Baby Got (Sweater) Back

For the good of the Order, I should state that I have never knit a blanket, coverlet or afghan. Furthermore, I have no desire to do so. And “No desire” here means “No way, no how, no thank you.” Not. Interested. No shaping, no wearing, and worst of all, SO BIG. No offense to those knitters who love making them, but I just can’t think of anything more dull. Or more awkward to struggle under the weight of. Giant squares of knitted fabric just hold no charm for me.

So obviously, I should undertake a drop-shoulder Aran for my 6’7 offspring.

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Imagine my dismay, when I realized what was happening in my lap:

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For some reason, every time I picked this monster up to work on it, it was even bigger and heavier than the last. Less portable, and less maneuverable too. Go figure.

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Here is the completed counterpane sweater back for Campbell’s Aran. All of its garment shaping will be achieved by the addition of separate pieces (side panels and shoulder straps). So the first body piece I knit is just a big old parallelogram. Great as an un-thinky canvas for gorgeous cables. Challenging to work on for the aforementioned reasons. So, yeah, I’ll “never” knit a blanket. This doesn’t count.

It did, however, give me ample time to meditate on two important construction elements, which can/should also be design considerations. I’ll dig a little deeper into the how and why directly, but for now, Gentle Readers, can you guess WHAT? Take a stab at what two things I’ve been thinking of in the comments, won’t you?

Until then, it’s chilly in here, so I’ll be snuggling up under this unblanket.

Post-Op Recovery and a Happy Surprise

You may have (correctly) concluded that I am bananas based on my last post, so I thought I’d share a bit more about my sweater’s surgical intervention. Here is my sweater back, with the right honeycomb panel reknit. It’s really not as scary as it looks to do this.

I put the rest of the (not-jacked-up) knitting on waste yarn holders first, so I wouldn’t have any other knitting needles in my way during surgery. Then I used a pair of short DPNs (5” glove needles, if you’re playing along at home) and a cable needle to reknit the frogged panel. Starting from the bottom, I carefully selected each frogged strand, one row at a time, working them all from the RS. Fun fact: Although counterintuitive, it turned out that reknitting with a size larger than my desired size for the rest of the piece worked much better for keeping the reknit stitches even during surgery. Who knew? Keep that idea in your pocket in case (Knitting Gods Forbid) this ever happens to you. Once I reworked all the rows properly, I put the reknit panel on waste yarn as well before moving on to the other side.

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Drunk with power Emboldened by success, I gutted the opposing side. Note: I only frogged back to the first cable cross row, rather than all the way down through the cast on. Because I don’t hate myself that much.

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Once the patient was resting comfortably post-op, I turned my attention to facing my real fear.

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That, dear friends, is my terror of mismatched dye lots. Because I had to dye my yarn on the stovetop it ended up that there were four different batches, using my biggest cauldron. My general level of dye lot anxiety went to eleven over this. I was as meticulous as I know how to be with regard to water, yarn amounts, time and temperature. I took copious notes, and I even used math. But I’m well aware that as a dyer, I make an excellent knitter. I’m a rank amateur as a dyer, and happy to keep it that way.

Even though it looked to be all the same color when it dried, I was still afraid there would be lines of demarcation in the work from skein to skein. And yes, I know I can alternate skeins, but I stupidly fearlessly threw caution to the winds when I began by choosing to use only one skein. Failure to match at this point would mean a total re-start. And probably permanent psychic damage.

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The Knitting Gods threw me a bone! In the brightest light available, I wound up the next skein and bravely spit spliced it in. I’m profoundly delighted to report that the new skein is a dead match to the first one. All hail the repeatable dye process! And getting lucky.

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All (“All”) that remains is to carry on working up the remaining 3,520 yards. And to not run out of yarn. And to get a sweater that fits. And to live long enough to find out. Anybody placing bets?

When Cables Go Pear-shaped

Having made my list and checked it twice, so to speak, I could hardly wait to jump into knitting Campbell’s Aran. Planning and noodling have their charms, but they’re not knitting, ya know? Due diligence done, there’s a point after which one can’t predict every possible happenstance. I’m always happy, then, when it’s finally time to settle down and play with string in a meaningful way.

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Above is the view from my lap, a few inches away from my provisional cast on. There is more to be said on the what and why of that choice, but for now we’ll just call it a deplorable excess of Start-itis. I wanted to crack straight on with the sweater back, and lower edge treatment be damned.

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Somewhere about halfway through the first 32-row repeat, I experienced a sinking feeling. The honeycomb panels adjacent to the center felt stiffer than was strictly necessary. And I wasn’t loving how fiddly the stitch pattern was, calling for all those 2-over-2 crosses on every right side row. Spreading out the sweater back to re-measure and “admire” my work, I admitted to myself that I really didn’t like those honeycomb panels at all. In addition to the other issues, they were too close to the same scale as the filler mini-honeycombs at the sides.

How, after all of that swatching to audition cables for knitability and scale, did I make such a glaring error? I unearthed the honeycomb swatch to look at it again, compared with what was happening in my lap:

Can you guess, Gentle Readers, what happened? How about now?

That’s right. After swatching the honeycomb not once, but twice, and finding it worthy, I failed to knit the pattern I had chosen. Instead of working the cable crosses every fourth row, as God intended, I was working them every other row. No wonder it was fiddly, and dense, and small!

Come to think of it, I’ve known PEOPLE who were fiddly, dense and small because they were crossed too often, and I didn’t much like them either.

In my fit of Start-itis, I had been so focused on following the charts I combined to get my pretty center cable that I never even bothered to look at my honeycomb swatch. Which could only mean one thing, of course:

Surgical Intervention. I still don’t know if it would have been faster to operate on it like this or to frog it and start over. I told myself that the surgical route would only require re-knitting 2,560 stitches, while a total do-over would call for 6,400. But of course, any decision that causes me to resort to math is probably already a bad one.

Heed, Gentle Readers, the lesson of our forbears: Those who do not study their swatches are destined to repeat them.