Work No Longer In Progress: RIP KNUS

Update on the update: OK, I was right the first time. One of the skeins I just unwound was cut half way through (so it presented as 2 balls - but the same size as one another so it confused me). To clarify - I've got 1025 yards - I know. I weighed the yarn. That's slightly over 5 skeins because Sweet Georgia errs on the side of giving me more yarn than the label promises.

Updated: Egad! I'm still ripping back this fabric - it's been more than an hour (I wrote this post, originally, last night, with the intention of undertaking the undoing of this sweater when I got home from work. I guess, having never done this before, I underestimated how long this would take.  Moreover, I was wrong about how much of this yarn I purchased?!?! (And I just purchased it all.) I actually have 1200 yards (6 skeins). Which means that I'd actually knit 900 yards before ripping back. Whoa, painful. And now I'm up to 8700 yards of stash yarn. I feel a bit overwhelmed.

By now it's done. I've ripped back the onerous, clunky, unhappy-making KNUS. It's rare that I dislike knitting something so much. I've actually never before ripped back a sweater that's 700 900 700 yards complete (that's 70 per cent of the finished garment). I've actually been avoiding the project bag for the last week. Many things I may be but "procrastinator" is amongst them. In truth, I've been on the fence about this garment since I was 100 yards in and then I spent another 30 hours knitting 600 800 600 more yards only to feel increasingly iffy with every row. (In retrospect, maybe I spent longer than 30 hours. It's not like I time myself while doing these things.)

Sometimes you have to cut your losses (and be grateful for the opportunity to make something else) but man, just rewinding 700 900 700 yards of yarn by hand is enough to put one off the task. Never mind all the work I'll simply have to chalk up to "learning". Fucking learning.

On the plus side, that gives me another 1000 1200 1000 yards of worsted for the stash. And that was the underrepresented yarn-weight!

So today I'd be grateful if you could regale me with a story about a time when you ripped back a major project and it was super unpleasant for a mere 10 minutes (but then you realized what a necessary and positive experience it turned out to be). Or you could tell me how it tortured and tormented you and you've never got over it. I'm looking for empathy. I'll take what I can get.

Work In Progress: KNUS Sweater (2)

The only happy thing I can say about the KNUS (which is more like a choke hold than a gentle hug - the very definition of the word "knus") is that it's facilitated my binge-watch of The Fall while drinking Grand Marnier. Ever seen it? Egad! It's an English crime drama starring Gillian Anderson. Lord, I love that woman. She's like the American version of Kate Winslet. And talk about the hottest serial killer ever. I don't know who that guy is but he's not hard to look at.

At any rate, here's progress to date:

This is a view of the right side of the back sweater (foreground) with the wrong side of the front sweater below it. The front upper back is that triangular expansion from above the line of the back sweater. I'm about to start knitting the back sweater to exactly the same proportions as the front. The cast on edge of the wings represents the front armhole.

I don't love how uneven the fabric looks, though I am confident, with blocking, it's going to even out. Again, you can see the lifeline about 4 inches from the bottom of the sweater, that ridge with black strings hanging from the left edge.

This represents about half of my yarn (or 500 yards). I do believe I'll make it with the 1000 yards I purchased. After working the expanded triangles (from the base of the sweater - or under bust bodice), one reconnects them in the round and then knits the yoke.

It's just fucking endless, all of this K1P1.

Here's a stock pic of the finished sweater for reference:

Do you see how the bodice widens into the armholes? Well that's the part I'm knitting right now. You can see how the slender, tall model is wearing a version without waist shaping. As you can tell, from my photo above, I've given the bodice an hourglass shape. We're destined to see if that's a good or bad idea.

Let me just say, it would be so horrible to finish this thing and find that it's hideous. My fingers are blue/green from dye and they're feeling the workout of working on dense fabric.

Of course, it could be a massive hit - but I'm not inclined to get overly optimistic just yet.

Work in Progress: KNUS Sweater

As anticipated (but sooner than I imagined), the weather has gone supernova winter. Fuck. (That's what my irises are saying right now.) Last night we had a few cm of snow which morphed into frozen rain for a few more cms and then culminated in a bunch of rain (ongoing). You cannot imagine the dangerous slush/ice fest that's right outside my door.

Needless to say, I'm sitting on my couch and knitting.

Here's the thing: I appear to be incapable of following a pattern, as written. I'm making the KNUS and I've been compelled to give it waist shaping. Why? Well, the Ravelry projects page is an invaluable resource. I've said it before and I'll say it again: If you see a bunch of finished projects and most of them reveal a particular flaw (my perspective, natch), don't imagine you can make the same garment, in the same way, without encountering the same flawed outcome.

In this instance, the body of the sweater is an unshaped box and most of the wearers look boxy. Not my scene - especially since I have to delineate adequately between my stomach (the place I store most of my body fat) and my boobs. Don't kid yourself - an intelligent pattern-maker will model the finished object on someone who can pull off whatever the finished object shape happens to be. In this instance, that model is a waif with no boobs. Of course KNUS looks proportioned on her. Most of the peeps making this garment will not fit that description because most knitters are not 20-something waifs who are 6 feet tall. You've got to make the garment to fit you. The drafting and pattern, as written, are no indicator of that possibility.

But here's the dilemma. The stitch pattern is a complex version of K1P1 (or 1x1 rib) called square rib. Good luck finding any evidence of what that is online. Alas, 1x1 rib does not lend itself easily to stitch decreases and increases (the mechanism by which shaping is achieved) because you have to retain the pattern and, the minute you get rid of one K or one P, you're left with 2 Ps or 2 Ks stuck together. It's a bitch.

I spent a good hour figuring a way to do this without obstructing the rib and eventually landed upon something that could work on the decrease (and complementarily on the increases I'll work thereafter to return to the width required before knitting the bust and arms). It's not as pretty as it usually would be - where one is able to leave a stitch on either side of the waist marker to give a bit of additional definition of the "seam". Instead, my decreases and increases have to abut the marker. Note: I "invented" this because I couldn't find any instructions about how to accomplish this online. There may be a more elegant way to do it but my brain didn't think it up.

Here's a look at the sweater so far:

It's knit bottom up in the round until the armholes. There's a temporary lifeline about an inch from the top which is why the pattern looks warped at that latitude. No way I was going to try this without a way of ripping back that didn't include redoing tubular cast on! Note: The fabric doesn't take on its square knit shape until it's blocked. I should have taken a pic of the blocked swatch to show that.

This represents 4.5 inches of length and I used 200 yards of yarn (exactly 1 ball) to achieve it. It produces a very firm fabric that weighs a ton. I have to hope that I've applied the waist shaping adequately i.e. in the right spot vertically or it's going to be rather observably contoured in all the wrong ways. You think I'd have done a lot of vertical measuring before I hatched my plan but, no. I used my intuition. Yeah, that's always a huge risk or, as I like to call it, lazy adventure. Truth is, I've been waist shaping on my own body for a long time. I do think I've got it right in a way that also respects the pattern instructions once I get to the section where the the front and back are separated to allow for the arm shawl and yoke.

I'm managing numerous engineering considerations concurrently with fit ones. I've got to take some chances. Which is why I inserted a lifeline (piece of contrast yarn to hold the stitches, should I need to rip back) right before I went off-road. Note: That's what's making the fabric look tight along one row. It'll even out when I remove the lifeline.

You can see how the waist is starting to take shape at the right of the pic. I'm actually going for a decrease of 16 stitches (almost 4 inches of circumference) over a vertical span of 3 inches. I'll add it back in over the next 3 inches (the 3 inches just below the bust which will well position me to create the arm/yoke unit over the bust without messing with the pattern overly. That's not negligible shaping.

As I mentioned in the caption of the photo, you can't get a sense of how the fabric will become waffley because it doesn't take that pattern until it's blocked. Also, that lifeline is messing with the apparent tension about 1 inch from the top.

And while I'm in the mood to disclose - I actually messed up the 5th row of the sweater (the one visible just above the tubular cast on hem). I thought the pattern was supposed to be nubby on the right side of the fabric (that's actually the wrong side) so I did a major wrap and turn in the round on the 6th row (to "correct" things) but, natch, that just made it wrong. Yeah, I created my own error with much forethought so I'm calling it a design feature.

Finally, here's a pic of the waist decreasing on either side of the orange marker:

The reason it looks terrible is because you can see the lifeline indent (that's not going to be there in the end) and there's no vertical channel between the decreases, as would normally be there, given that the K1P1 had to be preserved (see above). I'm also having to purl 2 rows down on every 3rd row which, in this instance, means I'm sometimes purling into a knit stitch 2 rows down. It's complicated to explain but I'm confident that, when blocked, this will look fine.

Updated: Half-Way Through the Holidays

Update: It took me a freakin' hour to do that tubular cast on and then I was 4 stitches short (despite counting meticulously for the entire hour). Fuck that. To make up the 4 stitches I just increased a K1P1 in 2 random spots while knitting the first row (after the 2 row tubular cast on set up). It's not perfect but no one will notice. I wasn't spending another hour to - very possibly - end up with the same sort of problem again, particularly when twisted stitches (something I managed to avoid) are the likely outcome of this cast on. I can see myself using this method for hats and cuffs but I will do what I can to avoid a sweater hem in the future.

Just want to clarify that long tail cast on and long tail tubular cast on are 2 different things. I actually love long tail cast on - it's the one I use 90 per cent of the time. It's fast and it creates a nice edge (though not the world's stretchiest edge). But long tail tubular cast on is a 3 row experience yielding an exceedingly stretchy edge that's also invisible. It's as if the stitches waterfall away at the hem. (I'll take a pic and post it when I can bring myself to move.) I'm sure one gets better at it with practice but it's much more involved than most any other cast on I've ever tried. Can't say I'm looking forward to the long tail tubular cast off (instructions for which I haven't yet read!).

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I don't know that sewing is going to happen this holiday. I've rarely been so low-energy and I'm having a bout of pain that I'm largely unfamiliar with (low back and knee). It's really limiting my desire to get active with the crafts. Despite yoga and other management techniques, the pain persists. I don't suppose I'm in a mind state to tell you about all the ways in which I've kicked pain's ass. The fact is that my condition seems to come and go. It's seriously aggravated by the dampness and cold of fall and winter - which is, frankly, a big issue (to understate things). High levels of cortisol don't do it any favours and inflammatory food and drink is a no-go. Too bad that the last 2 months have been unyieldingly stressful, full of celebratory events and constantly raining.

Scott and I have spent the last year on a semi-regular "research project". We look up crazy places that we intend to visit in the interests of verifying whether the place is retirement-worthy. Increasingly, my hope is to retire to a pied-a-terre Montreal for the summers (or stay in TO, but in a residence with a smaller footprint) and then to winter in a location that's warm. Yeah, it's not particularly novel but the places we're seeking out aren't standard. For example, ever been to Quito? It's a UNESCO site and the highest-altitude capital city in the world. It's also perfectly temperate (our first requirement) with blue skies. I'd love to retire half-time to Barcelona but I don't know if I'll be able to afford it (time will tell). I have 18 years to consider this so no rush. But when the pain hits, planning is a welcome distraction. There's nothing more invigorating than imagination.

(Sidebar: I do realize that it's insane to dream about retirement in foreign climes, at the age of 45, when I'm about to embark on a renovation of massive proportions - but whatcha gonna do? I won't retire till I have a full pension and enough funds to last me many years and my current life is in this absurdly-desirable city with half-time horrible, pain-exacerbating weather. I like to think I'm working all the angles.)

On the topic of couch-friendly, here's a look at my next knitting project (I'll show you photos of my last project - an uncertain pair of socks with cables - once blocked). I'm going to make this in that Sweet Georgia worsted yarn in "Riptide" aka a jewel-toned blue for which I visited Ewe Knit's sale yesterday, to stock up in the appropriate amounts (thanks Evie!!):

KNUS by Olga Buraya-Kefelian

It meets my latest criteria: sort of shawl/poncho-like with interesting, clean lines. It also mandates that I learn new things (another way to show pain the finger) - what better to take one's mind off everything than developing new skill?

But you know how I love to hate learning crazy new knitting things.

Lord - long-tail tubular cast on is not easy when you apply it to 172 stitches?! If I had a straight needle (rather than circulars) I could probably keep things in order but on a skinny cable, those stitches like to wind at will. And there are SO many of them to contend with. No mind, I've watched all the videos, read the posts, looked on the forums, downloaded the pdfs. I will prevail.

The other novel element of this design is the stitch pattern. It's a sort of fisherman's rib (not that I've ever done fisherman's rib) wherein you knit 3 rounds in K1P1 rib and then the 4th round is rib - but you work into purl stitches 2 rows below (i.e. on the 4th round you purl the stitches that correspond in round 2). It creates a nubby, waffley pattern and a fabric that's quite robust and firm. I imagine it's going to eat yarn for breakfast but, man, will it be warm.

Today's questions: How are you holding up this holiday season? Have you made KNUS? If yes, how did it go for you? Does long-tail tubular cast on aggravate the crap out of you? Any retirement plans you'd like to share? (I'm looking for great weather - dry, sunny, hot, culture, friendly people, beautiful architecture, awesome food and adequate health care. What? Retirees need good health care!) Let's talk.