Saturday, May 10, 2008

Status Report

Well, the sweater is done, except for blocking! It is rather close fitting (but wearable) , and I hope it will expand a bit after a wash and some careful stretching.

What have I learned? The importance of swatching, for one thing, but more significantly, the importance of adding enough ease when designing a garment. I wound up casting on 128 stitches for the body, and probably should have cast on 135 instead and then increased up to 150. Lesson learned for the next one... which I am already dreaming about.

I want to do another seamless one with colorwork, but this time done in more earthtones with raglan shoulders. I am still not sure about what design to use. I thought about doing a Celtic frieze motif running all the way around under the armholes, but I'll play around to see what it looks like. I also have come up with some possible designs based off of the Rovaniemi mittens using the same technique. So many possibilities...!

In other knitting news, I taught myself the Mobius cast-on yesterday and did a practice piece. The cast-on is incredibly quick once you get the hang of it. I am looking forward to using it in a real project!'

1 comment:

ColorJoy LynnH said...

Have you played with that free sweater design program called KnitWare? If you search for "download knitware sweaters" you can get a free trial version that never expires. If you want to save in a native format, you need to pay, but you can cut and paste a final pattern into a word processor with the trial.

First you put in a gauge for row and stitch counts. Then you pick a size and whether you will handknit, machine knit or crochet the different parts of the sweater. Then you choose style options such as amount of ease, raglan or set in sleeve, neck style, rib/edging options. Then you can change measurements if you want, like make the v-neck deeper or the rib longer.

Hint: start at the top and work down. If you change to a different sleeve style, for example, it forgets all the measurement changes you made and you have to do them again. But I tested out Sweater Wizard and this one, and at the time knitware was significantly superior.

I think it's fun just playing with options even if I never make a sweater. However, I've actually used it to knit a top before which turned out very well, better than expected.

Was good to see you guys the other night. Such fun!