Retro Knit Friday!

I am almost finished with the Simple Shrug. My gauge is spot on, yet I will eventully have used 6 balls of yarn instead of the 3 or 4 called for in the pattern. What were they thinking? In the large size the sleeves are very long, 66" across the whole thing, not counting the 3" cuffs. Is that the reason the mannequin has her wrists hidden in the pattern photo? Luckily, my daughter has long arms and likes the arms of sweaters on the long side. If you make the decreases and increases full fashioned (3 stitches into the garment), the resulting seam looks a lot better than that shown in the picture on the pattern. I also added some short rows to the collar area. The bind off on the ribbing must be very loose or the garment does not work. I ended up using a single crochet bind off which is very stretchy and gives the collar area a nice flare.


I really like the old 'Blouse' pamphlets put out by Jack Frost in the forties and fifties. Back then, women knitted a lot of sweaters to be used as blouses. I suppose this was a way to expand your wardrobe in a time of fabric shortages. The booklets are full of good design ideas, even though the patterns are only offered in one size, usually a size 16. They must have assumed that all knitters were skilled enough to draft out the patterns to fit themselves. In addition to the cute short sleeved pullovers, the booklets also have some interesting cardigans for the Rosie the Riveter of the time. Lots of them use bulky weight yarn, because the new working woman had less time to knit a tiny gauge.









The color pictures are from a booklet from the fifties. Tiny gauges and chic styling!

New Project

I have started the Simple Shrug for my daughter. http://www.caron.com/projects/shadows/sss_shrug.html

The pattern calls for 4 balls of yarn in the larger size, but holy cow, I have used up three balls already and am only half done. I checked the gauge, measurements etc, but plainly, the instructions are daft. I started the ribbing for one of the cuffs last night, then did about two of the increases when I got totally unenamored with the stockinette stitch, so I hung the whole thing on the machine and am now more than half done in just a few hours of off and on knitting. I took a break to go and buy three more balls of yarn, because either I am knitting the biggest shrug known to man or their calculations were way way off. I am using the green colorway because M likes green.

The garment is knit from side to side which is why it is so long that it is dragging on the floor. The other picture, the closeup, shows the color gradation in the yarn. The green is more like the green in the machine picture though.

After I finish knitting it, which should take about another hour, I will seam it up and pick up the rib border stitches to do by hand. You can see from the photos that I do not have a ribber on my machine, but I like hand ribbing better anyway.

After this is completed, I am going to make another short-sleeved sweater with some red Fiesta, changing the neckline to a V-neck.

Best of the Best

I've got nothing knitworthy to talk about today, but hey, this is my blog and I can talk about anything I like. So I am going to talk about the best restaurant coconut cream pie ever. That would be the pie at the Colonnade (http://tribes.tribe.net/atlantageorgia/photos/4c26c4c0-0260-4c95-b28b-866be541dfb6). That is not fluffy egg white stuff on the top, that is whipped cream, the way it should be. Just about everything at the Colonnade is excellent. I get to make one more trip to Atlanta to see the girl graduate with a Masters, so a stop for pie is already on my schedule. And I have already Googled yarn shops to visit. Doesn't hurt to be prepared, even this far in advance.

Chili Peppers

I did not knit at all this weekend, no wait, I did a few rows on the ribbing for a new pink sweater, but mostly worked on the new afghan. I do not have a lot of afghan experience, having only made one before to use up my scraps. The whole idea of using up my knitting scraps was a complete failure because I ended up buying some of this yarn and some of that yarn, and now have more scraps from the afghan then I did to begin with. But I digress.

I don't do much crochet except as a trim on knitting, and to make white cotton laces, but my MIL makes granny square baby afghans that are really beautiful. It all depends on the quality of workmanship and the colors you choose. Crochet works best at a smaller gauge, I think. Anyhow, I have a dark brown rug and a golden tan sectional couch, but an earthtone color scheme does not thrill me overly much. I wanted to pep it up a bit, to match the Mexican inspired mat I have on a table and another runner on my husband's grandfather's old trunk. I found a variegated yarn in red/red orange/yellow, some acid green, and black for background. I have to make 120 squares, and I try to do one a day, since it is a little boring and I would rather be knitting. I should be done with it before next Christmas at the very latest. It just reminds me of chilis and all good things. Right now I am about 1/6 done with the thing. Someday, I hope to cover the lame extra cushions that came with the couch in red, orange and acid green. Muy bonita! My husband loves to lie on the couch covered by the afghan to watch TV, so it is a necessary living room accessory.

I am not sure what I am going to put on for a border, but I found an extra ball of the green, so it will include that to tone down all the red hotness.

Retro Knit Friday!

I felt like getting out of the house today so I went to some nearby antique shops and found some new-to-me knitting pamphlets. Just look at that gold dress. The gauge is fairly small so it must have taken forever to knit. Looks pretty cool in a Hollywoody way though.

The red dress with the jacket has a skirt that is yards around. Around and around in stockinette. You don't see too many skirts knit nowadays, but the ladies at the store used to make them. Some of my older pamphlets have order forms in them with which ladies could order a skirt knit for them to match the sweater they were making.

It must have seemed very comfortable to have a knitted dress in the days before you could buy doubleknits.

This book is from 1948, and the clothes are starting to have a 50's look to them with the longer post-war skirts and nipped-in waist, but the 40's shoulder pads are still in evidence.

A lot of the dresses were two pieces or suits, but the turquoise dress, which I really like, seems to be one piece. I wonder if the dresses, when completed, were hung up on a hanger or folded and put away in a drawer.

I remember some of the dress yarns my grandmother had. They were not as stretchy as sweater yarns and often had interesting finishes like crinkling or slubs. I like the mock smocking on the turquoise bodice, I will have to look up the stitch instructions to see how they did it.

The other two fashions are tops with the faux pleated shirts that often accompany knitted outfits. They were done by casting on a huge number of stitches (one pattern I saw said to cast on 790 sts) for the bottom, then start the ribbed pattern, gradually making the decreases at specified intervals until you reached the waist. Elastic was usually applied to the waist, sometimes with a zigzagged chainstitch semi-casing to hold it in place.

Where I Keep My Knitting Needles

I have many many knitting needles, most of them old and peculiar. I keep them in the very old Bucilla blue box that the yarn for the only dress I ever knit came in. I knit a pink dress out of Bucilla Paradise because the management of the store where I was an instructor demanded it, and it was cute, but alas, those were the days of the mini so the dress is now useless. Not that I could even squeeze into it now, but still. I have kept the box in one piece through massive applications of book tape. Paradise was a yarn made of nylon or banlon or some such manmade fiber, it was crinkly and quite nice for a dress and had excellent drape. Lots of ladies loved it for cruisewear and other traveling because you could squish it in a suitcase with no bad consequences.

I keep the circulars in a separate plastic container. The crochet hooks are kept in two places, an old pen box and a quilted scissor holder/crochet hook caddy. The two places resulted when the silver colored pen box went walkabout and was missing for maybe 5 years before I found it again in the sewing room. I had to buy a whole new supply of crochet hooks.

Why is it that you can never have too many needles? My daughter was showing me her sock needles from KnitPicks, and you can tell just by holding them how nice they are. I have to get some of those, I am thinking.

Knitting Sidekicks

Today I am mourning the demise of my old reliable washing machine, well, I have to admit it wasn't too reliable in its old age, and cost us lots of repair bills, but I was still sad to see it go. I was used to it, after all. Yesterday it was hauled out of my life and a new machine was installed in its place. Now I have to figure out how to work this new one.

Here is a picture of the Must Have Cardigan in progress. I was having a lot of annoyance at flipping from the instructions for one cable to another, so one day I typed in all the instructions and made a spread sheet for rows 1 through 184. I love cut and paste! I mark every 20 rows with a safety pin so I always know exactly where I am in the instructions. This is a hangover from machine knitting where there is a row counter on the machine and instructions are written with reference to row number. You can see the pins in the picture.








I made a holder for the needles I am currently using out of some upholstery fabric samples. It originally had ties but they were too short, so I cut them off and use the circle of black elastic instead. The pink contraption is a small carrier for sock needles and other implements. I crocheted it out of scap yarn, then lined it with a cotton upholstery sample fabric and attached some teeny scissors to it with a length of crocheted chain. The front is stuck full of yarn needles and safety pins and whatever else I am using at the moment. I bought a lot of those canvas shopping bags at Trader Joe's and use one for each current project. That way, I can grab whichever project I want to work on at a moments notice, and everything I need is in the bag.

Kinokuniya

I love Japanese knitting magazines. I went to a knitting machine symposium that was held in Hayward in October a few times, and one of the vendors had some old Zazas that I picked up for about a dollar apiece, plus some other random publications. A few years ago, I found out that the Japanese bookstore, Kinokuniya, had a branch in San Jose, and I was determined to find it. It turns out to be right off the freeway at Saratoga Avenue, and is a bright and beautiful store. My only complaint with it is that everytime I go there, the craft magazines are in a different place, and since they file them all in shelves like books, if you can't really read the spines, you are out of luck. However, the staff is very helpful. The magazines are not cheap at all, but are very worth having. I love the Japanese production values on the magazines, glossy paper, beautiful photos.

My favorite magazine is mostly cable knits. The pattern I am going to knit one of these days, when the Must Have is finished, is this one, a cabled hoodie. I have a book called Japanese For Machine Knitters, and this helped me to decipher the pattern. This volume had some really attractive kids sweaters and a V-neck cardigan I would also like to knit.

A lot of the magazines have pictorials on knitting techniques and lots of great graphed stitch patterns. They seem to excel in the set-in sleeve, which a lot of the current magazines have on most of the designs. Just to look through them for design ideas is worth the money.

The clerk at Kinokuniya told me that Zaza is no longer being published, and the newer ones I saw are mostly cut & sew, but in its day it was a terrific, beautiful publication.

Sad Tale

I can remember the time when you could go to the local drug store and they sold yarn. The yarn was wool, in 4 0z skeins, and cost about 88 cents. I bought some nice heather grey and made a cardigan from the top down. Right about the time I was almost finished with the sweater, including basting in grosgrain ribbon to face the fronts, my husband got a job in Washington D.C. and we left California for a great adventure in the East. When we were all settled in at our new apartment in Virginia, I couldn't find the sweater to finish it up and actually wear it, since I was now faced with snow and ice and other unfamiliar weather oddities. We lived on the far edge of the country for about 5 years and then came home to a new job. One of the first things I saw after we moved back was a family member (his family) WEARING MY GREY SWEATER! The poor sweater was all worn and still with the facing ribbon just basted in. Why didn't they send it to me or at least tell me they had it? I had looked for it for years. Needless to say, I said "Hey, that's my sweater!" and took it back. And here it is lo, these many years later, still with the ribbon just basted in.

More Retro Sweaters

Today is all about something old and something new. For a new thing, I tried cooking shrimp. The only other shrimp I have ever cooked were bought fresh off the boat in Galvaston, and that is a totally different enterprise from dealing with the huge bag of frozen stuff I got at the Costco yesterday. The inlaws are very very fond of a shrimp salad so that is what I gave them for Sunday dinner. Learned how to defrost shrimp in brine and gently steam them to doneness. They, and the spouse, say it was good, but I was so tired of messing with shrimp by that time that they ate mondo salads and I had an egg salad sandwich. For old, I have been ransacking my chest of drawers to find old sweaters I had forgotton about. Here is the old V-neck pullover I used to wear in high school and college. It was featured in McCall's Needlework at the time. I used to wear this sweater with a grey wool skirt I made out of an old overcoat that had belonged to my father or grandfather. That grey wool was first a coat (the wool was very thick and closely woven), then my skirt, and then cut up and rolled into a bolster for a bobbin-lace-making pillow.

The vest is part of a series of vests I made. I always liked this pattern (which I designed) and now have adapted the pattern to include sleeves. The garter bands are manipulated to lie flat around the curves.

The crabapple down the street is blooming, and suddenly, there is a patch of tulips in the front yard. I don't remember there being that many tulips there, only one bloomed last year. In honor of beautiful Spring, here are some pictures from our yard:

Timeless Fashion

One of the things I like the best about sweater design is how the styles are so classic. You can look at the patterns of 50 years ago and still use them today. Here are some designs from several old pamphlets of mine:




I love this illustration and have two pamphlets with work by the same 50's artist. Don't the ladies look chic? I don't think I have ever managed to look chic, but one lives in hope.

This sweater is amusing because it has buttons but doesn't button, and an opening down the front that doesn't extend through the ribbing. A close-up view shows the snaps that are under the button band, which pull on the knitting in an unattractive way. I like the lace panels and the 3/4 sleeves though.

The next is a cable cardigan with a nice slim fit. People were certainly slim and fit after the war, and I like the way clothes got longer and skirts got fuller when rationing went away. The armholes were high and tight in these old patterns.

The capelet is right in style now, except for the cutesy bow and collar. This model is in a lot of photos and looks to me like the schoolteacher, Miss Landers, in Leave It To Beaver.

As long as we are talking about old pictures, here's one of me a few years after I first started knitting

Little Sweaters

Making baby and child sweaters is a favorite pastime of mine. My in-laws used to own a store that sold country decor and handmade items, and I used to sell my sweaters there and at a Christmas boutique in a museum. I would make pullovers and cardigans, usually with duplicate stitch designs or lace panels. I found that there was a market for really dressy white and pastel child sweaters, since it is hard to find a nice dressy sweater for special occasions like a confirmation or wedding. They eventually sold the store, and my sister-in-law is working hard to put a similar store online, so maybe the future holds more sweater selling for me. One day a few years ago, I took my little niece to the park, and there was one of my sweaters on a three-year-old blond cutie. It was a white cardigan with a large mama duck on the bottom of one front and a line of her chicks on the other front extending around to the back. I was pleased to see that the sweater, which had to be a few years old, still looked as good as the day I made it. I chatted with the mom and told her that I was the one who made the sweater, and she said it was a favorite of her daughter's, given to her by an aunt, and that it was in and out of the wash several times a week.

This white sweater is only waiting for the finishing and buttons. I like raglan sleeves for kid sweaters because it gives the child extra moving room under the arm and fits over clothes (especially a puffed sleeve) better. This yarn is an acrylic sport weight. The sweater was knitted on the machine, even the lace collar. I knitted the ribbings by hand. I like the way the collar is attached to the ribbing and does not flap around. There is a row of crochet finishing up the edge of the collar. The sweater is a size 6. I usually put a facing on the ribbing for the button band, since it gives the band more substance to hold the buttons. It is important to sew the buttons on extremely well, especially on baby sweaters because you know they will chew them. Even three and four-year-old kids that you thought had gained some sense will turn up with things in their mouth. I will tell how I manage the band in a later post.

It has been about 10 years since we had a baby in the family, but one is due soon, so I get to have fun knitting baby stuff again.

Recent Projects

I worked on the High Mesa Cardigan for about 2 years because I would get tired of it for long stretches of time. I was working with two strands of knitting worsted, knitting by hand, and the sweater rapidly got too big and too heavy to cart around. Finally, last year, I decided to finish it up, which involved recalculating the sleeves. I just could not make sense of the directions in the pattern, so I drafted the sleeves out and finished up the sweater. I swear, that sweater could stand up by itself. After a quick toss in the washer and dryer, however, it softened up nicely and started its life as my favorite sweater. Sure, it is huge and makes me look like a yellow Pillsbury Doughboy, but it is exquisitely comfy on the cold winter mornings we had this year. I found myself yearning for it when it had to go into the wash.

Another recent finished object is this short sleeved pullover. The hubster has requested that I use up some stash, so this sweater is made with Red Heart Fiesta, which knits up nicely on the bulky knitting machine and seems to wash and dry nicely. I drafted the pattern myself, experimenting with methods for drafting the set-in sleeves. It fits very well, but for some reason, I find the neck a little uncomfortable, since I like a lower neckline. But it is useful and I have been wearing it anyway.

The white sweater is one of a design series I was working on. I have a pattern for a T-shirt that fits me well, so I decided to try and adapt a sewing pattern to a knitting pattern. This is really hard to do, since sewing fabrics are completely different from the knitted fabric and behave differently. After several failed attempts, I actually wear this sweater.


Right now I am knitting a Must Have Cardigan in a pumpkin color and only have the sleeves left to finish.

What I Did Last Summer

It turns out that one of my daughters, A, is allergic to latex. It is amazing how many products in this life have latex or rubber related substances in them, including anything with elastic, like commercial SOCKS. This means that we always have something we can give her for birthdays and Christmas, and she really really appreciates the handmade socks. This last summer my older daughter, M, and I decided to get with the program and make A a lot of socks so she could be comfortable all the time. I made some by hand and some on the machine, and ended up making about 17 pairs. I tried a lot of different yarns, and a lot of different methods. Now that I have the basic sock wardrobe done, I can have more fun with colorful yarns, like Socks That Rock and Lorna's Laces.

Most of the socks I made on the machine were the white ones. Machine knit socks usually have short row toes and heels, and you can knit a pair in about an hour. I usually do the ribbing by hand and knit the socks flat with a flat seam up one side.

My sister was gifted with a huge bag of wool yarn from a weaver who was clearing out her stash, and she gave this gigantic bag of red, black, pink and purple yarn to me. I have been making clogs from the Fiber Trends Felted Clog pattern with this yarn. I had never really felted anything on purpose before, but this pattern is great and all three pairs of clogs are being much used.

The pink clogs show the before felting and after felting. They felted up OK though the black ones ended up looking like a character from Sesame Street and I had to give them a haircut.