Heather Knits

We woke up this morning to a light dusting of snow!

It is definitely starting to melt now, but was exciting while it lasted. Sadly I wasn’t quick enough to dash out and make a quick snowman - not sure there was enough snow for it either, and I may possibly have frozen to death attempting to do it in my pyjamas.

All in all I have decided it is safer (and definitely warmer) to be inside today. I am going to catch up on some work, and hopefully also have time to do a bit of knitting. I am still fiddling around with possible colour combinations for my next City and Guilds project. Here is my sample so far:

On the black and while photograph it is easier to see which pairs of colours don’t contrast enough to really show up a pattern. Although I love the reds and greens together, and the dark reds with brown I think they are perhaps a little too subtle (you can stop laughing now about the idea of me being too subtle). More playing to go I think. I want to try out all the colours against the dark red next, and then all the colours against the lime green. Then I think I will try putting the darkest colours in one pile and the palest in another and trying them out against each other. After that I will have another assess of the situation and see whether I think any of the combinations have potential, and whether there are any obvious colour gaps. Then possibly a bit more dyeing, or time to try knitting some actual patterns. I think this should keep me busy for a bit

I borrowed the Baby Burco owned by the West Surrey Guild of Spinners, Weavers and Dyers and have been having an experiment with dyeing solid colours. This is for my next City and Guilds project. Each project has to be inspired by a different one of our art modules, line, colour, texture, shape, and form. My cardigan was inspired by the module on line, and my next project is going to be inspired by the module on colour. There are four projects we need to complete in total, but we can do them in any order we like. Two are garments, a jumper with set-in sleeves, and a jacket or cardigan with sleeves which are not set-in. Both garments must display different necklines. Then there is an accessory and an item for interior use. I am planning to do the jumper with set-in sleeves next, and have been collecting pictures of autumn leaves for my inspiration.

Here is the Baby Burco in action.

I also bought some pH testing strips to test the pH of the dye solutions I was mixing. The The Dyer’s Companion (Companion (Interweave)) says that I should be aiming for a pH of between 4.5 and 5, and as you can see from the strip below, I had a pH of about 2, which could explain a lot of things. I have been doing some more experimenting with how much citric acid I use, and reckon that actually you need relatively little to create the appropriate pH. Citric acid is actually more acidic than acetic acid (vinegar).

I used 4ply weight superwash Bluefaced Leicester wool, and dyed 100g of each colour to give me plenty to play with. My idea is to knit up some samples and try out different colour combinations to see what I like. I don’t have firm ideas yet of what I am doing, so am hoping that doing a few knitted samples will give me some thoughts. It could well be that some of these colours wont be used in the final garment, and that I might add in some others, but at least this is a start. I dyed 10 colours for my first go.

I had quite a lot of trouble dyeing the kind of orange I had first been aiming at. You need a surprisingly small amount of red dye in with the yellow. I do like the couple of much darker oranges too though, and am looking forward to experimenting with all the colours.

I have started a little knitted sample but haven’t got very far yet.

I’m afraid it has been rather dark here, and the colours haven’t come out properly. The paler green near the bottom isn’t mint at all, but rather a paleish grass green. The 2×2 spiral idea is from Janine Bajus, she calls is speed swatching, and it is a nice quick way to get an idea about whether colours look reasonable together or not, without having to worry about the pattern. If you cast on 4n - 1 sts (where n is any whole number) then it will all spiral automatically with no effort whatsoever In this case n = 20 so I cast on (4 x 20) - 1 = 79 sts. Big enough to get a proper look at how the colours are coming out, but small enough not to take forever. My plan is to do a few of these speed swatches, or perhaps just one long one, to give me some ideas for colour combinations. Then to work out possible patterns and try them in the most likely of the colour selections.

I started this on Sunday at our City and Guilds class, it was good to have other people’s input, and I agree with Fiona that this brown isn’t right, and that a redder brown would look better. I’m not yet sure whether I want a brown at all though, or whether I will have the darkest colour be the dark red, so I think I will do a bit more swatching and thinking before I dye any more colours.

Talking of Sunday, I got my cardi back from assessment and it is all fine (whew!) though I do need to make sure to do more art, and fewer photographs for the next projects.

Here is my Keble Cardigan (named after Keble College, Oxford, since the brickwork helped to inspire the travelling stitch pattern). This is my first project for my City and Guilds course. We have to do 4 projects as part of the course, one jumper with set in sleeves, one cardigan or jacket with sleeves that are not set-in (so raglan, dropped shoulder etc), one accessory, and one item for interior use. I jumped in with the cardigan first and it has taken me 10 months to do, from starting to collect the photographs I used for design inspiration, through many iterations of the pattern, through to the final knitting and finishing.

I am very pleased with how it has come out, and it is the best-fitting cardigan I own. Finally a cardigan that I can wear open without it sliding off at least one shoulder! I do think this is the best thing about designing and knitting something yourself that you can have something which fits just as you like it. I now have a cardi that fits on the shoulders and chest, and the tummy and hips all in the same garment!

The yarn is Debbie Bliss Cashmerino DK, 55% merino, 33% microfibre, 12% cashmere. The really clever thing about the pattern is that all the waist shaping, sleeve shaping and the raglan shaping is hidden in the lattice pattern. That took quite a bit of working out but I am very pleased with the finished result, and the clean lines that it gives to the garment, since there are no extra shaping lines interfering with the stitch pattern.

I handed it in on Sunday, and will hopefully find out whether I have managed to include all the appropriate things in the write-up when I get it back next month. So, one down, three to go! I am planning to do the jumper with set-in sleeves next and have already started dyeing some yarn to use for trial pieces.

It has been an exciting few weeks on the knitting front here, and I’m afraid I have suffered from the problem that when you are busy doing things the time to write about them just seems to disappear, or I am available but just too tired to make any sense. Anyway, things are a little quieter now (we wont mention the City and Guilds homework that I am still behind on) so I will do a spot of catching up. I am going to try and keep things in the order that they happened, otherwise I will be confused (it doesn’t take much).

I have been composing this post for some time (I told you I was a little slow) and was all ready to tell you all about the progress on my Kool Aid socks. They are becoming quite well travelled, although sometimes they don’t make it out of the bag. However, on Sunday I began to have worries about whether I would have enough yarn, and when I weighed what was left discovered that I had knitted exactly half of my ball. Unfortunately I am only half way down the foot of the first sock. Oh blast!

I haven’t been doing too well with these socks, since they are on their second incarnation already. Oh well, at least it gives me a chance to practice the cast on and a slightly different heel again. The Supercook socks use the same base yarn, but I used 2.5mm needles, and had plenty of yarn left over. I was slightly concerned that as it is quite a fine yarn I would get a more hard-wearing sock if I went down a needle size or two. So I started the Kool Aid socks on 2mm needles - I think that may have been a step too far. This time I think I will try 2.25mm needles. I haven’t actually undone them yet. I was concerned that I would undo them in a fit of pique and then think of something I should have measured which would be useful for the re-knit. I will bite the bullet soon.

Anyway, here is a picture of the sock disporting itself at the old alma mater before its untimely demise.

On a more chirpy note, my stitch samples for City and Guilds class were all fine, so I am inching my way slightly closer towards finishing. I have been playing with potential button holes, and think I have just about made a decision. Soon I will be on to the even trickier decision of buttons themselves.

On a completely un-related note, The case of the disappearing teaspoons: a longitudinal cohort study of the displacement of teaspoons in an Australian research institute gave me a good chortle today.

Apologies for no post on Monday, and that today’s post is rather later than usual. We have been down to Cornwall for a couple of weeks which was lovely, so the last three posts were brought to you by the magic of post-scheduling. However I haven’t been very quick at getting things sorted out once we got back, although we now have clean clothes which is a good thing.

September’s City and Guilds knitting homework was combined stitch structures. All of my examples come from the 1000 Knitting Patterns Book.

First up stranded knitting and lace, with a few slipped stitches thrown in too.

Next some cables and lace.

And finally some intarsia, a little bit of stranding and cables. The original pattern for this was in just one colour, and had a mixture of garter stitch and reverse stocking stitch for the background. I changed it to use all reverse stocking stitch and to introduce the colours. The rings are worked in intarsia, but the background is stranded across the back of each ring.

These were the last set of samples to complete the sample portfolio, and I handed in the whole lot (all 5 lever arch files of it!) at the class on Sunday. This is the first piece of work that I have had formally assessed for this course although Fiona has been checking our work as we go along to make sure we haven’t got completely the wrong end of the stick. It is nice to finally hand something in officially though, and I think it will be useful to have a bit of feedback on it all before I am too far along with all the other parts. It is always hard to know exactly what is expected on a new course until you get your first piece of work assessed. I am miles behind on the projects though so I had better go and get a move on with them!

The homework for our August City and Guilds class was lace.

The first sample is an example of faggoting, that is, a lace mesh.

This pattern is called Basic Faggoting Stitch and is from A Treasury of Knitting Patterns by Barbara Walker.

The second sample is an example of a pattern made with eyelets.

This is a snowflake from Gossamer Webs: The History and Techniques of Orenburg Lace Shawls by Galina Khmeleva and Carol R. Noble. There were a couple of little errors in this chart so if you are interested in knitting any of these patterns I would recommend downloading the errata first (although neither of the errors I spotted were actually included in the errata, I have contacted them so hopefully they should appear in the next version of the corrections). In 2000 Mummy and I went on a fascinating weekend workshop in Bradford organised by the Knitting and Crochet Guild on Orenburg shawls. It was really interesting and a wonderful weekend, I am looking forward to getting round to doing my own Orenburg shawl at some point.

Next up is an example of Shetland lace.

This is Feather and Fan Stitch, I got the instructions from A Treasury of Knitting Patterns by Barbara Walker, but being a traditional pattern it is in a lot of books. This just goes to show that you can work lace in acrylic

Lastly, my fourth sample shows an example of a more complex lace pattern which distorts the fabric (if the decrease is not right next to the corresponding yarn over then the fabric will be distorted).

This is Fern or Leaf-Pattered Lace, again from A Treasury of Knitting Patterns by Barbara Walker. I do love this pattern, it tiles so beautifully. I must do a whole garment using this, it is such a lovely pattern, and very pleasant to knit.

I now only have one more set of samples to do, on combined stitch structures, and then I need to organise them all and hand them in. I am hoping to be able to hand in at the September class so I’d better get a move on!

Our homework for the July City and Guilds class was on stitches which distort the fabric, slits, slots, dropped stitches and elongated stitches.

My first two samples are in black, which unfortunately didn’t photograph very well. The first shows vertical slits in the fabric. Each section is knitted separately and then they are all united in the row that joins the slits. I gave each of the interior sections a one-revolution twist, one in each direction, before the join.

The second sample is of horizontal slots in the fabric. These are made like large horizontal button holes.

Then we moved on to dropped stitches (intentionally that is). The extent of the dropped stitch is controlled with a yarn over. The yarn over is worked at the point you would like the dropped stitch to stop unravelling. I like to mark the stitch I am going to drop with a safety pin so I can keep track of it as I am knitting. You can make it travel across the knitting using balanced increases and decreases, make a decrease on the side of the marked stitch that you would like it to bend towards, then make a corresponding increase on the other side so that the total number of stitches remains the same. For this sample I only used one dropped stitch. Since the stitch is wider once it has been dropped, I made two decreases at the start of the dropped section, one on either side of the yarn over. Then made two corresponding increases once I had dropped the stitch at the top of the section.

Next onto more elaborate patterns. These are all from Barbara Walker’s A Treasury of Knitting Patterns.

First Vertical Drop Stitch:

It was interesting to see how this looked with different yarns. They are all wool, apart from the top purple which is 75% wool, 25% nylon. I think this pattern actually looks quite good in the yarn with a slight variation of colour, but the very multicoloured yarn at the bottom is too much and obscures the pattern.

Next elongated stitches. Elongated stitches are created by wrapping the yarn more than once around the needles when a stitch is created, then dropping these extra wraps on the next row. First Simple Elongated Stitch:

Then the slightly more complicated, Twisted Elongated Stitch:

They were all fun to do, though I am not sure whether I would incorporate the slits or slots into a garment. They might be fun if you wove ribbon through them. I find the change in texture interesting when you have a line of elongated stitches or dropped stitches and I’m sure you could create something which used that to good advantage

Our homework for the June City and Guilds class was knitting with colour; stranding, weaving in, and intarsia.

My first sample was an example of stranding:

I did this one by knitting flat, then at the end of each row, snipping the yarn and, after zooming the stitches along to the other end of the circular needle, re-joining the yarn so that I could knit the next row, rather than purling back. The pattern is a traditional one, sometimes called Norwegian star I think. The yarns are all 4ply weight Shetland, apart from the darker blue which is an oddment and I think is probably acrylic, I’m not sure where it came from actually. I enjoyed knitting the pattern but didn’t enjoy the fact that this method meant it was hard to get the first and last stitches of each row neat and not sloppy. In light of this I worked all my other stranded samples circularly. It may be bizarre but I would rather do twice as much knitting and have it neat

With the stranding the yarn is just held loosely at the back of the work when it isn’t being knitted. Our next sample was weaving in, where the non-working yarn is woven into the working yarn every other stitch in the same way that you would weave in yarn ends.

As you can see, the yarn being woven tends to show through to the right side. This is particularly obvious if, like I have, you have used yarns which contrast a lot in lightness and darkness. This does allow you to make large blocks of one colour while still knitting in the round with relative ease.

Next up, Fiona gave us a traditional pattern, and using the same selection of colours inspired from a picture, we had to colour in the pattern in a variety of different ways. My picture is of tulip fields in Holland

It really shows how a pattern can look different depending on the contrast between the background and the foreground. Value contrast really makes a difference. It is one of the problems I found with a couple of my samples, that I had put orange against green, and although they are very different colours, the particular shades I had chosen were very close in value. So if you photocopied them in black and white they would come out the same shade of grey. This means that particularly from a distance the pattern is not clear, and just looks rather blurry.

Lastly we did a couple of samples of intarsia. The first geometric, so I used an argyle pattern.

The second pictorial.

They are supposed to be fish.

These were all very enjoyable to do, it has been a long time since I did any intarsia and apart from tangling the yarns a bit it was all good fun. I am definitely going to do some colour work for my second project for the City and Guilds - I just need to get a move on with the first one! Speaking of which, I don’t think I have mentioned this on the blog yet. I will take some pictures as it already has most of a body and one sleeve.

Last months knitting homework for City and Guilds class was on surface embellishment, mostly things added to a plain piece of knitting, but some were knitted in. I had had a go at some of the techniques before, but some were new, so a nice mixture of old friends and new excitement!

The first old friend was the method of knitting with beads that I used on my bracelets. Here the beads are placed between knit stitches, and the piece is totally reversible.

Next, a different method of adding beads into the knitting. This time the knitting is stocking stitch, and the bead lies on the working thread in front of a slip stitch. The pattern is only on one side of the fabric, and this method seems to work best if the bead is a similar kind of size to the knitted stitch. I actually have a dress that I am knitting using this method. I have been knitting it for the last 8 years (ok it has spent a lot of that time in a bag). One of these days I will discover which bag it is in and dig it out and continue.

The last sample using beads involved sewing the beads onto an already finished piece of knitting. I was less keen on this sample. I think it looks a bit messy, partly due to the beads I used being rather inconsistent, and partly due to my not sewing them on very neatly. Not sure I will be doing a lot of bead embroidery in my future.

The next bit of embellishment was fringe. I’m afraid my example isn’t wildly exciting.

And then onto appliqué. I got a bit carried away with this one So many little leaves, so much fun, so many colours. I particularly liked the sock yarn ones.

Then a bit of Swiss darning (also known as duplicate stitch). My example is a little abstract, though I do think it looks a bit like an angle-poise lamp (totally unintentionally).

Finally, an example of embroidery. Despite my rather strained relationship with sewing I enjoyed doing this one, and I particularly liked the effect created by space-dyed yarn.

Now I had better get cracking on this months homework. Only just over a week til the next class.

Thank you to all of those who left such lovely comments about my Teal Top. I have worn it several times now, and it is washing and wearing well, and very comfortable. I am very pleased with it

Shortly after my last blog entry we went to east Kent for a little holiday, over my birthday. We had a lovely time, very relaxing, and visited several castles and Roman remains, we are definitely getting our money’s worth out of English Heritage This is the view from the bedroom of the cottage we were staying in.

On the knitting front I have been catching up with my homework for the City & Guilds course. I started to get behind in about October, and have been struggling to catch up since. I have now caught up with all my samples (apart from the homework we just got from the class yesterday), and once I have done the latest set of samples I will concentrate on my coursework projects. Hooray!

One of the things I love most about the City and Guilds course is the encouragement and opportunity to try things I wouldn’t otherwise have a go at. I am not really a big fan of how bobbles look, I don’t think I would wear anything with bobbles on, though they might be fun on a tea cosy, or an accessory. So without the course it is unlikely I would ever actually knit any. The theme for the homework for the month before last was raised and embossed stitches, and this included bobbles and popcorns (mini bobbles). To my own surprise I actually quite enjoyed knitting them, although they were a little fiddly. They were especially fun in multi-coloured sock yarn.

So here are my popcorns.

And here are some bobbles.

To show a bit of variety for my other raised and embossed patterns here is Cocoon Stitch from Barbara Walker’s A Second Treasury of Knitting Patterns.

and Embossed Twining Vine Leaf from Nicky Epstein’s Knitting on the Edge: The Essential Collection of Decorative Borders.

and the beautiful Candle Tree by Barbara Walker available in her A Treasury of Knitting Patterns.

This one is so lovely that I think we all have had to knit one Certainly Jo has a lovely picture of her sample on her blog.

Moving on from the raised stitches, the homework for the last class was pockets.

First up we have a bag pocket.

I love the subtlety of this one. You work up until the point of the opening of the pocket, then work a purl turning row on just the pocket stitches. Then work back and forth on just the pocket stitches until your pocket is the size you are after, then fold your pocket up and work across all your stitches again. Afterwards you sew the sides of the bag up, but you don’t sew the bag to the main knitting so that it will hang freely inside your garment - so hopefully wont distort the garment if you put heavy things in the pocket. You do have to be careful that the bag wont hang out the bottom of your garment though!

Next is a lined pocket.

For this one you knit the inside of the pocket first, and leave the stitches on a holder. Then knit the garment up to the point where you want the pocket. Put the garment stitches which correspond to the pocket placement on a holder, and as you work across the row, knit the pocket stitches instead. Then carry on up the rest of the garment. Afterwards, come back and knit the rib (or whatever) on the top of the pocket, and then carefully sew the pocket down onto the back of the garment. This one is quite a commonly used pocket and can easily be put into a patterned garment. It is also better for thicker yarns than the bag pocket because you only have one extra layer of fabric.

Lastly is the patch pocket.

With this one, you knit the garment first. Then knit the pocket (which can be any shape), then sew the pocket onto the garment. With this sample I actually knitted the pocket onto the sample which I think is probably neater than my sewing. The advantage of this style of pocket is that you can easily make it any shape or size you would like. You also don’t have to think ahead, and can add the pocket as an afterthought. You can try the garment on and experiment with pinning your pocket in different locations to see which you like best. The main disadvantage is that it can interrupt a pattern on the front of the garment, and that you have to sew it down neatly.

If you have got this far you probably deserve a long service medal for reading my rambling I’m afraid I don’t have any medals, but I do have someone I would like you to meet.

This is Framboise and she came all the way from France as a birthday present from Paul’s parents. We seem to have gone from winter to summer back to winter again in the last week or so, but Framboise’s bright smile will cheer even the dullest day