Baby wrap sweater

In January, I started a wrap sweater for my soon-to-be-born nephew, but never seamed it up. This past weekend, I did all the seams and wove in all the ends. Looks like it needs to be re-blocked, though:

Even though I already blocked all the pieces, they’re curling like nobody’s business. (Maybe because I left them untouched in a bag for nearly two months? Nah…)

• pattern: Crossover Top by Glenda Overmann
• size: 3 months
• yarn: Regia 4-ply Color, “Rainbow”
• machine: Brother KH-860

The only things left to do are to put on some kind of border and make some ties. Crab stitch crochet around all the edges? Garter stitch? Not decided yet, but I think the ties will just be i-cord. Gotta finish it soon, though, or the kid won’t get it on time!

Error in newsletter version of Susitna pattern

It’s come to my attention that the version of my pattern Susitna that appears in the Oct/Nov 2007 issue of the Machine Knitters Guild of Pennsylvania newsletter contains a very unfortunate typo. The diagram as they rendered it shows exactly what you should NOT do. If you follow the instructions there, you’ll just get a big mess of tangled yarn.

I asked MKGOP to send out a correction so that people won’t be frustrated by a pattern that doesn’t work, but to my knowledge, they haven’t done so. Click here to download my original PDF version, which shows the correct needle placement.

Here’s the mistake: at the beginning, where the needle arrangement is shown, the MKGOP version shows the needles lined up (i.e., the needles on the main bed are directly over the needles on the ribber bed). This will not work! If you do it this way, the entire bag will unravel, and all your work will be for nothing.

Instead, the needles on the ribber bed need to be between the needles on the main bed, as shown in the original version of the pattern. This is what the diagram should look like:

My apologies for this, but I have no control over MKGOP’s newsletter and its formatting. I was under the impression that they were just going to provide a link to the original pattern, not paste my entire pattern into their newsletter, but apparently there was a miscommunication.

If you have any questions about the pattern, please do let me know. Likewise, if you spot any more typos, either in the MKGOP version or in my original, please give a holler.

Catching up

I keep forgetting to update here, so it’s about time to get caught up on what I’ve been doing since mid-December.

The Soy Cardi is finished at long last! The hems, neckband, and button bands are in hurdle rib, which I dug up from Epstein’s Knitting on the Edge book. I had a tough time finding buttons locally that were a) ugly, b) so cheap-looking that they’d fall apart in five minutes, or c) in some god-awful color. Eventually I found some light blue-green buttons that’ll do the trick, though.

My camera’s focus is getting increasingly fuzzy after I dropped it out in the field this summer, so this picture was the best I could do:

Two weeks ago, I spent a few hours working on a Dale baby sweater that I started in the summer of 2005 and never finished. Now the body and first sleeve finished, but I put it aside for a while to work on the Soy Cardi. I knit a few rows here and there on the second sleeve, so eventually I’ll get it done. Then I just have to sew in the sleeves, knit on a neckline, and sew on some buttons.

The pattern is from Dale of Norway, baby book #110, pattern #11001. The yarn is Microspun and I’m using US 3 for the body (US 1 for cuffs).

I also crocheted another Tawashi, this time using scraps of pink and blue kitchen cotton:

One of the other things I’ve been doing is tinkering with my knitting machine, making lots of swatches and testing out techniques. The only useful item I’ve made lately is a preemie hat, using a pattern kindly given to me by a fellow knitter.

It was very quick to knit, but that’s not too surprising since it’s absolutely tiny. I used some leftover bits of Dale Baby Ull (probably less than 1/4 of a skein). I think I’ll just knit these caps up with spare bits of yarn every now and then, and then just donate a bunch of them to the NICU.

Now I’m working on mitered squares knit from scraps of leftover sock yarn. I got the idea from Susy Ranner, who made a very helpful video showing how she’s making striped mitered squares. I’m not going to do stripes, but I think it’s a very nice way of using up sock yarn leftovers. Once I have enough squares, they’ll be seamed into a blanket.

So, that’s about it. I’ll write more about my knitting machine experimentation later.

Tawashi

I keep forgetting to post a picture of my completed Tawashi (タワシ), the Japanese crochet pattern I mentioned in my last post. (Tawashi just means “scrub brush” or “scrubber” in Japanese.)

The pattern calls for some Japanese antibacterial acrylic yarn, but I’m planning on using this as a face scrubber in the shower, so I just used cotton.

I just used some Peaches’n Cream cotton from my stash and a 5.5mm Tunisian crochet hook. It’s a bit bigger than the hook called for in the pattern, but for some reason I can’t find my crochet hooks anywhere. They’re hiding from me! The only one I could find was the Tunisian crochet hook, but it turned out ok despite being bigger than called for.

It’s quick and easy, but a bit small. So after finishing, I cast on immediately with more stitches and made a bigger one. Great, quick project for skeins leftover from other projects.

Monday evening surge

The Mikey cap is finished! I sewed the seams yesterday afternoon, and today I picked up the stitches for the brim. The brim was a quick knit, and then I just had to find a suitably stiff yet bendy piece of plastic to use for the brim insert. Since there’s null chance of the recipient (my dad) finding this blog, here’s a picture of the finished hat:

The pattern calls for elastic around the inside, but I’m going to hold off on that. My dad has a very big, very round head, so the elastic might not be necessary. I’ve decided to give this to him for Christmas, and we’ll see if it’s too big. If it is, I can easily add the elastic after he’s tried it on.

After that, instead of finishing the lap blanket I started for my friend, I had a hankering for some cute crochet projects on my to-do list. So I grabbed some kitchen cotton from my stash and started Tawashi (タワシ), a cute scrubbie pattern. Does look like much now, does it?

But when I’m done crocheting the piece, it’s supposed to transform into a neat shape via some clever seaming. It works up really quickly, but I should probably get some sleep instead of staying up to finish it.

More machine-knitting myths

Forgive me for ranting, especially since I’ve talked about machine-knitting myths before, but I can’t help myself. Myths about machines are so pervasive over on Ravelry, for example, that I wonder where on earth people are getting their firmly-held (negative) beliefs about what machines can and can’t do.

Responses to misconceptions about machines:

• for the billionth time, YES, knitting machines can do more than stockinette stitch
  • if you had a Bond Incredible Sweater Machine or whatnot and you could only do stockinette, that doesn’t mean that all machines are limited in that way. Also, even the simplest type of knitting machine can do more than just stockinette by manipulating stitches in various ways.
• it’s completely false that you can’t fix mistakes in your knitting when you use a machine. Why would you even think that? There are numerous ways to do it, too, just like with hand-knitting. You can rip back row-by-row (with or without a lifeline), you can fix stitches as they sit on the needles, or you can drop stitches and work them back up. That’s right, just like hand-knitting. Why? Because whether you use two needles or 400, it’s still knitted fabric.
• The fabric produced by knitting machines is NOT inherently different from the fabric produced by hand-knitting? Really. You might have used more needles to make it, but it’s just knitted fabric like any other (a series of interlocking loops, etc.).

It’s no skin off my back if people don’t like using knitting machines, but if they treat machine knitters with contempt because of incorrect information, that’s just silly. Get the facts, please.