gloriastitches

You know "knit" but "tink"?  Spell tink backwards.  Knit.  Tink is used to mean "to un-knit", or, to undo the knitting. Most sweaters are made by knitting the back, the front, the sleeves, then sewing them together.  This is a top-down raglan, meaning all the parts are knit at the same time, then separated at the underarm.  Thus, the neckline needs to be started with the desired size.  I was fairly pleased that I had to tink the neckline area only twice. Things were going along swimmingly; i.e., no errors, until the contrast stitches on the body of the sweater.  I didn't want to make a sweater that was plain (stockinette stitch).  When I saw the sweater in the mag with garter stitch at the neckline and in the body, I knew that was what I wanted to do. The beginning of the sweater (the neckline) of my sweater is worked flat, meaning a row is worked, then turned, then a row is worked, and turned, and so on.  The stockinette stitch is ...

When I was writing about my top-down raglan cardigan a lot of non-knitters were confused. http://gloriastitches.blogspot.com/2011/07/light-rose-sweater-re-do.html So, to make the process as basic as possible, picture or sketch a cape. Most likely you began at the top and went downward. A bottom-up (traditional) seamed sweater has several parts: front, back, sleeves and all are seamed (as well as the shoulders.) The top-down raglans can be seamless and the entire sweater is made at the same time. The cape is made just like the top-down raglan until the shoulders. The neckline is begun and stitches are added to increase. On the sketch of the cape I indicate two seams (plus are two seams in the same locations on the back). When you drew or pictured the cape, your increasing came at the side; on a sweater the increases are at the "seams", one stitch on each side of four "seams". That is how the sweater gets larger. Note that they are not seams in the sense that they ar...

This is the Light Rose sweater re-do so far. There were a few things which delayed my progress. I tried the neck ribbing until I felt it looked like the pattern photo. I undid a few rows because I found an extra yo (eyelet) a few rows down. Do you have any idea how much time is involved in taking out over 1,000 stitches? Answer: longer than it takes to knit them. This first pic shows the yoke part of a top-down raglan cardigan. This is after separating the sleeves from the body. I don't care to seam pieces but I dislike using dpns (double pointed needles) more, so the sleeves need to be done first if not doing seamless top-down raglans. I like to do both sleeves at the same time which creates quite a mess of yarn until a few inches are knitted. It was a bit confusing when I began the sleeves but got easier. From photo left to photo right: the right front, right sleeve, back ("circle" in center), left sleeve, and left front. The final pic makes it easier to see how a to...

The Light Rose sweater is no more. I was unraveling it when I got all of these strands of yarn and couldn't figure out why. I checked the sketch and yup, was undoing it in the direction it had been done. Except I wasn't. After I turned the sketch around a few times, I realized that I was trying to undo it in the opposite way that I should have been. Doh. Yes, it was made across, cuff to cuff. I was thinking the right front was the last part knitted. Doh. Had I continued and begun to unravel it from the right cuff up--the correct way--I would have undone more than 3/4 of the sweater. It was doomed from the start. My yarn wasn't quite to gauge so I used larger sized needles. Then I discovered that I knitted with a looser tension when working on the part with the circular needles. I wound up using four different sized needles. At the same time I was trying to knit to two sizes, one for where I was narrower and one for where I wasn't. There is no sense of giving up, frustra...

http://www.redheart.com/free-patterns/multi-directional-striped-cardigan For those of you asking to see the cardigan I'm doing in Light Rose--and you know who you are--there will be a wait. Why? Because I didn't heed my own advice of measure, measure, measure. I was knitting the front bands when I realized that the two upper front portions weren't the same length! How in the world did that happen? This sweater is knitted from the left cuff over to the right cuff (basically), so the upper right front is the last knitted for that portion. Usually I do compare and don't know why I didn't this time. For some reason I was knitting more loosely than I normally do; usually, I tend to knit more tightly as I progress. There might have been a way to knit the band and ease in the right side but it probably would be obvious, plus I would know that it was not right. The bottom portion is done by "picking up stitches" and knitting them to the upper portion. For you non-...