Making up is hard to do

The other day, a customer came in with her first ever jumper and made me aware of the limitations of making up instructions! The pattern said "Join the shoulder seams". With no guidance as to what shoulder seams actually were, she'd accidentally attached part of the front neck to the back of the garment. Very easily fixed, but it made me think - patterns for newer knitters really, really need to include diagrams showing how the pieces fit together.

Shoulder seams

When you look at a cast-off back or front, you will notice that there are 'steps' up the top of the knitted piece. Usually, the two pieces fit together with the highest steps joining (the neck edge), then the next, all the way down to the lowest (the sleeve edge).

This is the shoulder seam. To join the two pieces, thread a wool needle with the same yarn you used to knit the garment and sew a horizontal seam. Berrocco have put together a very good video on how to do this - I don't want to even try to write it out, it is much easier to show than to explain. Personally, I sew from the edge into the neck, but there is no right or wrong direction as far as I know.

Once you have the shoulder seam in place, put your garment flat on a firm surface. If I'm making something up for myself, I usually sit it on the bed or the sofa - for customers, I'll lay the work out on the counter just to make sure that I have it perfectly flat and even.

Take the cast off edge of the sleeve and fold it in half: pin the stitch at the halfway point to the shoulder seam.

The sleeve will have two 'points' about halfway down, where you did your first shaping cast offs. Pin the points to the matching points on the front and back of the garment. (If you look at the photo below, you can see the point on the back clearly).

Sleeve ready to be pinned

Sew the top of the sleeve into place: I usually begin at the centre and work around to each point.

Once you've set the tops of the sleeves in, pin each side. I usually pin the hem, the armpit and the cuff: you may want more pins to hold the work more securely. Sew one long mattress stitch seam from the hem up to the armpit, then down the sleeve to the cuff to finish your garment.

Thread any loose ends into the seams and you're done!

If you want more information, there's a good article about seaming on the Vogue Knitting website with illustrations and Interweave TV has a Seaming Primer episode that is pretty easy to follow. I think it's always worthwhile taking a bit of time to review seaming techniques before you start making something up - after going to all the effort of knitting or crocheting a garment, you want the finishing to be as perfect as possible!

Jo Sharp Moebius Scarf (worn as cowl)

Jo Sharp Moebius Scarf (worn long)

In other news, the Jo Sharp Moebius Scarf is off the needles. I love it! Funny, I would never in a million years have thought to knit it for myself, but it has quickly become my all-time favourite scarf. Very warm and soft!

Unfortunately, my Moebius class prep is not coming along quite so well. Garnstudio has an idiot-proof Moebius cast on - unfortunately, in Norway, they have really smart idiots. 
When I try it, the continental cast on is so tight that I can't pick up the stitches into it. I'm working on the Cat Bordhi idiot-proof Moebius cast on after I finish this blog - maybe I can get a version of that which won't leave half the class fighting to drive their needles into a cast on edge? Stay tuned...

Boiling needles

Last week, I posted about the Jo Sharp Moebius Scarf and the different ways of casting on to create a Moebius loop. My inability to get the twist to work niggled at me, and I ended up going through my stash and pulling out some Silkroad Aran Tweed that I had left over from one of Dad's jumpers.

Of course, because there was no-one watching, this time I got it right on the first try. I was so excited that I abandoned my lifelong resolution never to upload a bad, home-filmed craft video to the internet - I pulled out the iPhone and did a short movie of me knitting the first round with the twist.

The two clips below are the only parts of the movie where you actually have any hope of working out what the heck I'm doing: Jane Campion is never going to lose any sleep over me! Basically, all I did was cast on (using a cable cast on), twist the cast on row about halfway along, then start knitting in moss stitch.

If you have a look at some of the stills below, it might be clearer!

Luckily, I chose the 'right' needles. The cables on Birch circular needles tend to kink, making it difficult to avoid twisting your rounds. Normally, when I buy a new Birch circular needle, I soak the cable in boiling water to get it to straighten. In this case, I didn't want it to be straight, I wanted help to get my twist - and sure enough I did. Have a look at the cast on below...

Cast on - Moebius Scarf

You can see that the cast on row twists up and around because of the kinks in the cable joining the needles. If you look closely, you can see where the work twists (on the right hand side of the picture). This was before I even touched it - it was very easy to see where the work naturally wanted to twist and to help it along.

Moebius twist - close up

With such an obvious hint, it was pretty obvious where I needed to grab the work and twist it!

Ironically, with a higher quality circular needle (such as the Clover needles) this is much harder to do - the cable sits very flat, and any kinks in the cable drop out naturally as soon as you open the packet. When I attempted my demo twist last week, I was using a circular Clover needle and I found that the work would move back into place no matter how much I tried to twist it. Usually, this is a good thing, but if you want a Moebius, it is a complete disaster!

I knitted the first round very easily, keeping the twist in place - if you look at the photo below, you can see the twist at the top of the picture. Ironically, now that I've got a couple of rounds on the needle, I'm tempted to whip it out of the work, take it into the kitchen and douse it with boiling water - although the twisty cable is very helpful when setting up a Moebius loop, it is a nuisance once the first round has been set up.

Moebius - first round

On the other hand, if I leave the needle as it is, it will be perfect for the next two scarves that I plan to knit (one following the Garnstudio instructions, and one following Cat Bordhi's method). Keep an eye out at Brunswick Savers for an influx of Moebius scarves this winter!!

Going around the twist with a Moebius scarf or shawl

I was reminded today that there is nothing harder than deliberately making a mistake. Last week, a customer purchased the yarn and pattern for the Jo Sharp Moebius Scarf from Knit Issue 10. Today, she came in with a beautiful double-moss cowl, without so much as a dip in the edge... certainly without the twist.

Jo Sharp Moebius Scarf

We went through the instructions together: they were pretty straightforward. You cast on, using a circular needle, and twist the cast-on halfway through the round. Knit the first pattern round. You now have a twisted loop - keep knitting until you run out of wool. Now, I've managed to do this several times without even thinking about it. However, each time the customer knitted her first round, we ended up with a perfect, even round of untwisted knitting. And although I've managed to mess up the starting round any number of times before, now that I was put on the spot, I couldn't get it to twist either. So we moved to plan B...

Plan B was to tap into the Garnstudio freebies. Garnstudio has a free Moebius shawl pattern on their website. Although the colours in the photo remind me of cheap toothpaste, the shawl itself has a very nice construction and - even better - it has photos and a video showing a technique to get the twist into the shawl. The very short version of their technique is:

1. Do a long tail cast on over both your needles.
2. Pull one needle through, leaving the stitches on the other.
3. Pick up stitches along the bottom of the cast on edge.

You will end up with two lots of stitches: the stitches you cast on and the stitches you picked up. If you start knitting in the round, you will first knit the cast on stitches, then you will knit the picked up stitches, giving you a twist. Alternatively, if you're like me, you will accidentally unravel the second half of the work, giving you one round of straight knitting with a big gap in one side...**

From here, there was only one recourse - Cat Bordhi's tutorial videos on YouTube! Cat is a bit of a knitting celebrity in the US (and in Australia!) and does very good tutorials on weird and wonderful techniques, such as Moebius cast ons. All I can say about this is, somehow it works. I've watched it twice now, and it's like a magic trick - I can't figure out quite what's going on, but it works...

In the end, the customer couldn't face unravelling all those hours of work, so she decided on a clever compromise: she would pick up one stitch from the cast on edge in her cast off to make a fold - the fold will look similar enough that it won't be immediately obvious that the scarf isn't twisted.

My favourite option for a very easy Moebius scarf or shawl is to knit a rectangle, then twist it and cast off into the cast on edge to create the loop. You can also cast off normally, twist the work and sew the ends together to hold the twist in place. However, now I know some of the other options that are available, I'm very tempted to dig out some leftover Silkroad Aran Tweed that I have in my stash and give the Moebius scarf a try!! In fact, I'm tempted to knit three, so that I can try out the three methods of getting the twist :) I'm sure that my stash has more than enough wool in it to meet that challenge...

**I think the first failure was a combination of stage fright and trying to serve three customers at the same time as knitting a round: I've tried the Garnstudio technique again now that the shop is a bit quieter, and this time, it worked.Good to know!!

Melbourne in 1910

The other day, I found this in my Facebook feed. Fifteen minutes of silent movie era cuteness as a cinematographer films the streets and sights of early 20th century Melbourne :)

Some of the streets and buildings looked very familiar, even without their 21st century garnish of billboards. Some of the street scenes had me mourning the loss of lovely old buildings and their replacement by very large concrete blocks (reflective glass facades optional). The 'bustling streets' look practically deserted by today's standards, but trams seemed to be more frequent. I noticed several shots of gentlemen industriously sweeping the road, and was everlastingly grateful that horses in Melbourne now have to wear a large leather bag across their hindquarters! Most of the smartly dressed passers-by would have had their clothes made at home - some may have been 'flash' enough to afford the services of a professional tailor or seamstress.

I wonder how many of the shops would have stocked wool and yarn, and how many of the passing ladies would have had some crochet or a partly knitted sock stashed in their handbags in case they had some idle time while they waited for a train at "busy Richmond station"? I think the short answer would be - most. If you needed clothing in 1910, by default you made it yourself - and that meant lots of knitting, crocheting, tatting and sewing, which in turn would have meant lots of Local Yarn Stores (LYSs).

I'm eternally grateful for Progress (which has spared me from a relatively short life, with a Pin Shower as the highlight), but I can't help but think that shops filled with cheap, Asian-made T-shirts are a poor substitute for lots and lots of wool shops!!

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 :)

Sleeves

In the end, I decided to bite the bullet and finish the Green Chai Cardi. I need to have faith in my skills as a crocheter and assume that it will fit - instead of leaving my options open, then spending Mum's entire next visit frantically trying to get it finished.

Did I mention that I hated the sleeves? I hated the sleeves.

The reason was that they didn't come out even. They weren't badly out of alignment, but they were visibly different. I looked at them for a week, then cracked and ripped them out. Then, while the unravelled wool was soaking in a mix of warm water and wool mix to get the crinkles out, I sat down to see if I could work out a way of setting the sleeves straight into the garment. As you may have guessed from the photo below, yes I could. :)

Green Chai Cardi with crocheted-in sleeves

To provide a foundation for the sleeves, I did a row of double crochet into the broomstick lace (one dc for each chain in the foundation chain in the original sleeve pattern). I made sure that the double crochets were evenly spaced to either side of the seam (8 dc each side and 1 dc on the seam). Then I simply followed the pattern, working into the double crochets.

When the pattern changed from rows to rounds, I worked more double crochets to form a foundation for the round. It was actually easier than following the pattern - I found the whole "row of chain and join with a treble" a bit confusing, it took me a couple of goes to get it each time.

I also adapted an old knitter's trick of doing both the sleeves at once. This is a great tip that I got from my great-aunt, who was still knitting strong into her 90s. Her tip was to cast on both the sleeves at once (using two separate balls of yarn) and to work them at the same time. The idea is that you're unlikely to end up increasing on the right sleeve, then forgetting to increase on the left if you have both the sleeves on the needles at the same time.

Shawl Collar Cardigan - sleeves

This also works well for cardigan fronts - in fact, for pretty much anything where you have two knitted pieces that need to be absolutely identical. (Of course, it's no guarantee that they won't be identically wrong - but that is easier to hide that two uneven sleeves or fronts).

The crochet equivalent is to work a round - put a stitch marker or safety pin into the stitch to stop your work unravelling - take the hook out, then work the same round on the other sleeve. It seems to working quite well - I feel like the sleeves look far more even, and this also saves me from having to scribble notes about any 'fixes' that I've needed to make the pattern work out.

Lady Eleanor stole

While I was waiting for the wool to dry out after I frogged the sleeves, I had some time to spend on the Lady Eleanor Entrelac Stole.

Once I'd worked two tiers, the logic of it suddenly clicked and now I'm happily picking the stole up whenever I've got a spare moment and working a couple of rectangles. The Noro yarn is lovely and warm - very much looking forward to having this in my wardrobe by winter time! The pattern says to work 35 tiers, but I'm hoping I might have the yarn to make it 40. Not because I need a particularly long stole, but just because I'm really enjoying the pattern now that I've mastered it. :)

Stop taking photos and give us back our sofa!!

My next step will be to put together a simple entrelac design and block in at least one class for the winter. I'm thinking of doing something with one of the Jo Sharp tweeds... but more on that in another blog post. For now, I need to open the shop and give the sofa back to its rightful owners (see photo left!).

Sleeves and buttons

Well the Green Chai Cardi is officially more or less finished. What this means is, I've done the sleeves and the buttons, and now I can't do any more until Mum next comes to visit me.When Mum visits, I'll pin the thing on her and make sure it fits - if it does, I'll put the button band on. If it doesn't, I'll adjust it to suit.

Things I've learned:

• If this pattern is any guide, American women have no biceps. Mum's a farmer: she does. I am not sure that the sleeve would go over her bare arm, let alone over a jumper as intended. Hint to crocheting body builders and to anyone else who can lift a 10kg sack of horse feed: you will probably need to adjust the armholes and sleeves if you attempt to crochet this garment. I will do another post about this once I find out just how tight the sleeves actually are!
• Covering buttons is fun! This button method would also create a fabric button if you crocheted tightly enough. To make these buttons, I took three wooden buttons from our stock which were damaged (the finish was all scarred and scratched). You could also use a self cover button or maybe some old buttons that you've got that don't match.

Green Chai Cardi - buttons and sleeve

Covering buttons

To make a button cover or a fabric button:

1. Crochet a small centre ring (@ 3 ch), plus chain to start your round.
   These buttons were quite small, so I crocheted a single chain plus two chain as my first half-treble. For a larger button, you might want 3ch + 2ch as your first treble. The goal is to have a fairly tight centre ring, so that the button can't be seen through the gap.
2. Work one round into the centre ring.
   For these buttons, I crocheted a round of half-trebles: for larger buttons, crochet a round of trebles or double trebles. The goal is to create a circle of stitches that is about the same size as your button.
3. Working in the back loop only, work a round of double crochet. This creates a rim which fits neatly over your button.
4. A. To cover a button, fasten off (leaving a long tail) and place the button into the cover. Thread the yarn through the double crochets and pull tight.
   
   B. For a freestanding button, work a second round into the back loops of the double crochet round (creating a flat disc). Fasten off, leaving a long tail to attach the button.