Heather Knits

The second sleeve is now finished to the armhole.

Here is the view along the top of the sleeve.

And the underneath.

Back to the body now. There are only about 30 rows to go before I join the sleeves into the body and start working on the yoke!

I have a stinking cold today so am hoping that nice bright knitting will be a good antidote.

I have been knitting like a maniac for the last week, and have now finished the first sleeve to the underarm!

Here is the top of the sleeve.

And here is the underneath, where you can see the shaping.

I am really pleased with how it is coming along. The sleeve has been gratifyingly speedy in comparison to the body too

I have cast on for the second sleeve, but this week is a bit more busy so my progress will be a little slower.

We have had a quiet weekend here after the excitement of last week. My sister, Annie, and her husband, Andy, came to stay with us from Wednesday til Friday which was lovely. They have lived up the road from us for about 8 years, but moved to New York on Friday for 2 years with Andy’s job. The packers came and took all their stuff (including anything to sit on or sleep in) on Wednesday so it made sense for them to come and stay in our spare room while they sorted out the last of the cleaning and tidying up before their new tenants arrived. It was a lovely opportunity to see a bit more of them too without them having to take out too much time from their hectic list of things which needed to be done. I have had a check round and don’t think they have left anything behind, except for one blank CD, and I think they can probably live without that

It has made a rather symmetrical bookend to their time in Surrey. When they first moved down here, about a year after we moved in, they came and lived with us for several months while they settled into their new jobs and worked out where they wanted to live.

Over the quiet weekend (why is it the house always seems quieter just after visitors have left, even though it is exactly the same as it was before they arrived?), I have been jogging along with my jumper. It is very addictive, just one more round to see how the colours will look, just another couple of rounds to the next decrease.

I am very pleased with the results so far. Apologies for the not particularly good photo, you can click to enlarge it which makes it a bit better. It is rather grey and gloomy again here, though definitely warmer and drier than last week. A nice brightly coloured bit of knitting is definitely a good antidote to the weather

I am now about 30 rounds from the underarm, but am going to put the body on hold for a bit while I knit the sleeves. Then come back and finish up the body and then attach the sleeves. This seems to make sense, at least in my head. It seems a good moment to have a pause from the body as I have just finished my first ball of dark green yarn. I am pretty impressed at how much I have managed to knit with only 100g! I think that is about 105 rounds. I dyed 500g of the dark green just to be on the safe side, but I think at this rate I will probably end up using somewhere between 300g and 400g. Better to have too much than not enough, I am glad I have some extra to play with.

I finally finished fiddling around with swatches, and cast on for the real thing for my Autumn in Anatolia jumper in October. Then in November I undid it and cast on again, after discovering I had made a miscalculation and cast on too many stitches the first time (that will teach me not to knit the border before I have finished the charts for the main jumper). Here is the progress so far:

I timed myself and it takes me about an hour a row at the moment. I have set myself a target of two rows a day and am managing to keep it up at the moment. I love how the pattern is coming out, and the colours are looking good so far.

I have been playing with the dyes again for my stranded knitting project. One more orange and one more green.

This is the new orange between its two immediate neighbours.

The Kemtex Acid Dye in Yellow is definitely not as bright as the Jacquard Bright Yellow. They do have another range called Kenanthrol acid dyes, which have a variety of shades of yellow. I’m not sure what is the difference between them and the Kemtex acid dyes, but they might be worth investigating in future.

I think I have got the 12 colours for the background sorted now.

The new green was another experiment for a foreground colour. I think this one is very pretty but is too yellow for this project.

Here is the new green in the middle, with last experimental green on the left, and the original green I used for the knitted sample on the right.

I think I am going to have another attempt at dyeing a green which is more similar in colour to the one on the right, but more solid than I have so far managed with the Jacquard acid dyes. I do rather like the bluer one on the left though, it makes a good contrast with all the oranges and I think it is a definite contender.

I have now measured my tension from my sample, and started working out the charts – I think this will be quite a long process! I have a rough idea of how the patterns should fit in, and have worked out most of the logistics on my rough sketch. The charts themselves will take a while though, I am using excel and am not particularly fast. Have any of you used any of the knitting charting programs out there? If so what do you think of them? I have been looking at Knit Visualizer and have just downloaded the demo to have a play with. The details of how I am going to do the shaping will take some working out too! Hopefully I will actually be able to cast on for the real thing fairly soon.

On Monday last week I had another play with the dyes to see if I could make another pale orange and another mid orange for my Autumn in Anatolia jumper. While I was at it I also had another go at a green for the foreground.

These were the three colours I dyed. I am having a lot of trouble photographing them accurately, but this is fairly close.

The mid orange is good I think. I am a little concerned that the palest orange is actually nigh-on indistinguishable from yellow. The green is a beautiful colour, but I think still too blue.

Here is the new pale orange with the other colours it will be with in the sequence (the new colour is in the middle).

And here are the mid oranges. Again the new colour is in the middle.

Here is the new green on the right along with the last green I attempted on the left, which is 400ml of 1% stock solution of Kemtex acid dye in green, and which as you can see is a very bluey green. Then at the bottom is Jacquard Emerald Green, which is a lovely colour, but I had trouble with it being a bit blotchy. The Kemtex does dye very evenly and exhausts very well (which is very satisfying ). The new green is 300ml of green and 100ml of yellow. For my next trick I think I shall try 200ml of green and 200ml of yellow.

Just for fun, here is the sequence of colours laid out on our dining table. As you can tell we don’t eat on the table often

I think I shall have another go at dyeing a pale orange since I think that step is still a bit big. I think the mid orange is ok, and I shall try to get a slightly yellower green.

While I had the dyes out I had a go at semi-solid dyeing my Dorset/BFL sock yarn I spun during the Tour de Fleece. I did this using a variation on the dyeing in a bag method Fiona showed us at her workshop. Her method was a cold dyeing method, but it adapted easily enough for hot dyeing. Boil in the bag yarn! I put the dye and the yarn in the bag and squished around, then left for about an hour and then steamed it as usual.

There was 250g altogether of yarn which I think was a bit much for my bag. I couldn’t mash the yarn round as much as I would like, so some of the skeins are more evenly dyed than others. The two smaller skeins dyed much more evenly, with the biggest skein being the most mottled. I like the effect though.

It was also interesting to see how the Dorset took the dye in comparison to the BFL. As you can see from this picture, the Dorset has taken the dye a bit (both the grey and the white) but not nearly as strongly as the BFL.

I am looking forward to knitting this up and seeing how it comes out.

The cyclists did their biggest climb so far this tour, into Andorra, and I have crested my own little summit with my spinning.

I have finished my first full  bobbin of the tour. Yes, the grey Dorset is finally finished! Only two bobbins of the white to go and then I can ply it and see what it will be like as yarn.

In honour of the occaision I have been playing at making mosaics with Picasa 3. So here is a recap of my progress on this yarn on the tour.

And another, because if a thing is worth doing, it is worth overdoing.

I ran my foot over with our side gate shortly after taking these photos while having a quick tidy up outside. It is a nice substantial gate. I am hopping around now (well not right now, since even with the laptop I can’t type and hop at the same time). I shall go and bathe it and anoint it in a minute.

I have been managing to do a spot of knitting in between all the spinning. I have finally finished my latest test sample for my current City and Guilds project. I was test driving how the colours work, and also testing 6 possible patterns, of which I will probably use 3. This is the project I have been dyeing all the colours for.

This is it in its unblocked, straight off the needles state.

These are the most likely 3 patterns.

And these are the three probably rejects.

As you can see the edging at the bottom edge is too loose. I think the top edge is better but now probably a bit tight. I am reserving final judgement until after it has been washed. The top edging is worked on smaller needles, which I think works well, but I think I decreased too many stitches.

I also think I need to introduce another couple of intermediate colours. Another medium orange about half way up to ease the transition from red to orange, and a very pale orange just before the yellow. It is coming along though, and I am looking forward to being able to measure the tension after it has been washed and start plotting out the final design.

The homework for the April City and Guilds class was unusual and experimental Fair Isle. I am trying to be a bit more experimental with my samples but am not sure I am really succeeding. I find it quite hard not to have a little voice at the back of my head thinking about whether it would make a good garment or a practical something-or-other, whereas for these samples the whole point is to experiment and view the sample as art rather than as something necessarily useful.

The first two samples are corrugated Fair Isle. Here you pull the strands across the back of the work tighter than usual to create a raised surface. It is rather hard on the hands! This stitch is often used in tea cosy patterns. The first sample uses the same number of stitches in each colour.

And the second uses more stitches in the purple sections. The other yarn is actually a plastic sandwich bag I cut into a long strip. Not very pleasant to knit with! It feels very stiff and crunchy once knitted up too.

Next I had a go at fulling a bit of Fair Isle. The background yarn is wool while the foreground is cotton. Here is how it looked before.

And here after going through a nice hot wash. I like how the cotton stands out a bit from the fulled fabric as well as the stitches being still well-defined. I didn’t full this until the background stitches were completely obliterated, but it would be interesting to try that too some time.

Next I tried Meg Swansen’s Purl When You Can. This involved purling the stitch if the stitch you are working into is in the same colour, and knitting it if you are changing colour. It creates a fabric which doesn’t curl and can be used around the bottom of jumpers and sleeves to create a non-rolling edge without interrupting the pattern. The first sample I purled when I could in both the background and foreground colours.

For the second sample I only purled when I could in the background colour, and worked the foreground colour in knit. This is enough to stop it curling, and doesn’t disrupt the pattern as much.

Both of these seeemed to work well when there were strong diagonal lines in the pattern, but some more delicate details were rather lost.

For my last sample I worked a Fair Isle pattern using two different weights of yarn. The background is aran weight, and the foreground 4ply weight.

I’m not sure that this one was a great success. Fair Isle is actually very forgiving of different weights of yarn, and although the background does show through the foreground a bit, it is not nearly as obvious as I thought it would be.

The homework for the March City and Guilds class was on smocked knitting, something I had never tried before.

My first sample involved knitting a sample of k1, p1 rib, and then working the smocking afterwards.

The next two samples came from patterns in Barbara Walker’s A Treasury of Knitting Patterns. With both of these the smocking is knitted in as you go along.

This first pattern is just called smocking.

The second is called variation smocking. Unfortunately I chose a yarn which doesn’t show the pattern terrible well again

These were fun to do but I’m not sure whether I would use them in future knitting projects. The variation smocking is more delicate, but the other two make really quite a firm and thick fabric which limits its uses. They might make good tea cosy fabric, since they would be very well insulating, and a bit of a change from other tea cosy patterns.

I am back to doing samples of different techniques for my City and Guilds course. The homework for February’s class was on double knitting, where you are creating a double layer fabric.

This is plain double knitting, where you end up knitting a tube with stocking stitch on each side.

Next I had a go with knit and purl patterns, these both look the same on each side. Unfortunately my yarn choice was rather poor and the grey sample doesn’t really show up the pattern very well.

The blue is actually slightly better in real life, but being rather shiny cotton didn’t photograph very well.

Next I had a go at a combination of double knitting and garter stitch. This is another sample which looks the same from both sides. I think this would make great table mats. It is a very pleasing pattern to knit too.

Then the last sample of double knitting was using two colours. With this method one side is the inverse of the other colourwise. A wonderful effect, although hard to keep track of what you are doing! I really loved how this one came out, very stained glass looking.

And this is the other side. Not quite as good since it turned out that the multicoloured yarn was slightly thinner than the black so the black tended to show through a bit.

As well as the double knitting February’s homework also included two samples of quilted knitting. These patterns are both from Barbara Walker’s A Treasury of Knitting Patterns. First is the single coloured quilted lattice.

Then the two coloured royal quilting.

I really enjoyed knitting both of these samples. Both have a different but definite rythmn about them which makes them very pleasant to knit once you get into the swing. I will have to have a think about how you could incorporate them into a garment.