Double KNitting Scarflette

Double knitting is highly addictive. I started this project as a test, and couldn't put it down. Using luxuriously soft yarns, the double thickness gives just the right amount of warmth on a chilly day. I love the shape and size of Yarn Ball Boogie's Fourteen. This scarflette is similar in size and shape. Only it is double knit using dk weight yarn instead of brioche stitch.

This is a great project if you wanted to try double knitting, but didn't want to knit a potholder.

I followed Fashionable Life's directions for a button loop at the end.

Here are the directions. For more information on double knitting, Lucy Neatby's dvd Double KNitting Delight is a great resource.

Twenty Twenty Scarflette

Finished size: 4” x 21”

Materials

I used
Color A: Araucania Nature Wool Multy (100% wool; 240 yards per 3.52 oz skein) color 405 – less than one skein

Color B: Noro Cashmere Island (30% cashmere, 60% wool, 10% nylon; 110 yards per 40 gram skein) color 6 – one skein

I used size 3 needles
(Most people end up looser in double knitting than with regular knitting. Use the size that will give you a nice loose drapey gauge, but not so loose that the other side will show through)
Darning needle
2 large buttons

Gauge: 20 stitches per inch. Since this is a scarflette exact final size is not too important.





Using the Italian cast on and alternating between color A and B, cast on 40 stitches starting with color A (20 stitches in color A and 20 stitches in color B).

At the start of every row make sure that the color that you are not about to knit with is draped over the tail of the color you are about to knit.

Row 1: *Bring both colors to the back. Knit 1 with color B. Bring both colors to the front. Purl 1 with Color A and repeat from * four times. ** Bring both colors to the back. Knit 1 with color A. Bring both colors to the front. Purl 1 with Color B. Repeat from ** four times. : *** Bring both colors to the back. Knit 1 with color B. Bring both colors to the front. Purl 1 with Color A. Repeat from *** to the end of the row

Row 2: * Bring both colors to the back. Knit 1 with color A. Bring both colors forward. Purl 1 with Color B. Repeat from * twelve times. ** Bring both colors to the back. Knit 1 with color B. Bring both colors forward. Purl 1 with Color A. Repeat from ** four times. *** Bring both colors to the back. Knit 1 with color A. Bring both colors forward. Purl 1 with Color B. Repeat from *** to the end of the row

Repeat rows one and two until desired length. Bind off in Kitchner Stitch.

Cut off a length of yarn to make a buttonloop in the middle of one end. Try the scarflette on to determine the best placement for the button. Attach a button on each side of the scarflettte for ultimate reversible flexibility.

Tahki Torino, Berroco Pure Merino, Karabella Aurora 8

I finally got to test drive the Tahki Torino. I tried the regular Torino and not the Torino Bulky.

IN the pic are a strand of Berroco Pure Merino (light grey) , Berroco Pure Merino Heathers (dark grey), Tahki Torino (red), and Karabella Aurora 8 (pink).

The Torino looks like it should knit up to a different gauge than the other three, but all three have 4.5 as the suggest stotckinette stitch gauge. However both Berroco yarns suggest using a US9 (5.5mm) while the Karabella suggests using a US 7- 8 (4.5 - 5 mm) and the Tahki suggest using a US8 (5mm). I got the suggest gauge of 4.5 sts on a US 4 (3.5 mm) needle for all four yarns. Kathy at the Colonial Yarn Shop says that a yarn that suggests getting a gauge of 4.5 stitches on an US 8 will knit up differently than a yarn that suggests the same gauge but on a US 9 or US 7. I think fiber, ply and twist are far more important to yarn substitutions than what is printed on the ball band.

All four are irrestringibile (meaning they will not felt). All four did not change gauge after washing and blocking. All four are wonderful to work with, producing nice crisp cables and stitch definition. All four average about $7.50 - $8.50 per ball. All four come in 50 gram balls.

Here are the differences:

Karabella gives you 98 yards per ball. Tahki gives you 94 yards per ball. Berroco gives you 92 yards per ball.

Pure Merino Heather was the least soft of the three. Slightly dry feeling, but still very soft. Karabella was the slickest of the three (would not want to use it for anything that was to be steeked). PLain Pure Merino and Tahki were about the same in feeling.

Tahki Torino was the most loosely twisted, and sometimes the plys came apart. It was the easiest to accidently snag a loose strand. Tahki Torino also had the most loose fibers, not enough to produce a true halo, but just a little bit more fuzz than the Karabella Aurora 8 and Berroco Pure Merino and Pure Merino Heather.

Tahki Torino had the most drape of the three yarns. I could see how if I had to choose between the three yarns for a heavily cabled sweater I would choose the Torino. It would be the least dense and heavy. Maybe the loft of the yarn explains how it looks thicker than the other three, and knits up drapier. The Karabella Aurora 8

Berroco Pure Merino Heather and PUre Merino were the most tightly twisted, and the most dense feeling. The two Berroco's knitted up to a dense solid feeling yarn. For something that needs structure I would choose one of the Berrocos.

In any case if I had a pattern for either Karabella Aurora 8, Tahki Torino, Berroco Pure Merino, or Berroco Pure Merino Heather I would not hesitate to interchange or substitute any of these yarns for each other. They are all lovely cabled merinos.

swatching for Suzannah's sweater

Suzannah picked out the Wonderful wool by Steadfast Fibers for her picture day 2008 sweater. Label suggests 4 sts per inch. I swatched on a 4.5 mm and got 3.75 sts per inch. Then I swatched on a 3.75 mm and got 4.5 stitches per inch.

Why did I jump from 4.5mm needles to 3.75mm needles and skip the size 4.00mm needles? Becuase the swatch on the 4.5mm needles biassed like crazy. It leaned like all the stitches were italicized. I read in Clara Parkes' wonderful book The KNitters Guide to Yarn a suggestion to knit single ply yarns at a tighter gauge to try to conteract the bias. That is why I skipped the size 4.00mm needles.

However, even at the tighter gauge once the swatch was washed a blocked it had a definite bias. Not as bad as the looser swatch, but there is definitely some leaning going on. Darn it!

What do I do now. Suzannah has said she doesn't want any lumpie bumpies on her sweater. Yet she has choosen this single ply that will bias in stockinette. Do I substitute another yarn or do I add some purl and knit patterns, or do I just knit a sweater that leans?

If you notice in the middle of the swatch above I slipped in some seed stitch. First to test Suzannah to see if she likes the seed stitch and to test myself to see how long I could stand knitting seed stitch. I detest seed stitch. Even though seed stitch cancelled the bias, I can't bring myself to designing an entire sweater out of seed stitch.

Gotta sleep on it.

Stitches East 2007

Stitches East 2007 was a blast. I went to the convention in Baltimore for three days and two nights with my friends Tracie and Rae Ann. ALso had the oppurtunity to meet up for dinner with Barbara Rutt one night and with Melanie Brown the other night. It was knit talk all night. We talked for hours just about knitting. Being at Stitches made you feel like you could knit anything and had all the time in the world to knit. It was tempting to buy too much yarn.

I took one class : Seven Principles for Perfect Sweater by Sally Melville. Loved the class. Even though many of the principles were techniques I already knew, there were also some techniques that I didn't know. The class was worth every penny. Most of the things Sally went over in class are covered in her Knitting Experience books. But it really made a difference to hear it and see it, rather than just to read about it. I wish the next book in her series would get published soon. But I've heard rumors that it may never get published.

For the class swatched I used Paton's Classic Merino. Using size 3.5 mm I got 19.5 stitches for a 4 inch square. Here is a picture of my class swatch complete with the excercise on picking up stitches and button holes. I like Paton's Classic Merino. It is a good basic yarn. Readily available at Joann Fabrics. Not real exciting, but not too bad either. Definitely the best thing going at the chain stores.

Then while at Stitches I fell in love with a Jane Slicer-Smith mitred (mitered?) pattern and had to have it. I bought the pattern and the yarn at the Great Yarns Booth. It was my biggest purchase out side of the cochenille software I also purchased. THe yarn for the mitred pattern is Baruffa's Merino Sei. It is the same type of wool as Paton's Classic Merino, but what a difference. They are as different as apples and oranges.

Here is my first swatch of Merino Sei. Becuase it is many more plys than the Paton's it is easier to accidently snag just one ply. But it is also loftier and springier. The gauge also changed drastically after washing and blocking. Before blocking I got 5 stitches per inch on a 3.75 mm, 5.5 stitches on a 3.5 mm and 6 stitches on a 3.25 mm. After washing the yarn bloomed and I then got 4.5 stitches on a 3.75mm , 5 on a 3.5mm and 5.5 on a 3.25 mm. Over all a very lovely yarn. I'd like to have a full bag of this in every color. Can't really afford that. So for now I'll be content with the 18 balls I purchased at Stitches. THe Merino Seit is also a superwash merino - so it isn't feltable.

So if I had to pick between the Merino Sei and the Classic Merino for a project which would I pick? Well definitely the Classic Merino if I'm going to felt it. Outside of that consideration, as long as my budget allows I'd pick Merino Sei any day.

Every year I knit a sweater for my kids' school picture day. I started this with my son when he was three. He is now 8.



Last year was the first year that I let him pick out the yarn for his picture day sweater. I made his sweater out of Noro Shinano with a stripe of Schaefer Miss Priss in the middle. It was a great sweater.



This year he requested a vest and picked out some Noro Silk Garden. I have to have his vest done by November 1. Not a problem. I'm doing it in the round using the color he picked out for two rows and a contrasting Noro Silk Garden for two rows. I'm about 4 inches from where I need to separate the front and backs. Easy peasy.



Now 4 year old Suzannah has been expressing her wishes for her picture day sweater. Maybe it is because she is my youngest child and I treat her more like a baby that it didn't occur to me to ask her opinion. Last year she requested a yellow sweater and I made her a purple sweater. This year she requested a yellow sweater again. She even drew a picture of what she wants her sweater to look like and told me that she wants a yellow sweater, with buttons on the front, that comes down to just before her fingers, a round neck, no lumpy parts and no cats!

Now I'm trying to figure out what she means by no lumpy parts. Does she mean that she doesn't like yarn that is thick and thin like Colinette Point 5? Or does she mean that she doesn't like textured stitch patterns? Or is it cables she dislikes? Or maybe entrelac? Hmm.

I know why she specified "no cats". I showed her a picture of the child's Kitty Cat Pullover by Vermont Fiber Designs. http://www.vermontfiberdesigns.com/patterns/children/506.php
I think it is a really great design. I love the graphic simplicity of it. I was thinking it would look great with a grey background and then for the cat using a handpainted primary colors yarn (specifically Schaefer Yarns Miss Priss in the Sprinkles colorway) . Then there was another sweater in the 2001 Vogue Knitting Special Kids issue with a cat on it. Again a really cute design; the cat was done in an angora yarn to give the illusion of fur. Suzannah didn't like either sweater. Sure surprised me.

I asked my friend RaeAnn if I should knit Suzannah her yellow sweater, or the sweater I want to knit. RaeAnn has college age children. She said that her kids will remember incidents that she thought was trivial at the time and they will bring it up as something that really shaped their attitudes and personality. She warned that years from now Suzannah might point to the fact that I didn't knit her the yellow sweater that she wanted at age 4 will some how be a pivotal point in our mother daughter relationship.

So now next week I'll be at Stitches East and my mission there will be to find the perfect yellow yarn for Suzannah's picture day sweater. Luckily her picture day isn't until March. So I have time still to ferret out exactly what she is expecting from this sweater. Already she has told me that two of the skeins of Cascade 220 in my stash were the wrong shade of yellow.

All this is coming from a little girl who's first word as a baby was "shoes" and when given the choice between new shoes or a new toy will pick new shoes. Is this what fashion designers are like as children?

Japanese knitting books

Last June I stopped at a Japanese book store in NYC. There I found Vivian Hoxbor's Domino KNitting translated into Japanese. I had bought the English version a few years ago. Then had sold it for a few pennies on Ebay when I was going through a purge of knitting books I didn't think I'd ever use. Of course just a week later in a class at Knitters Day Out Janet Szabo pulled this amazing swatch that she said she knitted using a technique she said she found in Domino Knitting.

So now I own both versions: the English and the Japanese. It is interesting to see the differences in the books besides the obvious. The knitted samples in the English version are all very dark and sombre. Most of them tend toward autumn colorways. Not particularly appealing to me. Also the directions are mostly written with only a few diagrams. Some of the wording is very confusing.

The Japanese book has a lighter feel. The pages are not as crowded. The samples have a lighter palette. The diagrams are clearer. Even though I don't read Japanese at all I think I would have an easier time knitting a project from the Japanese book. If I were to recommend one over the other I'd say get the Japanese version.

The picture on the top is from the English version. The picture on the bottom is from the Japanese version. While I don't really care for the pom poms at the bottom of the Japanese shrug, I am far more inspired to knit the shrug (and maybe changing the pattern to a full sweater instead of a shrug) than the English ruana (which looks a little like a heavy wool blanket) .

Shop Samples

Oh NO!

I agreed to create a pattern for a shop sample, but got carried away and didn't think ahead about how easy it would be to explain to people how to do this.

Kathy at Colonial Yarn Shop said that she has not sold a single skein of Noro Cashmere Island and asked if I could come up with a pattern that could help move the yarn. This summer I created a pattern for a summer tank that was half crochet and half knit. The customers loved it. My class for that pattern was full and Kathy sold loads and loads of the yarn used for that tank (Blue Heron Metallic Rayon, and Blue Heron Ribbon). It looked fabulous hanging in the shop even though I wasn't 100% happy with it. I was sloppy in matching the crochet gauge with the knitting gauge. I suffered knitting and crocheting that project. The yarn tangled at one point and it took me a full 8 hours to untangle it. PLus writting the pattern for sizes other than myself took me hours. I should have learned from that experience never to volunteer to knit a sample AND make up a pattern AND use a difficult yarn.

So my idea was that the Cashmere Island was too expensive for most customers to consider using it for a garment. The next thought was that a hat, or scarf might make people just think of using the cheaper alternative to Cashmere Island - which is Kureyon or Silk Garden.

Basically this is a top down raglan (used Sweater Wizard to come up with a pattern). The rules for using the two yarns (Noro Cashmere Island and Jo Sharp Alpaca Kid LUstre) are as follows.

1.Every time you change yarns do a *slip 1 wyf, knit1* for the first row, but make sure that the slip 1 does NOT line up with the last time you did a slip 1.

2.Never change yarns on an increase row.

Sounds easy enough, yes? This pattern has become complicated becuase

1. With the raglan increases sometimes you can just start with a slip stitch and sometimes you need to start with a knit 1 when you change colors.
2. THe slip stitch compresses the pattern and changes the row count and therefore changes the rate of increases for the raglan shaping.
3. I didn't plan when to change colors and just made it up as I went along.

It isn't hard to knit. JUst hard to explain.

I enjoy knitting with this yarn. If I were knitting this for myself I'd be happy with how it is turning out. If I had to tell an advanced knitter how to do something similar - but not exactly the same I'd be o.k. But I'm really scared of having to tell a beginning knitter how to copy the sweater exactly.

I should have decided on a stripe pattern before I started.

Berroco Damask Bag

Here is the Berroco Damask bag (before and after felting) done in Ultra Alpaca in the colors Fig and Fennel.















It only took one cycle in the washing machine to get it felted. That Berroco Alpaca felts really well, and is heavenly to work with. I did most of the smaller areas in duplicate stitch.

lessons learned:

1. Always duplicate stitch smaller intricate areas of intarsia. I tried to do intarsia at the top of the motif and that was a bear.
2. To make the knitting easier I enlarged the chart by 200%. Since I don't have access to a copy machine I just opened the pdf file at Berroco.com and then enlarged the image. When I went to print out under print range I selected "current view" to get it to print out enlarged.

Noro Silk Garden Lite Entrelac Vest

This is the entrelac vest from Noro Volume 20 done in Silk Garden Lite color 2014.
The freaky thing about this is how the colors lined up. I did not cut the yarn or try to manipulate the color changes up to the under arms. It just turned out that all the bright colors lined up on one side of the best and all the somber grey blues lined up on the other side of the vest. How freaky deaky is that? If I had tried to make it come out that way it would not. It just happened to line up that way because by chance I picked up a certain ball and started at a certain part of the stripe. If you look at the picture of the vest all slayed out like a fileted fish you'll see how it is all just one long transition from one color to the next.

I should have continued the color pattern by doing the bottom ribbing for just half the vest in one part of the colorway and the other half in another part of the colorway. BUt by that point I was so ready to be done with the vest that my brain was not fully functional.

This vest was done as a shop sample. I will be teaching a class on this pattern, and needed to get this done at least a month before class started so that people could see it on display. Finished on August 29, 2007.

What I learned from knitting this vest:

1. Never again volunteer to knit an entrelac vest in less than one month.

2. Addi Lace needles are the perfect needles for doing entrelac. The sharp points make picking up a breeze. After struggling along using addi turbos (needles were too slippery - stitches kept falling off the needles), Addi naturas (tips were too dull), and Inox (join was too stiff) I purchased some addi lace needles from The Mannings, and then the knitting sped up and was much more enjoyable.

3. Noro yarns will never cease to surprise and amaze. I've never done a project with Noro that didn't turn out fricking fabulous. Can I have a warehouse full of noro at my disposal please?

4. Picking up an little bit in the corners of entrelacs keeps you from getting holes (old news, but I thought I write this done to remind myself). I learned this from a Japanese knitting book, more on this some day later.

5. 9 rib stitches equals 6 stockinette entrelac stitches.