Welcome to Ithaca:


Life is boring without an unfinished navy blue colorwork sweater laying around.



This is the Huntington Castle Pullover by Robin Melanson, from the Fall 2004 issue of Interweave Knits. The non-navy yarn is the handspun stuff I talked about in exhaustive detail. And after all that talking, a miscalculation. It looks like Interweave overestimated the amount of yarn required, and also I didn't pay much attention to the small amount of yarn on the edges, which also probably made a difference.

What this meant was that I ended up spinning a bit more yarn than was needed, overshooting by maybe 20%. I still wanted the pretty gradations that I'd worked so hard on, so I dealt with this by removing a length of yarn every now and then, in areas where doing so wouldn't result in a serious visual change. So the back is ugly as sin with bits hanging out everywhere, but the front is very pretty.

I still haven't spun the yarn for the bottoms of the sleeves yet, so I will try and take these results into account by chopping off a bit from each section. Honestly I probably should have spun for one sleeve first so that I didn't end up wasting so much handspun, but oh well, I've learned. Fortunately it won't have an effect on the final product, except that it involves me darning in a bunch of ends.

One more thing I'm thinking about is what to do with the hood/front edging thing. Part of the reason I bought an inkle loom at Rhinebeck is because I thought that would make an interesting, firm edging. What I'm not sure about, though, is what yarns I want to use in the pattern, and where. I *may* end up using the leftovers I was just talking about from the body; I could do some interesting color stuff without getting too crazy about it. It may depend on how much of the blue yarn I have left, since right now I'm not sure if I even have enough to do the hood in the first place.

Of course, all of this is dependent upon my actually working on the sweater. I did all the colorwork and a few inches of the plain knitting during the long weekend I went to Rhinebeck; I've picked it up since but not for long. Gift knitting is getting in the way, and so is a sudden desire to cross-stitch. Considering the cross-stitch moldering in my stash hadn't been touched for about 3 years, the urge took me by surprise, but I've been making good progress.

Shelley asked me if after the length of time this sweater took, if I'd consider doing another Fair Isle sweater. It's a tough question, especially because this thing's been sitting on me for 2 years.

On one hand, I adore the final product here; I like the subtle and controlled gradation of color, the way the individual motifs fit together, all of it. But I'm almost positive that this is the only sweater of this type I'll do. A few reasons.

First, while there are lots of FI colorways that I love looking, there are not very many that I'd make into a garment, so that's a bit limiting. I like bright colors, but only one or two at a time. So maybe I'd do a gorgeously glowing pillow or mittens, but probably not a whole sweater.

Then there's the construction issue. FI is fun to do in the round and a miserable slog to do flat. Meanwhile, I've finally figured out thatI find seamless construction to be an irritating bore. Having to futz around with 85% of a sweater while knitting rapidly-decreasing rounds of sleeve (requiring ever-more frequent futzing) drives me right up a wall. Plus, sleeves are an awkward circumference for doing with colorwork in the round. I could picture doing a vest, but no sleeves thank you.

Last and most damning, I got tired of changing colors all the time. And while I felt like this, you'll notice that only the background colors are changing, and at a somewhat slower rate than in some Fair Isle sweaters that have you changing both foreground and background colors every single row. Egads.

There are stranded colorwork sweaters that consist of only two colors (sometimes with a third at the cuffs for contrast), which I think is gorgeous. But I think this may be it for me and Fair Isles. I've done one, I get it, I can move on to more enjoyable things.

Thanks for the nice comments on the sweater. I didn't comment much on its history because I was in the midst of Pattern Panic, so I thought I'd talk about it a little bit.

The pattern started life as the Fair Isle With Vertical Stripes, from Sweaters From Camp. Among the very first things I did was the change the perfectly nice "vertical peerie" pattern (for lack of a better term) from a more traditional pattern to something scientific, a polyparaphenyl chain. I've never done any research with that type of polymer, I just like phenyl rings and thought that it would be nice to do some nerd knitting that isn't immediately recognizable as such. Another personalizing touch involved knitting my initials into the panel that extended from the bottom of the sweater all the way up to the sleeve, which you can see in this picture:

Managing to get the long string of initials to start and end with the right initials was pure serendipity, but it's the kind of detail I adore to little bits.

Another major change in the pattern was to convert it from a pullover to a cardigan. I had decided to do this right at the beginning, so there was a steek at the front, in addition to the ones at the neck and arms. You can see all three of them in their uncut glory:

That white thread in the middle marks the top of the cardigan steek.

This was my first steeked garment, but not my first steek. There's a steeked swatch knit out of a slippery acrylic that's been sitting in my knitting bag for about 5 years now. From time to time, I pull it out to show someone how steeks work. They pull and tug on it, unconvinced, but at this point I've seen it go through so many hands (in addition to my own) that I know for sure if a 4-stitch shiny acrylic steek holds up under those conditions, a 10-stitch steek firmly knitted in a sticky wool will do just fine. I hand-sewed on either side of the steek, for extra stability, and then I also tacked down the raw edges on the front edges, because that's the spot I'm most likely to have access to while I'm wearing it. Anyone who knows me has seen me worry frayed edges of clothing, paper, or upholstery to a fare-thee-well, so this was mostly to protect the sweater from the danger of me.

The yarn is fingering weight wool from Blackberry Ridge. I love the yarn; it's soft while still maintaining a natrual, wooly feeling. I selected the colors using their color cards, which worked really well. From looking at the color cards, I think a similar tonal colorways would be possible in blues, greens, pink/purples, or browns. One downside of using their yarns for colorwork is that they're only available in relatively large skeins of 450 yards. I used 1.5-2 skeins of navy, and less than half a skein of all the other colors. In the case of the least-used yarns (white and dark green), I probably used less than 1/4, there's still HUGE balls of both of them. If I used this yarn in a colorwork project again, I'd probably do a 2-color sweater so that I could avoid this problem. On the other hand, the yarn is quite inexpensive; I paid less for the yarn I bought than I would have for, say, enough Dale of Norway to knit the sweater alone. So I'll continue beating that particular drum--their yarn is great and they're lovely people, go buy some.

As I mentioned in the last entry, this sweater took a long time to complete. I started it in February of 2006 together with some other knitters in Bowerbird's Sweaters From Camp knitalong. I had completed the body and neckline sometime in May that year, and then let it sit through the warm weather. The next winter, I added a sleeve, but then the final slog of grad school and finishing my research left me unable to do anything more complicated than simple little sweaters and hats. This winter, I got the second sleeve done (a bit of a challenge so long after the first; what was my rate of decreasing again?). And then it was May and too warm to have a whole sweater on my lap as I picked up button bands. So, more sitting.

Last week I was feeling a bit overwhelmed by the number of unfinished projects, and at the same time I was mulling over a cool idea for the leftover yarn from the sweater, which is significant. So it was time to get on with it already and finish the darn thing. It's a good example of how relatively small things can loom large in your mind without your even noticing. Finishing was a huge relief, and how stupid to have put off a feeling a huge relief for 4 evenings of not-very-taxing knitting. It means that now I have a knitting bag free to bring places instead of being taken up with that sweater which was too complicated to work on while socializing. It means I can start planning out the shawl that should use up most of the leftover yarn. And, it means that I have a lovely sweater that's good to wear to the office.

More links:
Flickr set, starting from the swatch.
Ravelry Page