Ribwarmer DVD Arrives

And plays, thank goodness, so that plunge into technology worked out after all. Was it worth it? You bet! I love this DVD. Andy winced when he saw the receipt, but it runs I hour 45 minutes in total. I already watched it twice, which is around 3 hours fun, and for sure I'll watch it another 6 times or so at least, not to mention checking back for odd techniques, so in terms of cost per hour, it's not expensive at all. No, really! Knitting costs practically nothing, right?

I like this DVD because it is completely different from the Lucy Neatby DVDs, but just as good in its own way. Lucy shows you lots of single techniques in great detail. Meg tells you a little of the history around the ribwarmer, including one knit by Elizabeth Zimmerman herself, and a copy of the magazine it first appeared in. Then she shows you lots of variations on a single garment and encourages you to make your own choices and change your mind as you go - which is very empowering. She demonstrates making a child's ribwarmer in detail, then how you can adapt it to a longer length, or make a very pretty bolero version called the butterfly jacket. (The basic patterns are included inside the DVD case.) Also she shows lots of variations: a collar, a sports vent, a seamless version, I-cord trimming, a braided edge. She also shows you how to measure and size the garment and how to shape it a bit more - if you want to. Then she runs over all the techniques she uses. Pretty good value for money, I'd say. I plan to make a good few ribwarmers in the near future and have fun with it.

The techniques Meg shows for garter stitch would have been handy to know for my simple garter stitch jacket, but too late now! I picked it up again and solved the short row mystery - it turned out to be a matter of terminology. If you are knitting short rows, every row is 2 rows, so do you count one each time you do 2 rows, which add up to one complete short row? Or do you count 2, because after all, you knit one way, turn around and knit back, which adds up to 2 rows?Different patterns refer to it differently. Once I understood this, I knit the second sleeve with no problems. BUT I wanted to try grafting the seam. I knit the extra flap in bright yellow so I could a) have something to hold and b) use the waste yarn as a guide, but oh, dear, I didn't go back and watch Lucy again before I started and I carefully grafted two hills together, so there's a ridge on the right side and a double valley on the wrong side. DOH!

I decided not to undo it all. Instead I frogged the mistake sleeve back to where I'd gone wrong, finished it and sewed the seam so it looked pretty much like the other one. Job over! All I have to do now is sew it up and crotchet the trimming.

Those handy techniques Meg demonstrates on the DVD will apply to all garter stitch garments, and she really explains things in a way that helps me to understand. She doesn't say: 'At this point, put the yarn left and then right', She says: 'if you put the yarn left this happens, then if you put the yarn right that happens, and it's up to you which effect you want'. Although I'm not a huge fan of the ethnic knitted look, I will definitely get all the DVDs and knit my way through them, just because of how much I'll learn.

One thing that fascinated me: she knits Continental, but right down at the bottom of her needle! And I just spent two months learning to knit at the tips! After some thought I realised that she mustn't have any problems because she'll use her needles like that consistently - my stitches were altering all the time, probably because I wasn't aware which part of the needle I was using at any one time, so I knit differently in different chairs, or with different needles or even as the piece I was working on changed size. It just goes to show that there is no right or wrong in knitting, but, as Lucy said when she demonstrated the knitting at the tips technique: if you're not getting the results you want, you might want to consider something new. An added bonus is that I do believe that it's faster to knit at the tips - I'm sure I've sped up a bit since I got the hang it.

Last week I ordered some highlighter tape from the Woolly Workshop - I promised myself not to start the next cabled shrug until it arrived. It's so hard to wait though. Yesterday I dropped the shop an email just asking how my order was progressing. The shop owner rang up and said: but you cancelled it as soon as I sent the confirmation email. I said: oh no I didn't! She said: oh yes you did. Very odd. We dug deeper and an explanation emerged. I had put the wrong email address on my form - the one at work has no numbers in it and I sometimes mix them up. So, the shop had emailed a Louise Armstrong with no numbers in her BT email account - and this Louise Armstrong must knit, because instead of emailing back to say she'd never ordered anything from a knitting shop in her life, she replied to say that the order was from a year ago and she didn't need it now so please could she have a refund!! Anyway, my order is on its way and I'll be able to start shrug number two at last. But first I must finish the simple garter stitch jacket and the ribwarmer I couldn't resist starting last night.

This week, I have been mostly knitting ... Thorpe Hats

Five of the little fellows, one after the other. Thorpe is a free pattern by Kristin Kapur, which she has generously made available on her blog http://throughtheloops.typepad.com/thorpe.pdf
or you can get the pattern at Ravelry. It's an easy knit in the round in chunky yarn.

Hat number one turned out too large - but it didn't matter because it was made in Lopi and Andy asked me not to make another one in Icelandic wool because just trying it on made him itch! Lopi got frogged and missed out on the group photo.

It was interesting making a small item over and over. The first three were pretty numb, but four was OK (in a surprising kind of way - it was meant for Andy, turned out too small, so got a pink trim and became mine) and hat number five was perfect. It's gone off for field testing in the frost today. No plaits - health and safety at work.

What did I learn from the hat exercise?

• Read the pattern carefully, and then read your knitting - I had missed the instruction to knit a plain row in between the increase rounds on the crown. I kept thinking: the crown doesn't look so puffy in other people's photos. In fact, I thought that four times over four hats before thinking to check and getting number five right.
• It is worth taking the time to try out new techniques. Hats one and two had pretty messy joins at the garter stitch because in the round you have to purl a round, then knit a round to make garter stitch - and it looked messy at the change. I hunted out the instructions for a jogless join for garter stitch in the round, and it's so easy! All you have to do is take the yarn to the side you will be working on, slip the next stitch, work the round, including the slipped stitch, change the yarn to the side you will be working on, slip the next stitch, work the round including the slipped stitch - that's it! A lovely neat invisible join. If you mark the beginning of the round, you'll see that each time you are moving the start of the round one stitch over as the slipped stitch becomes part of the previous round. Wonderful.
• It's OK to customise ear flaps - the first couple looked a bit Japanese warrior helmet, so I did the decreases more often to get a pointed flap.
• A bigger crotchet hook just might be a huge improvement if the original choice didn't look just right - again, I twigged this at hat number five. The original instructions are not set in stone!
• Different brands of chunky yarn will knit differently - the cream hat was very small, yet it was knit on the same needles and to the same size as the second grey hat, which was an inch or so bigger - just right.
• That I can get better - but if I have to knit every garment five times to get it right, I'll be dead before I'm a good knitter!
  

Another Test Cloud

There's only 8 balls, which makes me nervous, but I can always make the sleeves a bit shorter if necessary.

The lady in the hospice shop asked me if I was a dealer today. Oh dear. I certainly never leave without buying something! All in a good cause, of course!

http://www.kcgtrading.com/index.php Today I joined the Knitting and Crotchet Guild - members get a 10% discount, and I'm going to be spending a lot on DVDs. I buy more and more from them because they always have what I want in stock - so why ring anywhere else?

I've ordered a DVD on Elizabeth Zimmerman's Ribwarmer - I hour and 45 minutes instruction - surely by the end of that I can make a ribwarmer? I had a go at one last year - the construction made my head ache and it turned out far too big. It was a pretty colour though, so I gave it to my mum, who wears it in winter.

I can't remember where I saw this comment now, but it's been depressing me all week - somebody on a blog or on Ravelry said that they had tried out Continental knitting and it had taken them a few hours to get the hang of it. A few HOURS? It took me months! It was like learning to knit all over again. Me hunched muttering over messy little swatches. Needles clattering to the floor. Knitting hurled across the room. The first thing I made was a monkey from Tracey Chapman's stuffed toys book. There was a typo in the pattern which didn't help! But I finally got him finished and the next small person to come to the house fell for 'Practice Monkey' in a big way. We chose buttons for his eyes and away he went.

It also took me several months to get used to knitting at the tips of the needles as Lucy Neatby suggests. Tangerine Alef didn't turn out too badly, other than uneven sleeves, but I ruined my first Turbulence U-necked sweater because I knitted too close to the tips. Oh well. As long as I get there in the end. I want to be faster and neater so changes have to be made. I wish I could make them in a few hours, though. It's like there's a knitting world where people pick up new skills and achieve effortlessly, and there's my world which is all damn and blast it!

I Give Away a Shrug

A mixed success, as you can see - it's great to have produced a garment which I like the look of. It's a shame it doesn't fit me by miles! I think what's happened here is overcompensation. I knew several of these shrugs had turned out too small, so I thought, right! Mine's not going to have that fault...

I will make another one of these - but I will knit the 10 diamonds that the pattern suggests and not 12. I think the rib section is only just big enough. I cast the usual proportion for ribbing - pick up 3 and skip one all along the edge, which gave slightly more stitches than the pattern suggested. I think it needs one stitch picking up for every stitch. Following a helpful suggestion from Ravelry, I knit the rib section in the round, which worked really well and eliminates a seam. I also changed needle size - pick up on one smaller, first few inches in the same size as the body (5.5mm) then a few inches in 6 mm, 6.5 mm and 7 mm. I had to stop there because I've no bigger circular needles. Then I cast off in rib. This tip came from a Lucy Neatby DVD - and the ribbing did look nice - it wanted to turn over and lie prettily. I might make it a few inches deeper as well.

It's so hard to measure knitting. Andy helped me with this one and it still came out wrong. He fits kitchens. He wallpapers. He cuts holes in £500 doors to fit the furniture. He can build a kitchen extension - and all his building stuff turns out perfectly. What is it about knitting? When I picked up my simple garter stitch jacket again at the weekend, there were 3 people in the room. I had pulled out the needles and forgotten to write down what I was using, so I knit up a tiny swatch along 10 stitches of the garment until I thought I had it right. Then I checked with the others, just to be on the safe side. Andy said: you need a bigger needle. Rick said: I think she needs a smaller needle. And Stewart said: I don't know.

The shrug saga doesn't end too badly though. When I knit a sweater for Andy's sister, she asked me to knit the sleeves 2" longer than usual because she has very long arms. Remembering this I took her the shrug. She wasn't too sure about the construction, never having owned or worn such a strange item - but it fitted her so I insisted that she take it. Hopefully she'll decide that she likes shrugs, I thought she looked smart in it, but then, I'm biased - it's my baby!

NVQ in Knitting

Thank goodness I'm better at last - other than still having to whisper as my voice hasn't come back properly. While I was sick, one of the things I missed most was my knitting blog (TV or computers made my head ache so I couldn't update it). So instead, over the week, I thought about why I missed my blog so much, and I think it is helping me to knit in the same way that an NVQ is supposed to help you be more efficient at work. I thought NVQs (National Vocational Qualifications) were rubbish when I was first introduced to them - partly because I was told they were the same as A-levels, which they clearly are not. A-levels are more about critically examining an academic subject. NVQs encourage you to examine your approach to a practical subject - and that's what my blog does for my knitting. Several times I've written down a problem or described a situation that I didn't understand and shortly after clarifying the issue, the answer has arrived. It's like keeping a nature notebook or a record of scientific experiments. There's also a touch of zen in there - by recording what's happening in the moment, I'm learning to be more mindful.

They say you should always write down your goals, so here's my knitting goal: I want to be able to knit beautiful designer garments very quickly. Oh, and they have to fit and be perfectly finished as well. And after a year or two on that happy pinnacle I might move on to designing my own garments. That's pretty ambitious, and it's not happening quickly. This week I've been wondering why.

I was browsing through some knit alongs and then looking at people's finished projects at Ravelry and the huge variety in outcome on the same pattern is fascinating - even when knitters use the specified yarn, the results vary, so the answer has to lie in the skill of the individual knitter. At the moment my knitting lies at the rubbish end of the spectrum. So how do I get to the fabulous finished garment stage? I've been hopping from pattern to pattern - thinking, well this one didn't work so I'll throw it away and look for the magic pattern that will work, or the magic yarn, or hey, maybe there's a magic needle out there. Instead maybe I should settle down to knit several versions of the same simple pattern and not leave it until I can knit it beautifully?

I hunted out another of my disasters from before I started blogging: Cloud by Kim Hargreaves. This is my third attempt at it - I spent ages struggling with increasing and decreasing in double rib (all I had to do was follow the pattern to the letter, but I managed to get tangled up). I made two test versions using 2 strands of a big cone of Shetland that came from a charity shop for 50p. The first one was such a mess of tangled ribbing that I threw it away and started again but the second attempt came out too small, so that went in the bin and I decided to make the 'real' one in the largest size. Unfortunately, it too was tiny, as you can see, but I think I know what went wrong - I substituted a fine wool for the specified cotton of Calmer, and the wool is far too elastic. I knit a swatch of double knit cotton and you can see how flat it lies in comparison to the wool. It's Jaeger Extra Fine Merino in Alpine green, which is far too good to waste, so it's the frog pond for this particular yarn.

I made the sweater version of Loll from the same Rowan Calmer book using some white vintage Jaeger double knit wool for Andy's sister, and that turned out beautifully; she looks like a snow princess in it, so substituting yarn obviously has a lot of angles to it. What works beautifully in stocking stitch might not work at all in rib - in fact, it didn't! Never mind, I will make another test Cloud when some cotton-type stuff turns up to see if my theory on the nature of the yarn is correct. I do like the look of this cardigan and one day I'll own it (beautifully made, of course) in coffee-bean coloured Calmer.

Folk Mittens

I got an email asking where I got the pattern for the 'lame mitten' from. I should apologise here and make it clear that it's my knitting that's lame! It's true I'm not keen on bulky mittens, but there are some fantastic patterns in this book which is Folk Mittens by Marcia Lewandowski and published by Interweave Press. There are folk mitten patterns from around the world, and most of the mittens feature at least one authentic technique, so if you knit your way through the whole book, each mitten would be different and you'd be a better knitter at the end of it - that was my plan, but alas, it turns out that I don't like knitting mittens.

No More Alef - We're Through!

I'm off work with a cold and no voice today, so I finished sewing Tangerine Alef . Then I spread it out and took a long sad look at it - it's hopeless. I still don't like the gap at the front of the lace trim, even though I knitted one half of the strip and purled the other then grafted them together in order to have the edges match, which they do now, but now the edges match and are no longer annoying my inner neat freak, the gap seems to show more and I just don't like it!

Then even though I must have spent a month of my life knitting and re knitting that collar, I cannot make it lie flat. It looks very cute lying flat on the floor, but as soon as it moves - FLIP! Rowan suggested stitching it down, but I can't find a way to do it neatly. That's it. I quit. I knit the first Alef in Classic Kid, then a peach test, then a brown test and now this tangerine test, not to mention a shed load of swatches and I'm just not getting it. We're through.

The fault probably is my rubbish knitting. I fully fashioned the sleeves, which looks messy and doesn't help them set in properly, so I wouldn't have been happy with this garment anyway. There's a great photo showing the difference between flat decreases and fully-fashioned decreases in Stitch and Bitch. I don't think I'd properly grasped the difference or the uses before. I'd got a fuzzy idea that only one way was correct, but in fact both ways are right. It's just a case of what effect you want. Say you are knitting up a right side, If you want your stitches to lie down and form a decorative ridge (this decorative effect is called 'fully-fashioned') you use a left slanting decrease, if however you want the stitches to stay pointing straight up and decrease without any fuss or showing off, then you use a right slanting decrease.

I am pleased with the graft on the lace trim, the Elizabeth Zimmerman sewn cast off, Maggie Richetti's neatest buttonholes ever and that my sewing is improving. I can see that the sleeves are odd, but it wasn't glaring. One sleeve was knit in my old haphazard way, the other Lucy Neatby's way at the tips of the needles - guess which one looks best? More care and attention, that's always the answer!

I'm going to email Rowan and ask if they have a pattern that uses the same amount of Classic Kid and 3 buttons.