Archive for 2013 April

Moving on!

Thanks for all the commiseration on my gray sweater debacle! Kirstin asked if Photoshop would be helpful in editing out the pooling spots. I’ve gotten pretty good at editing out the stray hair or tree branch, but I’m afraid making the middle part of the sweater look like the top would be well beyond my abilities. See all the light bits on the top?

Yeah, I wouldn’t even know where to start. Plus, I like to keep my samples in photo-ready condition, since there’s always the possibility of trunk shows, the need for photo reshoots, etc.–and wouldn’t it be a cheat if I managed to fix the photo so it looked good and then showed up with the pooling monstrosity?

Anyway, I’m moving on! Due to a sudden and all-consuming love affair with this purple Cephalopod yarn (and, okay, a desire for some damn color and texture after all that endless gray stockinette!), I have the purple vest blocking already:

Yum. It really looks good enough to eat, doesn’t it? Its working title is the Grape Vest, because it reminds me of the luscious spectrum of purple grapes you get at the beginning of the fall season. I’ll probably change the name, but it’ll always be Grape Vest to me….

Tough Decisions

(This is one of a series of design posts. The earlier posts can be found here.)

Remember I said we had a failed photoshoot for the gray sweater? Well, I was going through the pictures we got and realized something. Something not so fun.

I think I want to rip out and re-knit 30-50% of the sweater.

This is a really tough decision, particularly because it has nothing to do with the fit of the sweater. The fit is perfect, actually. See below:

What’s not so perfect (and even easier to see in these pictures than in life!) is the really terrible pooling of the hand-dyed yarn at the waist and below. This is particularly irritating because the upper body was knit with the exact same skein, but the smaller width below the armholes didn’t agree with the length of the color changes. What’s worse, I was working on this sweater mostly in the evenings in front of the TV and didn’t notice until the whole body was finished.

It’s also easy to see that the second skein I used for the sleeves and front pocket, while appearing virtually identical in the skein, included lots of dark bits not found anywhere in the first skein.

To tell you the truth, this is the kind of thing I’d ignore completely if I were knitting the sweater only for myself. The fit is perfect! The sweater is snuggly and cozy, just like I wanted! Who cares about some color differences?

But since I’m planning to sell the pattern, I know I won’t be happy with anything less than great pictures. And that is going to require ripping, rewinding, and alternating skeins.

Sigh.

Another factor is the season. This sweater is definitely more of a fall/winter piece. By the time I get it re-knit (sport-weight yarn, remember), we’ll be well into the spring/summer knitting season. So I think this is going into the WIP bin for a few months. I’ll probably revisit it in July and get everything ready for test-knitting during August, which will put me on track for a fall 2013 pattern release.

But it’s not all doom and gloom on the pattern-writing front! I started a new vest design with more Rhinebeck yarn, these two beautiful skeins of Cephalopod Traveller:

Learning from my mistakes, I’ve been alternating skeins the whole way. I’m pretty sure I’ll run out of yarn before I reach the end, but I found a Raveler willing to sell me a skein of this colorway and it’s already on the way, so no worries there. The vest is really, really cute so far. A great cure for the meh of the gray sweater.

Easter and Gray Sweater Update

Hope everyone out there had a happy Easter! (Or a happy Sunday, if you don’t celebrate.) My husband and I like to exchange little Easter baskets. This year, I left my shopping until the last minute–and to my horror, the store was out of Easter grass! So I improvised with a skein of truly horrific Day-Glo acrylic:

Wrapping the yarn before cutting…

Filling the basket… Esme’s trying to distract me by being adorable, but it’s not working…

Tah-Dah!

My husband was properly appreciative of my ingenuity.

I was hoping to have pictures of the gray sweater for you today, since it’s all done and blocked, but our impromptu photo shoot this weekend didn’t go so well. I wanted to take pictures of the sweater in the library of our new house, since that works with the sweater’s cozy feel. It turns out our library is just too dark for good photos, though, even with every light we have in the house.

Ah well. We’re scouting out potential locations for an outdoor shoot this week.

In the meantime, there’s a lot of this going on behind the scenes:

I’ve finally switched entirely over to using Excel for pattern writing. I used to do everything by hand, but I recently took Faina Goberstein’s excellent Craftsy class on pattern writing, and I’m a total Excel convert now. It saves me so much time!