Yet Another Ribwarmer

The ribwarmer is my benchmark garment. When I can turn out neat, beautifully knitted rib warmers that fit the recipient, then I'll be able to knit!

I got a pile of lovely green waterwheel acrylic chunky for £6 from the charity shop. I planned to make another Stockport, but Rowan's Cocoon yarn isn't a chunky either. I thought it would be, seeing as it isn't an Aran, but it isn't a chunky either, so it is difficult to find a substitute yarn for Coccon. I discovered this after I'd gone away for the weekend with only a few needles in the basket. Read through the entire Rowan book. I didn't have the needles for the only chunky pattern in the book. Growl.

Began a scarf from the book, Rochdale by Martin Storey. Hm. It would take 5 balls of Cocoon, which is an expensive scarf by any standards, and I wasn't keen on the pattern overall. The fabric is a rather nice cable and moss stitch and I did like the effect of the right side of the fabric, but the wrong side was very ugly. I hate scarves with a wrong side - however I arrange the thing the wrong side always shows. And the scarf was too narrow to fold in two and sew up (and anyway, I'd knit on a circular needle if I was going to make it into a tube). Not impressed. I might have carried on if I'd had a circular needle to hand and if I'd felt like casting on another pattern repeat to make it wide enough to be two sided. But I didn't. Frogged the six inches I'd started and hummed a little tune while I thought what to knit with only one yarn, two needles and no pattern.

Of course! A ribwarmer for Andy. He liked the colour of the chunky, and I want to practise being consistent so off I went. It was a wet weekend, so I knitted the whole front. Hurray! And, it does look a lot neater because I wrote down which way I was slipping the edges and which way I was wrapping the short rows and heroically stuck to it. Being consistent is definitely part of the secret of good knitting.

Snow Goose Rib Warmer - Finished

And what's more it fits! Time for that modest but triumphant jig that Elizabeth Zimmerman recommends on finishing an item.

Not that I'm happy with it - oh no! I think the yarn probably isn't suitable. It is very smooth and so it shows off every jog and imperfection, and there are plenty of those. I will make a couple more test garments before I buy some 'real' yarn, but I know what to buy for the rib warmer now - ethnic. Natural yarn, or tweed, not smooth and processed. I think selecting the right yarn is a huge part of turning out a successful garment.

Before buying expensive yarn, I want to work on consistency. My tension was fairly even over the whole garment. That's good. The short row holes don't look very neat, and I realise that is because sometimes I work into the front of a stitch and sometimes into the back. I might start writing down what I do and then sticking to it. Same for the I-Cord border. I didn't always go into the same part of the stitch to pick up (and of course the edges weren't always finished the same way, thus making consistent picking up impossible) and then when I knit into the first stitch, sometimes I went into the back and sometimes into the front, same with the slipped stitch. I-Cord is made by casting on two stitches, then putting them back onto the needle that holds the picked up stitched. You knit one, slip one, then knit one picked up stitch. That means there are eight combinations of going into the front or the back of each stitch. You can bet that I used all of them at random - but that is going to change!!

I was pleased with how I got the I-Cord around the corners without it puckering - I knit to the corner, knit two extra stitches on the I-Cord side without attaching them, knit as usual, attaching the I-Cord, then knit two extra stitches again. This is a tip Meg Swanson gives you on the DVD for going around the shoulders, but it works well on the corners as well. Unfortunately I didn't discover this until I'd set off, so the first corner didn't have the refinement, giving another slight irregularity to the garment.

I'm also going to keep track of rows. Is the front the same as the back? I don't know. Did I do all the increase and decreases at the same points? I don't know! More irregularity.

I do know that to fit me I need to knit four more ridges than the pattern suggests.

It shows progress, anyway, so I am pleased with it.

It's the Snow Goose Rib Warmer because the yarn (£1.45 from charity shop) is vintage wool from Halifax and the brand is Snow Goose Aran. 5 mm needles for the body and 4 mm needles for the trim.

Sick Knitting

A perfectly horrible week. Andy & I got a stomach bug, followed by a vile cold. When I did feel well enough to pick up my knitting again I'd gone wrong. My excuse is being driven demented by toothache - I thought I'd followed Meg Swanson's instructions for the knee length rib warmer, but clearly I hadn't. I wanted to make the garment a bit longer so it would fit Andy, but I'd over compensated and it was 50" around, because making it longer had made it wider as well. All that frogged yarn went in the bin. I don't actually like knitting with this yarn - it's rough and smells faintly of machine oil. It's the knitting equivalent of eating your sprouts. Once the rib warmer is done, the rest of the cone goes in the bin.