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So I’ve been holding out on you. Not from general blogging, I think I’d better stop apologizing about the length of time between updates and embrace the fact that I’m a once a week at best blogger. But I’ve had new, actual news, and yet I didn’t share. What is this privileged information, you ask? Allow me to show you:
The Saxon Braid Cardi is done, has been done and will continue to be done for the foreseeable future.
The knitting has been complete for about two (?) weeks now. All I had to do was reknit the cuffs, sew the arm seams and block the cuffs. Then I needed to wait for a decent day to take some real pictures, not mirror-self-portrait finished object pictures. I designed this puppy myself, it deserves a little respect.
It’s not a perfect garment, but it’s what I envisioned. A comfy green throw on cardigan. A big hood and no closures, long sleeves and the magic of waist shaping. I started this back in September, when I thought I would have it done for the three months of winter Nevada has to offer (stop that laughing!) and now I’ve worn it twice this week already. I love Oregon weather. I wore it into the ever wonderful Dublin Bay to pick up some needles, and it was properly fawned over. Trust knitters to make your day. I’ll actually be wearing this one, unlike the other five or six sweaters I’ve knit that never see the light of day.
Project details:
Pattern: my own!
Yarn: Elsebeth Lavold’s Silky Wool, about 10 skeins
Needles: US size 6 and 4 circulars
Cast on: September 2007
Cast off: August 2008
I didn’t mean to have only circa 2003 headless blogger sweater photos, but the ones with my head didn’t show off the cardigan nearly as well as the headless ones. Go figure. My head is featured on my old blog, for those of you who feel the need to know what I look like. Happy hunting! Oh, and I have a Flicr set for the whole SBC odyssey.
I lured my friend C out to Lone Fir Cemetery to take the Official Saxon Braid Cardigan Photos. Rather she suggested it, and I agreed. Lone Fir is a pioneer cemetery in the middle of Southeast Portland with huge trees and rolling hills. It’s a cheerful little place, nice and quiet (except for the goth kids on July 4th weekend and hearse conventions) and a lot of people take bike rides and walks along the paths. It’s more like a park than a cemetery, really. Except for when you come upon this
Or a squirrel that keeps looking you in the eye, then shaking it’s tail and clucking.
Or a huge mausoleum with the family name half broken off.
Sister in Law knitting update: She’s trucking right along with the purl stitch and started a ribbed scarf (didn’t we all?), black and light blue for Ravenclaw. Very nice.
Back in April, I wrote a long post about the Saxon Braid Cardi and detailed the process of designing it, then I wrote about grafting the hood, and you never heard about it again. That’s because I blocked it out, wrote a victorious finished object post in my head, picked up the dry sweater to discover that the sleeves hung past my fingertips and flung it down in disgust. All I had left to do was seam the sleeves and weave in the ends, and then I had a finished cardigan, but then I was presented with the simple task of ripping back the cuffs and reknitting them. Not so much fun, but I was neither in the mood nor the head space at the time to deal with it (read: rampant insomnia), so I just packed it up with me when I moved and left it hanging in a bag in my laundry room for the last three months. Today I finally decided to get off my ass and just rip back the cuffs already.
That’s seven inches of knitting I ripped back. I tried to get a picture of it actually on my body, but that didn’t work out so well. I started on one cuff already, and I’m about a third of the way done with it already. The size 4s I’m using feel like tree branches compared to the size 0s I’ve been using on the Bayerische socks for the past month. Also, I’m being a Good Knitter and using the extra ball of yarn every pattern on the planet advises you to purchase for the cuffs, instead of the crinkled up unraveled yarn. See? I can be taught.
Here’s a pic for anyone who forgot what the whole thing looked like (I know I did). I want to get this done before September, so I can get it finished in under a year. Oregon summer will be over soon, and it would be nice to have a new cardigan for fall. And get this thing out of the knitting bag.
I’m feeling a little triumphant and smug.
That’s a grafted cable you are looking at. It’s not perfect, it’s an interruption in the pattern, but it’s seamed and it’s not falling apart, there are no holes and to the naked eye, there’s nothing wrong with it.
I promised to share my research, which was not so much of a scouring, but more like a quick Google search of “grafting ribbing” and “grafting cables” and a peek on my bookshelf. I’m not the tutorial sort, but I’ll tell you what I did, and that might be helpful. Also, I found that the Rogue hoodie , which craze was before my knitting time, required a grafted cable hood, so I’m sure any of the nice knitters at the Rogue KAL would be helpful. I didn’t ask any for help, but knitters are normally generous with sharing knowledge. Anyway.
Wooly Wormhead has a tutorial on grafting stockinette, reverse stockinette and garter stitch (scroll down). It’s a PDF file, so that’s convenient for when you can’t get to the computer (but of course, you knew that.) She doesn’t specifically address ribbing or cables in the tutorial, but I used her method for the reverse stockinette sections.
Wise Hilda Knits has a blog post on grafting ribbing and cables. I didn’t follow her method, but it might work for you.
So Much Yarn, So Little Time has a grafting ribbing tutorial. Again, I didn’t go that way, but it’s another source.
As for in my books, Domiknitrix has a grafting ribbing tutorial, but the instructions are for 1×1 ribbing. Mary Thomas’s Knitting Book has a section on grafting, pages 170-171. Knitting Rules has a tiny blurb on gratfting cables on page 166. Knitting in Plain English and Knitting Without Tears mention grafting ribbing, but don’t give any instructions.
So, what did I do?
I knit two swatches of ribbing, leaving the stitches live, then experimented with the two main methods I had found. 1.) Graft the stockinette sections the “regular” stockinette way, then when you get to the reverse stockinette “purl” section, switch to the reverse stockinette method of grafting. 2.) Graft the stockinette sections the normal way until you get to the rev. stockinette, then flip over the swatches and graft the knit stitches there (the reverse of the purls, you see?), then flip it over again and continue.
The first method worked fine, but left a half stitch jog on the seam line. I didn’t like that so much, so I picked out the seam and tried the second method. It left me with gaping holes where I had flipped over the swatches. Obviously, I hadn’t done something right, but I’d rather have a half stitch jog than holes so I went back to the first method. And the only place the jog is really noticeable is right at the edge where the stockinette section of the hood begins, and that’s not enough to make me unhappy with the results. Maybe I’m a sloppy knitter, but there it stands.
So, for my advice, if you want to graft a cable or ribbing, learn how to graft reverse stockinette and switch between stockinette and rev. stockinette for each section. It requires a little patience, and some previous experience with grafting, but I’m pleased with the results.
If this isn’t clear, or if some one wants a full tutorial with pictures, just leave a comment and I’ll work on it, but I think the links and books are sufficient to puzzle out what you’re doing.
I’ve made some noticeable progress on the SBC, so I thought I’d let you take a peek.
I finished the hood, all but seaming it together, and the bottom ribbing. I managed a full three inches of ribbing, and I didn’t lose my mind with the monotony, as I thought I would. I chose to do 4×4 ribbing, so the braid sections would flow naturally into the ribbing, like so:
I was lucky that I only had to increase two stitches on each side to get the right number for a 4×4 rib, so it all worked out nicely. I just started on the ribbing for the cuffs, also three inches deep because I like a nice long sleeve, and those numbers worked out perfectly, too! Hooray!
After I’m done with the cuffs, I have to tackle seaming the hood. I want to kitchener stitch it, so the top will be seamless, but that involves grafting ribbing for the braid panels. Yep. Grafting ribbing.
Right now the hood is on a holder so I can gather my resources, scour teh internets and my books and find the best way to do this. I’m also going to knit some swatches to practice on so I don’t mess up the focal point of this sweater. Once I figure it out, I’ll post my findings and resources so you all can benefit from my struggles. Like the good little martyr I am.
Once the hood is done, all that’s left is the button bands, which will be three inch deep ribbing again, and will most likely suck the soul right out of my body through my nose. Expect flagging at that stage. Look at the length of this thing! That button band is going to take forever.
The final pieces of the Nantucket Jacket are blocking after languishing in the basket for a month or more. and to think I wanted this done by the beginning of March. Bwahaha! All I have to do it seam it, but with mattress stitch in reverse stockinette, my arch nemesis. What is with me lately? I hate finishing as much as the next knitter, and here I am grafting ribbing and mattress stitching in rev stockinette. Idiot girl.
Just a note: The Nantucket Jacket is in Berroco Ultra Alpaca (don’t get started on alpaca’s wear-ability in Las Vegas, I just like it). Is it just me, or does alpaca when wet have the faintest wet dog odor? I noticed it when I was squeezing out the water at the sink, and then again while pinning out the pieces. Wet dog. Fragrant.
I have two sleeves! Mwahahaha!
Looking over my posts (past and present) on this cardigan, I realize that I’ve talked about it, I’ve reported progress, I’ve bitched about it, but I have not properly described what exactly I am doing here. So here it is. The definitive Saxon Braid Cardigan post.
The journey for this sweater started way back about two summers ago, when I saw the Central Park Hoodie pattern (scroll down), but didn’t want to buy the magazine. So I took note of the features I liked, the cables, the hood, the length and the wide ribbing, sketched it out, and set the idea aside for a few months. I hadn’t, and still haven’t, designed my own sweater pattern, and wanted to get a little better at knitting before I jumped in. I’ve knit quite a few top down raglan sweaters, so that seemed to be a logical starting place for me, what with the avoiding of calculating sleeve caps and seaming. I also had to find a cable pattern I liked. I have very few stitch dictionaries and none that focus on cables, so I set out to the internets and found a pattern I liked. (Let me see if I can find the link. I know it says Celtic, not Saxon, but I like the word Saxon better. Ubi sunt, and all that.) From there, I played around with the braid placement. I liked one on each side of the button bands, but what I wanted to do with the back took a little more time. I eventually decided on one braid right down the center.
That was the fun part.
I looked over all of my top down raglan patterns (thank you, Stefanie Japel!) and Sweater Design in Plain English, and an article I pulled off a blog that was very helpful, but I didn’t write down the source and I can’t find it by Google, so unfortunately I can’t point you to it! Grrr! Anyway, after all of my reading, I still couldn’t find the fundamental piece of information I needed: how many stitches to cast on. I had knit my swatch and was pleased with it, I had my row and stitch gauge. Now, how many stitches? I ordered Knitting from the Top (again, scroll down), but got impatient. So I took my tape measure, placed it where I thought I wanted the neckline to be by looping it around my neck and imagining it was a sweater neck (very scientific, I know), writing down the number of inches, and taking my calculations from there. The next challenge was figuring the bust/ arm ratio. I have plump (ahem) upper arms and a not so plump bust, so increasing a fixed number of stitches until I had my bust measurement wasn’t going to compensate for my sumo wrestler arms. (Sumo wrestlers are awesome. I wouldn’t want to meet one in a dark alley.) Both SDiPE and the mysterious article mentioned casting on more stitches at the armpit to alleviate this problem, but didn’t mention how to go about it. So I increased some, about half, of the amount of extra stitches I needed to get my arm circumference at the top of the sleeve, much like you’d make puffed sleeves, but not enough to actually be puffy. The rest I left to cast on when I picked up the sleeves to knit when I was done with the body. I needed 10 extra stitches, so on each end of the sleeve I cable cast on 5 stitches. Make sense? At least that’s how I puzzled it out. So far, it looks like my sleeves are going to fit fine.
With the cast on figured out and the sleeves taken care of, I just knit back and forth, one braid on each end and one in the middle of the back, increasing at the sleeves, until I had my bust circumference, separated the sleeves from the body and kept knitting the body down to the hem. I did add a little waist shaping to nip it in and get rid of some of the bulk of the cardigan.
I’m designing this bit by bit, and some of my decisions aren’t final. Most depend on how much yarn I have left, like how long the ribbing at the bottom is going to be. I put the stitches on waste yarn (along with the stitch markers I need for other projects, like a doof!) to wait until the rest of the main sections are knit. Then I’ll evaluate how much yarn I have and how much ribbing I can squeak out of it. I want a wide ribbing, like a 3×3 or 4×4, but I haven’t decided yet.
The cuffs got the same treatment (both of them!). Right now they reach my wrists, so my arms are covered, but I like overly long sleeves. I’d like them to go to about my knuckles. Again, it all depends on the yarn amounts. (So much depends upon… yarn amounts. I’m not the first to make w.c. williams rotate in his grave.)
With the sleeves as done as they’re going to be for now, I picked up stitches for the hood. I’ve never knit a hood before, not even following a pattern, so this could get funny. As in cackling maniacal laughter at 3 am, ripping out the offending hood for the fifth time funny. I cast on a large amount of stitches on purpose for having a hood, so I decided not to increase any more in the hood, and just knit straight up. Is this a huge mistake? Am I setting myself up for hood doom and failure? If I am, please don’t sit there and spray your coffee all over your monitor with your own wild and uncontrollable laughter, give a girl a break and tell me.
As you can kind of see in the top photo, picking up stitches from a knit and purl pattern at the cast on edge made a funny… ridge I guess. I keep saying that this late in the game I don’t care. I really don’t. Nope. Doesn’t bother me at all. Not in the least. Know what else doesn’t bother me?
This
It’ll get covered by the hood 99% of the time, right? Right?
Le sigh.
Hey H, learn to knit!
