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!

I’ll be using two stitch patterns in my next “original” design for Jim’s sweater: “Welt Leaf Pattern” and “X-and-Diamond Border”. Both are fairly simple knit-purl combinations with 8 stitch repeats and appear on page 36 of Barbara Walker’s “Treasury of Knitting Patterns”.

Because I like following knitting charts, I charted out “Welt Leaf Pattern”, it’s shown below the right. (If you have trouble reading charts, refer to How to read knitting charts. If you scroll to the bottom, you can find all 7 articles in that series.)

I’m planning a simple drop sleeve sweater for Jim. The chest will measure 40″ around. So, the body will just be one big tube up to the armholes. Tonight, I plan to calculate out the body and cast on the ribbing.

Later this week, I’ll explain how to organize the two stitch patterns– which pretty much involves centering the two patterns. There’s not much to doing it, but my philosophy is: There is always a newbie knitter out there who wants to know. Why not post the tutorial?

Who knows, if I get ambitious I’ll make a podcast!

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Blogging tip: I get about 600 visits a day when people search for knitting tips using Google or other search engines and I also make some money with this blog. Not a fortune– but more than most knitting bloggers. How does this happen? Well, it’s partly due to using few “tricks” Two are used in this article:

• Tip 1: Notice how I linked back to my previous article about reading charts? Linking back is helpful for the reader. It also reminds Google that page exists and is about reading knitting charts! (This is called a ‘SEO tip’ because it has to do with pleasing a search engine.)
• Tip 2: Notice that the first time I mention Barbara Walker, her name is linked her knitting books at Amazon.com? That link helps knitters find all her knitting stitch pattern books, which quite frankly, most avid knitters eventually buy. If they happen to buy after clicking my link, I make a few bucks.

  But neither of those two are the tips! The tip is this: I inserted that automatically using a free Wordpress plugin called “aLinks”. I described how to use aLinks at Big Bucks Blogger. (I can write a better tutorial at anyone’s request. ) Do you want to see how powerful that plugin is. Look at this: Elizabeth Zimmerman! I didn’t code that: aLinks did.

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Tonight, I cast on!