Meta Mittens

 On our way home from Buckhorn State Park last month Eli suggested we stop at a yarn store in Madison.  I am not one to say no to that so I did a google search on my iPhone and came up with Off the Beaten Path.  It wasn't too far from the highway and their website said they had locally produced yarns.   I ended up with some crochet thread and some rough, rustic wool that immediately said "make mittens out of me".  The yarn was Yaeger's Acres 2ply medium weight wool.  I got the natural and the black-brown   I felt like I wanted to have something related to knitting or wool on the mittens but I decided a yarn ball would be too abstract. I decided on sheep and did a big google image search on sheep so I could get a handle on what they look like and for illustrations of sheep so that I could understand how they are generally abstracted. I knit up a swatch in the round later in the week.  This swatch lied horribly, I must have been knitting incredibly tight because I ended up with 7 sts/inch on US 3 needles which I was never able to replicate.  Swatches Lie.  Do them anyway.  Always make a swatch especially if you are working with a yarn you have never used before, if only to get a feel for what needle size will go with it best.

So once I had my horribly off gauge I went and made some graph paper from my favorite graph paper making website (What? You don't have one?) Incompetech (see it even has a punny name) and input my gauge.  The website makes a pdf of the graph paper which I then opened in adobe photoshop.  I marked out the parameters of the mitten using the dimensions of a pair of Norwegian mittens I made a few years ago and liked.  Then I spent about a day or so dinking around with the chart.  The palm was easy,  as was the thumb, but making sheep that looked like sheep and made a good composition on the back of a mitten took a bit longer.  Once I was satisfied with the chart I knit up a prototype.  Which was sized for a child.

Good thing it doesn't take too long to knit a mitten, I thought, I'll just go up a needle size and add a little length and it'll be fine...

 Nope!

Still Tiny!  Urg!  I felt pretty frustrated with myself, but luckily I had plenty of yarn so I didn't have to frog either of them.  I went back and counted how many stitches were in that old Norwegian mitten I mentioned earlier and went with those stitch counts.   I finally finally got it the right size, yay! Here is a prototype progression photo with a 5" ruler at the side to show how tiny the small ones really are.

So, after knitting 4 mittens, only 2 of which were any good, I was ready to take some photographs.  It was 90 degrees outside so bundling up and going outside were a bit out.  I didn't want to get heat stroke, even for my work.  So I plopped on a matching hat and sat on my workroom couch and used the self timer gratuitously.  I think they came out pretty well all things considered

I really upped my game with photoshop on these photos.  I generously used the dodge tool to brighten and emphasize the mittens and to make the eye in shadow more visible. Plus I was having a really good hair day.   So I wrote and laid out the pattern, I went with a vaguely  German, 70s medieval revival sort of style that I think went really well with the mittens and made the pattern pretty to look at. It's for sale, if you'd like to  buy now

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So I finally finished that vest

 So I finally am totally done with the argyle!  After finishing the first vest and having it come out 4" too big in the chest, and doing it all again in a different color, I am very happy with the result.  Eli doesn't like having his picture taken but I explained it was the price he had to pay for hand-knits.  For what it's worth I think he's handsome but he loves to make put-out faces for the camera.  Here is a nice close up of the vest.

The crisscross lines on it are duplicate stitch embroidered after the knitting and sewing together and pretty much everything was done.  It was a bit of a slog, that last bit, I just SO wanted to be done with it!  And so I am.   I really think this was one of the nicer things I've made.  I did make a big modification to the pattern by making it 6 stitches smaller on the front and the back.  I basically followed the directions but just decreased the size.  The pattern was nicely done but I don't know why you'd  want a vest like this to have 4" of ease.  My vest of fail showed that clearly it isn't very attractive.  Who knows?  Do most men really like everything 2 sizes too big?  Anyway here are a few more photo's of Eli hamming it up.  

 

Swatches swatches

I've been working pretty hard on getting everything ready to start the Idea. I've done my calculations wrote a chart for the stitch pattern and made some really large swatches.

The really large swatches were necessary to see how the worsted and bulky weight yarns handled the stitch pattern. I went through my stitch pattern book several times and found patterns that were close to what I wanted but I ended up writing one that was similar to others, but did exactly what I needed it to.

I've also completed the yoke portion. I don't know how happy I am about it. I'm not sure that portion is going to work, but I'm willing to sit on it until I get the skirt done. I just don't know how it is going to look when it gets sewn to the side. Also I need to frog a bit of the back and make it shorter as it somehow got too long.

I've made 30 lower portions of the leaf motif as a cast on for the skirt. I realized at some point yesterday that I was really going to need to buy a 60" circular. OMG. The poor thing is stuffed on it. Good thing it has to decrease pretty quickly. One round takes about an hour at this point so I think this thing will take longer than I was thinking. Also I'll probably need more yarn. Oi. I should have known this would get out of hand. :)

It's been such a long time...

Lately I've been lured away by facebook, getting out all my little thoughts and dramas in succinct and slightly thoughtless blurbs. But I have had an Idea that will not be quelled and I think the process of working through the Idea is worth documenting in blog format. Anyway the genesis of the Idea began with Alexander McQueen.

As you all may or may not know Alexander McQueen killed himself on February 11th 2010. He was one of the most visionary and artistic fashion designers ever to send a dress down the runway and I actually cried when I heard he had died. I found his work challenging and beautiful and was continually inspired by it. I felt moved to examine my grief for his genius by trying to replicate his aesthetic in a knitted work of my own. I felt very driven to do this and haven't had this fevered a desire in a long time. I began by googling for retrospectives of his work and a few images really grabbed and stood out to me.

What really struck me as overarching theme in lot of his work was a certain historicity, body consciousness and emphasis on texture. I played these ideas around in my head and came up with this sketch.

You'll have to forgive my drawing ability, I'm terribly rusty as I haven't done any real drawing or sketching in years. But the idea is there. I feel like the Idea captures the body consciousness and the textural elements that I was going for. I don't know if anyone but me will ever see Alexander McQueen in it, but if I can pull it off I think I'll feel mighty proud of myself.

I have picked out the yarn and have done some swatching. Here are some photos of the yarn and my work area. I'm really wishing I had a dress form these days.

So the yarn I'm using is Brown Sheep's Lanaloft in Bulky and Worsted. Its a soft single ply wool with a lot of stitch definition and loft. The dark grey will be for the yoke and the cream for the lace portion. I think this dress will need some heavy duty foundation garments but I've been angling for a reason to buy the fancy pair of Spanx I've had my eye on. I'm currently in the process of charting stitch pattern that will be what I want because despite having a pretty comprehensive collection of stitch patterns I couldn't find one that was just what I wanted. It gave me a lot of ideas to make what I wanted after I swatched a few that were similar. I think that this dress will need a lot of negative ease for the lozenge shapes to really pop and It will need a good amount of blocking. The yarn I'm using is pretty thick though, so I think it won't take too long to knit once I've planned it. But oh the planning!

Thinking about making this dress leaves me feeling like I'm standing on the edge of a cliff. The yarn was not inexpensive and I'm afraid to fail to accomplish what I want to do. I've had a lot of trouble lately with large projects not coming out the way I wanted or anticipated so I hope this goes well. I'll need to buy a petticoat for this dress too, and I don't know where or why I'd wear it but it wants to exist so badly I can't help but move right along with it.