Fitting feature panels

And.... done!! The Green Chai Cardi is finally off the hook and safely stashed in Mum's birthday/Easter goodie bag. It looks amazing :) Very happy with it.

Finished! The Green Chai Cardi

Just before Easter, one of our regulars brought a top in to be made up. It was a clever design (from the Debbie Bliss Andes book) which included a feature cable that ran around the top of the neck.
The usual way to fit something like this is to:

1. Sew or pin the ends of the band together.
2. Pin the band evenly into place around the neck.
3. Sew the band to the neck edge, using a mattress stitch seam.

Debbie Bliss Andes - top with feature cable

Sadly, in this case, the band was a fraction too long for the neck edge of the garment. You can see the little leftover bit in the photo - barely 2cm long, but enough to make the cable look cramped and bunchy when I set it in using the above method.

I tried to unpick it to pull out the extra bit and discovered that Andes is hopeless to unravel! I couldn't get the knot undone for anything. In the end, with Easter looming, I bit the bullet and contacted the customer: would she be OK if I cut the extra bit off? (I didn't mention that I actually couldn't think of any alternative that would leave her with a sensible looking garment). Luckily, she OK'd it - I cut off the extra and cast off along the cut edge. I could then set the band into place and finish the garment off.

This got me thinking about tricks to avoid the nuisance of feature pieces that don't quite fit. The sideways cable is a reasonably common one - in her early books, Jo Sharp designed cardigans with a separate band and collar that had to be sewn on and one of the recent Rowan magazines has several designs that included a feature panel in a different yarn that had to be slotted in to the final garment.

In a perfect world, we'd all do our tension squares and knit perfectly even pieces that would turn out to be exactly the correct size and fit together effortlessly like a soft, woolly jigsaw. In reality, even quite skilled and experienced knitters can find themselves with a feature piece that is just that little bit too long, too wide, too short or too narrow!

There are a few ways to minimise the nuisance value of the feature piece:

1. Leave a nice, long end and a loose knot when you cast off the feature piece. That way, if it's not quite right, you will easily be able to unravel a few rows to make it a perfect fit - or pull out the whole thing and start over!


2. Intarsia is not just for colour blocks. One of my first Jo Sharp projects was a cardigan with a long button band that was supposed to be knitted afterwards and sewn on. Instead of driving myself mad trying to knit a band of the correct length and fit it into place, I knitted the band at the same time as the fronts, using 3.25mm double pointed needles and a separate ball of yarn. When I reached the end of the band, I twisted the yarn around the yarn I was using for the main body of the garment, as you would for two intarsia blocks. Although it was a bit fiddly, it was worth the effort when I cast off two fronts with perfectly fitted bands and no sewing up to do!


3. Another option (which would have worked well for the cable band above!) is to pick up a stitch into the body then K2tog/sl K1 psso at the end of each row. This effectively knits your band into place as you go. The only disadvantages are that you have the weight of the made-up garment hanging from your needles, and it may not give a smooth/invisible join.

With those options in mind, I might go and spend the last few hours of my Easter break raiding my stash... There are a lot of odds and ends in there that could be used for Rowan feature panels if I find the right base yarn! Happy Easter :)

The Fearless Knitter rides again...

The Christmas before last (Xmas 2008), I bought myself a present, a bag of patterns and other useful stuff from Knitting Daily. On the front of the bag, there is a heart design and the slogan "Fearless Knitter". This was a promotion/challenge that Knitting Daily ran through 2008, challenging knitters to try at least one new technique during the year.

I took that challenge to heart (a bit late, since the promo had finished, but nevertheless...) - over the last 12 months, I've started knitting socks (unfortunately, start is all I've done so far, but I'll make it one day!) - I've crocheted some reasonably complicated garments (now that's the ultimate in fearlessness for knitters - putting one of your needles down!) - and last, but not least, I have started clearing my stash by knitting Fair Isle patterns.

The first thing I discovered was that there are an incredible number of variations on the theme of knitting with more than one colour. Apparently, to be strictly accurate, I should call my current project (Jo Sharp's Devon cardigan) a 'stranded colour work' project. 'Fair Isle' refers to traditional Scottish patterns, knitted in the round using no more than two colours at any time, and generally using a palette of no more than five related colours. Intarsia refers to patterns where large solid blocks of colour are knitted without running the yarn across the back of the work (as happens in Fair Isle patterns). If I wanted to slip some of my stitches instead of knitting them, I'd have something called slip-stitch knitting, which may or may not involve colours, but usually does. I could also go beserk and try mosaic work (square or rectangular patterns, similar to intarsia work).

The second thing I discovered was that it is very hard to knit from three balls of wool simultaneously while travelling on public transport! Usually, I use my travel time for knitting - PT is generally slow, and knitting or crochet helps to relieve the stress of knowing that I'm going to arrive late. Unfortunately, I can only knit patterns that don't require a great deal of concentration, as I need to focus my attention on the various announcements to make sure that I catch the correct train/tram/bus and get off at the correct stop! Hence my socks have a rather fetching dropped-stitch effect (caused by dropping stitches!) and my colour work cardigan currently consists of two half-finished fronts. I managed to knit as far as the colour work panel on both sides, but then found that I couldn't knit colour work, decrease for armholes and front slope AND decipher the announcements coming over the PA system at Flinders Street.

Looking forward to the day when I am both fearless and accurate with my new techniques...