Greenwillow

A new year calls for a new pattern, and with all the snow we've gotten over the past few weeks, nothing fits the bill like a cozy cowl.

Greenwillow features a dimensional lattice texture accentuated by crisp linear edge details. The pattern is written for two lengths, a simple 21.5" loop, and a 43" loop that can be worn as a long infinity scarf or doubled around the neck for extra warmth.

Knit in String Theory's Blue Faced Sport in Jade, the yarn's subtle tonal variations and incredible luster perfectly complement the latticework pattern.

Greenwillow can be found in the Blue Bee Studio Ravelry store.

Norden revisited

For a while now I've been itching to cast on for a longer version of the Norden Cowl. Over the Thanksgiving holiday I was looking for a good travel project, and thought of Norden. It's a simple lace motif that fit the bill perfectly for not-fully-mindful knitting.

For this longer, lacier version I used fingering-weight Spirit Trail Fiberworks Sunna in Kismet. I doubled the number of repeats around the circumference, and worked one vertical repeat less. The finished cowl is about 46" around, and 5" tall. It used less than 200 yards of the lovely Sunna.

Brickletown

The small mountain town I live in came to life during the building of the transcontinental railroad. As the work crews advanced, the 'Hell on wheels' that supplied entertainment to the workers advanced too.

Blasting train tunnels through hard Sierra granite took time, and some of the denizens of 'Hell' put down roots. When the railroad work eventually moved on, it left behind a rough-and-tumble community with more than its fair share of saloons, gambling dens, and brothels. When I imagine those folks, I somehow always picture them wearing fingerless mitts – so much easier for counting out those ill-gotten gains.

The town has changed a lot in the intervening years, and only a few ramshackle old buildings still remain as a testament to those days – but a pair of fingerless mitts can still come in pretty handy.

In celebration of brisk temperatures and shorter days, the Brickletown Mitts pattern is available for 20% off through the end of November.

Green delirium

I've been able to indulge in a little knitting for myself lately, in between other projects. Here's one sweater recently finished: Meris, knit in Quince and Co.'s Finch in the Snap Pea color.

This green just fills me with joy. When I saw it on the shade card, I worried that it might be too intense. As a check, I ordered two skeins of Snap Pea, plus two skeins each of two ‘safer’ colors. (With that yardage I can always make a scarf or shawlette with the extra yarn.) Then I wore them around my neck and solicited opinions. Snap Pea was the clear winner.

In a yarn shop I often find myself drawn to semi-solid and tonally dyed yarns. In the skein, solid colors often don't look quite as enticing. But when knit up into a garment there is something so pleasing about a pure swath of solid, gorgeous color – and there's nothing like it for showing off your stitches.

Tenaya: It's the details

Photo: ©2012 Carrie Bostick Hoge

I admit it: I'm a geek. While most knitters look upon swatching as a dreaded ordeal, I can't wait to dive in. I love swatching up a new stitch I've found in a stitch dictionary, imagining how it can be made to work in some garment or other I'm thinking of. Even better is working out my own unique lace or cable pattern. But best of all is when I have to engineer or re-engineer some detail, figuring out how to get the fabric to do what I want it to do.

With Tenaya, the top-down set-in sleeve cardigan I designed for Twist Collective's Fall 2012 issue, I had an awfully good time. The cable pattern is one that I'd been fooling around with for a while. It's an asymmetrical three-stranded open braid that is mirrored on the fronts and back of the cardigan. Nothing complicated, but the asymmetry keeps it entertaining.

The seed stitch that adds such a rich texture to the button bands and neckband provided me with some fun engineering opportunities as well. I find that the edges of most buttonholes, especially the one-row type, can look rather sloppy. They look even worse when worked on a seed stitch ground. For Tenaya, I tinkered with the two-row style of buttonhole, finessing the methods of binding off and casting on stitches until I found a way to produce crisp, clean, square edges.

The main challenge with the neckband was how to decrease the circumference without interrupting the seed stitch pattern. The faux I-cord that begins the band and the real I-cord that binds it off gave me some places to stash decreases invisibly. And I love the way that those edges echo the slipped-stitch ribs that separate the cable and eyelet panels on the fronts and back.

Hail Storm

Living in California's Sierra Nevada, most summers we don't see any precipitation from mid-May until late September. We'll get the occasional gully-washer, but the norm is four months of bone dry weather and clear blue skies.

This past Wednesday the first fat drops started plopping down at about 4:00. Since summer rain is such a rarity, it's usually kind of a treat when it does come, and it was nice to settle in at home and pick up the knitting needles. By 4:30 it started thundering and the first small hailstones fell. Soon the sound of hail was a deafening roar on the roof and decks. The storm raged on for nearly an hour, pounding our neighborhood with hail and torrential rain. When it was over there was 3 to 4 inches of hail accumulated on the ground, and piles more than 3 feet high where it poured of roofs.

Water flowed as it never has before, cutting gullies and ripping through earthen berms like they just weren't there. Our neighbor had streams flowing across his yard. Trees and other plants were laid waste. Leaves and needles were stripped from the upper portions of trees. The native bitterbrush that grows in the greenbelt behind our house is completely defoliated. And my beloved vegetable garden has been pummeled to mush.

Batman's commentary: a firm shake of the paw.

Knit, knit, rip

All photos ©2012 Blue Bee Studio

There's nothing wrong with a little fudging. If you're knitting a garment for yourself, less-than-perfect can be perfectly okay. But when you're designing a garment for others to knit, the details have to be right. Swatching is a great help, but sometimes you simply have to see the whole thing knit up to know that it's not quite working yet. Ripping back is just an inevitable part of the design process, and I guess I'm pretty efficient at it.

I've come to realize though that not everyone does as much ripping as I do, and even experienced knitters can be unsure of the best way to pull back their work. Here are some tips to make the job easier.

Don't use a scalpel when a chain saw will do

Unknitting stitch by stitch (aka 'tinking') is laborious. To rip efficiently, you need to do as little tinking as possible. To drop back several rows (or several inches), I put the work on a flat surface and pull the needles completely out. If the knitting is simple and the yarn fairly cohesive, I just rip back as far as I need to and pick up the loose stitches. If the knitting is more complicated – say a lace shawl – or the yarn a little less inclined to stay put, I rip back to the row before the one with the error.

Next comes the tinking. There are different ways of doing this, but here's my method: I hold the knitting in my left hand, with the opposite side of the work facing me (wrong side if it’s a right side row I’m going to take out, and right side if a wrong side row). With my right hand, I insert the tip of the needle purlwise into the first stitch that the working yarn is going through, and gently pull the working yarn out. Holding the work in my left hand allows me to control the working yarn very precisely, and I tension it gently over my left index finger. It’s kind of like backwards continental knitting. I can work very quickly this way.

To minimize tugging on the stitches as I recapture them, I use a much smaller needle than the one I'm actually working with. If there are complicated decreases that require untwisting stitches, a tiny dpn can be useful, too.

If the yarn is something slippery like silk or linen and I'm afraid that I’ll lose control of the stitches once they're free, I steam the work while it's still on the needles to set the stitches. I use a handheld steamer for this, but a steam iron held above the fabric will work, too. Once the stitches are set, I rip back as needed, but leave the work on the flat surface while tinking that final row. This helps to keep from tugging the yarn out of the stitches before I'm ready to pick them up.

Unkinking the ramen

Once all the stitches have been picked up, the next step is to get the recovered yarn back into usable condition. Working with kinked and curly yarn is a recipe for wonky stitches. It's nearly impossible to have an even tension with seriously wavy yarn. To quickly get it back in shape, I wind the yarn into a small hank, then pin it out on a blocking board. I steam the yarn until the kinks relax, let it cool, then wind it back into a ball and get back to work.

My favorite knitting tool

If you haven't already guessed, I love my handheld steamer. It's possibly the best $15 I've ever spent. In addition to the above-mentioned uses, it's brilliant for finishing knits. And unlike a steam iron, there's no heated sole plate, so you can touch it directly to the fabric. One caveat though – keep it well away from acrylic yarns, as high heat can damage them.