Kingscot Episode II

"The ribbing (both fronts, back plus both button bands on the same long needle) was slow going and it looked and felt huge. It was like I could have fitted two me’s inside, but was not to worry, the stitch count remarkably diminished once the ribbing was done. The hem is supposed to flare a bit rather than pull.

The pattern tells to decrease evenly across one row and I took extra care to place the decreases symmetrically on both sides and the back and even though I did not think it then, I am happy now that the decreases are symmetrically placed because they will show a bit when done. Again I started with tubular cast one – it is so neat, I am going to use it from now on. Then I tweaked the button bands a bit. Since there is this good and sturdy cast on, I wanted to add sort of the same kind of effect to the bands. On the right side, I always knit the first and last stitch, but lift the two stitches (as if to purl) right after the first or right before the last stitch, and in the inside, I knit again the first and last, but purl the two that were lifted on the right side. The tricky part is to keep the edge stitch tight but the two purl stitches a bit loose, so that the edge won’t come too short and start pulling too much. The edge rolls a bit inwards and looks nice with this cast on.

The bands are done with twisted knit stitches and they are a bit smaller than regular knit stitches and the bands are pulling a tiny bit (as if being a little too short). To eliminate too much of this effect I am going to add few extra rows to the bands, I will do this with Japanese short rows although I am not sure if this is necessary, since the possible holes might be pulled in with the twisted ribbing and would not be seen anyway. I hope you get what I mean here.
In this picture I have done about nine centimeters and have added two extra rows so far. Until now it has not been too bad since I had all the stitches on the same size needle, but from now on, I will change needle size to bigger for the main part but will continue to have the bands on the smaller bamboo needles and so will need to add extra rows here and there. I will check this every now and then and use my eye for deciding whether or not extra rows are necessary. I don’t want to overdo this because good blocking will take care some of the pulling.

I am cabling without the cable needle and using Addi Turbo Lace needles makes the process quite manageable.

When I started this cardigan I thought that it would be very quick knit because of big gauge, but really the process has been quite slow, slow but interesting. Although I wish I had cast one with plain color…
I have almost ripped out and started over because so much of the work will be lost in the jungle of colors but have been able to avoid it so far and intend to stay on this track."

This above is what I wrote some time ago already. The pictures I took then I thought were all bad so I never got around publishing the post but to be honest, those pictures are better than what I was able to do today. So I must just settle with these and get on. Our daylight time is nothing to talk about now, it is either dim or dark all times. The day breaks about 11 am and the sun sets around 0130 pm.
The body of the cardigan is done and it is drying at the moment. I have knit the first sleeve except for the sleeve head. My row gauge differs from the pattern and I wanted to finish the body before knitting the sleeve heads. Now I can adjust the pattern if needed.

I made one-row buttonholes.

I did not bind off any stitches when shaping for the neck in the fronts but just turned and left the stitches on a waste yarn and while picking up the stitches later on for the neck band I again used the Japanese short row technique to avoid holes. This worked well in some parts of the neck but not so well in all (of which I was hoping for when I decided to try this).
I added few centimeters to the length and skipped the shoulder shaping since I have very square shoulders but took the stitches for the back neck opening on a waste yarn and knit two rows on both sides to have a bit of shaping in the back as well.
I suppose this is all so far. Now onto the sleeve head number one and then to the second. I have hopes of getting this done before Christmas and getting to start something new soon. I have plenty of yarn and I am still in love with it all. I am glad I went through all the boxes of yarn few weeks ago since now I have a very good picture of everything.

I have been reading Margene’s blog for a long time and she knits very beautiful sweaters and cardigans all the time. Now she is making plans to knit one sweater a month during the coming year. I have been entertaining myself with the thought too… except that I am not joining any KAL’s because I always fail them. But I think I will keep only 12 sweaters in my queue in Ravelry and am making a very humble (not to irritate the knitting gods) effort to knit them during the next 12 months. Of course my queue will keep changing all the time and I might do something “own” as well.

I will start counting from the next one even though I will start it most likely this month. I am thinking of knitting Margaret from Mason-Dixon Knitting Outside the Lines -book and will not finish it this year so hopefully it will be my January sweater.

I have to underline that I have sincere hopes of being able to do this, but am well aware that knowing me and my ability to deal with any knitting stress, I might start knitting only socks right after Kingscot is finished.

Enjoy wool,

Lene

PS. There are very good tutorials in the net for all these techniques I mention here. Google will help you to find them.