A bright spot of color in a week of dreary grey. Who needs fireworks, after all?
Pattern: My own (pattern available someday)
Yarn: Brown Sheep Cotton Fine, in color 230 (Victorian Pink)
Yardage: 5 50 gram balls (about 1000 yards)
Yarn Source: Clover Hill Yarn Shop
Needles: 2.75mm (US 2) Crystal Palace bamboo circular needles
Gauge: 8 st/inch over ribbing
Modifications: --
We're getting there.
Now all I need to do is join the sleeves to the body and finish knitting. That is, I need to work out the the armscye shaping, and the sleeve cap shaping, and, uh, figure out the whole set-in-sleeves-in-the-round thing.
I'm hoping it's a lot like knitting a seamless yoked sweater - hold underarm stitches for grafting, incorporate the sleeve stitches across, and then, to create the set-in sleeve, just make the appropriate decreases on either side of an imaginary seam line between body and sleeve cap. Right? Maybe. I hope so.
But anyway, I'm sort of delighted with the way this is coming together. This is a new experience for me - usually, I'm full of niggling doubts about this or that detail, or unhappy with the execution of something, or disgusted with the whole project before it's done - but this time around, everything just worked exactly the way I wanted it to, with a minimum of false starts and hair-rending and bitter, bitter tears. The rest of this post is going to sound horribly smug and self-satisfied, but I can't help it - this is the nicest kind of suprise.
I love my neat, prim little ribs along the sleeve increases:
And I love the sleeves themselves. Indeed, what dark heart beats in he who could not love sweet, elbow-skimming sleeves with a tiny little vent detail at the back of the arm?
The edgings here and at the neck slit were the one thing that gave me a little pause. I wanted something that would give a little structure to the edges, particularly along the neck - the neck is quite high, but deeply split, and I didn't want the corners to flop so much they allowed any more than a gentle curve framing a peek of skin. The usual non-curling work-as-you-go edges - moss and garter borders - were out because they didn't fit with the very clean look of the top portion. A hem, a la the sleeve vents on the Norwegian Jacket, would have been a good, sturdy solution - but I wanted to keep the knitting as fuss-free and simple as possible.
Grumperina and Anna to the rescue! I read Kathy's post on a clever little self-edging, and headed over to Anna's discussion of it for more information. What, ho! It's just a column of double-knit! Brilliantly simple, wonderfully appropriate for this project.
So, I've got a nice, tidy little tube of double-knit (or double-purled, I should say, for a reverse-stockinette tube) on either side of all my vents and slits, with a beginning and ending slipped knit stitch for a neat, clean selvedge.
It fits perfectly, almost invisibly with the body fabric, gives a nice bit of double-thickness structure to a seamless knit, and best of all - my numbers work perfectly within the stitch pattern. See how those facing knit stitches meet to form a new rib above the slit? See how the edges of the slit themselves continue into the reverse-stockinette background? Swoon.
Books
Thanks for all the good wishes! I'm very excited about both projects, and all the other things coming up - thanks again, and I'll be sure to keep everyone tuned.
I'm ready to weep with astonishment and relief, it so nearly approaches what I had in my head:
That never happens. It was a fight, I'll tell you - plotting the shift from cable to rib over the curved point was squeezing blood from a particularly recalcitrant stone. Somehow, though all the crossings are going in their proper directions, and the right slope was maintained, and I ended with the right numer of stitches, and the ribs are distributed to create extra fullness in the places that need it most. It works, it's sweet-looking and well-behaved, it tap-dances along the line between function and form, and I'm enormously pleased with myself.
Now, if only I could remember what I did.
