Not Everything You Make is Worthy

After you've been knitting for a long time, you can get a little tired of the things you've been doing and suddenly a "What if...." moment pops into your head.  Just bear in mind that not all light bulbs flashing on are winners.  Sometimes you follow your moment and end up with something you wouldn't really want to display.

My summer has been a symphony of these moments and some have lent me some marvy new ideas while other, although finished, should probably not see light of day.

I refer to my liberal use of soutache to hide mistakes.  It all started when I mastered I-cord on my knitting machine.  Zip, zip, zip and about ten minutes later you've got 12 yards of cord.  If you wind it this way and that, you've got soutache, a nice pattern of whirls that you can tack down and cover things.

Here's what worked...those nice cross hatches in the white area at the bottom of the sweater.  I suppose you can see what didn't.  The soutache below the nice cross hatches was meant to cover a mistake in the number of rows.  It worked, kind of.  The other soutache was meant to offset the heaviness at the bottom.  Altogether I like the idea, but this first application just didn't do it for me.  I shall press on though.

Here's the second "What if..." moment.

I'm still knitting the sleeves, but that bodice of the sweater is just fine and the sleeves will be too.  I got thinking that I'd like to turn the stripes in the other direction on the skirt and shir them.  Again the I-chord, yards and yards of it, came into play.  I'm envisioning delicate stripes and gossamer shirring.  I end up with material that's too heavy and too wide in the stripe.  It's not fit to sell, or give away.

But here's what I learned for the time and energy I put into both garments. The ideas were good, but I need to experiment with a wider gauge of knitting if I want gossamer. Then maybe I should gather with a length of yarn, not I-cord.  I need to cut the yarn and begin a new color so the stripes aren't so wide.  The idea of soutache might be better done with a firmer yarn - the red yarn was wimpy and the heaviness of the soutache dragged the drape down.

All is not lost.  I have shown both items to friends who think they are marvelous, but it's not what I had in mind.  I now have a better idea of how to achieve what I really wanted in the first place.

Knit and learn, friends.  Keep coming back and hugs to you and your projects too.  Pat

Help, I've Run Out of My Yarn!

With the caveat that you really can't make a fiber mistake you can't ultimately conceal, I should talk about color choices. An example of that would be the non-color of white.  Go in your closet and examine all of your white shirts and sweaters and see if  you can find two that are the exact same shade.  Same with black. These are two non-colors that you had better be sure you have lots of the same dye lot before you begin a project.  Can't cheat on these.

But what do you do if you have come to the end of your ball of yarn and you still have a couple of sleeves and a hat to go?  That happened to me last week.  It was a blue jean jacquard sweater, knitted from the top down, so the top of the arms were already in place.  There was nary another ball of it in my stash (odd)? Even the local yarn store didn't turn up anything, so now I had to do a color match.  I found a lighter grey that worked out but not without some cheating.

In this case, because the jacquard pattern was in tones and variations  of the same color, I had a far less difficult time blending.  I will recommend that if you see this problem coming, you rip back so that you have half of the yarn necessary to complete the project and then knit the new yarn every other row.  Might not work well enough if the shades are too far off, but for me and that particular pattern, it worked very well.

This is the same technique you want to use if you buy a "no dye lot" bunch of yarn.  It means nothing matches, but you can blend it far more effectively by knitting one row from one ball and the next from the other.  Hand spun yarns are notorious for having the matching problems.  Maybe it isn't the dye lot, but it will be the thickness so blend by alternating rows.

Another blending trick is to vary the stitch.  In the hat, I used picots. It was crunch time for me because I had used up all my blendable yarn in the sleeves and the hat was on its own.  It was not remotely ever going to look like it was on purpose.  I started with the light grey rib and then alternated two rows of the original yarn and two of the grey.  I tossed in the picot holes on the grey rows to give the eye something else to think about.  I think it all worked out well because my resident yarn critics didn't see the problem until I pointed it out.

Obviously, to avoid the problem of running out of yarn, buy an extra ball.  This, of course, is how out-of-control yarn stashes get started, but that's a whole other subject.  The other thing is to try to calculate how many yards you need to complete your project - most patterns will say.  Then check the yarn band of your intended yarn and do the math (and buy the extra ball).

If in doubt turn to the idea of on purpose collars, cuffs and ribs in a complementary color.  Add stripes if you must to blend.  Because I do mostly charity baby sweaters, I often have contrasting bodices that pick up the extra striping in the lower part of the sweater.

There is much to be said about color, such as how you actually choose it, but we'll save that for another chat.

Come back soon and hugs to you and your projects too, Pat