Twisted Yarn

I've been knitting a pair of gloves with two colors, juggling four balls of yarn to simultaneously knit the two gloves on my circular needles.

I did my usual knitting-two-objects-at-once trick of putting each glove's yarn supply on a different side of me. By alternating whether I rotate the needles left or right, I can keep these two supplies from tangling.

The two colors used to knit each glove, however, were tangling badly. The yarn is a wool/silk blend that is both slippery and has a tendency to felt. I stopped every few inches to untangle the yarn, wishing there was an easier way to do this.

The slipperiness of the yarn was also causing it to unball somewhat, so I stuffed each ball in its own ziploc bag. That helped with the tendency of the balls to tangle, but the strands running from the balls to the gloves were still twisting and tangling.

One of the little plastic zippers accidentally closed around the yarn, bringing me up short.

It also gave me an idea.

If I stuffed as much of one strand of yarn as I could in the ziploc bag and zipped it shut, could I just dangle the ball and encourage it to unwind.

Yup. Who woulda thunk.

Unvented: Underarm Gusset

On the Broad Spiral Rib cardigan, I had an attractive Knotted Rib inset into the raglan line. As I was thinking about writing up the way I divide the arms from the body, I had an idea.

“Wouldn't it be handsome,” thought I, “if I continued the Knotted Rib through the underarm area and grafted it to the other side of the underarm? Then I could pick up along both edges of the Knotted Rib strip and have a little underarm gusset. It would probably help with the stretched stitches that I sometimes get in that area.”

The more I thought about this idea, the more I liked it.

When I got to the spot where I ordinarily do the underarm cast-on, I continued the Knotted Rib strip instead:

When I got to the end of the little strip, I grafted the end of the gusset to the Knotted Rib on the back raglan line:

At about this point, I briefly wondered if I was a little obsessed, knitting that little tiny strip and then grafting it to the other side. Could it possibly be worth the effort it was taking?

I continued knitting across the back, and then knitted and grafted the other little strip on the other underarm.

At the end of the row, I had underarms that looked like this:

Next, I picked up along the body edge of the gusset, muttering more things about how obsessive I can be in the knitting of the perfect sweater:

I'm very pleased with the results.

Top-Down Design Tutorial 10: Dividing the Arms from the Body

In all kinds of top-down sweaters, the yoke and arms are knit as a continuous unit to the underarm.

The yoke of the sweater has a cape form when you get to the underarm:

And here's the yoke open so you can see the shawl neck shaping:

When you get to the underarm, you knit the sleeve stitches to holders, dividing the arms from the body (oh, how gruesome):

The sleeve stitches on their holders:

The sleeve stitches stay on their holders while you knit the body.

On the first row after dividing the sleeves from the body, you cast on a few stitches at each underarm and then knit the body on down to the hem:

When the body is complete, you pick up along the underarm cast-on and knit the sleeves down in the round. Pick up the cast-on stitches and add two transition stitches at each end of the cast-on. If you don't pick up transition stitches, the corner stitches along the underarm will be stretched, leaving unsightly holes at the underarm. The transition stitches close the gap and make the fabric of the underarm smooth.

The steps for dividing the sleeves from the body:

1. Knit one row, knitting the sleeve stitches onto holders.
2. Knit back across body stitches only, casting on an inch or two of stitches at each underarm.
3. Finish knitting the body of the sweater.
4. Pick up the cast-on stitches along the sleeve edges of the underarms, adding 2 transition stitches at each end of the cast-on stitches.
5. Knit the arms down in the round.

Top-Down Design Tutorial 9: Figuring the Raglan Yoke

I recently updated my open-source KnitFitter project to do the calculations for round-yoke and raglan sweaters as well as for poncho sweaters.

I'd worked up a Broad Spiral Rib pattern in a lovely Peace Fleece yarn that I wanted to make into a zippered sweater. I put the gauge and my dimensions into the KnitFitter and tinkered with the raglan figuring until the program gave me a sensible answer.

This took a lot longer than I expected.

Raglans were the first sweaters I designed. I knit them exclusively for years. They're fairly straightforward to knit. They fit a wide variety of bodies nicely and work with a wide range of designs.

As I tinkered with my program, I discovered that getting the numbers right for raglan yokes is more complicated than I had realized. The logic for round-yoke sweaters is 15 lines long. The logic for raglans and poncho sweaters is 80 lines long, and it only covers the basics.

The good news is that figuring raglans is easier for humans than it is for computers. You just juggle things until they're right. You have a lot of options, a lot of factors you can fudge to get the numbers to come out right. Computers can't do that; they need to do things the same way every time.

A raglan has four or five distinct sections: the front (or left front and right front, if the sweater is a cardigan), the back, the left sleeve, and the right sleeve. Each section is separated by a raglan marker and one or more raglan line stitches. The increases for each section are done before and after the raglan markers.

In the Broad Spiral Rib Jacket, the five sections of the sweater are separated by a single Knotted Rib that emphasizes the raglan line.

Each section of the sweater grows from its initial width at the neck to the desired width at the underarm. Sleeve increases and body increases can be independent of one another; front and back increases can also be independent of one another.

The standard raglan instructions say to increase before and after each raglan marker until the sweater is wide enough and then to knit straight until the desired underarm depth is reached. For a lot of sweaters, this leads to a wide-enough sweater with appropriately-sized sleeves and an underarm somewhere in the neighborhood of the wearer's underarm. I find that this basic formula works well for children's sweaters worked in stockinette. For other stitch patterns or other sizes, it doesn't work well at all.

Okay, so a few numbers that we'll need to figure the raglan yoke:

Raglan rows: multiply the underarm depth of the wearer by the row gauge of the stitch pattern. This number tells us how many rows we have to make the raglan increases.

Sleeve stitches: multiply the desired sleeve width at the bicep by the stitch gauge.

Body stitches: multiply the chest measurement by the stitch gauge.

Neck stitches: the number of stitches cast on for the neck. In a basic crew-necked raglan, this is ((2 * back-neck) + 2) * stitch-gauge.

Underarm cast-on: A small number of stitches cast on at the underarm to form a gusset between the sleeves and the body and allow freedom of movement. In standard raglan sizes, this is usually an inch or two. I usually allow 1" for children's sizes and 1.5" for adult sizes. Multiply that number by the stitch gauge to get the underarm cast-on.

You have some variables to play with. You have a fair amount of wiggle room in dividing the neck stitches between the sleeves and body. You can adjust the underarm cast-on by a few stitches. You can undershoot the raglan rows by an inch or overshoot it by two inches.

Look at the numbers for neck stitches, body stitches, and sleeve stitches. About an inch of the neck is usually apportioned to each sleeve. So start by assigning an inch of stitches to each arm and divide the rest between the front and the back. Find the number of increases for each section by subtracting the neck stitches for that section and the underarm cast-on from the total number of stitches needed for that section.

Are the body and sleeve increases close to the same? If so, you might be able to juggle the neck stitches so that you can do the same number of increases on the sleeves as you do on the body. If not, the sleeves and the body will have to grow at a different rate.

Once you've juggled the neck stitches, figure the rate of increase for each section. Divide the number of increases you need to do by 2 to get the number of increase rows you need. Next, divide the raglan rows by the increase rows to get the increase rate. The increase rate tells you how often you'll need to do raglan increases for that section. If the increase rate is close to a whole number, your increase instructions for that section are simply Increase at beginning and end of section every [increase rate] rows until section is wide enough.

Now, if the increase rate is not close to a whole number, you'll have to do more fancy figuring to get those increases in. There are also stitch patterns where you don't want to increase on wrong side rows, so you might want to do more fancy figuring in those cases as well.

The simplest kind of fancy figuring is to round down to the nearest whole number, stop increasing when you have enough increases, and then work straight to the underarm depth. This conforms pretty well to the shape of the human body. The shoulders widen quickly, then the torso continues straight until the underarm. At the underarm, the sleeves and body of the sweater need to expand to form tubes around the arms and body. Ideal shaping for a sweater looks something like this:

Another option is to build a complex-angle raglan which conforms to the shape of the ideal sweater. This will fit better than a simple raglan. To build a complex angle raglan, you decide that you need to work so many increases, say, every row, and so many other increases, say, every other row. You put the more frequent increases towards the neck, saving an inch or two for just before the underarm and do the less frequent increases on the chest section where the body isn't changing.

Arms, luckily enough, follow a similar pattern. The sleeve cap can use a little extra ease, and the sleeve also needs extra width at the underarm.

Once you've figured out the rate of increases for each body section, you can write your pattern to the underarm.

Swatch Scarf

I found some Elizabeth Lavold Silky Wool on sale online, and I ordered a variety of colors thinking it would be good for gloves.

When it arrived, it didn't feel right for gloves. Not soft enough nor springy enough nor tough enough to make the sort of gloves I had in mind, anyway.

Yarn plays this sort of trick on me all the time. I buy it thinking it will work for one project only to swatch it and discover that it flat out refuses to become what I had in mind for it.

I have an old wool/silk scarf that I love, though, and the nubbly fine-textured yarn seemed like it would make fine scarves.

I leafed through my stitch treasuries looking for a good pattern stitch. I decided to start some leisurely swatching, knitting up some patterns I'd never tried before. I cast on 40 stitches and planned on working through about 4 inches each of Sailor's Rib, Twin Rib, Shadow Rib, Berry Stitch, Brioche Stitch, Wheat Ear Rib, Clove Stitch, Syncopated Brioche, Zigzag Knotted Rib, and Waffle Brioche.

I'd worked through four or five of the pattern stitches when my daughter casually asked, “Are you making a scarf?”

“Oh no,” I responded, “I'm making a gauge swatch of all these stitch patterns. When I finish, I'll choose one for the scarf, rip out the swatch, and knit the scarf.”

She looked at me as if I was slightly demented.

“It looks nice like that, with all those patterns together. Why don't you just make it longer and call it a scarf?”

So that is what I did.

There was one small catch. I hadn't included a side border stitch on the swatch. Some of the pattern stitches needed a border to look finished. The width of the pattern stitches also varied considerably, and a side border would help smooth the variations.

When the scarf was finished, I needed to pick up stitches on both sides and knit in a garter stitch border.

Fortunately, I'd started the whole endeavor with a few rows of garter stitch, so I was able to measure to deduce that 40 stitches of garter stitch equalled roughly 7.5 inches.

I marked 7.5" sections along the edges of the scarf. Fortunately, the scarf was 75" long, so the math came out even. (How often does that happen in knitting?)

Along each marked section, I picked up 40 stitches.

Okay, I didn't actually pick up 40 stitches. What I did was to pick up stitches in the most natural, consistent way possible. Then I counted them. When I had fewer than 40 stitches, I picked up the deficit evenly spaced across the span. When I had more than 40 stitches, I dropped the extras evenly across the span.

I've read a lot about different ways to pick up stitches, but I'm here to tell you it doesn't usually matter much as long as you pick them up consistently. You can pick up inside the outer loop (okay for bulky yarn in a reversible pattern), the inner loop, the running threads between the first and second column of stitches, etc. Each gives a slightly different look and might turn up an edge on the wrong side. Sometimes, you get loose stitches at the edge, but you can tighten them up by knitting them in the back loop to twist them shut.

When the scarf was finished, I thought it looked a little funky with its uneven edges, but it's a good color and undeniably warm. Several family members tried to stake claim to it, and Garry ended up scoring it.

My knitting project for my trip to Manhattan was another scarf from the same yarn, this time in Portcullis Stitch in three colors:

When I got back from New York, I was ripping the pages off my Stephanie Pearl McPhee knitting calendar. I chuckled at April 9th's You Know You Knit Too Much When... and Garry wanted to know what was so funny.

“You know you knit too much when you're glad your kids lost their mittens. You wanted to make more anyway.”

He looked at me with a twisty smile on his face and said, “Oh good. You'll be glad to know I lost one of my gloves, then.”

A-Knitting We Will Go

After the flurry of creative activity before Christmas, I've been relaxing with the next afghan.

I was shooting for 60" square, but it seems to be coming in at about 58" wide. It goes more quickly than the King-Sized Afghan, which is now serving as a very warm bedspread.

The new afghan has only eaten 3 balls of yarn so far and is only 14" long, so it still works as take-along knitting.

The other thing going on is this gauge swatch:

When I made the Twilit Forest Poncho Sweater, I dusted off my old perl program that does the number crunching for poncho sweaters and updated it so that it matches my current sweater design process.

Then I knit this gauge swatch. It's the raw material for a light zippered jacket, in a lovely spiral rib pattern that I used for Malcolm's Christmas concert vest. It will be a raglan with a little knot cable in the raglan lines and probably a fancier cable framing the zipper.

Yeah, well, I decided that, before I knit this sweater, I'd go ahead and port the poncho sweater program to Python and then expand it to do raglan design too.

The basic porting took a long weekend (and kisses to my wonderful husband for providing key support in getting started on this), and then I started looking at what I would really want a number-crunching sweater design program to do.

So I've been working on my vision for a top-down design program that would do the math to build sweaters the way I knit them. I have visions of neckline and sleeve variations, hooks for the sweater types I want to support, and a general mulling over of the best ways to specify and implement my ideas so that the program can do a lot of what I do when I design a sweater.

I'm excited about this. I've started an open-source project for the KnitFitter, and I invite anyone who is interested to pop over to sourceforge and take a look.

Tis the Season

Finished objects.

Malcolm's Christmas concert vest, begun December 2nd, finished December 15th, and worn for a piano performance December 18th:

Original top-down design with Rope-and-Diamond cables, Spiral Rib, and Knotted Rib.

The finished (and by now much-worn) Twilight Forest poncho sweater:

And a pair of working gloves for Garry: