My Opus Medius -- Finishing my Aran Sweater.

Remember the St. Brigid sweater by Alice Starmore that I started nearly two years ago? Well, this past weekend, despite, many trials and tribulations, I finally finished it! (kinda sorta).

This cardigan has become somewhat of a opus magnus for me. (Okay, maybe not quite opus magnus, more like opus medius....) Nothing about it was overly complicated, but, it did take a lot of work and effort to finish. It is definitely one of those things on my knitting bucket list that I can now cross off -- completing an Aran sweater!

But, before I could cross it off, I still had some finishing work that needed to be completed over the weekend. And I was very determined to finish this cardigan!

First, I had to do surgery on the sleeves that were much too long for me. My Viking had helped me determine where the sleeve needed to end.  I cut nearly four inches off, and then proceeded to tink back several rows.

Then carefully seamed the sleeve band onto the sleeve.

This process took nearly two entire weeknight evenings to complete. After work, I would eat dinner, then sit down and work on a sleeve. The cutting of the sleeve was quick. The tinking back to the appropriate location took a while to finish. And I had to carefully graft the band onto the sleeve.

At this point, the cardigan looked pretty darn good....or so I thought. When the weekend rolled around, I hoped to have the cardigan fully completed and wearable after the weekend. At one point during the weekend, I wasn't sure I was going to live up to that early expectation!

The nearly finished cardigan...or so I thought

The second thing I did was all of the necessary finishing work, including:

• Putting an edging treatment on the sides of the cardigan to keep it from rolling and to add a zipper later.
• Reinforcing the seams (shoulder, side, and neck) with a single crochet. (For how's and why's, see this article by Tech Knitter or this old blog post by the Yarn Harlot).
• Adding grosgrain ribbon down the length of the saddle shoulder.
• Adding grosgrain ribbon along the edges of the cardigan.
• Adding a backing ribbon on the sleeve cuffs and collar.

I used Nancy Wiseman's book, "The Knitters Book of Finishing Techniques" to help guide me.

It was a lot of extra work, but the extra finishing work that I put into this sweater helped take it to the next level. I actually finished one side first (all the seam reinforcements, etc), and wore the garment for my Viking. He told me he could see a difference in the finishing work, and pointed to the correct side that I just completed.

Finishing Work Details

Edging Treatment: For the edging treatment, I was undecided between an icord edging or using a crochet edging. There are pros & cons to both, and the hive-mind of Facebook suggested using icord. I took my original swatch for this sweater and tried both things, and found I could get the look of an icord using a crochet hook with a lot less hassle. I completed both sides.

Sleeve Band Facing: At my local sewing store, I found a pretty ribbon (width= 2 inches/5cm) that I wanted to use as a neckband and facing to the sleeves. The ribbon has very little give so would act like grosgrain.

Sleeve cuff band

Attack of the Sweater

At this point, I tried it on, and saw my first big issue. If you look at the photo of the finished cardigan above, you'll notice something about the collar. It's TOO BIG. I tried to fix it....using darts, taking it in at the back of the collar, but to no avail. The collar band was simply too big by nearly 10 inches, and I was going to have to completely undo a lot of the work that took me a few hours to complete.

Why 10 inches? Because I measured the length of the seamed body and came up with a number (26 inches). However, where I wanted it to sit only required 17.5 inches of collar......

Isn't amazing how it only takes 20 minutes to undo about 2.5 hours worth of work?!? Ugh...I was kicking myself while I ripped out the edging and remove the collar. My Viking was nice enough to help me figure out how much of the collar to rip out. I put the sweater on myself, where I wanted it to sit, then he took the collar and marked where it should end. The collar was SIX inches too big.

I pinned the sweater on my dress dummy, Esmerelda (or maybe Harley? Or Morticia? I have still yet to decide....), where I wanted it to sit as the finished garment, and pinned the collar to it. There was some easing that needed to occur, but it wasn't too bad.

Afterwards, I seamed the collar onto the body with the aforementioned easing. I added seam reinforcement to the back of the neck, and then added the crochet pseudo icord back.

Neck Band Facing: With the neck finally completed (and sitting correctly), I added the grosgrain ribbon and neck facing. The grosgrain and crochet seam reinforcement would help keep the saddle shoulders from slipping and stay where they should when I wear the cardigan.

Grosgrain down the side saddle (along with seam reinforcement)

The ribbon would add additional structure to the collar and keep it from flopping over.

Neck band with the edging grosgrain pinned to a tailor's ham

It's looking pretty darn sharp! I really like the splash of color that the ribbon gives.

Now, I just need to find an appropriate length zipper in a matching color. My local sewing supply store didn't have them in the correct length of a matching or similar color. Nor did any of the other colors work. :-(

I love these cables!

As a costumer, I know how much finishing work can make or break your costume.
I'm really pleased with how much the finishing work helped pull the cardigan together....even if it took two days to finish all of the finishing work! For a sweater that took nearly two years to complete, what's an extra two days?

I might wear it as is, until I find a zipper of the right color / length. I'm extremely happy with it.

Could this be one of my opus magnus? I'm not sure yet. I'll let you know when I work on something far more complicated.

Handcrafted vs. Homemade

Blocking my sweater in stages is progressing slowly. The evening after I blocked the front pieces, I blocked the sleeves. It took 8 wires to block each sleeve; thus using up all of the block wires in my blocking kit.

Someone asked me why I block my knits as this unnamed knitter never blocked any of her knitted items.

There are plenty of reasons to block your knitted items. There are a lot of previously written articles on why you should block, especially if you're knitting a lace shawl!

• Twist Collective has a wonderful article on blocking. 
• So does the Tech Knitter
• The Yarn Harlot will tell you she blocks every time....
• And Vogue...
• There are many many more out there. (Link to a Google search)

I can understand why people don't want to block. It's extra time and effort that could be spent doing something more fun....like picking out your next project or starting something new.

But Vogue sums it up nicely for me:  "without blocking, your perfectly knit garment will look sloppy"

IMNSHO, blocking makes the difference between something that looks hand-crafted vs. homemade.  It's the reason why I press seams open when I sew and why I add grosgrain ribbon to my sweaters. It's the extra bit of effort into the finishing touches that can help a finished garment look more couture & polished, and less homespun.

It takes a lot of time and effort to block. For me, just blocking this sweater has taken three evenings. And it'll probably take me a bit longer to seam the sweater, add the edgings, sew in the grosgrain, etc.

 
 It took 10 wires to block the back piece.

But I know it'll definitely be worth it once I'm done.

Blocking in Stages

I'm finally getting around to blocking my St. Brigid Aran sweater — the one I had finished knitting for Ravellenics. I was hoping to have a chunk of time with which to block it over a single weekend, but so far that hasn't happened.

I really want to finish this sweater, so I decided to take some time in the evening during the week. My plan was to steam block the sweater and use a closed-off room to lock the pieces away from the kittens. The pieces were small enough to keep it confined to a room (unlike my Knit Swirl sweater).

However, as I started blocking the right & left front pieces, I realized quickly that I was going to need to block this in stages.  First, it took a lot long than anticipated to run the blocking wires through the pattern pieces to make each cable stand out. It took about 30 minutes to block each front piece (running the wires through the fabric, steam blocking, and pinning everything out to the measurements).

It took four blocking wires for just one front piece (8 wires for both left and right); I only have 13 blocking wires in the kit.

I left the some of the edges to be seamed alone, per Amy Herzog's technique

I could tell that the sleeves would require even more wires. I was not going to have enough to block everything all at once. I could wait until the weekend to run down to my LYS to buy more blocking wires or just do this in stages.

I'm opting for stages right now, because if I don't do it in stages and wait until I have all of the necessary elements in place, I won't be able to finish this sweater. At least in this way, I am making measurable progress. Patience is the very difficult key to this operation.

 
Blocking is really making the cables POP!

Ravellenics Victory!

This weekend, I went off to Gallifrey One, the Doctor Who convention. As there was going to be a lot of waiting at the airport, it was a good chance to continue with my Ravellenics project. I brought my I had wound up half of a cake of new skein of yarn, figuring it would be enough.

Here's the sleeve at the airport, waiting for our flight. I'm done with 5/6 cables for the main body of the sleeve.

At Gallifrey, I managed to get some knitting time in at various panels, interviews, and at dinner/lunches. There were some hiccups, including one where I had to drop down 8 rows to fix mis-crossed cable. Plus, I kept looking at the shrinking ball of yarn, hoping I had brought enough. (I also brought my Color Affection with me, so I had plenty of knitting, but I really wanted to finish this sleeve!)

At one point, I actually stopped knitting on this project and picked up the Color Affection because I was very concerned about not having enough yarn. However, I did pick it up again at the airport on my way home, because, at least if I ran out of yarn, I'd be closer to getting it done and I'd be home in few hours.

LUCKILY, I managed to finish all 8 inches (~20.5cm) of lenght with about 12 inches of yarn left to spare!

I have to say, these black airport chairs at LAX are very uncomfortable. I had to keep getting up every 20-30 minutes to stretch out. Here's the entire sleeve, bound off, along with some of my carry-on luggage (filled with knitting, naturally!)

 

 Finished the second sleeve! And by the grace of the knitting gods, it matches the first sleeve.

 

Ravellenics 2014: Close to the Finish Line

 I'm getting close to finishing the second sleeve of my cardigan. You really can't tell from looking at the sleeve, but here's my wonderful knitting app -- Knit Companion.  (See all of the highlighted cable crosses and sticky notes? I love this app!)

I'm at the last cable repeat (5/6). I have 24 more rows in the last cable repeat (3 inches), then the bind-offs, and the final three repeats of the saddle (9 inches) over 8 stitches. I've been watching some of the Olympic coverage while knitting, so it's a win-win.

I've got a good solid 2 hours of dedicated knitting time on a plane for the upcoming US holiday (Presidents' Day Weekend), and I hope to have this last part finished. Then I can move onto my stretch goal of finishing my Color Affection.

KnitCompanion App: A Review

While I was working on my Dire Wolf flip-top mittens, my SIL suggested that I try out a knitting app called, KnitCompanion, that would help make reading charts easier. Since I was nearly complete with my mittens when she told me about this app, I opted to just keep on with the paper charts I was using.

(I had even made my own chart holder for it.)

I had been using the app, Readdle Documents, for PDF patterns, but while did the job for written patterns, it wasn't that great for charts. And, I was planning a very chart-heavy project -- an Aran sweater by Alice Starmore called the St. Brigid --- a pullover that I'm converting to a cardigan. There are FIVE different charts, 7 types of cabling, a variety of row repeats, and two types of increases. Plus, I'm going to be including some waist shaping. All of this together is a lot to keep track!

The back panel, alone, uses a combination of the 5 charts for a total of NINE CHARTS. This is what my work table looked like while I was trying to do some knitting math to work some waist shaping into the pattern (and where in the pattern to include the shaping).

When I tried to test out the my chart holder with just two charts taped together and it didn't work out so well. I could have made the charts smaller, but I actually wanted to be able to read them. I couldn't imagine having to cart around 9 pages of charts taped together, with sticky notes on waist shaping, etc.

So I thought to take my SIL's advice and try out the KnitCompanion app. It took me about 2.5-3 hours to go through all of the tutorials and figure out how to set up my pattern. (CAVEAT: I work in the software industry and am used to dealing with very complicated software.)

BUT, the effort was WORTH it! The ability to just follow the chart, and have the app keep track of everything for you...it's wonderful. I really like this app. I can see it really changing how I deal with patterns with written instructions AND charts.

This is what my worktable looks like now, and the only thing that I need to carry with me.

The GOOD:

The people who designed this were knitters and/or took care to address the needs knitters might have.

• This app is pretty robust, and keeps track of both written & charted instructions pretty darn well. If you shut your app for any reason, it keeps track of where you left off -- for both row and stitch
• It allowed me to stitch together 9 charts (row-by-row).
• You can add highlights to your charts
• Add your own notes and audio cues.
• It keeps its own row counters, and you can advance or frog back.
• It keeps track of what stitch you are on (using a slider.)
• It won't let me advance to the next row unless I check off that I'd done specific increases that I've set up.
• It has special counters for shaping, row repeats, repeated stitches, AND keeps track of them for you.  (I have to repeat rows 3-24 multiple times, so this is handy!)
• You can set it up where the Chart Keys are always visible so you don't have to flip back & forth to different pages.
• There is a community page on Ravelry where you can look up problems and post requests & ask for help
• The moderators are quick to answer the questions on the Ravelry boards. (I posted a question/comment, and had a response in less than an hour!)
• There's an extensive line of very helpful YouTube tutorial videos to help you learn how to use this happ
• They also have free "Webinars" you can sign up for and learn how to use the app.
• It has the ability to read any PDF pattern, and you can use your Dropbox to download patterns or through the iTunes interface.

The BAD:

This app isn't perfect by any means.

• Most people are going to have a very steep learning curve on this app. It does A LOT so consequently, it's a bit complicated. However, the short video tutorials are extremely helpful, and you can figure out most of what you need to do.
• The UI is not exactly intuitive, so setting up your pattern to read correctly can be a hassle until you get used to how it works.
• Currently, this app only allows you to sync up with Dropbox. (My other PDF readers allow me to sync up with any cloud storage, including Ravelry.).  However, you can:
• open up any PDF file that you can access via your web browser .
• upload patterns to your dropbox
• add PDF files via the iTunes interface
• At the time of this writing, the User Guide was slightly out-of-date with the app. But, the developers said they were revamping all of their documentation.
• This app only reads PDF. If you have paper patterns or patterns in different formats, you need to scan or convert your patterns to PDFs.
• Some people are going to balk at the price of this app, which is $15.00. BUT, as they say, it's cheaper than a skein of good sock yarn, and you'll find that you're going to probably use it a lot (esp. if you do a lot of chart work!)
• Currently, this app is only for Apple products -- the iPhone and iPad (regular and the mini). They are investigating into the Android devices, but it might mean they have to completely re-write their code from scratch. Sorry Android users. :-(

Go Try It!

I think the number of good outweighs the bad. Despite it's steep learning curve, I really think this app is WORTH the money. I've managed to get through at least one repeat of the cabling pattern on the Aran sweater and the app has made knitting this pretty simple. (It's almost knitting itself! -- Okay, not quite, but I wish). I don't have to second guess where I am in the pattern; there are no more scribbling of notes or yellow stickies, and I don't have to carry around taped-together pieces of paper that I'm afraid of losing!

You can try download this app for free. They have also included 4 pretty good patterns as part of the download. However, it won't let you open up your own patterns (until you buy it), but first, I highly suggest playing around with their free patterns, go through their tutorials, and learn how to use it. (Don't be like me and try to learn how to use it on a pattern that you want to cast on immediately!)

Now, the app isn't perfect by any means, but it's pretty damn good, especially with all the bells and whistles that the developers keep adding.

Their customer support seems to be very good (which is a must with an app this complicated). My own questions were answered on the Ravelry board within an hour and all of the responses were thoughtful. Plus they're constantly updating their app, and working with knit wear designers to make their PDF patterns more readable.

Check out some of their screenshots from their website to get a better idea of how it handles patterns for both written & charted instructions

(this is from their website)

This app is going to radically change the way I deal with my patterns. I'd say it was definitely worth the money and the effort to learn how to use it.