The Knitting Fiend

In the beginning, all sweaters are the same. Well… that is if you knit bottom up. Today, I’ll explain how I came to cast on a mystery sweater, and how you can too! Once you master this, you won’t need to decide what the armholes and neckline are until you have knit about 1/4 to 1/3 your sweater!

The stitch pattern

Remember I said I was going to knit Jim a drop sleeve sweater using two particular stitch patterns? Notice this stitch pattern doesn’t look like either of these? Well… on Thursday, at knitting club, I showed the swatch to my Heather. We decided I should elongate “Welted Leaves”. Then, after finishing one repeat, I decided I liked it so much, I decided to just forget all about Crosses and Diamonds or whatever that stitch pattern in Barbara Walker’s book was!

I bet you are wondering: Didn’t you need to knit another swatch? I know that nearly all knit-purl combinations will have similar stitch gauges, so the swatch I already knit would do. Plus, this is a fairly loose style, 1″ or 2″ off in the chest won’t matter much.

So, now, I’m using a knit stitch pattern of my own making. On the needles it looks a bit rumply, but this will smooth out some.

Will it be a drop sleeve sweater

Oh… and I don’t know whether this will be a drop sleeve sweater. Over the weekend I was glancing at a book about knitting ganseys by Beth Brown Reinsel, and I thought: “Hhmm… this could be a gansey… Or at least, sort of a gansey. After all, underarm gussets do make hand knit sweaters more comfortable.”

Lucky for me, I know that drop sleeve sweaters are shaped just like Ganseys until I’ve knit to within 2″ of the underarms before I decide whether or not to add the underarm gussets. So, for now it’s either a drop sleeve sweater or a “sort of” gansey ! What will it be like? Beats me.

How to start a mystery sweater in the round.

If you like to not know what you are making when you start, you follow these steps:

• Figure out the number of stitches for the body. You need the sweater to fit the guys chest. Jim likes his sweaters t 40″ around. Mutiply by the stitch gauge: I had 5 stitches /inch– and round if required for your stitch pattern. So, I get 40 * 5 = 200 stitches. This will be the number of stitches for the body.
• Figure out the number of stitches for the ribbing: If your guy has a fat butt or a gut, this should be the same as for the body. If your guy has a slim butt, subtract 10% of those; 10% is 20 stitches. I get 200-20=180 stitches. Round to a multiple of 2. This is the number of stitches for your ribbing.

Using circular needles one size smaller than cast on 180; join being careful not to twist. Work knit 1, purl 1 ribbing for 1″ to 3″ (depending on how much you like.)

• Knit the ribbing: Change to larger needles. On next round, change to main needles, and increase to the number of stitches for the body (that’s 200 stitches in this example.) If necessary, do a bit of thinking to center your stitch pattern, and begin to work. Knit circular until you are about 2″ from where the underarms start.
• Think about the rest of the design as you knit: If you knit slowly — like I do you’ll have about a week to decide what to do at the underarms. But, you do need to stop and decide when you get near the underarms. (No, that’s a lie. You can put the body on a holder, start a sleeve and work to the elbow! )

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Blog Tip:
The blog- about -blogging blogs are on fire about “BlogRush”. It’s supposed to be a method to get yourself more traffic to our blogs. It will probably even work at your knitting blog if you join quickly.

The reason joining quickly is important is that the blogs displayed by this admittedly ugly widget depend on a) how many times it displays on your blog, b) how often it displays on your recruits’ blogs and c) how many times it display on their recruits’ blogs down to the 10th generation of recruits.

So, if you join now, you have a chance of getting lots of traffic. I suggest you join, try displaying it on your sidebar for a week, and then, if it doesn’t work deleting it (because, let’s face it, it’s ugly! Plus, who knows if we’ll get traffic from knitters.)

I joined. I checked “hobby” — because “knitting” isn’t a choice . . . yet. Give it a try by clicking join Blog Rush.

X-and-Diamond is a simple knit purl combination suitable for ganseys. If you are working on your first design project, this would like nice placed across the chest of a man’s sweater, or as border just after the ribbing.

I’ll be alternating this pattern with “Welted Leaf Pattern” when knitting Jim’s sweater.

I was supposed to cast on last night, but we got too rowdy with the inlaws. Maybe today? The family is threatening to make me watch a Bears game; I can get a lot of knitting done during that!

The knitting chart for this stitch pattern is shown to the right.

I bet you’re wondering how I’m creating these nice clear charts? I bought “Stitch Visualizer ” yesterday. The program is available for both Mac and PC from Knit Foundry. I’m finding it very easy to use, but also joined the Knit Visualizer Users Group, which is run by Nancy Walsh who wrote Stitch Visualizer. I’m sure if I run into any problems, she can answer them!

Jim’s going to have a cardigan soon!

I picked up some blue “Chaco” brand yarn, which, according to the vendor at the fiber fest is “just like” Plymouth Galway. In fact, it’s spun by the same manufacturer.

Do I believe the vendor? Well, actually, I do. The yarn does look like Galway, it knits up like Galway. Yarn mills often do sell the same yarn under various labels.

I do know the yarn cost about 1/2 what I would have paid for Galway. So is it “just like Galway?” I guess we’ll see over time.

In any case, I knit a swatch using “Welted Leaf Pattern” and “X - and - Diamond Border” in Barbara Walker’s “A Treasury of Knitting”.

I plan to design a drop sleeve pullover using these yarns, and I’ll be illustrating the steps as I go along!

If I happen to find any thing to write Haiku’s about I will, but for better or worse, knitting designs have gotten less awful recently. So I’m having trouble finding inspiration!

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Knit Blogging Tip.
From now on, when I write a blogging tip of general interest over at my blogging blog, I’ll post a link here.

Blogging tips for the week: To increase links to your blog, get a better page rank and encourage traffic, advise your friends to try coComment. I discuss coComment at my blog.

I set up a knitting group at coComment. I’m not entirely sure how those groups work, but there weren’t any for knitting. I think having could might help us track collect all the comments tagged “knitting” and help us track conversations at a variety of knitting blogs. Worth a try anyway!