I rewrite the pattern for the new gauge? What am I, a grown-up? For god’s sake. Heh.
Pipe Dreams
I had some problems with Mariah last night. The intention was that if I worked really, really hard I might finish the sweater and get to wear it today. I didn’t bargain that I might have to rip out everything.
The only thing I had left to knit was the hood. I had already seamed everything. The problem ahead of me was that I have never knit an adult-sized hood before, and I’d already determined that the hood in the pattern as written for size XXL wasn’t right. I had to make it up as I went along.
I instinctively tried to shape the hood by visually following the look of another hoodie I have. I managed to get the shaping mostly correct, but I’m going to have to rip out the whole thing anyway. The sweater doesn’t call for any binding-off before shaping the hood and while this just might be okay for the smaller sizes, it certainly isn’t okay for the XXL. There is no integrity at the back collar to keep the sweater from stretching out uncontrollably and the hood didn’t naturally fall or drape into shape.
The whole hood is going to need to be ripped back to the collar area, where I’ve decided to keep the stitches before the front raglan decreases live and I’m going to bind off everything else. Then I’ll be picking up for the hood and knitting from that point.
This means Mariah has to go away for a little while. I just can’t rip back three skeins worth of knitting and feel like knitting it back up right away. I’ve got to get a little project in there in the meantime.
Stuff
I couldn’t have asked for a better or longer 30th birthday. I basically spent all week quoting my cake and making people get me coffee and stuff like that. Last week we ate this cake with friends, and last night we ate more cake with family. My mom gave me some $$ which I spent on clothes. I go clothes shopping so infrequently because at my size it’s just depressing but this time I found some great stuff. I mentioned before that we bought the Nikon so I wasn’t really expecting anything from Jeremy, but he surprised me anyway. This is a photo-heavy post so I tossed the rest of the pictures in the extended entry section. Take a look…I even have a couple of knitting photos in there.
(more…)
Yoke-o Oh No
I’ve been a good girl, working diligently on Mariah whenever I have knitting time. I’ve finally joined the pieces together at the yoke.
This took me a bit longer than I thought because I had to reknit part of a front panel. It turned out that I didn’t do the ribbing as high as on all my other pieces so I had to rip out all the stocking stitch to correct it. Now the stocking part looks like shit because reknitting with the Elann Peruvian isn’t as nice as knitting in the first place…the yarn has lost much of its loft. And considering it wasn’t too great to begin with…let’s just say I’m putting all my eggs in the blocking basket right now.
The yoke is going smoothly, if endlessly. I know it’s going to seem like nothing is happenening at all until half of the raglan decreases are complete, then the rest is going to fly by.
I wish I had decided to knit this out of something else, so I would still be enjoying the process even after the cabling is complete. The pattern really is very clever and intuitive, and as long as you read through the whole thing before you start you should have smooth sailing.
This is the first sweater on which I have attempted cables, and I was dreading the sleeves. It turned out that the sleeves were my favourite part for a change. I love cables…I’m getting quite clever at them.
Finally, Update
First we’ll discuss Mariah. As you can see, I decided to stick with the Elann Highland stuff to finish Mariah. The Pingouin yarn I got to replace it is just too heavy and I can’t make gauge. I have the back, one sleeve and the right front completed. I really don’t want to knit this anymore and I’m dreading the time when I join up for the yoke and I have a billion stitches on the needle.
I really hate this yarn. I wish I didn’t because it’s so cheap and it comes in all these great colours, but I’ve come to hate working with it. I love the Mariah design so much and I can’t wait to wear it, but when I pick it up I’m discouraged because I just can’t keep an even tension. The yarn is fluffy and when you knit slightly tightly the strand pulls and it goes thin. When you loosen up just a tad, the stitches look too puffy. It looks awful. I hope blocking will improve the fabric, but for now when I look at my work I cringe. The sleeve and the cabled ribbing looks great; it’s just the stocking stitch that looks like shit.
Here we have part of a cardigan knit in another yarn from Elann, but this yarn I adore. It’s also Peruvian wool, but it’s unspun and it knits up around 16sts/4″. It’s fuzzy and soft. The pattern is basically Firth from Rowan’s A Season’s Tale, but I changed the ribbing and I think I’m going to do a hood instead of a collar. So far I’ve knit the back, one sleeve and the left front.
Ah, yes…the Ribby Cardi! The back and half of the left front…excuse the horrendous photo. (All the pictures were taken indoors at night in a dark basement with a hideously bright flash and then photoshopped so as not to hurt the eyes.) Since we all know how much I love that Elann Peruvian Highland, the finish date for this one has been changed to maybe never. Besides that, the pattern seems really small and I think I’ll be better off designing my own to size. If I finish this, I’ll give it to my sister.
I seem to like to knit 3/4 of each cardigan before I go on to the next. I keep thinking that if I just knit one at a time, I’d have 2 completed sweaters by now.
Mariah…Goodbye-ah!
After doing some research and learning that the Peruvian Highland Wool can pill after first wearing I have decided to frog (!) the sleeve and use the yarn doubled up to make a warm lofty sweater for my son. I don’t want to go to all the trouble of knitting up these cables just for the sweater to get all pilly and bleh.
I just came back from the yarn shop and got some Pingouin Le Yarn 3 in navy instead. I’m starting over again. New sleeve pictures as soon as it’s knit up.
Mariah Sleeve
Sleeve number one of Mariah. The cables look really great. It got a little tedious at the end there, so instead of casting on for the second sleeve right away, I cast on for the back.
I’ve joined the yahoo group and I am getting the feeling that some people are confused when to stop knitting the sleeves. The sweater is knit in separate pieces until the yoke, where everything is joined and knit back and forth until the neck and hood. The sleeves are designed to be a little long, but they’re not supposed to be as long as some people are experiencing.
You don’t need to complete the pattern repeats before you stop knitting the sleeves; all that is necessary is that all increases are worked so that the sleeve is wide enough. The final pattern repeat will be completed on the shoulder as you knit the yoke. I stopped knitting my sleeve a few rows after I hit the final increase row, which happened to be right after 3 pattern repeats. I expect to complete a fourth repeat on the shoulder.
As soon as I got used to doing the cables without a cable needle the knitting went faster and got easier. I highly recommend learning to do it that way. The colour is a warm butterscotch. I really like it.
The Social Event of the Season!
Here she is…Peruvian Highland Ribby Cardi. I’m making the whole thing in this colour, and I’ve decided to rib the entire thing. It’s the largest size but it looks rather small. I’ll be blocking it with the ribbing stretched, though. Eh. If it doesn’t fit I’ll give it to my sister.
Tonight is the first ever Scarborough Stitch N’ Bitch. I’ll be bringing the Ribby Cardi to work on while I knit with some women I’ve never met. I guess I should have a shower?
I got my Mariah yarn yesterday…I started the sleeve last night. They yarn is Warm Tan, also Peruvian Highland Wool from Elann. The colour looks rather like a warm butterscotch…I love it. The only concern I have is that La mentioned on the Mariah mailing list that Jen knit her Rogue sweater with this yarn and it pilled. Anyone else have experience with that? I hope it’s an isolated thing because I have two projects on the go with this stuff; it’s great to knit with and inexpensive so I had hoped to use it again.
Unfortunately I can’t take Mariah to the SNB because I need to concentrate while I knit the cables, which would mean a lot less bitching than I would like to do. It’s all about the bitching.
Not Much Knitting
If any of you read my regular blog, you would know that my husband and I just quit smoking…we’re going on 4 days now. One of the effects of this is that I just can’t seem to concentrate. I can’t knit more than a couple of rows on anything before I get lost and just give up. I expect this to pass…I’m actually going to try knitting for most of today, but who knows.
I’ve joined the Mariah Knitalong. I thought I was going to knit it in some yarn from my stash, but the yarn is rather itchy and I have plans to wear Mariah with a tank top, I have decided to forego my itchy stash yarn and knit it in Peruvian Highland.
I ordered some a few weeks ago with which to knit the Ribby Cardi and decided to use that, except then I noticed that I don’t have enough yarn for Mariah and my colour is completely sold out at Elann. So I decided I’m going ahead with the Ribby Cardi in the Peruvian Highland I already have, and ordered enough of a different colour for Mariah.
To make a long story short, the plan for today is to knit me some Ribby Cardi. I haven’t decided if I’m making the all-ribbed version or not…that’s a lot of ribbing, yo. Mine will be monotone in a pretty coral colour…pictures when I have something to show.
