FO: Oranje

My fair isle obsession continues.  This has been the winter of colorful colorwork for me, with nary a cable or lace to be seen.

I liked the idea and look of a more modern take on the traditional fair isle yoke sweater- something with a bit of shaping and more modern looking yoke motifs- and I've been wanting to cast on for the Oranje cardigan for a while.  I originally thought I would work this monochrome- black, grey, white- but got inspired and replaced the black with the most insanely shocking pink I could dig out of my stash.

The yarn was sport weight, so it took quite a while to get knitted up.  It was pretty boring until the yoke, and then it got colorful and a bit complicated with all the braids tangling up the yarn.

I finished the knitting, then butchered it.

Ha ha, kidding, I machine-stitched neat lines on either side of the steek, and then split it from navel to throat like the barbarian that I am.  Pullover become a cardigan, presto changeo!

 Oh and I did try it on before I sliced this- I was happy with the fit.  Then I washed and blocked it, and wouldn't you know it?  That son of a bitch grew and grew and grew.  Behold the wonders of superwash wool.  I blocked it a bit smaller, with some success.

Behold.

It is now a too-large cardigan.

I put in button bands, but no buttons or zippers yet as I give this some thought.  The cardigan is in time-out while I decide what to do with it.  I had made the Medium size- 40", wanting something that wasn't skin tight.  Unfortunately, if I would have made the next size down, I would have gotten a much better fit.  So it sits, folded in the corner, waiting for divine inspiration or someone slightly larger then me to be in want of a sweater.  

I love the details- the short rows to build up the back of the neck:

The neatly turned hems:

The colors I chose, and the braids that added texture and gave it a more modern look:

Alas, none of this will make up for the fact that it's about two sizes too big.  It's just way too much fabric for me to swim in!  I did want a relaxed cardigan, but this much ease is just unflattering and unkind to the curvy.  I'm trying to decide if it is worth it to tuck in the button bands and attach a zipper- it would lop off about two inches that way.  I need to somehow get rid of six before I felt like this was a good, flattering fit.

It's not a complete loss: It was fun to knit.  But you can see perfectly in the photo below that all the extra fabric is just hanging out.

But the yarn, ooooh, the yarn.  That touch of cashmere makes it so lush.

Sigh.

I used 2 skeins of Sanguine Gryphon Bugga in Tulip Tree Beauty (grey) and most of one skein of Devil's Flower Mantis (pink) plus a skein of undyed yarn.   I DID SWATCH and yes, I did get gauge.  It's just bad judgement on sizing and yarn drape on my part really.

If anything, this cardigan has taught me to doubt myself a bit more and to take my self-confidence down a few notches.

I did make some modifications: the original has 3/4 sleeves and a high turtleneck that reaches the chin.  I lopped off the turtleneck once I finished the short rows, and added inches to the sleeves.  Having a winter sweater with 3/4 sleeves just seemed silly.

To be continued...

FO: Insane Clown will Eat Your Brains

I made a sweater. I dislike the way it turned out. It's the Caftan Pullover by Norah Gaughan from the Spring 2006 issue of Interweave Knits.

It was supposed to look like this:

Pretty, right? It's all bohemian floaty and comfy. I might go to a gallery and spend the day decoding some modern art and then sip cappuccinos and nibble little cookies which cause me to not gain weight or have wild mood swings because of my blood sugar crashing afterwards. La vie est belle.

I cast on for it and started on my way. I do love Norah Gaughan and cables and sweaters and I'm even starting to like silk a little bit more. The cables are fun, and I liked the yarn despite the yarn being a slippery silk novelty yarn- Berroco Ultra Silk. It's a silk knit tube with a nylon roving core. Using size 9 needles this moved along nicely. It's such a pretty shade of summery beach blue.



I made the front, I made the back. I seemed them up. Then I realized: because the front is heavier than the back with all those lovely cables, it stretches out alarmingly more than the back. Even though I made them the exact same length and seemed the armholes so they match perfectly, the front just hangs down lower, like a tumor. A floppy, heavy tumor.





Also, because I still have a bit of dignity left, I seamed up the front panels instead of leaving my ta-tas to awkwardly flop around in the breeze. One the model, it works for her, but she's doing nothing but drinking soy half-caf skim lattes and batting her eyelashes at the off-duty fireman in the corner. Also, because the yarn is mostly silk, there's no way to keep the neckline opened up and keep from rolling over. Silk has not structure and it just wants to collapse in a heap. So it got seamed.

Except, seamed, the two front panels create a face.



A deranged clown face. This is almost as rich as people seeing the image of the virgin Mary in their toast or other mundane everyday objects- except this one isn't a peace and comfort to anyone. Insane Clown is Out to Get You.



It can not be unseen. I put the sweater on and then I break out in a cold sweat, get twitchy and then spend about 20 minutes trying to get this thing off me. Like it's a cicada clinging to me. GET IT OFF GET IT OFF GET IT OFF ME! Sadly, it does not. Insane Killer Clown Face is here to stay. It terrifies me, and I can really only blame the book "It" for all this.

Also, I didn't make sleeves. I couldn't give the clown any more power over me than he already has.

Ah well. You win some, you lose some. Novelty yarn + complicated pattern= the potential for Insane Clown to appear. The Insane Clown will appear to you someday in something you do- or does he just appear to me?

Mistakes were Made...

...although it wasn't by me this time. I am the salvation in this situation.

Multi-colored handpainted yarn has its place, but in this case, it did not belong in a complicated alpaca sweater. It looked like clown barf from a very sick, sad clown with emphysema.





The alpaca yarn was way too busy and too many clashing colors in there: red, black, brown, blue, green, yellow, purple, orange, pink and then a whole lot of mud.



It's actually quite a lovely sweater- very Voguey and stylish, but the complicated cables going up the sleeves were lost and it looked like it was knitted with more than one dyelot as there were sections that were darker then others. I was commissioned to overdye this.



I got to work mixing dyes. I knew I'd have to go much darker to hide some of the dark browns and reds, so I chose to do a dark blue with some red undertones.

Since it was alpaca, I was super careful about stirring and agitating it. Once it sucked up all the dye, I left it in the dye pot overnight to cool before attempting to rinse it.

Voila! A new sweater emerged in a classy-ass navy blue, with darker shades taking place of the barfy brown and black.



Cables usually get lost when you use darker colors, but compared to the busybody yarn this started out as, you can now actually see the cables clearly.



Ahhhh, much better now.

Damson

I picked out the Damson pattern for my travels last month. It's mostly garter and stockinette stitch with some yarn overs thrown in. Easy to memorize and fairly mindless. I pulled out a skein of Malabrigo sock that has been in my stash for a while, waiting for the right project to call home:



It's in Botticelli Red. I actually thought it would be used for a pair of sexy vampy lacy socks, but the Damson called to it instead.

I cranked through this shawl and had it pretty much done within the week. It even made the trek with me to the top of Pilatus:



And then crap crapity crap crap crap. I ran out of yarn on the last row. I considered doing the scallop edging and bind-off in a contrasting color, but that just screams "I've run out of yarn". I've decided to break my yarn diet (as this is truly an emergency) and buy another skein of Malabrigo. I know that the dye lots may not match up, but I'm hoping it would be similar enough to not be a huge difference.

I guess that my little personal indulgence of not swatching for scarves and shawls and other non-fitted things has just come back to bite me in the ass.

Has Anyone Had This Happen?

Please tell me yes.

I'm working on the Snapdragon Tam. It's a bit complex so it requires some concentration to follow the pattern, but it's well written and not terribly difficult. I started it on the plane ride home on Sunday and I've been able to get a few rows in on the bus every morning this week.

I picked it up yesterday morning and I could not, for the life of me, figure out what was going wrong. I was at the start of a new row, but the pattern had ceased to make sense and fit in with the existing pattern. I searched for my mistakes, went back to see if I accidentally skipped a row or lost my mind on the previously row and interpreted it wrong. Crossed my cables the wrong way? Nope, they look ok.

I spent way too much time on this. I checked Ravelry and Ysolda's website for corrections or anyone having similar problems, but got nothing but raves about the pattern editors. Finally, as I was about to frog it back a few rows to start out where I thought I had a grip on things, I noticed something. I had two stitch markers designating the beginning of the round. The first one was correct, and the second one must have been lying around loose in my project bag and slipped onto the needles in the exact spot where I had stopped. So I wasn't at the beginning of the round after all, HA! I simultaneously felt relief that I didn't have to tink back and I wasn't crazy, but extremely dumb that I didn't just hold the work back a few inches and see the bigger picture and save my self an hour of angst.

Sneaky stitch marker.