Vogue Knitting Spring/Summer 2008

Welcome back to another round of 'is this supposed to be high fashion?' starring your Vogue Knitting editorial team, Zoolander, and some yarn. As always, anything in quotes is from the magazine, all other text is mine, and I refer to the patterns by number, not page. I've tried to summon a good rage for the entertainment of my Beloved Readers, but all I can gather up is disgust.


There are a couple good articles in this issue, which is why I'm not kicking myself harder for paying SEVEN FUCKING DOLLARS for this thing. Meg Swansen discusses Latvian mittens, their social and economic niche (haha, I typed niche - enough sinus meds for me!) and basics of how to knit them. She includes a basic pattern that's as useful - or moreso - than anything else in the magazine. There's more ass-kissing of Nicky Epstein in the 'signature style' article, showing details of how to make the first pattern which should really be included in the instructions and not called an article. (I really like Nicky Epstein's work, but come on, can we profile SOMEONE else?) Excellent article by Lily Chin, again, this time on waist shaping and making it work for you. An article on women who knit their own wedding dresses, which seems to be needless torture on a stressful day, but to each their own. Shirley Paden has an article on how to design and work with lace patterns, which is probably worth the cost of the magazine.


1. Bag knit with beaded silk, with crocheted accents. Looks like something straight out of the Victorian era. This is cutting edge high fashion?






First section, "EcoLogic". "Enviro-friendly fibers are easy on the earth and look cool in the heat." Yeah. They are. But most of these aren't enviro-friendly.



2. Cover sweater, a short-sleeved lace cardi-thingie. Nice, if casual. Closed with wooden buttons chopped out of a dead tree. Happy Earth Day!


3. Pullover knit from bamboo tape - mucho chemical processing there. Elbow-length sleeves, cable down the center front to just above the belly-button, after which it hangs open to that just-below-the-hips length that makes most of us look like we've got butts the size of Alaska. But it comes in plus sizes. You know, because plus sizes enjoy having their belly hang out and their butt look bigger as much as the rest of us.


4. Short-sleeved pullover, much like a tee shirt. It's got directional cables for shaping, but they seem to add bulk to the waist instead of making it look better. Also knit in bamboo, with dead-tree buttons. VERY earth-friendly.



5. Tank knit in more happy-planet bamboo yarn, in stranded color. Because TWO layers of yarn are SOOOoo cool and light for summer. And the horizontal stripes! So flattering! Actually, the shaping on this is kind of cool, and probably flattering if it were knit in a solid color. As it is, the pattern placement makes it look like a kangaroo pouch.




6. "Bark colored" sleeveless vest knit with soy silk (hug a soybean today!) Again with the big-butt length, the gut-exposing opening, and, didn't I see these at the last Grateful Dead concert? VERY avant-garde.



7. Bag knit with what looks like kite string. With the way the handles are sewn on, it will stretch all to hell out of shape if you put something heavier than a cell phone in it. THE HANDLES ARE LEATHER! AAAAH! SAVE THE COWS! MOOO! MOOO!



8. Who in FUCK shapes a dress by bunching fabric at the waist??


9. Pullover tee in HORIZONTAL STRIPES of pea green and brown. Soy and bamboo yarns used. So not flattering. So not environmentally friendly. But it comes in plus sizes!



10. Kind of cool shrug/cardi thing. Nice for sitting around in air-conditioning on full blast, I bet. Flattering. Not sure about those buttons on the boobs, but that could be worked around. And knit with corn fiber! A double whammy on the environment! I wonder if Monsanto sponsored this one. Looks like just their thing. (Didja know crop circles are really aliens protesting Monsanto? Yup, they're disgusted too.)



11. This one's misleading. Looks nice on the model, doesn't it? Neat idea, with the asymmetric cables. But a closer look reveals that there is NO shoulder or neck shaping. I don't know how flattering it would be when you actually, say, MOVED AROUND while wearing it. And I KNOW that neck line would make you feel like you were being choked. Still, if you wanted, you could alter the pattern to make it work. Sure isn't worth the seven bucks to re-write the pattern, though. And it's knit with bamboo. Har.



Next section, designer discussion of Rebecca Taylor, who is knitter to the stars. Lots of celebrity name dropping. Apparently her designs have "Grown-up Girl Power". I'm rolling my eyes so much over that one, I'm afraid they'll get stuck under my eyelids.

12. Knitted dress, made with Baby Cashmerino - so cool and light for summer. And all that fluff makes the butt look so SLIM. Sorry, it looks like seventh grade home-ec class, or a first attempt at design that came out just a little wrong in all directions.



Next section, "Floral Fixation". A floral theme for spring. Wow. That's original and cutting edge.

13. Little tank top knit with soy yarn. Lace pattern at the bottom to prevent curling, cabled shoulder straps. Cute, but the stylist blows it. I don't know whose dumbass idea it was to put it on over a peter-pan blouse. With the styling it looks totally fucking stupid. Not sure about that pea green color, either. And what's with the HAIR?



14. HOLY FUCK KAFFE FASSETT DESIGNED SOMETHING WITH SHAPING IN IT!!!! CODE RED, CODE RED, WOOT WOOT WOOT! ALERT THE MEDIA!!! Ahem. Not sure about the, shall we say, strong horizontal striping effect, but it does come in plus sizes and I do like the pattern. Fifty bucks says he designed the actual color pattern and had an assistant do the shaped design.



15. They're calling this a tunic. It's that Big Butt Length. In a color that's almost impossible to wear without looking like you've been dead a week.


16. Very simple boat-neck, sleevless tank sort of thing. Ribbing around the waist so you look like you HAVE a waist, a contrasting colored ribbon around the top to hold the shoulders in. Clever, simple design, in plus sizes.



17. Yet another deceptive photo. Looks kinda cool, doesn't it? Neutral colored cardi with a bright, floral border. Yup. Nice idea. Shame about the lazy pattern-writing. And lazy knitting. See how the bottom front swings out? That's because the stitches along the sideways-knit border were picked up wrong and essentially there's too much border for the fabric of the jacket, so it oozes sideways and makes the edge droop. And the edge itself? There's no facing or hem. I don't have any idea how they kept that edge from curling up like a shrimp in a hot skillet, but I'm betting it involved pins, glue, starch, or all of the above. From the photo, it looks like the upper front corners are trying to curl and someone pinned them down and hung the collar over top to hide the evidence. If there's one thing I despise, it's lazy knitting in high-cost magazines. Oh. But it comes in plus sizes.


18. Run-of-the-mill lace pullover tank with ribbed waist. Knit in some non-color they probably call taupe. The lace is wrong-side out; they're making it sound like some cool design feature, but I bet some dumbass assistant sewed it together wrong and they didn't have time to fix it. Very Vogue. Especially how it looks inside-out; I hear that's hot on the runways this season.



Next section is on knitting for weddings, called, har, The White Way. "Say I do in resplendent knits fit for a fairy-tale wedding." Because, you know, you don't have enough to do in the months leading up to a formal wedding, WHY NOT KNIT YOUR OWN WEDDING DRESS??



19. Lace net shrug. Knit with some clever shaping, neat cuffs, and workable edging. Not sure I'd wear this for a formal occasion, though, even if it is knit with silk. And that white? Makes me think of fish net. Sorry. The pattern is written for only one size. Lazy again. Really lazy. Fuckers.



20. Lace cardi. Nice, but this thing is straight out of the Edwardian era and I fail to see the Vogueness of it. (But then I fail to see the Vogueness of 90% of this stuff, so what do I know?) There's some very clever structural engineering going on with the peplum and cuffs, and I bet with some ribbon threaded through some of those eyelets, it would look REALLY cool. Unfortunately this sonofabitching pattern only comes in ONE SIZE - a 34 inch/86cm bust. Assholes. I think the part that pisses me off most is someone got PAID for this.



21. Lace dress. I can't decide if this is an atrocity or an insult. Maybe it's both. Among other serious problems, there is no straight shot of the front of the damn dress. The one front shot they have, the model is holding a dorky bundle of daffodils at a weird level that completely obscures any bust shaping - if there is any. But from what I can see of the neckline, I would say there's something wrong, structurally. The fabric is bagged up in the front of the neck, and pulled down low in the back, which says 'no neck shaping' to me. There's a zipper in the back. Because, you know, putting a zipper in knit lace is SO easy.


22. A lace trench-coat/peignor/half-assed coat sort of thing. It's lace, with big holes in it, so I don't think it's for warmth... But it comes in plus sizes!


23. Lace skirt. We've discussed THAT topic before. But may I add, I think it's pretty stupid to knit a floor-length skirt with mercerized cotton, if for no other reason than because it'll be impossible to hold up. Cotton is heavy. This pattern uses almost TWO POUNDS of yarn. Come on. Who is going to look good in that? If they can keep it on?


24. Ribbed camisole knit in what looks like more kite string. Upon investigating, I find out it's WORSE than kite string - Lion Brand Cotton Ease. Not the most flattering thing I've ever seen. And it has crochet accents. Is this Vogue Crochet??!!??



Urban Outfitters is our next section. "Must be able to communicate dazzlinglly in basic black and white." If this is dazzling, my ass is a paint sprayer. And... and... ZOOLANDER!!! SNAP!


25. I'd consider knitting this in a solid color and wearing it as a casual dress. If it came in my size. Fuckers. As it is... well... I used to work at a newspaper and we had stuff that looked just like the front of that, when the press was messed up and the ink wasn't feeding right.



26. Lazy-ass pattern writing at its worst. Knit in two parts, with horizontal stripes and no neck or shoulder shaping. Hangs to that lovely Big Butt Length (I'm making that an official term). And it comes in plus sizes, so we can ALL look like we have big butts! How Democratic!



27. Yet another half-assed Chanel Jacket knockoff, this one knit with what looks like dryer lint. With a soupscon of dust bunnies.



Next section is called "Shore Leave". "Meditations on a Mediterranean idyll, our sailor blues radiate a femininity that has nothing to do with the regimented world." In my sinus-addled state, the only reply I can come up with to that is, 'my ass'.


28. Casual pullover with asymmetric lace pattern. Eh. Nice enough. Don't we all have ten of these in the closet already? Is this cutting edge?



29. Blue lace tee. Clever shaping and directional knitting, to make it more flattering, nice cut, reasonable length. Very nice. Even comes in multiple sizes.


30. Lace mesh pullover. Nothing terribly original, but not bad. Comes in plus sizes. It's at Big Butt Length, though it'd be easy enough to shorten.



31. This one's the pick of the issue, I think. Nice, fitted style, classic, vertical line to the texture pattern. Not avant-garde, but I'm good with that. You could wear it forever. I'd consider knitting it with linen; it would never wear out and you could literally leave it to your grandchildren.


32. Tank with criss-cross straps. Neat styling, and it's summery. If you have no boobs or gut, go for it.



33. Short-sleeved, cross-wrapped... thing. Again, if you've got no boobs, and no gut, and not much of anything else, go for it. I think these last two are the off-the-wall-but-cool patterns of the issue. Average women aren't gonna wear them, but they're kinda cool.


I still can't believe they're charging seven bucks for this thing.

It's baaaaaaaack.

The Etsy shop lives again. (Link in the sidebar, or click here.) I really regret shutting down the shop last fall, but truly, there was a while there when getting through the day was about all I could do. So. Anyway. I listed the new stuff and re-listed the old stuff, and, well, I don't wanna be a yarn pimp or anything, but...

Somebody buy this yarn, before I'm buried. Please.


Okay, enough of the gross commercialism, some comments on the comments:

Netter mentioned a theory that one reason the pollen count near her is through the roof is because landscaping people are planting more male trees, so as to have less squishy fruit to deal with. That may be the problem up by you, but down here, we don't have that many landscaping plants that are gendered (there's a technical term for it, but damn if I remember), and I doubt most people would have the wit to do it, even if there were. In this area, I blame the problem on all the decorative grasses people use to landscape, as well as coniferous trees, and cattails in the swamps. All those species are known to produce massive amounts of pollen (hell, native Americans used to make bread out of cattail pollen - just scrape it off the stalk and away you go). According to a doctor I used to have, something about coniferous trees makes the pollen unable to trigger an allergy. That may be, but I'm of the opinion just huffing the dust in the air can cause major problems, all supposed allergies aside.

Back on Friday, with my bast fiber post, Trish asked if she could, then, make yarn out of celery fiber. I would say, technically yes. But it'd be an unholy mess, I don't know if the fiber would stay flexible, and I bet it would smell like rotten celery no matter what you did.

Roxie wanted to know about getting salad dressing out of fabric. My only suggestion is dishwashing detergent. Should break the oils down. And it's fairly safe on fabric - I wash wool with it all the time. Good luck.

Since y'all had such a good time with the bast fibers post, would you be interested in more posts about fibers through history? (And I really need to list all those color posts on the sidebar, don't I?)

Off to knit. Or spin. Or wrestle the cat.

Killer snot!!

It's that time of year again. When the fucking plants fuck each other with their fucking flowers and their fucking pollen and I've got a head full of snot and a toddler with a head full of snot and plant freak or not I wish all these fucking flowers would just fucking die already before I do. Fuckers.

Ahem.

Knitting. Right. Knitting.

Since it hurts to go outside and have sunlight hit my eyes, I spent the weekend huddled in the house, knitting. The Zen Sweater is almost done; I hope to finish it today. Then I'll chuck it in the washer and felt it a little, and the Goob can wear it as a sweatshirt for the next year or two. (Or ten minutes, the way she's been growing lately.) When I knit this sweater, it was to use the yarn and see how good my spinning was. I didn't make a gauge swatch or anything. I figured if it came out huge, I'd keep it, and if it came out small, I'd give it to the Goober. So, Goober it is.

I began a skinny scarf with the Reactor Coolant, and am pleased to report my spinning is getting more even and I think I'll be willing to sell my handspun, now.

Unfortunately, the color reminds me a lot of what I'm blowing out of my nose lately, so I didn't work on it much. But the spinning's pretty even. I'll be selling the second half of the batch of roving, after I spin it. (And that's about half done, 'cause when I wasn't knitting this weekend, I was spinning.)

So, I started a gauge swatch for my father-in-law's Christmas sweater.

...had a little trouble finding the end. Arg. This is Bendigo Woolen Mills 8-ply, in the color "Midnight Tweed". If I had easier access to this yarn (it's Australian), I'd knit with nothing else. You Aussies, I don't know why you buy anything else. This stuff is wonderful. It's gonna make my FIL a kickass sweater. (I'll be using the Morrigan cable patterns and the Steeked Jacket saddle-shoulder decreasing method. In the round. Only maniacs knit cables flat.)

The Goober has been as out of it as I have; I think the poor kid has inherited her mum's sinuses.

In between zoned-out phases, she's been acting like a two-year-old. The other night I heard the water go on in the bathroom. I was in my office, and yelled to the husbeast "Is that you in there?" and from the living room, the husbeast shouted back "Am I in whe- oh SHIT!." We both ran to the bathroom, and there the Goober was, standing on her stool in front of the sink, water running. Brushing her teeth. So we let her off easy.

As for the environmental issue, the planet may care more than I thought about my opinion. Lighting hit the house on Saturday night. We're still not sure exactly what happened and assume the lightning rod system divered the worst of it; the computers are all right, no electronics were fried, no visible damage. But we saw the flash and heard the pop at exactly the same time (when it's very close, it sounds more like a giant bubble popping than thunder) which means it was within about four hundred feet of us. The husbeast was in the bedroom and swears he heard the ZZZT! So, uh. Nice planet. I promise I'll never knit acrylic again.

The Etsy shop AND the Vogue Knitting review are coming soon. Honest. Soon as I can breathe.

Fucking flowers.

Bast fibers.

Before we start, a more general discussion of plant fibers can be found in my epic article at Knitty. This is deliberately about the weird stuff. So no leaving "that's weird" comments, I already know that. Of course it's weird. We live for weird around here.

I strongly suspect that the reason a lot of these... odd... fibers were developed/used, is because weaving is a direct offshoot of basket making, and many of these same fibers were probably VERY useful in basketry and someone probably figured, why not weave them, then?

Okeydokey. Quick botany/biology lesson before we go further. Bast fibers are made from the vascular tissues of assorted plants. Think circulatory system. Remember the xylem and phloem in bio class in ninth grade? Those. Check it out:

That's a cross-section of plant stem. (I am so not getting into dicots and monocots and primary and secondary growth and angiosperms. It's 'plant' from here on out. You want gory details, let me know. I will subject you to taxonomy and microbiology and chemistry and you will beg for mercy.) See the solid green bits in a ring, near the outer edge? Those are the phloem. They run the entire length of the stem/branch/root/leaf. You know those ungodly strings in celery? Bingo. Bast fibers.

Linen is the most common bast fiber these days, and the way it is processed is, generally, the way they're all dealt with; the plant is harvested, the stems half-broken (bent to break the outer 'husk' but not pulling the pieces apart). Then they're left to rot, with some kind of moisture, usually running water but sometimes morning dew gets the job done. Once the outer bits of stem are rotted off, the long fibers are collected, cleaned, and spun. You can do this with a kajillion other plants besides flax. Hemp and ramie are two more that are used commercially and most people have heard of. But there are as many others as there are people to process them.

Another of the more common bast fibers in history - though not in commercial production - is nettles. Yes, the stinging weeds. Same deal as linen, above. Let the plant rot, take out the fibers, spin and weave. I could only find one photo of a nettle shirt, and it's from Tibet:

Looks a lot like linen, because it IS a lot like linen, both in processing and in a molecular sense. Nettle shirts were also very popular in Northern Europe, and many shirts labeled as linen in museums are probably nettle. I assume they used nettle instead of linen because, hey, why waste valuable farmland growing something when you can get it from weeds?


Another family of plants that are used widely are the agaves. Yucca, agave, sisal, jute. All related, all used the same way. These fibers are more coarse than those previously mentioned:

These days they're mostly used for floor mats, bags for shipping produce, and shoes. But back in the day they were occasionally used for fabric. I'm unable to find any photos, but I know the Native Americans used Yucca fibers. And Agave fibers are becoming a popular textile for washcloths in high-end bath stores:

If you've ever heard of Azores Lace, they are doilies, knit (yay, knitting!) with fiber from some member of the Agave family:



Trees were also harvested for their fibers, which grew under the bark. The Haida of the Pacific NW and the ancient Japanese were known to use them. This kimono is woven from Japanese elm fiber:

And this one was woven from banana, though the fibers were from the leaves, not the trunk:

Banana fiber was popular all through SE Asia, and is still used, though not commercially. Or at least, not much.


I could go on for days. But basically, ancient people used anything they could get their hands on to weave fabric with, until the trade routes opened up and specific, specialized fibers could be traded across continents. Africans made textiles from raffia, the stripped bark of a palm tree. The Hawaiians used several members of the hibiscus family. The reason we're down to only four or five commonly used bast fibers is because they're the most useful; why kill trees for pitifully short fibers that are hard to process, when you can get nice, long, easily processed fibers from a plant grown specifically for the purpose? It's kind of sad, though, there are a lot of interesting textiles that aren't being made any more, because they're inconvenient.


And while we're discussing freaky fibers, here's the bonus round:

A fisherman's work glove, knit with, get this, the spun-together beards from shellfish. The fibery little bit on the bottom of oysters and clams, that hold them to the rocks? That part. A kajillion of them, gathered and spun and knit. Supposedly, they had to be kept in a bucket of salt water when not in use, to stay flexible. And they were so tough that men left them to their sons and grandsons.

We really will knit anything, won't we?

General ramblings.

I'm going to be doing a couple posts today, on different subjects. I wanna keep them separate, because then I can link them in the sidebar easily. One will be the Vogue Knitting review, probably. If not today, then tomorrow. The other is some information about bast fibers, because I had a couple requests after yesterday's stuff and since it involves plants, I find the subject interesting.

As for the environmental rant yesterday, I didn't mean to come across as saying we should all say 'fuck it' and knit with anything and pollute all we want. Nor did I mean to come across as some kind of purist who lives on nuts and berries in the woods. It was due in part to my education with plants, and in part just because I'm frustrated by any type of situation where people say/think one thing and do another. (I know, that makes us human. Cut me some slack. I've got a sinus infection and quite dislike being human at the moment.)

I do all I can for sensible consumption, re-use, sustainability, and all that. I drive as little as possible, knit with fibers I think are earth-friendly (and bio-degradable), use dyes and mordants that are safe and break down into even more safe chemicals. It's stupid not to; the safe stuff is as affordable and easy to find, often moreso. I just don't think that all these 'green' fads are doing much, if anything, to save the environment. When governments are filling in lakes or draining them, radically altering coast lines, and encouraging the blasting of chemicals into the atmosphere, whether or not I use plastic grocery bags really doesn't mean jack shit. I hate to be a downer, but there it is.

Take a look at this:

That's the Aral Sea in Russia in 1973. Then people started diverting rivers for cropland, for power, for larger and larger cities and every damn thing. And now it looks like this:

Actually, that photo was taken in '04, so I'm sure it looks even worse now. But you get the idea. With crap like that going on, I seriously doubt the planet gives a shit what yarn I knit with.

This sort of thing isn't new, either. We've been filling in the Persian Gulf for twelve thousand years; all that irrigation has washed most of the topsoil down the Tigris and Euphrates rivers into the Gulf. The coastline has changed hugely. The island of Java has been terraformed so extensively by humans, for so long (mostly terraces on the mountains, for farming), that geologists aren't quite sure what the original form was.

And then there are things like this:

Dubai's building resorts in the shape of date palms with dredged soil in the Gulf. Each 'tree' is expected to house HALF A MILLION people. There are at least two of them that I know of. (They're visible on Google Earth.) At least in the stone age we altered the environment so we could EAT, not so we could have nice fancy resorts with lots of coastline for our oil-guzzling yachts.

So, I hate to be a downer, but until governments get involved, really involved, what I do or don't do has little to no impact on the environment. But I still won't bury car batteries in the back yard, I promise.

Organic, my ass.

(I have decided to do the VK review in two parts, because this stage is more a massive rant than a review. Patterns tonight or tomorrow. Plus I've got a sinus infection and am pretty incoherent at the moment. And enraged.)

See that on the cover? Organic Knitting? I should have known right there. But I bought the damn magazine anyway. There may be a day I quit doing these reviews, because I'm sick to fucking death of paying such idiotic prices for shit like this.

Anyway.

Organic knitting is a myth, to begin with. Technically anything with a carbon molecule is organic, so the term has no real meaning. As for the idea of 'green' or environmentally friendly knitting, while it's certainly possible, this obsession with plant fibers as eco-friendly is just bullshit. Even organic cotton uses a lot of power for processing, and these 'new' fibers, like bamboo, sea silk, viscose (that one's not too new), soy, etc? They're some of the worst polluters in the fiber world, along with industrially grown cotton. The rayon family of fibers all require an unholy, toxic soup to break down the cellulose during the processing. (Think paper mills in the fifties, before the EPA made them clean up; same general process and mess. It's really that bad.) Cotton of course uses all kinds of pesticides and crap, and even organics use dyes and mordants and processing oils that are chemically icky.

Green knitting is for those people who use canvas shopping bags and drive around in their gas-guzzling SUVs and feel all smug for being environmentally friendly. The same assholes who buy huge houses that suck power and cost a fortune to heat and cool, and buy organic produce and pat themselves on the back for it. Next time someone says "it's ORGANIC!" like that makes it safe and friendly, I'm feeding a nice dose of organically grown belladonna.

There's no way to do ANYTHING without environmental impact. There are six billion plus people on the planet. Let's get real. Please. Before I lose my mind.

For low-impact knitting, which IS possible, humanely raised animal fibers are actually better than most of these plant fibers. (And I won't even BEGIN on those PETA assholes who would rather poison the soil than shear a sheep.) Of the plant fibers, I'd say the least polluting ones to grow and process are the bast fibers - linen, hemp, ramie, and nettle (among other, more obscure ones like yucca and beech bark). If they're allowed to rot on their own and not chemically broken down. Otherwise they're just as bad as the bamboo and soy silk.

So now Vogue Knitting is claiming to go green. Because it's a fad. And they're using pollution-heavy yarns to do it.

I hate those assholes.

(On the other hand, I think that recycled sari silk yarn and other recycled fibers are an awesome idea and that attitude is just what this planet REALLY needs.)

A note from the dark side.

Where all the wool is black, and all the knitting is knaughty. [Insert evil laugh here.]

Finished plying the first half of the Reactor Coolant. Got 350 yards out of it (!!!) I won't be selling this batch; I want to knit it up and see how good the spinning is. Depending, I will probably sell the second half of the batch in spun form. If anyone wants regular yarn dyed in that color scheme, or some unspun roving, let me know. As always, I'm happy to do custom orders and they come with free shipping.

My hands are killing me due to the spin-fest and my efforts to finish the Zen sweater so I can start knitting up the Reactor Coolant (which isn't even dry yet). I'm also working up the motivation to dye the rest of the wool I've got here - another experiment, this one titled "Citrus Grove". (Unless it looks like shit, then I'll call it "Bong Water".) I'm not looking forward to listening to the husbeast bitch about the vinegar smell again, but I've got two pounds of wool coming in the mail to dye, so I should probably finish dyeing what I've got before it gets here. (Ha.)

Picked up a copy of Vogue Knitting's spring/summer issue last night. I was sneering before I even picked it up off the magazine rack at the store. Brace yourselves. Review for that, probably tomorrow. And the Zoolander model is back. I will endeavor to restrain myself. But probably fail.

Now I'm off to knit, or spin, or dye, or snort wool, or go insane.

Wait. Already did that.

Reactor coolant.

That's what I'm gonna call this color. (Never mind that not all reactor coolant is radioactive, and very few radioactive isotopes glow. Quit bogging this down with facts. I get enough of that stuff from the husbeast.) I've got half of the roving spun into singles, and half of THAT plied. I started off with four ounces - I weighed it - and yet I keep pulling wool off this stuff and the remaining wool NEVER GETS SMALLER. We need to call in Stephen Hawking to investigate, because I'm sure some laws of physics are being broken, somewhere. I'll be able to knit a car cover with the yarn if this keeps up.

For those asking about how I dyed the roving, well. I'm going to write a Knitty article about this, I think, but to give the highlights, I soaked it overnight in 50/50 vinegar and water. Then I drained off most of the liquid and poured in more liquid with dye in it and left it for about half an hour to soak through the whole dish of wool (glass is good for this 'cause you can look at the underside and see if the dye is all through yet). Then it went into the oven at 350F until the water was clear (meaning all the dye had stuck to the yarn - that's how to get these intense colors from food coloring). I carefully drained off the water, squished out the remaining liquid by putting the roving between two towels and standing on it, then hung it up to dry. That was it. Remember, agitation and temperature shock is the double kiss of death for working with wool; move it around as very little as possible. There have been a few mildly felted spots - very small - that have turned up during spinning, but with practice I think I can avoid them altogether. They're so small they MAY have been there to begin with, before I dyed it.

The Zen sweater has been SO relaxing, I zoned out through a couple rounds and missed some yoke decreases. So I have to go back and tink out about five hundred stitches and try again. I forgot my motto, "Everything in moderation, including moderation."

-... -

The Goober is coming down off a spring cold or hay fever or something. She's been running a low fever since Sunday and has been off her food. The not eating worries us more than the temperature; normally this kid is an eating machine. In a way, it's been kind of nice, with lots of cuddles and lap-sitting.

And attitude. Don't forget the attitude. (That photo was taken right before she spit bright pink cough syrup down the front of that nice white shirt.)

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go order two pounds of undyed wool roving. The husbeast is going to shit bricks.

Sekhmet, you fucker.

After she crawled up, uninvited, she decided she didn't like the motion caused by my treadling, and BIT MY LEG.

I fucking love merino.

I started thinking the other night - I know, I know, that's always dangerous - and decided if I was going to use the malachite green roving as a gift, I should probably hone my spinning skills a bit (okay, a lot) more before I screw it up. From knitting the Zen sweater, it has become apparent that my spinning is a lot less even than I think it is.

So I dyed half of the merino roving I had laying around.

The trick seems to be using a lot of mordant. In this case, vinegar. The husbeast has carried on for two (three?) days now about how the house smells like he stuck his head in a pickle barrel. I may have to remind him of the weekend he went drag-racing and blew the differential out of the truck three times, to get him to shut up. Like he's never smelled up the house.

Anyway, the roving came out a bit, uh, well.

Bright. I think bright's the proper word for this. As I've been spinning it, I've been trying to come up with a name for these colors, and all I can think of is "Summer Landscape on Acid." I dunno, call me crazy, but I'm not sure it's good to be refrencing illegal drugs in my color names. (I've already blown that with Purple Trainwreck, actually. Turns out it's the same name as a high-yield mairjuana hybrid out of British Columbia. I SWEAR I did not know this when I named it. Honest. I swear. Stoners keep showing up on my blog after doing searches for the stuff and finding yarn instead, poor bastards.)

So I've been spinning the merino. I'd been told by quite a few people that I shouldn't start with merino because it's too slippery or something, but this is the nicest fiber I've spun so far - long staple, soft, smooth, easily drafted, you name it. It's like a tactile hot fudge sundae. Though the colors are still, um, yeah.

Maybe it'll mellow out a bit when I ply it. But somehow, I doubt it.

I remember that.

While poking through my knitting archives this week for photos for the seamless sweaters info, I ran into a bunch of other stuff... mostly charts for stranded-color knitting that I'd worked out from different sources, and never knit. But it jogged something in my memory, and I dug around in the gauge swatch pile, and turned up this:

I took this straight off a chart in "A History of Hand Knitting", from one of the very old 'Coptic' socks. This was knit in cotton at a much larger gauge, with the idea of producing a tunic-style sweater/jumper.

Maybe I should do that.

There were some other good photos in the archives, like the doily I knit while I was caring for my mother (to keep my hands busy so I couldn't strangle my family):

This is - I think - the last doily in my Early Doily Phase (I won't rule out a Late Doily Phase, later in life). It's the Daffodil design from one of Marienne Kinzel's books. I knit it with crochet cotton on size two/3mm needles, from the center out. It's about three feet across and used, if I recall correctly, about 1300 yards of cotton. Looking at this I have the sudden urge to knit an epic doily, but I'll lay down until the urge passes. (And I am SO not gonna think about the 1000 yards of alpaca/silk laceweight sitting in The Pit. And the turquoise beads.)

There were also my first - and only - pair of mittens, knit in something like 2002.

I used some traditional Norgi pattern or other, and Dale of Norway yarn. They were a gift to a friend of mine who is anything but traditional, so I thought the color combo with the traditional pattern was fitting.


In other news, the husbeast bought is own iPod, a Nano, and is driving me utterly batshit running back and forth between our desks, synching our two play lists and music archives. I'm waiting for the editorial comments on my playlist; he seems to think listening to Queen, Ozzy, Madonna, and Bob Marley in the same sitting is strange. His head's really going to hurt once I start loading my classical CDs. Bach and old VanHalen make a good combo, too.


And further evidence the Goober hath inherited the mechanical bent of both sides of the family:

She keeps turning over her toys to fix them.


The husbeast is blasting Slipknot and showing the Goober how to mosh. She's giggling.


Oh, and a word on the wool I'm spinning. I want to make a three-ply yarn with it, which means I have to spin the single 1/3 the thickness of the final yarn. Plus handspuns bloom quite a lot when you wash them. (At least mine do.) The yarn I am knitting the Zen sweater with was intended to be sport weight, and after washing it came out as a mostly DK-weight, knitting up at five stitches per inch. So, really, I don't intend to knit lace with this stuff. Or spend the rest of my life knitting a sweater. The color looks like something my sister-in-law would like (the one I never know what to buy for, at Christmas), so it may be turning into a hat and scarf, or a wrap, or, I dunno. But whatever it is, it'll be Zen. I think I'm in a phase. Zen good. Ohm.

Sekhmet, you fucker.

She's figured out the laptop gets warm. I especially love when her nose hits the 'delete' key.

Ah. Much better.

Which is a pet phrase of the Goob's. I'm borrowing it.

When I was a kid, in NE Ohio (Stark County, for those of you who know the area), I used to have this weird thing going on where I slept through every February. Twenty hours a day or more, crashed out on any horizontal surface I could find; bed, couch, occasionally floor if I was desperate. My mother took me to doctor after doctor, and I heard theories a-plenty for this odd behavior - mitrol valve prolapse (which I do have but it's no big deal), a 'Mono-like virus', Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Seasonal Affective Disorder, blah blah blah. Between fifth and ninth grade, I think I had every medical test imaginable run on me, and nothing much turned up.

I think I just hate shitty weather.

Anyway, every spring, it's like I wake up and realize the sun's shining and I'm a bundle of energy (okay, maybe a small espresso cup of energy), and suddenly life is good and I wanna do everything. All at once. That day was today.

Yay.

Got the second sleeve on the Zen Sweater and am now knitting the yoke. I've been taking photos as I go, and at some point soon will do some kind of 'details of percentage sweaters' kind of post, with gory details of what I do to make things go as smoothly as possible.

I'm contemplating a KnittySpin article on beginner spinning, and some of the things I've found helpful as I've learned.

The wool finally got here, and I've already begun spinning the green:


The second photo of it on the bobbin is more accurate in terms of color; the top photo is too bright. It kind of reminds me of malachite. It's another Zen sweater. For someone. Dunno who the victim will be, yet. There's also some white merino, and I'm going to dye it with some easter egg dyes. At that point I'll decide if I'm gonna spin it, or sell it as-is.

And, best of all, I'm making the first pitcher of iced tea of the summer. But not the last. Aaaaaaah.

This explains a lot.

Apparently I have given birth to the reincarnation of Carmen Miranda.



That was totally unprompted. Came up with the dance all on her own; all I did was get the camera and ask her to do it again. Almost makes up for the Day From Hell on Tuesday. But she still won't sing Dean Martin with me.

Spring has finally sprung here, and it's gotten warm enough to enjoy sitting outside for more than ten minutes. Remember "Where I knit?" well, here's where I'm going to be for the next little while (until sweltering humidity chases me inside again, probably by mid-May):

The whole porch needs a good scrub. I'm hoping to do it tomorrow, weather permitting. I'll let the Goober help. She hasn't gotten muddy recently.

And the Zen sweater is coming along nicely.

Almost done with the second sleeve; need to start counting rounds and figure out how much more sleeve I need to knit.

For any beginning spinners out there, I've got a suggestion. As soon as you produce something you think is acceptable, knit it up. Doesn't have to be a sweater, but SOMETHING. It's very educational. This yarn is a lot more uneven than I thought, but there's only been one spot that was so bad I had to cut it out. And even that bit would have held, it was just as thin as sewing thread. Not bad.

I've given up on the Corriedale roving of doom (I'm chucking it in the back of The Pit - formerly known as the yarn closet - for when I get a sudden, wild hair to try needle felting), and am waiting for some new wool to get here in the mail. Should get here tomorrow; I'm thinking of spinning up the next round and doing another zen sweater, this time for the Goober. ('Cause we both need sweaters, what with summer coming and all.) Until then, gonna go knit.

A field guide to seamless sweaters.

I had some questions and requests for photos, so I dug around in my archives (good grief) and found some decent shots of the styles under discussion. I'll also try to give a better explanation of what I mean by seamless vs. sorta seamless.

The first three yoke types I mentioned, raglan, saddle shoulder, and circular yoke, are all variations unvented (her word) by Elizabeth Zimmerman. There's a fourth style I forgot to mention last time, the box-the-compass yoke. It's halfway between a raglan and a circular yoke, creating an octagonal stripe around the neck instead of a circular one like in a yoke, or a square one in a raglan. All but box-the-compass methods are explained in "Knitting without Tears" by Elizabeth Zimmerman. The box-the-compass is found in "Meg Swansen's Knitting".

All four of these sweaters are knit the same way: You knit the body and arms up to the arm pits, join it all together, then do some sort of decreasing (therin is the only difference in these styles), up to the neck where some sort of hem or ribbing is made and then the whole thing is bound off. All that's left are some stitches at the arm pit to graft together. (It depends on the gauge and the size of the sweater, but in reasonable sizes and gauges, it's about fifteen or twenty stitches.)That's it. The end. No other fussing. I guess if we're getting really technical I should be calling these 'no fuss seamless' or something. Anyway, here are the different types. (Other than box-the-compass, because I've never knit one, but it's VERY similar to the yoke style.)

RAGLAN:

As you can see, there are four decrease points, directly above where the sleeve meets the body on each round. This is (in my opinion) the easiest of the three styles I'm showing here, and is flattering to nearly everyone. I've heard very thin women with broad shoulders complain that raglan shoulders aren't flattering, but to be honest, I've never seen anyone look bad in one of these. Mind you, this style is meant to be loose and casual; you start doing a tailored fit, and while it still may look good, it's going to be a lot more trouble.

SADDLE SHOULDER:

Whether you believe it or not, this method of decreasing is very similar to the raglan. Instead of diagonal lines of decreases, the decreasing is fudged to give straight vertical seams, with a shoulder strap across the top. With little fuss, you can do fun things like run a cable up the arm and across the strap:

In terms of knitting skill, I'd say this is the hardest of the styles, but in terms of math, and figuring out the percentages and doing the pattern from scratch, this is as easy as the raglan is. Which is to say, very.

CIRCULAR YOKE:

It's thought this style was invented by Bohus Stickning, to show off beautiful color combinations like the one shown above (which is taken straight off one of their patterns, the Blue Shimmer). If you were to knit one of these babies in one color (though I don't know why you would), the knitting skills required would be on par with the raglan - very simple. However. If you're doing stranded color, or writing your own pattern using the percentage system, or BOTH, it can get complex fast. I re-wrote the pattern for the sweater shown above, and found myself doing stuff like "increase by 25% to a number of stitches divisible by 12". (The divisible by stuff was so that I could fit entire pattern repeats onto the yoke.) So the math is pretty involved. Not hard, it's still middle-school level math skill, but it's certainly more elaborate than the raglan or saddle-shoulder.

The box-the-compass yoke is a sort of hybrid between raglan and circular yoke; it has stacked decreases in columns, like the raglan does, but instead of four columns, there are eight. Looks kind of cool, but the math is as elaborate as the circular yoke, if not moreso. (I was considering this yoke for the Zen sweater, until I looked at the math involved and thought 'that's not Zen, that's math'.)



This brings us to what I think of as 'semi-seamless'. There are literally dozens of variations on the theme, but ultimately what it comes down to is knitting the body as one big tube, either steeking the arm holes or knitting the back and front flat (oh yeah, two-color knitting in purl, VERY zen. Not), then joining the shoulders. Usually a three-needle bindoff is used for the shoulders, but there are other decorative methods and grafting is also done. Then, the sleeves are either knit from the cuff up and grafted into the body (or sewn or several other even more complicated techniques similar to a three-needle bindoff), or else sleeve stitches are picked up around the arm hole and knit downward, dragging the entire sweater around and around and around on gradually faster/shorter rounds.

Yes, technically, these sweaters are seamless. From a purely structural viewpoint there are no seams. However. Once you've grafted in a sleeve, you'll be sure it FEELS like sewing the damn thing together. And while picking up the sleeve and knitting downward is no-sew/graft, by the time you get to the wrist of the second sleeve, you'll feel like all you've done is twist the sweater in a circle over and over for half your life. Not to mention, if you're really nit-picky, the pick-up-and-knit-down throws off the pattern no matter what you do, because the body of the sweater is knit UPWARD, and the sleeves are knit DOWNWARD. (Unless you're knitting from the neck down, but that's another issue for another post.)

I've knit lots of sweaters this way, and this method accounts for the vast majority of traditional European knitting, including Norwegian and Fair-Isle. Here's a Dale of Norway to illustrate the point:

This baby was knit upward, with steeked arm holes and a three-needle bindoff across the shoulders. I then knit the sleeves from the wrist up (so that the 'lice' on the body matched the 'lice' on the sleeves) and grafted the sleeves into the body after cutting the steeks. (I also steeked the neck opening.) Again, while this sweater is technically seamless, I spent as much time doing finishing (mostly grafting) as I have on seamed sweaters. Really the difference is a technical/structural one, not method/time spent.

There you go. More than you ever wanted to know. Now go knit your own. Ohhhhhm.

Death to princess potties.

And the husbeasts who buy them.

When I got pregnant, I swore I would NOT NOT NOT turn into the type of mother who tells everyone in hearing all the gory details of their child's potty training. So I'm not gonna.

I'm gonna bitch about the motherfucking princess potty.

The husbeast went out and bought this damn thing (though he didn't pay near that ridiculous price for it) when we started the inevitable process with the Gooob. Can he get something servicable? NO. He gets something full of princesses and pink plastic with glitter. So not only do I have to deal with the usual issues of accidents and the constant questions about bodily functions, no, I ALSO HAVE TO DEAL WITH SCREAMING TEMPER TANTRUMS BECAUSE I WON'T LET HER PLAY WITH THE PRINCESSES. She wants to drag the damn thing all over the house. I'm making her leave it in the bathroom.

Fucking princess potty. There oughta be a law.

-... -

Due mostly to the above issue, I've been knitting on the zen sweater as if my life depended on it. Zen good. Zen so good, I may knit another one when I'm done with this. I finished up the body (to the arm pits) and am now halfway up one of the sleeves:

If I can squeeze both sleeves out of this ball of yarn (and things are looking good), I will have enough yarn to knit this in one color, and can do a raglan, which is what I want. We'll see. This knitting has gone so smoothly and wonderfully, I'm considering dumping the Newgrange idea for my mother-in-law's Christmas sweater (this is how it always goes, when it comes to doing my own designs), and instead spinning some of this fiber and knitting something more Zen-like from White Lies Designs. I'm quite attracted to the jacket shown on the home page, and think it would look good in a tweed similar to the peacock stuff I'm knitting now, except maybe in shades of brown and coral.

This means if and when I ever get to Newgrange, I can keep it for myself.

Still not sure what I'm gonna do, I'm going to finish the Zen sweater and the Russian prime are done before I make a decision. Maybe I can knit my father-in-law's sweater while I'm thinking about it.

Anyway. Zen knitting, good. Princess potties, bad.