Hmmm. As I was writing today's entry, I wanted to refer back to a post I remembered writing back in June of 2004. Apparently not all of the posts for that month imported correctly when we transferred our archives over. So the posts you'll see today are hand-carried ports of the AWOL material. Apologies for the deja vu. True new content tomorrow. I promise.

Material originally appearing on June 14, 2004. For the record, the pattern for the Spring Lightning Lacy scarf is now in the main wiseNeedle pattern collection.

WORKING REPORT - SPRING LIGHTNING LACY SCARF

My lacy scarf is done!

As planned, the ribbed center section pulls in a little bit, making the two diamond panel ends flare out. Stretched and blocked, across the widest point of the edgings it measures 14 inches at the end and 12 inches at the center. It's about 80 inches long. That's big for a scarf and narrow for a stole, but I like the size. I really enjoyed this project. It was just the right combo of super-easy and super-exacting. The Greenwood Hill Farm 2-ply laceweight yarn was wonderful. I Can t say enough about it. It's the softest, most buttery Merino I've ever worked with. It's hand-spun look is unique. You can see the slightly whiter areas in the photo - those are spots where one of the plies of the two-ply yarn gets a bit fluffy. There's a lot of variation skien to skein in the amount of the fluffy bits, so if you order it or buy it at a sheep and wool show, you may want to try to pick skeins that are similar (or not, as your taste and project needs dictate).

I'm not sure whether I'll keep this scarf or give it as a gift. On one hand I really like it. On the other hand, while it would be an interesting contrast with my guy-style brown leather aviator jacket, I know several people who might appreciate it as much as I do. Plus I'm not tired of my Kombu Scarf yet. Good thing I have the summer to think about it before scarf season resumes.

FILET KNITTING

Here's an obscure style. Mary Thomas in her Knitting Pattern Book mentions Filet Lace Knitting. It's a style of knitting more or less equivalent to filet crochet, which is itself an adaptation of earlier lacis and other filled net or withdrawn thread style darned embroidery. In this set of styles, the needleworker follows a graphed pattern, working solid or "empty" squares. The pattern is built line by line by these blocks of squares. This butterfly insertion is a good example of filet crochet:

(Pix from http://www.knitting-crochet.com - attributed there to Star Needlework Journal, 1917)

On page 263 of her book, Thomas describes a way to do something like this using knitting. Solid blocks are formed by units of three stitches x four rows. Spaces look to be formed by a combo of yarn overs and bind-offs. I haven't quite figured them out yet, but Thomas gives several illustrations and a couple of easy practice pieces.

I'm asking if anyone has ever actually tried this because I have never seen any lacy knitting that was done this way - not as a piece of actual knitting, nor in a photo either on the web or in any other book. I have never seen a lace pattern for a project done in this style either. So I'm asking. Have you done this? Do you know of any pix or other sources for the style?

The reason why I'm asking? I'm in the middle of one of those panting-and-eyes-wide moments of gotta-do-it-but-how? inspiration. Yesterday we closed on the new house. I am now the proud owner of a massive Arts and Crafts style front door, with a glass window that's 30 inches wide by 18 inches tall. There's mounting hardware there for a lace curtain panel, currently holding a dingy scrap of Woolworth's best. The door cries out for a better curtain.

But not just any lace panel will do. I've **got** to make one, and not only do I want to make one, I want to make one from THIS panel from my book of embroidery patterns:

The ultimate source is a book published in Nuremberg Germany around 1597 by one of the more prolific and well-known makers of embroidery pattern books. Not only did Johan Siebmacher put out several (this pattern was in his Schon Neues Modelbuch vol allerly listigen Modeln naczunehen Zugurcken un Zusticke"), his books traveled all over Europe so they're very well represented in museum collections. Many plates from them were copied and re-issued during the counted pattern "Renaissance" of the mid 1800s. This particular panel has cropped up several times over the years - often simplified or truncated. The most recent adaptation from it of which I know is a pattern for an cross stitched kitchen tablecloth and curtains set in an Anna magazine from the mid 1960s.

I haven't a clue as to how I'd go about making my George and Dragon panel, but I've got the will, the how-to book, the cotton yarn (Crystal Palace Baby Georgia), and the blissful confidence born of total ignorance.

Technorati : knitting

Hmmm. As I was writing today's entry, I wanted to refer back to a post I remembered writing back in June of 2004. Apparently not all of the posts for that month imported correctly when we transferred our archives over. So the posts you'll see today are hand-carried ports of the AWOL material. Apologies for the deja vu. True new content tomorrow. I promise.

Material originally appearing on June 13, 2004. For the record, the pattern for the Spring Lightning Lacy scarf is now in the main wiseNeedle pattern collection.

WORKING REPORT - SUMMER LIGHTNING LACY SCARF

I'd hoped to be able to report this a done item, complete with in-block pictures, but life continues to intrude. Closing for our move is on Monday, and hectic does not begin to describe the household right now. At least we don't move for another month. I'd have gone nuts if packing was loaded on top of everything else.

I can report a good deal of progress on the scarf, even if it isn't done. Exactly as described, I ripped back to before the final panel, added around six inches of length, then reknit that part. I've added all but the last six inches of the edging, going completely around the new end.

One person has asked if I'm doing anything special where ends of the edging meet. I started the edging in the center along one side on the theory that the scarf's center was most likely to be worn behind the neck. I'm hoping to make everything work out so that I end my edging knitting on the last row of the pattern. That way I'll graft the live stitches of the last row to the half-hitch cast on I used when I began. That should make an almost-invisible seam. To make sure I end up at that spot I'll have to plan ahead. My edging pattern is 8 rows long. Since I'm attaching at the rate of one attachment point per two rows (at the beginning of each right-side row), and since the scarf body was done with a slip stitched selvage edge things should be easy to calculate. That works out to one attachment point per slipped selvage chain.

Starting around now with six inches to go, the next time I am about to begin at Row #1, I'll count the remaining selvage chains to see if the total count is divisible by four. If so, I'll just work along merrily until the last row is complete. If not, I'll figure out how to fudge by either adding an extra attachment point or two, spaced out over the six inches, or by skipping an attachment point at the very end. I'd prefer to fudge by adding rather than skipping attachment points because a little tiny bit of extra flutter is less noticeable in a fluttery scarf than would be a little bit of puckering.

Another question I've gotten is how I went about edging the corners. At first I'd planned on mitering the corners, but that fell through. Instead I just eyeballed it, working three points worth of rows (that's 24 rows or 12 attachment points) in each corner. I spread those pick-ups out just a little, starting them one stitch away from the corner, on the corner stitch itself, and continuing onto the stitch following the corner, but the bulk were lumped up as best I could in the corner stitch itself. Here's the scarf end so you can see:

It's the last day of the year, and like everyone else I should be looking back over the year past, and ahead to the year future.

Lessons Learned for 2004

First and foremost - blogging is fun and (I hope) less of an imposition on people than is?writing interminable posts to the knitting-related mailing lists. At least the audience here is self-selected. Plus I've never kept a knitting-specific journal before. I find myself going back and looking up what I've written before to see how or why I did something in a specific way. Who knew?

I learned a lot this year about the periodicity and use of variegated or hand/dyed yarns. Although the projects on which I employed them aren't completed yet (Crazy Raglan, Entre deux Lacs Tee, and Birds Eye Shawl), I did spend lots of time figuring out how to get the color effects I wanted given the color cycle repeat lengths. This remains a fascinating topic for me, and as each skein of hand-dyed offers up new challenges, won't be an area that becomes boring any time soon.

Filet crochet. I've done piddly little things in crochet before. Even blankets count as "piddly little" because they are generally very simple in motif and technique. Snowflake ornaments, a table-topper round cloth of simple design, several blouse yokes in the '70s, a couple of ill-conceived faux Aran style kids' sweaters, but nothing as complex as the filet dragon curtain. It turned out to be an even bigger project than I thought, and consumed the better part of five months. Lessons learned include the fact that no two companies' crochet hooks are the same size (even if so marked); the effect that near imperceptible differences in hook size can make on gauge; how to do a near-invisible join on adjacent strips of filet crochet; and how well the old graphed patterns for Lacis and other Renaissance needle arts can look in filet.

Along the way to the filet crochet project I learned that none of the methods of filet knitting I tried worked particularly well, nor were they fine enough in gauge to handle the complexity of the dragon graph. I'm not through with this subject yet. I did do some experiments in alternate techniques that were less cumbersome than the methods I had read about. I'll probably revisit this in the future.

Entrelac is much faster if you can force your fingers to knit backwards. I'm still no speed demon at left-to-right knitting, but I'm faster at it than I am at knitting and flipping at the end of each mini-row. Especially when those rows are only six stitches across.

I also learned (via my Suede Tee) that novelty yarns can bring a world of interest to a simple, well-drafted pattern, but at the same time can be a *(#@ to knit. Side note:? I am also not that pleased on how the Suede is wearing. The microfibers do tend to be grabby, and catch on even the slightest roughness.

I learned several methods of knitting a lace edging directly onto a piece, rather than making it as a strip and sewing it on later. The most fiddly but most satisfying came via the Forest Path Stole. I used it again on my Spring Lightning Scarf:

Under "miscellaneous," I learned a nifty I-cord trick that applies a band of cord to both sides of a strip of knitting (apologies for the blurry photo):

I also used?a highly trendy but extremely boring to knit kiddie poncho to experiment with double width I-cord treatments to help tame edge curl in large stockinette pieces.

And finally, I learned an important lesson about something to avoid in the future. If any of you have ever looked at a loosely plied yarn like the Paternayan's normally sold for needlepoint, and thought about how nice only one or two of those plies might be for lace knitting - take heed. Spare yourself. The yarn for the Larger Kid's simple drop-stitch rectangle poncho took longer to de-ply than it did to knit up. For this one, I still bear the scars...

Next year?

Who knows. If you've been reading along, you'll have noted that I'm more of a whimsy knitter than a planner. Projects leap up and seize my interest. Sometimes that interest wanders before I finish, but I (almost always) go back and work to completion. Eventually.

I'm finishing up a couple more unanticipated last minute gifts right now - more socks, and a pair of quickie Coronet hats from Knitty (one hat = one evening). Then it's back to the Birds Eye shawl and the Crazy Raglan. While I don't as a rule knit to deadline, the Raglan is for The Small One, and the one thing certain about 6-year olds is that they're a moving target growthwise. The shawl is a present that I really should finish by the summer. Unless another killer project like the dragon curtain ambushes and drags me off first...

My holiday knitting. I'm pleased to say the Hannukah socks were graciously received by someone who both knows and appreciates hand knitting.

The scarves aren't scheduled for distribution until later this month, but as all are to be mailed, should be boxed up as soon as possible. Here they are:

First, the blue one for which I offered up the texture pattern earlier in the week.



Not terribly exciting, but soft and warm. And blue. I'm debating whether or not to fringe this one. Fringes aren't my favorite edge treatment as they often look ratty too quickly, but I have a feeling that this recipient would like them.

Second, the gray alpaca Kombu scarf is finished. Here's another blurry photo to prove it:



And finally, after sitting completed (but never used) since earlier this summer, the Spring Lightning scarf joins its siblings in this year's gift parade:



I love it, but I think the intended target will love it more. Plus, I can always make another. I did however want to take a final good picture of it for use in the pattern I plan on posting on wiseNeedle (which I'm still writing).

Two more hats and two more pairs of socks and I can return to my regularly scheduled knitting.

Face it, incremental progress on the Dragon is as boring to see day in and day out as it is to report.  The thing is chugging along, but I'm past the part of the process that's interesting.  There are no new challenges or problems to overcome - just plain old slow and steady progress.   On my other projects, I'm stll looking for the bag with the raglan and entrelac pieces.  It's here somewhere.  Emphasis on the somewhere.

So I turn to another intellectual exercise with a challenge factor increased by prior laziness and poor timing:  writing up a pattern for an object that I finished a while back, and on which I took very few working notes. 

To be truthful, my Spring Lightning scarf is better documented than most of my efforts.  Blogging does serve a purpose after all.  I did find the scarf itself - a happy byproduct of my continuing quest for the striped raglan sweater. I've got the graphs I printed out to start with, although Providence alone knows where the copy I annotated as I worked has gotten to.  And that city's not talking. 

I begin with a photo or two.  I've posted these before.  Unless people here think that these are adequate, I'll have to take another that shows the piece relaxed and ready to wear.  No I won't take a shot modeling my scarf.  I prefer to labor sight unseen.

Now I can figure out my original cast-on number from my chart.  I remember that I worked slipped stitch selvedge edges, because I used them when I was knitting the edging on to the finished strip.  I didn't document the little welted eyelet bits between the main pattern sections, but that's easy to retro-engineer.  My original charting didn't include the long (but simple) zig-zag motif used the scarf's center.  I did  that one up off the top of my head as I was working.  I think I can re-create it though with minimal trouble.  With luck my fingers will remember the pattern.

The edging I do remember playing with, so it's not quite straightforward.  I started with something that was much wider than the final version - a relatively deep lacy edging adapted from one in Heirloom Knitting, but I tinkered with it a bit.  Plus I used the pull a loop through and knit with the slack method of knitting the edging onto the body that I learned doing the Forest Path Stole.  I'll have to figure out a way to write that up that's both original and non-confusing.  I think that will be the most tricky part.

So it's off to boot up the house server, pull up the pattern template in DreamWeaver and Homesite, and code the thing up for wiseNeedle.  One thing I won't be doing this time is rewriting the entire pattern in prose format.  I doubt that anyone who would want to knit a lace piece of this complexity is going to want to wade through prose directions.  Plus there's only so many hours in my day, even if I do stretch the definition of a day by being among the "sleep optional" part of the population.

I've been  to keep the trivia of life from occluding my flow of knit-related entries, or from letting daily happenings stomp all over my posts.  That's about to get somewhat more difficult. 

Please don't be surprised if I miss the odd day (or week) between now and August.  For example, in the next six weeks we close on a new house, I am marshalling an army of contractors to rewire, repair the plumbing, and do the floors and (possibly) roof.  I personally have to remove all of the old fiberglass insulation improperly installed in the attic, rip down several massive ivy vines invading the stucco and pack all our stuff, supervise the move to the new place, clean the old place, and unpack.  During this period the kids end school, the little one begins day camp, the big one gets hauled to horse camp.  Also during this period we take our annual week out in North Truro on Cape Cod. 

Why a vacation in the midst of the chaos?  It's paid for (we have to reserve it in January); and it's at a place that gives 'dibs' on next year's rooms to this year's occupants.  I first stayed there when I was a teen, and have been going back ever since we relocated to this area.  It's on a quiet, (mostly) unchanged part of the Outer Cape just south of Provincetown, right on a bay side beach.  About all that's different in this particular place since the '70s is that the curtains of the efficiency were replaced sometime between '74 and '95.  No phones, no computers.  Just books, sandy children, knitting, and paella cooked on the grill. We may come back early, or I may zip home a couple of times if my presence is needed, but we ARE going. 

Which place is it?  I won't tell you.  I want it to remain undiscovered, but if you know that area if I say we're about a quarter mile from Day's Cottages in a hotel that straddles Rt. 6A, you'll have a very good idea of where I'll be.

(We are NOT staying in Day's Cottages.)

KNITTING PROGRESS - LACY SCARF, PILLOW, ENTRE DEUX LACS TEE, CRAZY RAGLAN

Good news on the Lacy Scarf!  After a minor failure of the on-line ordering system (graciously rectified by the owner after a phone call) I finally got the skein of the Greenwood Hill Farm 2-ply laceweight I need to finish the scarf.  I spent last night ripping back about a quarter of the finished edging and the last diamond panel of the center.  My plan is to extend the center section by about six inches, reknit the diamond panel, then finish the edging all the way around.  This should take a couple nights of work.  I am not sure whether or not the thing will require blocking.  We'll see.

The fulled pillow is stalled.  I just haven't had a moment either to make a pillow insert to the exact dimension needed, or to run to the crafts store to see if I can improvise a solution with off-the-shelf stuff.  It sits here on my desk, buttons in a baggie, just waiting.

Entre Deux Lacs Tee is moving along.  I've finished two of the ten strips needed, and am about a third of the way through the next one.  The bowling ball sized lump of yarn seems barely diminished, which is a good thing.

I haven't mentioned the Crazy Raglan yet.  I did end up going back to the clearance sale at Wild & Woolly in Lexington after the weekend.  I came home with a bag of Regia 6-ply Crazy Color.  It's a DK-weight machine washable wool, in a somewhat self-striping combo of red, blue, yellow, white and turquoise.  I'll use it to make a top-down raglan style pullover for the small one, probably worked at sport gauge because I like this yarn better knit slightly tighter.  The pattern is something I whipped up using Sweater Wizard, customized a bit after the original output.  I'll be casting on for this one prior to heading off on vacation.  A plain stockinette small piece in washable yarn sounds like relaxing vacation knitting to me, as I'm not at all sure I'd like to get my entrelac project's boucle hand-dyed wool full of sunblock and sand.

A NAME GENERATOR MORE TO MY LIKING

I see tons of people posting name games, quizzes and other web toys on their blogs.   Some are cute.  This one isn't.  (I miss Brunching Shuttlecocks.)

I'm feeling better and better about the fits-and-starts process by which I usually arrive at a finished project.  As I read more blogs I realize that I'm not the only one who's journey from start to completion is a single linear process.  Especially on original pieces, most people have a three steps forward/one step back path of progress.  Thank you Joe, Wendy, and everyone else who has documented forward but retrograde motion!

My own retrograde progress is that the lacy scarf is stalled.  The good news is that the hand-spun Merino wool I am using for the lacy scarf is still available.  The bad news is that I ran out of yarn, and have ordered another skein. 

Now I have two choices - finish out the remaining foot of edging and use the piece as is; or rip back to add length.  After (already) ripping the first end and re-doing it, I am liking the feel and drape of the piece more.  The only thing that is still bugging me is total proportion.  It's wide for its length.  Another three or four inches of the center motif would go a long way to making the piece more pleasing.

I'm leaning heavily towards adding length.  With an entire extra skein, I'll have plenty of yarn with which to do so.  Plus I won't have to remove all the edging that's been completed.  The Knitting Gods were with me when I started that part because all unknowing, I began on the "downhill" side.  I worked from the center down to the cast-on row end, then back up the other long side.  That means I only need to rip back enough to free the final diamond end.

As you can see, I've tentatively decided on a name for this mangled creation.  Playing on the zig-zags, plus the petal shaped holes and fluttery edge reminiscent of our cherry tree in bloom, I'll call it "Spring Lightning."  I'm still debating on whether or not I should write the thing up for wiseNeedle.  I shoudn't have a problem doing so, but I don't think there are many people interested in a scarf of this type.  Most of the scarves I see being knit are low-effort/high-tactile-visual-appeal type stuff from novelty yarns.  I see people doing complex lace shawls, but not small scarves.  (There's a poll at the right if you'd like to leave your opinion.)

What to start next?  Hmm...  Ideas have been bubbling around for that blue fingering weight hand-dyed boucle I wound a couple of weeks ago:

I had fun with the entrelac stole.  Perhaps I'll do some swatching for an entrelac or modular knit Tee.  But I'd like to work in some sort of shaping as most stuff I see in modular knitting is too boxy a fit for me.  I'd also like to make the modules very small to capitalize on the intense color patches in this yarn. 

Since I'm now stalled on Lightning and on the perpetual wash cycle mode on the felted pillow, it's back to swatching for me.

Yesterday's visit to the halls of jurisprudence was at the same time, quite dull and quite interesting.  Although I was not among the impaneled and got to leave early, watching the process up-close-and-personal was enlightening.  I met three other knitters among those waiting in the jury pool, and got lots of edging done in the hours I sat there:

Two of the people I chatted with were quite nice.  Both were women who had knit years ago and who were thinking of getting back into it after reading that the hobby has grown in popularity.   Both mentioned "fancy scarf yarn," so I'm guessing that the scarf craze hasn't exhausted the pool of late adopters yet.

The third was a pain, a pest, an annoyance, and I spent part of the morning trying to dodge her.  The problem was that she insisted that what I was doing couldn't be knitting.  It was crochet because it was white, lacy looking, had holes, and wasn't being worked on long needles with buttons at the ends (I was using two DPNs).  After all, everyone knows there's no such thing as knitted lace.

She wandered over and gushed a bit.  I kept working, giving short but (mostly) patient answers.  "Gorgeous crochet!" 
     "Thank you.  It's knitting, not crochet."
          "It can't be.  It's crochet.  I can tell."
               "Sorry.  As you can see, I'm knitting."
                      "Thats not knitting.  I know knitting and you aren't doing that.  
                      You're making holes. You NEVER make holes in knitting. 
                      It's wrong.  This is crochet.  Don't tell me what I know."

This went on and on, all in a voice that the entire room could hear.  I excused myself, picked up and resettled in another waiting room.  After a little while my tormenter followed, commencing where she left off.  I moved again.  She followed.  I was ever so grateful when they announced the lunch break.  I watched to make sure she left the building, then popped down to the cafeteria for a stale tuna sandwich and a half-hour of relative quiet. 

On the edging, I'm about 85% sure that I won't run out of yarn.  I'm also not entirely pleased with the two corners.  I did try to miter them, but wasn't able to manage it in the face of constant interruption.  They are more or less symmetrical in stitch count and pattern iteration, but they look clunky to me.   I'm also  not entirely sure that this project will be successful enough to make it to the write-me-up-for-wiseNeedle stage, or to deserve a name other than its current generic descriptor.   So it goes. 

If any lace mavens out there can offer up advice (or sympathy for ripping back), I'll listen with eyes wide.

I continue to make progress on my two at-hand projects. 

Lacy Scarf

I finished the center strip of the lacy scarf on Saturday night.  The center strip took almost one entire skein of the hand-spun lace weight Merino.  That rate of consumption put the last stake in the heart of my first choice of edging (with minimal modifications).  I did't think I would have had enough yarn to do one that wide. 

So as I predicted, it was back to the drawing board.  I spent my knitting time on Sunday and Monday messing around with stitch dictionaries both hard-copy and on-line, using the little bit of yarn leftover from Skein #1, swatching out possibilities.  Disappointment.  Overall, I felt like a cable TV viewer - I've had hundreds of choices, but nothing to watch. 

I started with several possiblities from books, then tinkered with them.  I even drafted up a couple ideas from scratch.  I wanted to use diagonals and/or diamonds to mirror the motifs on the scarf end.  The thing should be rather demonstrative as the bulk of the body is so plain.  I needed my edging to be no wider than 12-14 stitches at its widest point.  A sawtooth or point detail would make going round the corner easier.    

After extensive fiddling with dozens of patterns  (enough to actually wear out my short length of practice yarn from all the knitting up and ripping back), I cycled back to my original pick.  It had the best combo of diagonals and I liked the balance of opage to openwork areas.   All that effort wasn't lost though.  What practice did do was give me a better feel for how patterns can be changed around.  My initial efforts at modifying the pattern book original were pretty tame - taking out a small insertion detail.  This last time I chopped it right in the middle of a vertical pattern element, narrowing the thing down by half.  As you can see, it's working:

Stitch counts on the eding range from 10 to 15 (the body by contrast is 27 stitches wide, but because it's a ribbing, it looks narrower than that).  

To attach my edging, I'm using the same pull-a-loop method employed in the Forest Path Stole.  It's fussy, but it makes a very airy join, with no heavy column of attachment stitches.  I will work from the point shown, rounding the first corner to the center of the end.  Then I'll weigh my remaining yarn.  That should give me a handle on yarn consumption.  If I've used more than a quarter, I'll rip back and slash another three columns from the edging's repeat, then begin again.

Fulled Pillow II

The fulled pillow went through five wash/tumble dry cycles over the weekend, keeping company with the family's regular laundry.  I didn't expect much in terms of total shrinkage.  I've used this yarn before and it takes quite a few tries before it's sufficiently de-lanolined to full.

It did start to fuzz up around Wash #3.  I can still see garter stitch ridges, but the individual stitches are getting harder to spot.  The pillow has also begun to get denser, and a small bit of shrinkage has occurred, but it's not worth photographing yet. 

Original dimensions were 26 x 14 inches (66 x 36 cm).  Right now it's roughly 23 x 13.5 inches (58.4 x 35 cm).  I do note that the yellow stripes account for about half the shrinkage so far.  The blue and green ones haven't tightened up as much.  I'll keep washing the pillow until I'm satisfied but as laundry is only done on weekends, you won't be hearing about this piece again until next week.

Thank you to everyone who wrote to say that they liked the level of detail in these posts.  I blush a bit.  I'm writing a blog that I'd find interesting to read.  But my mom's main point is taken - not every post need be essay length.  I'll try to make things a bit more readable, perhaps splitting longer thoughts over two or more days.

Lacy Scarf

I ran into a temporary snag on the lacy scarf pattern, but I think I've beaten the problem.

I chose a bunch of texture patterns that I thought would look good together.  Lots of play among them on diamonds and sharp diagonals.  My idea was to knit a pattern panel at each end of the scarf, and use a simpler, coordinating pattern between them for the scarf body, with the entire piece trimmed with a killer edging.

I drafted up my patterns, and swatched each one.  Here's where the mistake came in.  I've got **just enough** yarn with no chance of getting more, so I swatched each pattern in turn by itself, ripping back and re-using the yarn between swatches.  Each looked great on its own, so I cast on and began the piece as a whole.  End pattern #1 worked fine.  The welted eyelet divider looked fine.  But the simpler plain diamond pattern for the scarf body was wrong, wrong, wrong.  The proportions of the diamonds just didn't fit the proportions of the end pattern.  They fought, and the piece looked way too busy.

So in a Wile E. Coyote moment, it was back to the drawing board.  I decided to go with a contrasting pattern/texture.  I had played with the rick-rack rib stitch in the Zen scarf pattern.  It looked nice enough in a large gauge, but the texture didn't really come out.  I decided to play with it some more.  I separated each column of the zig-zag by a column of p1, k1, p1.  I like the look and I think that it's enough different from the first panel to stand on its own:

Thinking on the edging I've graphed out, I think am going to have the same problem.  I'll scout around today to see if I can find something narrower that has a coordinating presentation.

The yarn is wonderful.  It's a hand-spun super-soft Merino wool, labeled as laceweight, but actually closer to fingering.  (I'll add a yarn review after the project is finished and blocked).  It's from Greenwood Hill Farm, a small producer here in Massachusetts, and is my souvenier from this year's Gore Place Sheepshearing Festival.  It's a rustic-looking two-ply yarn in that there are thick and thin/tightly spun and looser spun, fluffy sections on each ply.  This makes a very informal feeling bit of lacy knitting - snuggly rather than crisp.  (You can see some o the slubby, puffy sections in the piece above - look at the top corner of the top leftmost diamond.)  It knits up evenly, there's none of the kinking back on itself I've found in some other small-production hand-spun yarns.  One minor annoyance - there was quite a bit of tiny, sharp vegetable fragments in the first third of my skein - about one thorn or spriglet every two inches.  I understand the logistical problems/economics of why these shards remain.  I don't expect this type of sheep-to-knitter enterprise to produce pristine yarn; but it's a minor pain to keep the tweezers on hand to pull out the stickers as one knits.  In spite of the rustic look and occasional tiny thorn, this yarn slides like butter and feels like a cloud.  It's the absolute poster-child for non-itchy natural Merino.  I've got about 400 yards, enough for a very short overlap style inside-the-coat scarf (as opposed to a wrap-around-the-neck grand scarf).  If it performs as I expect it will, I'll be trying out their sport weight real soon.  

Another departure from my original idea: At first, I was going to work this scarf like I did my Kombu Scarf - starting with a strip of edging, picking up along its spine, then working the edgings at the same time as the scarf body.  I decided to work it differently this time, just for the sake of the challenge. 

I am going to knit the entire center strip, end to end.  Then starting in the scarf's center (the part usually at the back of the neck), I'll knit on the edging.   I will calculate the length of each edging repeat, so I should be able to work in an even number to the corner.  If the edging I end up using is narrow and flexible enough, I might be able to wrap the corner easily, working an extra iteration on the corner to avoid cupping.  If it ends up being too wide for that I think I'll try mitering the corner with short-rows to make a nice, finished end.  Remember, both approaches are "in theory."  I'm not quite sure how I'll go about the corners yet.  In the mean time, I'll just keep knitting the center strip.

The past two days' posts aside, I have been making progress on both my lacy scarf and my fulled pillow.  Knitting on the pillow is almost done.  I've got maybe one more evening of garter stitch left.  This weekend I intend on fulling it when I do laundry.  I'm rushing a bit on it because I want to be sure to be able to full it completely before I have to leave this washing machine behind (it was a negotiated sacrifice in my house sale).  I'm afraid the older hand-me-down machine at the new house might not be up to the challenge.

On the lacy scarf, I've finished re-graphing the patterns I intend on trying out.   I'm working on modifying them a bit so that they play off each other better.  I'm also narrowing the edging by either messing with or eliminating the double column of faggotting shown in the pattern original. 

For those new to the term, faggotting is a true lace knitting stitch, in which increases and decreases occur on every row (as opposed to a lacy knitting stitch, in which rows containing increases and decreases alternate with plain knitted or purled rows).  One common form of this effect when worked in the flat takes only two stitches and two rows for the entire repeat.  Row 1 would be  an endless repeat of the (YO, SSK) unit.  The accompanying Row 2 would be an endless repeat of (YO P2tog).

So?  Why is it called "faggotting" anyway?  [Warning.  This is a Kim-theory, so go chip yourself an enormous grain of salt before reading on.]

It's not immediately evident why the name stuck to this particular knitting texture stitch.  In historical usage, faggots are bundles of sticks - especially twiggy sticks used as kindling or cheap firewood.  Nothing much looks bundled if you examine just knitted pieces.  But if you look at those pieces in in the context of other needlework contemporary to the Great Whitework Cotton Knitting Craze of the mid to late 1800s the reasoning is pretty clear. 

 Withdrawn thread embroidery was one of those contemporary needlework styles.  Commonly used for hemming or decorative insertions, it can range from the pretty simple to the amazingly complex.  The sampler below shows several withdrawn thread patterns spanning several different substyles (the lacy white-on-white bits).  Disclaimer and attribution:  this sampler isn't my own work, it's a piece in the collection of the National Academy of Needle Arts that I found doing a Google image search.  I didn't find a more exact attribution on their website for it.  Great work though!

The top three little bands on the sampler are the most widely known and used forms of the technique.  The others, while nifty aren't as often seen.  The two most common names for this substyle that includes the top three are "Italian Hemstitching" and "Faggotting."  The multicolor bands are double running stitch (aka Holbein Stitch or Spanish Stitch).  

You can see in the openwork bands that the horizontal threads of the linen ground were snipped at the left and right, then teased out.  The cut ends were secured with stitches, usually before any cutting took place.  The remaining vertical threads were bundled tightly with tiny hemming stitches that tie the  fabric threads together like little bunches of sticks.  In the more complex forms on this sampler, these bundles were further embellished with threads woven in among them, or were subdivided and/or twisted by additional stitching.

The second strip of the sampler with it's running VVVVVs is the most interesting one for knitters.  Compare the zig-zag pattern of one often-seen type of knitted faggotting:

The zig-zags produced by faggotting in knitting mimic the groups of verticals created in withdrawn thread hemstitching.  That's where the bundle idea came in, and from where I believe the knitting stitch borrowed its name.   This snippet is excerpted from Lewis' Knitting Lace, p. 146 (Yow!  I just saw the used book price. I need to update my insurance to cover my library!)

Having finished the poncho yesterday, I scuff around with what little yarn remains here in the house (my stash being stowed in the storage cubby pending our upcoming move.)

At the Gore Place Sheepshearing Festival last month I bought two skeins of hand-spun fine gauge Merino from Greenwood Hill Farm.  Each is around 200 yards so I have about 400 yards total.  In my opinion it's more like a light fingering weight than a true lace weight.  I bought them with a lacy scarf in mind.  No pattern in particular.  I thought I'd noodle out one on my own.

I've decided to make a piece with two fancy ends, a rather plain but coordinating lacy middle, and trimmed all the way around with a killer edging. 

I swatched on several size needles, and decided I liked the way that lacy stitches felt when knit on a US #6.  (That's an argument that this stuff is truly fingering weight, because I like lace weight knit on #3s.)  Gauge is hard to estimate because I haven't decided on pattern stitches yet, but I'm not worried about making a scarf fit.  The various lacy patterns I played with worked up at between 5.5 and 5 stitches per inch, so I know roughly how wide a pattern I should be looking for to make a scarf of around 5 inches in diameter.

To that end I started paging through some of my knitting books and stitch dictionaries today.  I found several things that had elements I liked.  First, I found a wide diamond band in Lewis' Knitting Lace (pattern #42).  Nice wide diamond frames, filled with a smaller diamond pattern in the center.  It's a 12-stitch repeat, with 2 stitches before and one stitch after the end repeats.  That's 15 total for one repeat.  Narrow, but I'm planning on adding an edging.

To complement the diamond pattern, I'm looking at a couple of simple lace grounds.  Right now the leading candidate is a mini leaf pattern from Walker 1 (p.215, #3 in the set), but I'm not sure it will work out.  I'd like to use a divider to set this pattern off from the diamonds.  I've always liked a plain row of YO, K2tog framed by garter stitch welts.

Finally we get to the killer edging.  I'm looking at Heirloom Knitting by Miller, the Victorian Zigzag Edging on p. 125.  That's a WIDE piece as written - 20 stitches at cast-on, widening to 26.  I might have to eliminate some of the openwork on the attachment side to slim it down some.

The next step is to swatch a bit with each of the given patterns.  Before I do that however, I'm going to redraft them using a uniform symbol set and put all the patterns I intend to try out on one sheet of paper.  It's easy enough to adapt to each book's ideosyncratic style of stitch representation, but it's a pain to switch gears between systems and flop all those heavy volumes around while I'm knitting. 

I give no guarantee that this process will lead to an Actual Design.  I begin two or three of these for every one that ends up as an on-the-needles project. 

In the mean time just to have something mindless on the needles for last night's and tonight's weekend sofa movies, I took my other Sheepshearing Festival acquisition and cast on for another felted pillow similar to the one I did in Manos del Uruguay wool .  This one is also done in the rustic Nick's Meadow Farm yarn I've mentioned before.  The pale blue, light moss green, and light butter yellow skeins together cost less than one skein of Manos. 

The movies that accompany this excercise in autopilot garter stitch?  Last night it was Master and Commander.  Tonight it's John Cleese in Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew.  If you like either adventure stories or Jane Austin, you'll enjoy the series of books from which the former was adapted.  The movies skipped over the whole drawing-room/social manners side of O'Brian's books, especially the rivalries in love that divide the two lead characters.  As for the Shrew - it's so non-PC it's over the top, but it's also one of my favorite plays.  I'm really looking forward to seeing Cleese as Petruchio, and finding out how the actors cast as Katherine and Grumio stand up to him.

Back to knitting.  Thumbing through my stitch books I lighted again upon Indian Cross Stitch (Walker I, p. 112), a variant on enlongated stitches.  I used it in my Suede T.   It seems that in just the past three months, I've seen elongated stitches, including this one and Seafoam (Walker II, p. 21 ) all over the place, including the latest Interweave Knits and Knitters,  Berroco's patterns, and Lana Grossa's patterns.  Given the long lead time of both magazine and yarn makers' pattern development cycles, it's always interesting to see the same idea hit multiple sources at the same time.  Shadow knitting cropped up in parallel issues of IK and Knitters a while back.  Lacy knitting featuring lily of the valley-inspired textures is another recurring theme (IK led the pack with Forest Path last summer). 

About the only explanations for this parallelism I can come up with are that the designing knitting community is quite small; some things are natural fits (elongated stitches work well with ribbons, ribbons are hot right now); and many designers draw inspiration from the same fashion industry sources (deconstructed/slashed looks were big on the runways two seasons ago, and it takes a season or two for runway ideas to percolate into retail knitting patterns.) 

So far most sources talk about doing the elongated stitches do them with the multiple wrap method.  Can a revival of Condo Knitting be far behind?