Deb Gemmell: Top Down, Gauge Free and more

I went diving into my stash for worsted weight yarn for another Any Gauge Raglan pullover. I found 6 50g balls of royal blue (300g in total). A great colour but not enough for a sweater. I didn’t find any sweater amount of anything else that caught my eye. What to do? Spiral Stripes, that’s the answer. I have lots of single balls in several different colours. I’m going to go stash diving to see if I can find 4 more colours that will go with my royal blue. Wish me luck.

For quite some time I have thought that a raglan would be perfect for working Spiral Stripes (also known as Helix stripes). This method gives you single rounds of stripes without any jog at the beginning of the round.

I’ve worked Stash Buster Socks with 3 colours and with 4 odd balls I worked the Stash Buster Striped Hat using spiral stripes.

These are the rules I follow:

1.  One more colour than sections your project is divided into.
2.  Do Not Twist when changing colours.

That’s it.

Rule 1:  Divide your project into sections and work with one more colour than the number of sections. You can use markers to make arbitrary divisions in your project or use any natural sections your project may already be divided into. The sections do not have to have the same number of stitches. For example, a sock can be divided into the front of the leg and the back of the leg. My Top Down Raglan will be divided into 4 sections: Back, shoulder, Front, shoulder. There are 4 markers, each placed between these sections. At each of the markers the colours could change. Since I have 4 sections in this raglan pullover I will be looking for 5 different colours.

Rule 2:  Do Not Twist. Usually when changing colours you would pick up the new colour so that the old and new colour link together (twist around each other). This prevents holes at the change. For this method of stripes you purposely Do Not Twist the colours at the change.

I’ve knit this method in the Stash Buster Socks with great success. I used 3 colours and divided my sock into 2 sections (front of leg, back of leg). At the colour change spot, I took the colour I just used, placed it to the right and dropped it. Then I picked up the new colour from the round below (it will be sitting right there where you need it) and began knitting the next section of my sock. The two colours do not twist.

These socks were knit with a solid purple colour, a solid green and a variegated brown/pink/gold combo.

In this photo the purple has just been used and placed to the right and the green from the round below will be picked up to start knitting the next section.

Can you see that the green round will continue over the brown/pink variegated round on the left needle? All the rounds are continuous so there is no jog.

So far I have knit 5 pairs of socks. The Stash Buster Sock is a great for those lonely 50g balls of sock yarn you might have in your stash. Pair them up with some interesting friends and see what magic happens.

I’m starting my Spiral Stripes Raglan this week. I’ll keep you posted on my progress. This is the result of my stash dive.

EVENTS: On Saturday September 8 Cabin Fever will be at the KW Knitting Guild’s Knitter’s Fair in Kitchener, ON. It’s a terrific show with tons of vendors and lots of like minded knitters. Drop by and say hello.

Thanks for reading,

Deb

Cabin Fever patterns on ravelry.

I’m on the sleeves of my latest pullover. This is Not my favourite part of the sweater but I want sleeves so here I am, slightly irritated but determined to get these done.

I’m working with stash wool which is hand dyed and has some colour variation between the skeins (it’s been in my stash quite a long time). I knit the entire body of the pullover working 2 rounds with one ball and 2 rounds with a second ball. That evened out the colour really well.

I started working my sleeves in the round but …

Continue reading “Sleeve Angst”

My first prototype for the Any Gauge Raglan is finished. I’ve been knitting this pullover for several weeks and calling it the Pepto Bismol sweater.

It’s a bright pink colour which I would never wear or even knit with usually but it was in my stash, and is now discontinued, so was perfect for my first experimental sweater. There was the real possibility that it might not work out at all and then nothing is lost except my time. It’s not that I don’t like pink but I favour a very pale pink colour with lots of white in it and this is not that.

So what should I do when the sweater actually worked out? Once I had the yoke done I figured I should just finish it up since everything was going so well. The whole time I knew I couldn’t wear it. Continuing to call it the Pepto Bismol sweater was probably a clue.

This is where the tea comes in. I had been reading up on home dyeing (without chemical dyes) and the idea of tea was kind of interesting. I put a piece of pink yarn in my tea cup, which I was actually drinking at the time, just to see what would happen. I liked it.

I’m at my camp where I don’t have a proper kitchen but I can handle making tea. I steeped 3 pots of tea with 10 tea bags in each time and poured it into lots of cold water in a rubbermaid bucket. I wet the sweater with the hose and then I dumped it in.

Yup, the whole thing, in it went. I left it outside on the deck for 24 hours. I don’t think it changed colour after about 3 hours but I left it in anyway. Next morning I had to work to get the sweater tea-free but after several dunkings in cold water I thought the water was coming up pretty clear.

The tea took the brightness off. It’s more of a rose colour now I guess. Still pink but not so bright (it’s a little bit more orangey than this photo shows).

I’m happy with the results. I’m really glad I took the chance and did it. This sweater has a story now.

Do you have a sweater that you can’t wear because of the colour?

Share this with your knitting friends. They might have a sweater that could use a tea bath. Thanks for reading,

Deb

FOLLOW ME and I’ll send you a Gauge Free hat pattern. It’s a great stash buster.

Cabin Fever patterns on ravelry

I’m working on an Any Gauge Raglan Top Down Pullover. Yes, that’s quite a mouthful. I’ve been thinking about this for some time. What if you had a couple of patterns that you could cast on with any yarn? You could gleefully dig into your stash or go for a nice stroll through your favourite yarn store and pick any yarn you want, any colour, any weight. What freedom!

I’ve worked out sweaters with stitch numbers for many gauges in my Cabin Fever multi-gauge books. Any book with the title Need A … has all the stitch numbers you need for many, many gauges of yarn.

Exact instructions for the Twin Stitch Bust Shaping

This time I wanted to write a recipe style where you do some of the math. I know, I know, you hate math. But it’s pretty simple with a calculator and a little bit of direction. More on that later. Phew, let’s put off the discussion of number crunching until much, much  later.

I thought this would be easy to do. A raglan sweater with any gauge for any size, how hard could it be? The first hang up was how to get all the sizes started correctly with as little math as possible. (Oops I said that nasty word again.) I think I have that worked out. This pullover will have a rectangular neck opening. The neckband will be picked up later and finished with a smaller needle. Not my usual way of working a Top Down Raglan (since I usually start with the neckband itself) but compromises must be made to avoid too much math bother at the beginning.

I have now thought up 4 more neckband options to make it look different. So far I’ve knit this pullover with a ribbed neckband and 2 sets of short rows to raise the back of neck and keep the front of the neck low. I like the squarish neck. What do you think?

You might have noticed that I worked the neckband before finishing the sleeves. I wanted to see how it would look. Now that I know I like it i can finish.

Thanks for reading. Follow Me and I’ll send you a gauge free hat pattern. Get started on your Christmas and charity knitting now.

Deb

Cabin Fever books and pattern on Ravelry

Are you a sweater knitter? I am. Even in the middle of summer I have the compulsion to cast on. My enthusiasm for the scarf I am knitting is wearing off. I’m not sure why. I am not deterred because a fingering weight scarf is a lot of knitting. A sweater obviously is a lot, more than a lot, of knitting. So that’s not it. It may be that small needle knitting requires more small motor skill than I can maintain for long. I have a yearning for larger needles.

I am trying out a Crochet Cast On. Have you done this?

Continue reading “Are you a Sweater Knitter?”

Can I make something other than a full shawl with a triangle? I started a new One Triangle Shawl with a gifted ball of Malabrigo Sock. Yummy. This time I thought I would  make a scarf instead of a full shawl. I only have one ball, 100g, which should do a scarf nicely.

What would happen if I started with the One Triangle shawl, increasing every other row and only worked until I had a depth I would like for a scarf, around 9″ deep?

Continue reading “One Triangle morphed into scarf”

While I was working on the Waiting For Rain shawl I was thinking about knitting a lace sweater. (That might explain why some YO got missed.) I decided I could do a little DIY lace knitting right now and put one of the stitch patterns I’m considering into this shawl. Why not? If I’m going to work a lace sweater I better like the stitch pattern a whole lot!

Continue reading “A little DIY lace knitting”

Are you into stash busting? Do you have a lot of odd balls of yarn, bits of left over yarn? Have you been gifted with someone else’s stash? Do you need to reduce so you can buy something new? A summer shawl where the gauge doesn’t matter may be the answer.

I usually have one (OK, maybe more than one) garter stitch project on hand that’s great for TV knitting, car knitting, tea time knitting or reading a book and knitting (that’s a trick which takes some practice, my mom is an expert at it).

Continue reading “Stash Busting with One Triangle”

Do you knit your pattern using a device or a paper print out?

Continue reading “Device or Paper?”