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FO Friday: Blue Betty!

The blue Tosh sweater is finished, blocked, and photographed!

I’m so, so happy with the way this design turned out. My intention was to design a colorwork sweater that would be flattering to larger-busted gals. Here’s my original sketch:

I did add ribbing on the sleeve cuffs. My first idea was to do a turned hem, but I don’t think it would have looked right with the ribbing at the bottom and the neck. Other than that, the sweater’s pretty much the same as I envisioned!

Hubby and I went out to a local park and strapped the 50mm/f 1.8 lens to our Canon Rebel T3. I cannot begin to express my love for this camera and this lens. Practically every shot pops right off the screen. And after hours of manually blurring backgrounds in Photoshop on the pictures from our point-and-shoot, having pics that don’t need anything more than a little cropping is spectacular.

The Tosh just glows, doesn’t it?

Here are the specs on the FO:

Pattern: my own, tentatively called Blue Betty. I’m hoping to get it into the hands of test-knitters next week and release the pattern in a month or two.

Needles: 32-inch circs in US #6 and #7, plus DPNs in both sizes. Loving my Knit Picks Harmony DPNs–they really make sleeves in the round more enjoyable.

Yarn: madelinetosh tosh vintage in Betty Draper’s Blues (about 4 and a half skeins) and Antler (about 1/4 skein).YUM. Tosh vintage remains up there on my all-time-favorite yarn lists.

Two of my skeins were much darker than the others, which unfortunately didn’t show up until I wound them into balls. I alternated skeins on the sleeves and yoke to address this, and I think it worked out okay. There’s a little bit of striping, but nothing I can’t live with. You can see it on the upper back in this pic:

Notes: I love the fit of this sweater. I tried back shaping only instead of my usual side shaping, and I’m totally sold. My back is much narrower than my front, so this sweater fits me better than any others I’ve knit. The colorwork band pulls in right under the bust and adds an almost empire waistline effect.

Now on to writing up the pattern! Also fun, but not as fun as knitting (and wearing) the sweater…

WIP Wednesday: Blue Betty

I’ve got a colorwork design in beautiful Madelinetosh Tosh Vintage to show you today! As of this afternoon, I have the body and both sleeves finished:

I was originally planning to do a smaller version of the body motif for the cuffs, but it’s a 22 stitch repeat and would have made the sleeves too hard to size up or down, so I went with a simple 5 stitch repeat that (hopefully) does a good job of echoing the main pattern instead:

Usually I have trouble coming up with clever names for my designs, but this time I think I have a good one. The colorway is called Betty Draper’s Blues, so I’m calling the sweater Blue Betty. Perfect, isn’t it? :-)

Now, on to the yoke!

TILT: colorwork!

Thing I Love Today:

How amazing Tosh Vintage looks in stranded colorwork. Holy cow, why have I waited this long to try it??

WIP Wednesday

Now that the hubbub of Blog Week has died down, I can get back to regularly-scheduled blogging!

The green sweater is currently languishing in the WIP basket, waiting for buttons and possibly afterthought pockets. I’m giving it some time to marinate while I decide.

In the meantime, I’m working on a shawl design (my first!) in Tosh Merino Light. Being a newbie at shawl design, I didn’t plan for enough yarn, so I had to order another skein.

And now I’m paralyzed by doubt. I knew getting a similar-enough color was a total crapshoot, but I thought I got lucky–the new skein looked close enough in color when it arrived, but now that it’s caked I’m not sure. I don’t want to rip out the whole thing and alternate skeins (I’m 3/4 done!), but I have a bad feeling there’s going to be a noticeable line.

Hmm… although, looking at the picture, the new cake doesn’t look very different. I should probably just bite the bullet and work a few inches before making a final judgement.

Math, math, and more math

Gosh, I feel like I haven’t shown much of anything here for a while (posting my husband’s hat last week was intended to distract from this fact–did it work?).

There’s a good reason. Here’s what I’ve been doing instead of knitting:

Yes, I draw little mad faces on my pages when things don't work out the way they should.

I’m working on sizing a sweater design for a yarn company. This is called “grading” among the pattern-writing community. It’s HARD. Especially when you’ve designed a cardigan with large cables and 3X3 ribbing (even on the sleeves) that must be maintained for each size.

I have about ten more pages in my design notebook that look pretty much like this one. Many designers prefer to grade patterns in Excel or another spreadsheet program… but to be honest, I like working everything out on paper better. Plus I never really learned how to use Excel to its fullest potential, and the amount of time it would take to learn seems somewhat prohibitive at this point.

Plus, this way I get to use my iPhone, an incredibly powerful hand-held computer, the same way I’d use a $2.99 calculator, which entertains me for some reason.

But as I’ve said before, I actually really do like math, which helps the whole process a lot. And figuring out how to maintain the overall look of a sweater while upsizing/downsizing parts the right amount appeals to the part of me that likes puzzle-solving.

I did get buttons for the green sweater this weekend. It was surprisingly difficult to find 4 large (1.5″) brown buttons, but the fifth store I went to had some that will work. This means blocking can commence! Hopefully I’ll have pictures for FO Friday this week…

Happy Easter!

I’m having a very good day :-)

Luck ‘o the Irish

I bought some new yarn for a design yesterday.

That’s Madelinetosh Prairie in Thyme–my first purchase of Tosh laceweight. I am, of course, in love.

I’m also cranking away on my WIP sweater design:

Green just happens to be my favorite color. I’m one very happy (half) Irish girl :-)

WIP Wednesday

I’m working on a new sweater design! Top-down raglan with fun cable details:

The yarn is Araucania Toconao (totally had to look up that spelling, yeesh), which I purchased at Little Knits for an astonishing 78% off. I couldn’t NOT buy it. And guess what? They still have some: http://www.littleknits.com/products.php?cat=1123. You’re welcome. :-)

The yarn reminds me most of Madelinetosh Vintage (my fave). It’s light and very elastic, so cables show up fantastically well. I’m really having a blast knitting this sweater. More to come about it later!

Cables always inspire me to take artsy pictures….

Work-in-progress: Baby Blanket

Sigh… so I was hoping to have this as an FO for today, but that definitely isn’t happening, so I thought I’d do a post about its progress.

This is a blanket for my best friend, due to have her first baby (a girl!) in May. (Kari, I don’t think you read this blog–but on the off chance you do, act surprised when I give it to you, okay?)

The yarn is Knit Picks Simply Cotton in Duchess Heather. I’ve been on a Knit Picks kick recently–can you tell? The mama-to-be (who doesn’t know anything about the blanket) informed me a few days ago that she’s painting the baby’s room lavender, so I think it’ll go nicely. She also registered for mostly organic clothes and blankets, so the fact that this yarn is 100% organic cotton is a bonus.

The design is my own, a heavily-modified version of a stitch pattern from one of my design books. It’s an easy-to-memorize 16 row repeat, interesting enough to keep my attention but not enough to be frustrating. I’m about 75% done, and only now starting to get sick of the pattern–that’s pretty good for me. Blankets of any size usually drive me up the wall. They’re basically just giant swatches, right? Makes me long for some shaping.

Stay tuned for the pattern, coming soon to a Ravelry store near you….

In Which I Use Algebra

In what seems like a former life, I spent some time teaching algebra to pre-teens and teenagers. The number one question anyone who spends time in this particular pursuit hears is, of course, “When am I ever gonna have to use this?” (sometimes accompanied by a curse word, depending on the teenager).

Most of them sounded a lot like this.

I usually had to go with “well, you need it for college,” or “it’s helpful for logical thinking practice”, or a cooking or construction example that 95% of the students wouldn’t be able to relate to at all.

But I was thinking yesterday… geez, I wish I had been designing then. Because I use algebra ALL THE TIME now. I have a whole notebook full of algebra equations. It’s a thick notebook, even. I use algebra to figure out sweater dimensions, to upsize and downsize a sample so it’ll fit people of many shapes and sizes, and to calculate the exact ratio a sleeve cap should have to its corresponding armhole.

Here’s what I was doing yesterday when I started thinking about this: working out yarn requirements for the different sizes of my Bevin Pullover.

First I split the pieces of the sweater up into geometric shapes:

That says "sleeve", not "Steve". Trust me. I'm a professional.

Then I wrote out algebraic formulas for the area of each shape, in order to figure out the square inches of knitting in each size:

I'm especially proud of myself for remembering the formula for the area of a trapezoid without having to look it up.

It might look a little complicated, but it’s actually very basic. I just took my numbers for each size, plugged them into the formula, and it spit out the total square inches for each size. Then I figured out how much yarn per square inch my swatch used, divided by that number, and voila – fairly accurate yardage amounts!

If only those kids could see me now….