How do you sew a totally razor-straight line? I’m interesting in topstitching and pintucking, but I can’t really make a straight seam yet. I’ve tried:

a) masking tape down the entire arm to make a long visual seam guide
b) tall magnet that sticks onto the throatplate to make a short physical barrier
c) pushing/pulling the fabric from in front and behind
d) sewing really slowly

FWIW, I can’t draw a straight line freehand, either.

Anyone?

I mentioned in my last post that when crossing cables, you may have to change the angle of your approach. Here’s another image from AS’s Aran Knitting – it exmplifies the change between the slope of the diamond leg and the diamond cross.

The changes in the left-over-right crosses are particularly noticeable. I wanted to minimize the visual jarring in my cable; legs that are only 2 stitches wide make the effect more subtle – and when I showed Matt my swatches, he didn’t even notice the changes until I pointed them out.

So. The next cable that I’m designing for Matt’s sweater is based on the stonework outside of the bronze doors of the Plummer Building. The pillars have crisscrossed ribbons and motifs nestled within the ribbons.

Mouseover to see the motif that started it all.

The ribbon part was pretty easy because the width and height of the component diamonds are easily adjusted to fit the size of the internal motif. As long as the motif is roughly proportional to the space within the diamond, it will look rather nice. Now I already talked about trying to carve a fleur-de-lis out of cables. (Flashback: Riiiiiiip!) Of the attempts, I saved only 1 fleur swatch; this shows an outline of the fleur using twisted stitches. It is lopsided because I was experimenting with different angles in the outer petals.

Meh. It almost looks like an insect.

After griping and moaning about how this was kicking my cabling ass, I learned that Matt was not particularly enthusiastic about the prospect of flowers on his sweater, no matter how stylized. I (gratefully) let the idea go. Still, I did want to put something inside some of the lattice diamonds. I’ve a fondness for miniatures – why not put the same motif within a diamond?

Yeah! We like!

The argyle flavor gives it some class, and it works as a sweater cable because it is tidy, not too wide, and the repeat isn’t too long. I played around with how to start and finish the traveling lines of the inner motif. Here’s a closeup:

A and B: twisted stitches to form the lines started on the wrong side
C and D: twisted stitches to form the lines ended on the right side
A and C: border is “below” the lines that form the X
B and D: border is “above” the lines that form the X

D satisfied me the most. I’ve got the pattern charted and am test-knitting it this weekend.

I’m designing a pseudo–diamond lattice cable and will have photos of the new swatch to share in a few days (I hope!). My cable “legs” are 2 stitches wide, and they move left or right in 1-stitch-every-other-row increments. During the process of graphing and swatching, it took me a ridiculously long time to suss out the following: when the 2 legs meet, no matter what slope they were moving at before, they must cross in a 2×2 maneuver. Well, duh. More on that in a later post.

Just to make sure there wasn’t some sneaky clever increase/decrease method to maintain the angle of movement, I consulted with an expert (Alice Starmore’s Aran Knitting). She has an almost identical cable in her book (her legs are 3 st wide but still move 1 st over at a time), and I looked up the graph to see how she dealt with the transition. Answer – there is no sneaky way. You have to break the angle for the transition. And then I saw it:

Mouseover to see the error

Oops! Now, I’m not mad that there’s a mistake (the chart is correct, btw), I just laughed when I found it. Actually, I don’t know why I’m so tickled to stumble across an error (and that photo is used 2x in the book, too). I guess it’s like finding a typo in the New York Times. She has such a reputation for perfectionism and is godlike in her ability to design Fair Isle colorways, it’s almost a relief to see signs of her humanity. (Even if it was a test knitter’s goof, surely AS examined the swatch before it was photographed and published.) FWIW, I freely admit to having a tee hee giggle when VK some years ago had a pink purplish Debbie Bliss number on the cover with a grossly obvious missed cable crossing.

Edited to add:

I found a photo of the VK cover:

(Since I misremembered the color, am I also wrong about the pattern author?)

Matt and I are doing much better, thanks for your good wishes. He’s back at work today, although he’s coughing; I’m working, too, and no longer sound like “death, warmed over.” For me, the coughing is worse when I’m laying down, and I’ve taken to sipping cool water and sucking on sugarless cough drops in my attempts to control the coughing when I go to bed.

Unfortunately, I tend to fall asleep with a cough drop still in my mouth, and the damn thing never does dissolve entirely. When I wake up in the middle of the night to begin coughing up my tired lungs all over again, I also have a creepy, semicrystallized nodule in my mouth that is too nasty to describe. I keep thinking a tooth has fallen out during the night and has grown fuzzy little legs, but then it’s so eerily sweet and menthol-ly that I eventually remember what it is. I contemplate the likelihood of menthol burning a hole in my cheek after hours of exposure (hasn’t happened yet) and compare it to the chances of choking to death in my sleep on a piece of medicated candy as I try to cough quietly and watch the clock glowing “3:15.”

—

I’ve been spinning up more singles for “Jennifer” yarn after someone emailed me a request. Even though pulling out the neps and nops is a PITA, I’m still enjoying the colors.

Matt called me around lunchtime yesterday.

Me: Hello?
Him: Hi! I felt really funny at work, so I came home and threw up!
Me: Ugh! Are you OK?
Him (cheerfully): Mmm hmm. And my bowels have turned to water!

I’ll spare you the rest of the conversation, but I just want to note that it included words and phrases like “explosive,” “hourly,” “in the wastebasket beside the bed,” and “liquid jets.”

FYI, the meals he had in the previous 24 hours of which I did not partake – 1) a meatball marinara sandwich from Subway, 2) chicken broccoli pasta alfredo at Applebees.

So now we’re both sick, although ironically, we share none of the symptoms. (In addition to what a previous professor delicately terms “double-bucket disease,” Matt has a sort of high fever. And malaise. And complaining. But I admit I may be on par with him for kvetching.)

It’s a clear sign that we need to have a lockdown this weekend. I’m going to drown us both in chicken soup and vitamin C drops until it kills us or makes us better.

The New York Times has an article on handspinning! Many thanks to Astute Coworker Jane for bringing it to my attention.

(Click here to read the article.)

We got back this morning at 2 AM from a whirlwind visit to Matt’s parents and grandparents. Miracle of miracles, we were able to coordinate 5 working people’s schedules to take simultaneous time off and flew to Florida for the long weekend.

There was lots of eating (Matt and I refer to weekends with his family as “Weekends of Meat”), lounging around, sleeping, and playing with Baby Dan who is now a few months shy of his first birthday. He’s talking (“Bah! Mah! On-yon!”), waving bye-bye, pointing at things, and generally being irrepressibly cute.

With Mom

With Uncle Matt

Matt’s family. Click for big!

Brother-in-law Bob (father of Baby Dan) is at the far right. He mentioned that Dan has mostly outgrown the Viking Chicken hat by now, which is not unexpected. As a general rule, I don’t knit for children (they grow so fast, mostly), but I might make an exception for a baby nephew. *g*

In other news, I have airplane flu (aka The Flying Plague) AGAIN. Almost without fail, I get horrendously sick after flying. This “habit” has ruined more vacations than I care to remember. (Currently, I have a headache, total body fatigue, sore throat, phlegmy coughing, a man’s voice, mild fever, cascading nasal drip… Yes, I’m so sexy.)

An aside – can you say fever dreams? I dreamt this afternoon that a General is coming after fundamentalist Christians, ostensibly to round them up and kill them. He has hired a band of nuns to do the dirty work. I’m working undercover in the resistance, but I think I’ve been discovered. I fight the nuns, but they turn out to be legless puppets – I literally find polyester fiberfill under their habits, their curled fists turn out to be wooden knobs attached to dowels, and their skin reminds me of oven mitts with faces that are made from stuffed pantyhose. I jab large T-pins into their faces and eyes to prevent them from reporting to the General. (I also step on them and discover they are squishy.) In the meantime, one of my coworkers is leaving me clues inside large packages of noodle soup, but I have to cook the soup to get the secret messages. I wake up (drenched in sweat) after washing a mountain of dishes to find a pot the right size to decode my next mission.

Nothing like a fever dream to confirm you are exactly as crazy as you always suspected… Anyway, I’m diligent about handwashing, I don’t touch nasty surfaces in airports or airplanes, but I don’t see a lot of people and am not exposed to many germs in the course of my daily living. How else might I boost my immune system?

I’ve hit a roadblock on my second cable design. I’ve been working on it for 2 weeks now, and it’s time to put the idea to rest. I was trying to chart a cabled fleur-de-lis, but after 5 ripped swatches, I’m concluding that it has too much horizontal movement to work properly. (If you’re mixing cable crossings, you can only put in so many 2×3 maneuvers – like 1 or 2, actually – before the fabric crumples in a bad way.) It’s funny, I looked through my stitch dictionaries (and believe you me, I have many stitch dictionaries) and couldn’t find anything even remotely adaptable. Suspect I know why, now. I tried outlining it in a twisted stitch pattern, too. No go.

Although I hate ripping, I did unravel nearly all of my unsuccessful swatches to be frugal. I’ve already gone through ~200 g of yarn, more or less, but it’s the same 50 g skein being repeatedly knit and ripped. Heilo (from Dale – pronounced DOLL-ah, btw – of Norway) is holding up very well. You’d never know I’d abused it so much.

In other observations, I feel like there’s a certain level of fetid discontent coursing through the fiber ‘blogosphere lately. People are unhappy about stuff – the weather, their spouses, clutter, work, health, etc – and it’s coming through in the daily chat. Seems like I’m reading more grumbling about swatches, pattern mistakes, and running out of yarn than I usually do, too. Are we overwhelmed? For the northern hemisphere types, is it the winter blues?

I rushed through spinning the wool and silk batts for sock yarn, but before I could take a few snaps to share, we went through this really dark period where SE Minnesota had absolutely NO DIRECT SUNLIGHT for several weeks. The perpetual darkness was kind of awful, actually – I think I heard on the radio that it was some kind of weather record for the area.

But today! Today I woke up to blue skies! I’m here, unwashed and uncombed, to take photos before this fleeting good weather vanishes. :) Aren’t you glad the internets don’t carry smellovision?

I present to you the first prototype of my “perfect” sock yarn!

Technical notes –

The yarn was spun using mostly short-draw style (worsted spinning). The batts had been prepared to maintain the parallel prep as much as possible (I was applying fiber directly to the large drum), and I used my forward hand to smooth down the single as it drafted to lock the fibers in place. This technique makes an exceedingly smooth and shiny yarn. I could see where the blending was not too thorough – I believe the photo shows where there are shiny paler parts (silk) and darker fuzzy parts (wool). But overall, I think the yarn will still wear pretty well.

I was aiming for standard sock yarn weight. I used a strand of Meilenweit sock yarn as an example, the same stuff I used for Annalisa’s socks. I sampled to make a 2-ply yarn that would have approximately the same final grist, and I spun mostly to the standard for the entire lot. The final outcome: Meilenweit sock yarn – 100 g, 430 yards; Twosheep sock yarn – 110 g, 424 yards. Hey, that’s not bad! Most handspun is usually much denser than millspun, and while I did come out a little shorter for greater weight, the difference is pretty small. (I’m rather chuffed about it!) Goofing around with calculations – this is nearly a half mile of singles. Cool.

One more look:

I never would have come up with this idea:

Interesting links and explanation here.