The final chapter in the epic sweater saga

Over the last 3 years, I have been on a mission to knit a sweater for my son.  Allow me to review the chronicles of my journey.

February 26, 2012:  I got hoodwinked into knitting a sweater for my 6 foot tall son.

March 1, 2012:  I encountered my first obstacle, just trying to find a pattern for a man's sweater, and ended up having to purchase an entire book of men's knitwear just for one sweater pattern.

March 2, 2012:  The actual knitting of the sweater began.  After many stops and starts due to rusty knitting skills, inexperience,  and a realization that the pattern was coming out too small, I was forced to rip out what I had and start over with a whole new pattern.

March 15, 2012: After two weeks of sustained effort on the sweater, I had the back finished, and was struggling through knitting the front.

March 31, 2012:  I finished the sweater front (or at least I thought it was finished) and moved on to knitting the first sleeve.

April 13, 2012:  I realized that I made an error in the cable pattern on the sweater front and had to unravel several inches of work.

June 25, 2012:  After taking a break from the agony of knitting this sweater, I got back to work and finished one sleeve, only to realize that it did not even come close to being the right size or shape to fit the armhole.

January 15, 2013:  A new year, and a new commitment to finishing the sweater. (Who am I kidding? I really was trying to get it ready to give it to him for Christmas of 2012 but I missed that deadline completely.) I spent many a fruitless hour   trying to figure out what I needed to do to make the sleeves fit the armholes.

January 25, 2013:  I rewrote the directions to completely reshape the cap of the sleeve, hoping it would fit into the armhole, and knit a second sleeve. 

April 5, 2013:  Three months passed with no more progress. The mere thought of knitting was enough to make me cringe.  I decided that it would be okay to start knitting something else just to remember why I ever liked knitting in the first place.

November 19, 2013:  The sleeves were finally done, and with help from my sister  I started sewing the monstrosity into a sweater.  I got stuck, and put it aside. Again.

January 31, 2014:  Another new year, and yet the sweater remained untouched.  It was at this time that I joined the prayer shawl ministry at my church, and all my knitting efforts went into that.  I blocked out the specter of  the "ghost of sweaters past" and happily moved on.

January 17, 2015:  Tired of seeing the unfinished sweater at the bottom of the closet, and with the encouragement of my expert knitter sister, I set aside a Saturday night specifically for us to get together so she could show me how to finish the sweater.  We got to talking and visiting and the time flew by.  By evening's end, the job wasn't nearly done.

By some miracle, and with only  a little bribery, my lovely sister volunteered to take the sweater home with her and finish sewing it together for me! 

A few days later, it was done.  After 3 years,  the sweater monkey was off my back!

I was finally able to give my son the "wearable hug" he had asked for.  What a relief!  No more guilt!  No more angst!

It was a very good fit!

I am so grateful to my sister for her help, and
I am so glad that I don't have a request for knitting
 hanging over my head anymore.

Oh wait.  

My daughter has asked me to knit her an infinity scarf.  

Learning the hard way

The evening hours can be a great time for crafting.  The house is quiet,  the kids are in bed, the daytime chores are done. Sometimes I get so caught up in a project that I just have to keep going a little longer to see how it's going to turn out.  Sometimes there is a deadline for completion so I keep on working past what should have been bedtime. 

However, I have learned the hard way that there are some things you should not do when you are tired.  One of those things is using a rotary cutter.  I think that if there were a study done about what time of day most rotary cutting accidents occur it would show that after 10:00 pm is the most common. (Not to worry, this is not a blog post about a rotary cutting accident).  Another common error with cutting late at night is just that you can cut pieces the wrong size because your brain is too tired to notice.

Now I have added another item to the list of things you should not do when your brain is tired. Knitting.  Even though I stop and check my work every few rows,  a major mistake managed to pass under my correction radar and by the time I saw it, hours of  additional work had been put into it.

Behold exhibit "A":

This is the front of the sweater I have been working on.  I took this photo a week or so ago, and even posted it on my blog, never seeing anything wrong with it.

But today, on closer inspection, I saw it.  A mistake in the cable. Do you see it?

How about now?

I checked with my knitting experts (Hello Mom and Joanne!) and they both agreed there was no miracle cure for correcting a bad cable.  Sure, you can go back and fix a knit or a purl stitch, but this is something different all together.

Now I have to tear out quite a bit of the front, including the perilous armhole shaping, and do it again.

The lesson here, my dear blog reading friends, is to put away that knitting when you are still alert, or at least re-check your stitches again in the morning. 

Sincerely,

Auntie Em   (making mistakes so you don't have to)

Knit wit

I confess to doing more knitting than quilting lately, mostly because it's so easy to take a knitting project with me when visiting with my dad.  He came home from rehab about 2 weeks ago and I have been spending as much time as possible with him and with my mom to help with the transition and his continued recovery. 

I have finished the back of my son's sweater, and begun working on the front.  The pattern calls for 2 cables up the front.  I was a little confused with the pattern at first because it is not a traditional, single twist cable.  Instead, it looks more like a braid:

The braid was not hard to do, it just meant paying a little more attention.  I had never really noticed until now how many different kinds of knitted cables there are.

When it came time to start shaping the armholes, I laid it out to measure it against the back:

That's when I saw it. 

Oops!  Three stitches that should have been knit instead of purled.  I managed to fix them without pulling out a dozen rows of work, but it was a nail biter.

While all this was taking place, a certain party took advantage of my distraction and did this:

I don't think he looks particularly sorry....

but I forgave him anyway.

They grow up so fast...

I finished knitting the back of my son's sweater, and laid it out on top of a sweater that he already has.  It looks like they are about the same size, so that's a relief.  I have yet to sort out how to shape the very top for the neck opening, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

With a surprising lack of searching, I dug out the sweater I had knitted for him when I was pregnant. 

It is a little one-piece outfit that  his 3-year-old sister nicknamed "the Bubble Suit", due to the oversized bottom half.  (Diapers were a lot bigger back then!)  The pattern was pretty simple, just plain knit stitches with alternating stripes of yellow and white:

I couldn't help but compare today's sweater with yesterday's "bubble suit"

I guess my son really has grown a bit since I last knit him a sweater. 

In my defense, underneath the sweater in the photo is a well-loved Harry Potter quilt that I made for Sonnyboy when he was younger, so it's not that he's been forgotten in the handmade department.

Knitting needle Bling

I have a love/hate relationship with circular knitting needles.

I love that they are more compact than straight needles and therefore allow me to knit even when sitting in my recliner chair.  (The long, straight needles kept hitting the chair arms.) I tried short straight needles but they were not long enough to hold all the stitches I needed for a men's sweater.

What I hate about them is that the nylon cable that connects the needles is very stubborn and likes to stay curled.  I had hoped that after knitting with them a bit that they would relax a little, but they did not and I found myself struggling.  The perfect solution seemed to be a flexible knitting needle that would not extend to hit the arms of my chair, but that would not have the tension of being attached to the other needle.

I found a solution that worked for me. 
Prepare yourself. Some surgery was involved...
 
I snipped the nylon cable:

(Don't worry.  Those are NOT my fabric scissors!)

I needed to put a stopper on the end of the cable to keep the stitches from falling off.  My first thought was buttons, but then my thoughts turned to beads.  I am lucky enough to have a daughter who makes jewelry.  She was happy to let me dig into her bead stash:

The small seed beads would not fit on the cable, but I was able to find a few larger beads that would work.  I settled on these:

I slipped them onto each cable, then tapped the cut end of the cable a few times with a low-temp soldering iron to make a flat end that would keep the beads from sliding off:

a bit blurry, but I think you get the idea.

That's all it took, and now I'm a happy camper.  It's also kind of fun to have some needle bling.

This pattern called for 2 different sizes of needles, so I did the same to the second set:

One thing that I would change next time is to put the biggest bead closest to the working end of the needle.  Occasionally I have had one stitch go over the smaller bead and get momentarily stuck, but it's not a big deal.  My project may be gray, but my knitting needles are shiny and bright.

The Chronicles of YARNia

Armed with many skeins of this charcoal heather yarn and a pair of circular knitting needles, I began knitting the sweater for my son. 

I made myself a test gauge to be sure my stitches matched up in size to the pattern before starting, and then worked on the ribbing for the bottom.  At that point, I only had to use knit, purl and cast on stitches,  and those were all familiar to me.

To start the body of the sweater, the pattern said to increase 6 stitches.  Feeling confident that I could manage that, I knit the first row, increasing 6 times evenly as I went.   On the return row of purl knitting, I realized that I did not remember how to increase because I had created 6 holes in the sweater instead.  Rookie mistake.

Ripped out those rows,  looked up "how to increase" in a knitting book and tried a second time.  This time I got it right, and began the body of the sweater.  Again.

About 8 rows in, I came across a random hole.  I think I had mistakenly done a "yarn over".  Ripped out about 4 rows and started up again.  After a few nights work, I had about 8 inches of the back done.

I laid it out on top of a sweater that my son already owned and that fit him well.  It was easy to see that my knitted sweater was going to be too small.  Another rookie mistake.  I should have compared my work to the storebought sweater about 4 inches sooner and saved myself a lot of time.   I had to start over.  Again.

I went back an looked through the pattern book I had bought, ignoring the crazy eyes and the sullen stares of the models and found a nice crewneck sweater that looked more roomy, then convinced my son that v-necks were overrated anyway. 
Then came the hard part, ripping out everything I had done so far:

Going....

Going...

Gone.....

Before I could start over, I had to deal with this...

a mountain of yarn sitting there on the table. 

 I lamented to my knitting expert sister about losing the convenience of a pull-skein, where your skein stays in one place while you pull yarn from the center.  She showed me how you can wrap a ball of yarn and make your own pull skein, a technique I will graciously share with you:

Start wrapping the yarn around your fingers, making sure to leave a long tail hanging out from the center:

Continue winding your yarn into a ball, always making sure the tail end is hanging free:

When you are finished, you will have a nice, tidy ball of yarn with a pullstring from the center:

Now I was ready to start the sweater project all over again, but not without a nice, consoling cup of tea and a good night's sleep first.

Stay tuned....

The journey begins

As I mentioned in my previous post,  in a moment of maternal weakness, I agreed to knit my son a sweater.   This would be no small project, seeing as this son of mine is 6 feet tall.

Off we went to the nearest craft store hoping to find a pattern for a man's sweater, in particular, a V-neck pullover.  It seemed like a classic style that should be easy to find.  Unfortunately, we were both wrong.  It was actually quite hard to find patterns for men.  Page after page, in booklet after booklet, we found beautiful patterns for pretty, feminine sweaters and accessories,  sweet baby items,  lots and lots of sock patterns, but not one single pattern for a man's V-neck sweater.

Finally, I searched out the craft book section, and reluctantly picked up this book:

I was reluctant because I did not want to pay $20 for a whole book of patterns when all I wanted to knit was just one sweater.   But also, I was put off by the scowling face of the guy on the book cover.  If  the sinister looking coverboy was any indication, how could I expect to find a sweater in this book that would appeal to my son?   Expecting the worst, but with no other alternative,  I began flipping through the pages. 

On the inside cover was this guy staring back at me:

I could not imagine wanting to make any sweater that would also appeal to this crazy-eyed, disheveled lost boy. 

I kept searching. 

The next picture I saw was this guy:

He seemed to be daring me to ask about that earring in his ear. 

There was another sweater modeled by the coverboy-with-attitude:

Is that the only face he knows how to make?

Perhaps he was annoyed because his overachiever girlfriend made his scarf

way too long:

This next model looked less menacing, but did I really want to spend time and effort to make such a droopy, mis-shapen, boring cardigan as this?

Who was the stylist for this photoshoot anyway? Looks like this guy just rolled out of bed.

Finally, a model who was more cutie pie than smarty pants:

Cute smile, but we weren't looking for a cardigan.

And then this pic of somebody's lovable, teddy bear grandpa:

I bet he keeps Werther's original caramels in that pocket.

At long last,  I came to this photo of a camera shy computer geek  modeling a perfectly normal looking V-neck pullover.

My son and I both agreed it would make a fine sweater, and we found some nice
charcoal gray heather yarn to make it with.

I guess this book was designed  to appeal to the new breed of younger, edgier, way-hipper-than-me knitters.  Stepping away from my comfort zone to attack a sweater project is as close to the edge as I want to get.