Monthly Archives: June 2020

Einstein and leftover yarn

by
4

I know. It’s nearly 90 degrees and I’m posting super warm stuff. I’ve never been able to time my knitting to the seasons. I knit the warm stuff year round. I completed my Einstein Coat, designed by Sally Melville, a few months back. I’ve been planning on knitting this simple beauty for many years. It took a jumpstart from my Canada Creek Ranch knitting group to encourage me to cast on. A number of our knitters worked on Einstein over the winter and spring. The pattern is available in Melville’s classic book “The Knitting Experience, Book I, the Knit Stitch.”

I knit mine in Cascade Yarn’s Ecological Wool. My reason for this choice was pure ease of knitting. Bulky weight yarn is almost always put up in very short yardage skeins. I do not like dealing with a zillion joins, particularly not when knitting miles of garter stitch where there’s basically no place to hide what often ends up (for me) to be a slightly discernible join. Ecological Wool is put up in huge 478 yard/250 gram skeins. That made the knitting so much easier. Well, except when it didn’t. As in, I tried every trick in the book to get gauge and failed. But having invested in the yarn, there was no way I wasn’t going to use it.

Here’s another view–thought I’m doubtful I’ll ever be buttoning that top button.

My swatches were undergauge even on size 11 US, where the fabric just didn’t feel beefy enough. I knit this on 10.5 US needles and knit the largest size–exactly as the pattern calls for it to be knit. It ended up smaller than the largest size, both in length and circumference but it (basically) still fits. It coulda shoulda been otherwise. But I lucked out.

I had trouble following the directions in the Melville book for seaming garter stitch with a slip stitch edge. Her photos weren’t doing it for me. And I just couldn’t–for the longest time—figure out her references to the “outside edge.” I eventually figured out that means the outermost edge of each of the fabrics being joined. In other words, it means you work what is really mattress stitch on the inner sides of the slipped stitches. Duh!

There are no slip stitch edges on the shoulders and I didn’t like the way my mattress stitch was working out. So I picked up stitches along the edge of both the front section and the back section–on 2 separate needles. To work the shoulder section of the seam, I worked a 3-needle bind-off, from the public side so the garter stitch-like ridge would form on the public side.

I heard that everyone is supposed to look nice or sort of OK in this coat, even rolly pollies. Hmm. ‘Nuf said. It would likely be more at home in a yurt on the Russian Steppes. But it is super cozy. And now I can join the rest of the knitting universe who’s knit this Einstein Coat as their garter stitch right of passage. I very much enjoyed the knit.

In my last post I whined about patterns that specify the yarn requirements only in terms of the number of skeins of a particular yarn. You may recall that my Kelbourne Wool Germantown was the gift that kept on giving for that reason. This time, it was my undergauge knitting that ended up leaving me with gobs of extra yarn. Also, from the outset, I knew I’d not be needing much of the yardage from the final humongous skein.

This bulky weight hat knits up super quickly. It’s Helen Rose’s freebie Cozy Ribbed Hat. All it took me to complete it was 85 yards of yarn, size 10 needles, and an hour or two of time.

I find the top interesting and rather organic, if a tad messy.

And still the yarn wasn’t used up. This is the Mermaid’s Purl’s Bulky Cabled Hat, another Ravelry freebie. My version used up about 130 yards of yarn. I knit on size 8 US needles for the ribbing and size 10 for the body of the hat.

The pattern suggests adding a pom-pom. That would have been nice. But I rather liked the way the decreases resolved and didn’t want to obscure that design. Plus, I figured it made the hat a bit more unisex to leave the pom-pom off.

I was very much drawn to this next hat. I do not know how to crochet. I can crochet a chain. And, with a lot of hand-holding, I once crocheted a market bag out of rough kitchen cotton. But, to my knit-trained eyeballs, this hat looked like crochet. It’s Anne Claiborne’s Tenure Track. The pattern calls for Aran weight. But since my bulky weight Ecological Wool had already proved itself a lightweight when it came to gauge, I figured I’d be safe giving this hat a try.What creates a bit of a crochet vibe is granite stitch through the main body of the hat. I’ve not worked this stitch before. And I’ve not even heard of it. I was hooked. Granite stitch is a super easy sequence of 4 rounds. You knit round 1, purl 2 together throughout round 2, knit in the front and back of each stitch in round 3, and knit round 4. Easy peasy. I love the effect.

I nominate these crown decreases for a crown decrease prize. Really. It’s ridiculously perfect!

Another feature that makes Tenure Track shine is that it uses very beefy bobbles. If a knitter is going to go to the trouble of bobbling, why end up with limp little dangles? Beefy bobbles are better.  Try to say that three times in a row quickly. I’m inordinately fond of this hat. This one’s for me.

The new(ish) Germantown

by
2

This is Elizabeth Smith’s Layla, knit in Kelbourne Woolens Germantown.  I don’t knit many sweaters for grown folks. But this one caught my eye. Oversized. Boxy, Great for layering. I figured it would work for winter and do double duty on cool evenings the rest of the year. Plus (don’t laugh…too hard) I don’t like to sew buttons on and a sweater that looks good without buttons is a plus. You don’t even have to have someone’s first remark on your hand knit be….all together now…”I really like the buttons.”

The pattern is simple, but with some excellent detailing. I like the subtle garter stitch panel that runs down the sides. When picking up the bands, Smith doesn’t provide an exact number of stitches. I mean, does anyone ever get exactly that number? Instead, she says to pick up 3 for every 4 edge stitches. So, no pressure, just well-behaved bands. There’s even some easy short row shaping on the shoulders.

The pattern teaches a fun little “trick” for knitting one-row alternating stripes while knitting stockinette flat. You knit two rows and then purl two rows. The color you need for the next stripe is in the correct place because after you knit (or purl) the first in the pair of rows, you slide all the stitches forward on your circular needles to knit (or purl) another row in the other color.  And because of how you handle the yarn, you are working stockinette despite the knitting two rows and then purling two rows. Here’s Smith’s brief photo tutorial on the technique. Easy peasy. And such a nice effect.

I am very pleased with the result.

The pattern calls for 11 inches of positive ease and, in my size, presents the yarn requirements as 1066 yards of the main color and 464 yards of the contrasting color. That would be 8 skeins plus 4 skeins of the recommended yarn, Quince and Company Lark because Lark is put up in 134 yard skeins. I decided to give the new incarnation of an old fav, Germantown, a try. Smith’s pattern doesn’t tell a knitter how many yards are actually needed, just how many skeins. One of the ways Ravelry can be very helpful is when knitters report their actual yardage used. But I didn’t find enlightenment in the project pages on this point.

Germantown is put up in 220 yards skeins. The only safe choice was for me to buy at least as many yards of each color as the Lark skeins would have provided. So I bought 5 skeins of the main color (220 times 5 is 1100) and 3 of the contrasting color (660 yards). That was a bit of a gulp pricewise. When I last met Germantown it was many years ago in Woolworth’s “dime” store, I believe. The shop where I purchased Germantown sells a skein for $15.50. Let’s just leave it at I couldn’t have spent $15.50 even for a sweater quantity of Germantown in my dime store days.

I had 1760 yards of Germantown. I used less than 1250 for the sweater.

What to do with the remaining 500 plus yards?

These are Saffiyah Talley’s Heartland Marsh mittens, included in Kate Davies Warm Hands book. Good pattern, from a new-to-me (and newish) designer. What I take to be a tree motif appears on both sides of the mitts. And the mittens both fit each hand.

They fit very nicely.

The fair isle work has some very long floats. Especially with mittens, where fingers are apt to get caught in floats, I decided to catch them at least every 3 stitches. More often I caught them–loosely–every two stitches. The mittens definitely needed blocking. Hmm. No dedicated mitten blockers in this household.

I used a piece of stiff plastic I had on hand, and this Asa Tricosa tutorial, to make a pair of mitten blockers.

I modified Tricosa’s directions some to allow for the pointier tops of my mitts. It worked out just right. I traced the top of the mitten shape from the toe of my wooden sock blockers.

And still my Germantown wasn’t exhausted. Next I knit Kate Davies Design’s Haresd, from the same Warm Hands book.

Those honey gold bumps strike me as a bit odd, but they do make for a warm mitten. They are two-stitch, two-round, purl stitches knit onto a stockinette background. The first round of the purl stitch set end up half ’n half—so, in two colors. If it weren’t such a prominent design feature, we’d call it a mistake.

So, I’m done with Germantown, right? No. I have 3/4 of a skein of yardage left. I began to think some fairy was secretly spinning more yarn almost as fast as I was knitting it up. I’ve relegated the rest to my oddments bin. I’m quite sure that someday a honey colored pony with a purple-maroon mane will gallop out.

What about the yarn? Do I like it? Yes. It’s a very nice workhorse type yarn. In most skeins there would be one or two rough, stiff joins that I needed to cut out and spit-splice. That’s not too bad for a 220 yard skein. Kelbourne says that it’s “100% US grown wool.” I know that needs to make it more expensive than imported wool. Drat.