what do you call a hoodless hoodie?...

A noodie! LOL!  not sure that will catch on, but I’m loving mine! I wasn’t going to say anything because you already know I can be a bit obsessive. I was just going to quietly knit this thing and keep it to myself but I’m also somewhat of a show-off, I’ll admit it! With my Girlfriend Hoodie pattern in mind, I started off making three pockets - oh, did I say three? Yeah, I was doing that decrease hack and loving it - it's so much faster than that old, outlined full-fashioned decrease and it truly looks nicer and lays flatter - but in my excitement, I must have been operating on auto-pilot and thinking of other things and on the second pocket, I ended at RC078 instead of the 82 rows of the first one - somewhere in there I didn't knit two rows between the battenburg transfers - easy to do when you are shortrowing at the same time and there is something happening on every row instead of just every second, and not concentrating! I made the third pocket (16g each, by the way), paying full attention and got it perfect.

before washing
 

 In my haste for glory, I hadn’t weighed my cone at the beginning, just took the old information from that old post and acted like I had the same size cone (1.2 lb/520g) as the plumberry one. In my mind I was making a half-sleeved hoodie (do you like that ‘half-sleeved’ term – I saw it for the first time on something the other day and decided to use it a few times just to see if it catches on!), knitting the half-sleeve in the battenburg lace, the body a little longer than the  original version, with narrower bands to compensate (those deep stockinette bands do take more yarn so that was a consideration) and of course a hood, because, after all, this is a hoodie, right? 
After both sleeves were knit (I did weigh them, 46g each), I jumped right into making the back, determined to get it made plain before I could reason my way into jazzing it up unnecessarily. I kept saying to myself that people behind my back would notice the beautiful half-sleeves without being distracted with random patterning up the back and though I got it done quite quickly, was rather dismayed to notice the diminished size of the cone! ouch! The back was 84g so that meant that much again for the fronts and I still had bands to do – the hood would take about half the weight/yardage of the Back and I began to readjust my vision. By the time I had the Fronts done I saw this garment as a zip-front, summer cardigan with picot hems and neckband with half sleeves in lace. Final tally, 42g left, good thing nothing was written in stone! Oh, and because of the shrinkage factor, when I first tried it on before laundering, it was like, yuck! this is way too big, but sure enough, the machine wash and dry sorted it out fine!

 

P.S. The hems were ‘Knitting on the EDGE’ #3 – I used the neckline technique from Borderline, KW #25 and added 8 shortrows to centre back and fronts (but not to pockets) to even out the A-line.
MSP here I come! I'm teaching at Founders Fest in Minneapolis, July 28, 29, 2018.
Google Midwest Machine Knitters Collaborative for more information and registration! Hope to see you there!

progression of a design...

I have the base piece of the shrug knit and I’m really happy with it – it’s lovely and soft and the angora has a beautiful drape to it. I wanted to be sure that it would be long enough in the back before going any further so I decided that it would be good to get Shannon here to see how it was actually going to work for her – she’s like half a minute in size but reasonably tall and I thought this would be the time to see if maybe I should/could add a sleeve to it – after all, the date in June (the 17th) could be quite cool – there are no guarantees with our weather here and we’ve just had one of the worse ice storms at the end of freakin’ April so who knows?

Anyway, Shannon came and she was on the same page, that a sleeve might be a good idea – I told her I could make one, with a very snug fit and we could try it and then re-evaluate – the yarn is holding out really well - I have more than half left so I don’t expect any issues there – stay tuned! I'm heading to NC for this weekend and I have a few more samples to knit and some packing to do so I won't get to it until next week at the earliest...

some cheats....

There I was, all anxious to get going but I didn’t want to waste the yarn or the time to make a swatch (kids, don’t try this at home!) but I knew that would be incredibly foolish. With the angora, I had cast on 20 stitches and knit a few rows to get the tension that I wanted – slightly loose but not too loose - to make the yarn go farther and have the resulting fabric drapey and thinner - angora will be quite warm anyway and I didn’t want it to be like a quilted vest! I settled on T7. I unravelled that so as not to waste a drop!
 I had some alpaca that looked like the same thickness so I made a quick swatch with it. Technically, for a swatch on the LK150/6.5mm machine you want to measure 30 sts by 40 rows with the orange gauge, so I cast on 16-0-16 stitches wide and knit one full pattern repeat which is 28 rows – I was using pre-knit yarn from a previous practice swatch (😉). Pinned it out, steamed it, released it and then measured it, roughly a 6-inch square, to obtain a starting point, of 18 stitches and about 22 rows to 10 cm. So, I plugged that into my KR11 knit contour and found the mylar sheet with my original half-scale schematic from 1999! I’m ready to knit for real! I get going and I’m planning to mark my stitches on the real thing to be able to do an actual gauge as I’m knitting the back – (see ‘cheating at swatches’ http://knitwords.blogspot.ca/2008/04/im-packing-up-to-go-teach-at-cardiknits.html). I’m not sure if I ever told you this but how do you hang yarn marks on the 16th needle on each side of 0 when one or both is out of work? You just count over to the next needles that are in work – on this particular row, #16 left is out of work (I pulled the #16 needles out for this photo so you could see) and looking at the right, #16 is in work but then there are two needles to the right of that out of work, so I need to count over 3 needles to the right on each one to find a working needle each side that will mark the 30 needles (NOT stitches) required for the correct measurement -OMG, hope that makes sense! Then I take a yarn tag, tie a knot in it so it won’t inadvertently pull out and hang the loop over the needles I want to mark – don’t pull this through or it will spoil your piece – you want to be able to cut these off the inside without loosing a stitch after you’ve done your measuring!

I hung my stitch tags on row 19, 40 and 61 so I have 40 rows from bottom to top for the row gauge. At row 70, I took the whole thing off on waste yarn and let it rest overnight before measuring for the final, more accurate gauge and oh my! Just like the professional I am, it is 18 stitches by 22 rows! 😉
Oh, and one more thing, on this pattern, I have set it up so when my carriage is at the right, the transfers are done, check that the correct needles are in or out of work and then two rows knit. If you are stopping to take a break, stop when the carriage is at the left. That way, you won’t make the mistake of just knitting two (more) rows before making the transfers! This is not exactly a fun pattern to rip back 20 rows because you didn’t spot the error sooner ;-(.
Hope you’re coming to Raleigh to see this thing – it’ll be your only chance!

12 step...

Last month, I admitted that I had an addiction to that Battenburg stitch pattern (http://knitwords.blogspot.ca/2016/05/obsessive-compulsive-addictive.html ). Well, now I'm not so sure what I was addicted to. Was it the stitch pattern? Was it the yarn? Or was it my GFH? I have been wearing that natural-coloured one non-stop and although I am loving it, I feel that it didn't go far enough and I've been dreaming of making another one. I was contemplating my stash of Bonita - the pale blue (nah, it's never been my favourite shade - it actually has a dull, almost dirty cast to it and the other sweaters that I've made with it are mostly left on the shelf) or red (although I am totally partial to red, I do have a couple of good, serviceable red cardigans/hoodies at the moment) and then! I recalled that I've been hoarding 2 cones of black Bonita - I know, I never told you, sorry, but we all have our secrets!
Anyway, I thought, what better way to get this out of my system? Knit an entire GFH out of black Bonita using the Battenburg stitch pattern!! That should cure me!
I'll admit, it has taken me 4 days to complete the back and, yes, for me, that's like almost a year! But I have really tried to limit myself to no more than one full repeat (40 rows) at each sitting and I have been working on other things!
I'm really trying to break the GFH design - I'm going to use different bands! It will be more 'dressy' with all the open lace work so I thought the stockinette bands won't do it justice - I'm waffling between the shortrowed lace edging from 'Nougat', KW#49 and/or one of the 'XOXO' trims from 'Band Practice'. And I am trying to talk myself out of the hood, I promise! But I do think it would look really cool to have the casing fold line in the centre of the stitch pattern...

obsessive, compulsive, addictive...

Can you be addicted to a stitch pattern? I mentioned the other day about making myself another Girlfriend Hoodie and how I had been meaning to do a knitted version of that purchased hoodie...well, another part of that was, upon finishing up my prototype of the Church Cardi, I was still totally in love with that Battenburg stitch pattern and it dawned on me that there was no need for a lot of useless experimenting, just use that pattern vertically up the sleeve of my new hoodie!

 The purchased hoodie has a vertical column of stitching and cut-outs on each sleeve and up the front, half on either side of the zipper. This will be so easy, I thought.
I banged out the sleeves in no time, just filling in bits of time here and there, you know, without really planning to spend the whole day at the machine.  I sat back and admired the sleeves, ignoring the little voice in the back of my mind that the 'floats', which are over 3 empty needle spaces, were going to be too long and would catch on things - I just didn't care, I was committed!
The next day, as I began knitting the pockets and fronts, I kept thinking, this will be done in no time, because the back will be totally plain and so will the hood. Well, when I cast on for the back, all of a sudden on row 2, without really thinking, virtually unconsciously, I began transferring for a single column of Battenburg to run up the back...what the?? oh well, in for a penny, in for a pound as they say and next thing I know I have this growing motif happening on the back like it has a life of its own! After I got 3 repeats wide, I tried to get it under control and cut back but I still couldn't stop until I got to the top, reasoning that no one would really be able to tell because the hood would hide some of it anyway.
As I started the hood, still planning on making it plain, I again found myself addictively hanging onto that 7-prong tool and not just making half of a repeat to run beside the drawstring casing, but doing a full one!
I love it! After machine washing and drying which I did to the first one (http://knitwords.blogspot.ca/2015/06/manfriend-hoodie-pattern.html ) and all the others I've made since (this is number 7) the strings/floats tightened up very nicely and it's all good!
I'm thinking, I could use one in pale blue (ha, ha! you caught me! I did add a pale blue and a red zipper when I ordered the ivory one - zipperstop.com)...but my yarn has come in for the Church Cardi!