Cloud and Butterfly

My knitting is very poetic this week! This is the back view of Elizabeth Zimmerman's Butterfly Jacket. She does call it a jacket, not a shrug or bolero. Odd little beast, isn't it?

Cloud is causing me grief. Even with help from the Internet I'm lost in the thicket of reversing P2tog Tbl and so on. Decreases in K2 p2 rib are hard. I had a look back through my scribbles and I've done it at least 30 times. I got it exactly right last night, then smoothed out the left and right fronts for a final check and DOH! You guessed it - two left fronts. At the moment I've got the front right and the arm wrong. I might have one more go. I must be able to do this. The same way I must be able to parallel park a car with a caravan attached behind it? Maybe it's not going to happen. There's something about reversing anything that makes my head spin wildly.

Butterfly Wings

Look what a difference needle size makes. These are the arm openings on Elizabeth Zimmerman's Butterfly Jacket. I'm putting I-Cord around the openings and also using the three-needle I-cord cast off across the shoulders. (As the name implies, that's having live stitches on two needles and using the third needle to work I-cord - tricky, but not impossible.) I didn't want the trim to look baggy and ethnic, so I overcompensated with 3.5 mm needles for the I-cord. It did look neat, but it pulled in the armhole too much. This could be a useful trick to remember if I ever make a sleeveless vest with baggy armholes. I frogged it, steamed the yarn to get out the kinks because I didn't want a knot and finished the garment using 4.5 mm needles. It actually fits me! And there are no major errors in it!! Definitely time to do that modest but triumphant jig. Do I like it, though? Ah, yes, slight problem there. It's an odd little beast, this butterfly jacket. I'll get Andy to take some pictures of the back and you'll see what I mean. It's quite cute, but the 'wings' leave a very open bit on the back - it might work in summer, but leaves an odd draughty spot in winter.

Rowan haven't replied re my reversing shaping query on Cloud. Maybe my email went astray. Maybe the knitting guru is on leave. Maybe they are not speaking to me because I haven't bought the yarn yet. I suddenly remembered how nice knitters on Ravelry were and fired off an email to a knitter who'd finished a beautiful Cloud. I had an answer the same day. How cool is that? I'm going to try the left front again tonight.

Incidentally, I drove myself nuts last night trying to post some photographs on Ravelry. They use Flickr, and Blogger use another system. I once managed to log in and create a Flickr account, but it wouldn't let me back in. It wants me to use my Yahoo ID, but my computer will only show a dialogue box with my broadband ID showing. I did link the relevant post to each garment. Until Ravelry add a bit that lets you upload easily from your computer, that will have to do.

Butterfly or Sea Creature?

This is Elizabeth Zimmerman's Butterfly Jacket - I hope! The two fronts have just been united and I'm knitting up the back. I'm not keen on the yarn - it's a big ball of Robin I bought from the market when I first started knitting. I prefer vintage thrift shop finds to cheap acrylic, and don't buy new acrylic now but it doesn't matter. Some deep pessimism tells me that this is going to be a test garment rather than something I'll actually wear, so it won't matter any more than it mattered that I knit a 50's 'Ladies Jacket' in vile green Robin double knit yarn. It would have been unwearable whatever it was knitted in.

The Genius of Elizabeth Zimmerman

I spent all night knitting and re knitting this little collar - how smart Elizabeth Zimmerman must have been to invent it. I had DVD instructions and it took me forever to get it. Part of the re knitting was due to the fact that I'm working in Portuguese for the first time, so I kept making messy stitches which had to be redone, but the structure of the collar honestly made no sense to me at all - and even now, with a successful swatch under my belt, I'm baffled by how it works.

The edge of the collar looks a bit ragged because there are two cast offs on the edge - the one at the top and bottom is the Portuguese cast off demonstrated by Andrea Wong on her DVD, and I think it looks better than the section in the centre.

I chose to put a line of purl (an option demonstrated on the DVD) along the line where the collar joins the shoulders in the end. I thought it looked neater than the wobble of the increases - not everyone's increases will wobble like mine, of course. It took me a while to realise that as I was purling, and Meg Swanson's instructions were for knit, I had to reverse the increases to make them work.

So, finally, after hours of tussling and re knitting, I had a great little collar. And I don't think it will suit the butterfly bolero - too angular in shape. Andy agreed, but then he said: 'You could round the edges of the collar.' And he's right. I could. But not this time round. I've enough to be going on with.

Frustration!!

I've posted another Nostalgia shot rather than try to photograph the tangle I'm currently in. This sweater is an Icelandic Lopi sweater. They are very quick and easy to knit, yet look rather impressive - and they used to be cheap. The local market had a stall that used to feature bin bags full of yarn and crates full of cones left over from the mills - thinking about it now, I wonder how Icelandic wool got into the mix? I used to buy piles of odd balls and make sweaters for everyone, whether they wanted them or not! The one in the photograph was either knitted in Japan, or knitted while on a trip to America. I know that's 2-day stopover in San Francisco in the background of the photo. My American boyfriend took me on a ski trip to Colorado - and we had a day trip to Aspen which was just about the most glamorous place I'd ever been too. For some reason my response to being in a place that had a plane park bigger than the car park was to urgently need to buy wool. We went to a delicious yarn store in Aspen with snow on the roof and fairy lights all down the street - I clearly remember enjoying the American-style service, so different from the UK's grudging sales staff, and I remember buying a pile of Lopi, but after all this time, I can't remember which colour yarn I bought there. I made a Lopi for the BF as well - he really liked it because he was so tall he'd never had a sweater with long sleeves before - the advantage of custom knitting.

Well, that's enough pleasant nostalgia - back to painful reality. I simply cannot get the shaping for the right slope of the last side of Cloud Three. I can't parallel park either. It's the same kind of skill. I cannot do decreases in double rib without clear directions. Something in my head simply won't translate P2tog tbl at end of row for the left slope to what you need to do for the right slope. The pattern simply says: 'reverse shaping for right side'. What do I reverse? Work at the beginning of the row not the end? Is P2 tog the opposite of P2 tog dbl? Or is it K2tog tbl? Or simply K2 tog? I would have thought that I'd tried every available combination over the last couple of days. It's a problem because you have to shape on both sides of the work - so I need to know what you do at the beginning and end of the row for both sides and it's just not working. I admit defeat. I'm going to email Rowan for help and knit lace for a bit instead. Although I can knit the lace now, I still need to be alone in the house so I might start my next project while I'm waiting to hear back from Rowan - Elizabeth Zimmerman's Butterfly in Portuguese knitting - so of course it will be the Portuguese Butterfly.