I think that fall colors are the biggest reason that this is my favorite season of the year, especially in New England. All of a sudden, there’s a burst of color around every corner. Trees that have been green and full all summer go up in flame overnight. It was kind of rainy and cold today, so we didn’t really get out to take pictures of the color, but I snapped a few photos with my phone while we were driving around doing errands (Branden was driving).

When we got into the car, this was on the windshield:

Aren’t the colors beautiful, with the light shining through like that?

And just look at this one:

Shooting with a phone camera through a windshield really doesn’t do it justice. Those colors just glow, especially on a dark and rainy day.

Of course, my knitting has been full of colors that I love this week, too. The fall colors sweater is growing by leaps and bounds:

I split for the armhole shaping this morning. I was planning to continue the same steek band right up the arm holes to the shoulder seam, but I noticed that it was pulling a little bit at the corner where I started decreasing for the arm shaping. Since it’s a pretty wide steek band, I didn’t want to take any chances of it causing a bulge or a pucker at the corner, so I decided to bind off and then cast on again immediately.

That means that the two sections of steek band will be completely separate, and will be able to bend and flex as needed to accommodate the curves. This is something that you do all the time in sewing, but I don’t think I’ve ever needed it in knitting before. You can see how nice and sharp the corner is now, though:

Of course, all of this progress means that the question of what on earth I am going to do with the neckline is becoming ever more urgent. Last weekend, I sat down and drew out a few sketches (click to embiggen, and pardon the water stain).

The idea I had in my head originally was closest to #1 – a high, rounded neck opening with corrugated ribbing to finish it off. It looked a little stuffy in the sketch, though. A little too much going on all at once, maybe. 2-4 are all revisions with small changes to the neckline details. I ended up liking #4 the best, and thought that I might continue just the colorwork band up into the neckline, and then cast on plain brown or corrugated ribbing the rest of the way around.

As I drew out the sketches, I also started thinking about how exactly I might accomplish these ideas in knitting, and realized pretty quickly that it was going to be difficult to bend a 1″ wide strip of stranded knitting like that. It would be a lot easier to convince it to bend into a v-neck (#5), or possibly even a curved v-neck (#6), if I did my body section decreases right. I don’t like those options quite as well for this sweater, though, even if they are two of my favorite neck shaping options in general.

Next I started thinking about how I might play with the geometry of the pattern a bit more. Possibly a hexagon-shaped neck, with an angled intersection between two pattern designs (#7). I liked the shape of the neck, but wasn’t confident that it would be simple to get the colorwork to play along.

I also thought about just going straight across the body at the top, kind of framing the top half of the sweater as well (#8). I have a commercial sweater with a detail like that that I like, but it didn’t really appeal to me here.

At that point, it was way past bedtime and I needed to be up early, so I put the designing on hold to stew for a few days. This is usually a good move, because designing is one of those things that almost always gets better with time.

And then today, Jocelyn suggested a square neck opening. That would certainly be the easiest thing for the colorwork pattern, if I could make it work in a way that I liked with the rest of the sweater.

I think it works pretty well. #9 is my favorite of the lot (at least in the drawn version), but I like the idea of adding a solid brown panel to cover up the neck opening and keep the sweater warm, possibly with a high-collar ribbed neck, like a sports fleece. That can always be added in at the end, though, so I don’t need to worry too much about that aspect of the design just yet. Then I started playing with stitch patterns. It’s not really to scale, but I quite like what I got:

I think that’s very likely to be the final neck design. I still have a few inches in which to think it over, but so far I think it’s going to work out really well. At the rate this is going, I might even get a chance to wear it for a few days before the end of fall!

Here it is, almost the end of September, and it is just beginning to feel like fall. The mornings are getting colder, the days are getting shorter, and all of a sudden there are signs of color creeping in amidst the green leaves of summer. Our farmer’s market was full of pumpkins, squashes and apple cider this week; for the first time I’m starting to realize that fall really is here.

Fall is also progressing very quickly on my needles. Despite the tiny needle size, the fall colors sweater is making very rapid progress. I’m past the waist shaping now, and am about 2-3 inches from the underarm split, depending on how I measure the waistline placement.

I don’t think I showed the back last time; I had just started the pattern band, and it wasn’t far enough along to show well in pictures. It shows up now, though:

I decided that I didn’t want a strong, bright band right across my back hip line, and so opted to move the accent pattern up a few inches, so that it falls at the narrowest part of the waistline instead. I think it will look a lot more flattering there, and it made for a nice change of pace in the body knitting. And again, I love where it fell in the color pattern; that bright red-orange band really pops right after the darker section below.

I’m thinking that I will probably transfer the sweater to a second needle and try it on, despite the fact that it’s a few inches too small (the side steek bands aren’t as wide as the final side gussets, so it won’t be the right size until after I’ve done the steeks). It will have a lot more negative ease than planned, but putting it on will give me a better sense of where the waist band and final hem placement should be.

Branden also asked a very good question about the neckline tonight…i.e. what I was planning to do about it. I’ve had a picture in my head all along, but his question made me start trying to square that picture up with reality. The more I think about it, the less I think it will work without some fancy footwork, which is made all the riskier by the fact that I was planning to use a steek on the neckline, too.

I need to think a bit more about the neckline design, to be sure, but it’ll be a little while yet before I get there. Still, I’m really happy with how quickly this seems to be moving along!

It turns out that colorwork on tiny needles is just the perfect thing to keep my hands busy and my brain amused on the train to work (and even on the rare evening at home where there is time to knit between dinner and bed).

I must say that I’m rather smitten with the way the color changes are working out:

The brown started off very dark at the bottom of the corrugated ribbing section, then lightened again, and is now gradually darkening as I knit up the body. The orange is also cycling between very bright, high-contrast spots and darker, almost-brown areas. The color repeats in the yarn are fairly long, though, so the color changes gradually across the sweater, just like leaves turning color in the fall.

I’ve never tried using a variegated yarn in colorwork before, though of course I have seen examples of beautiful Kauni sweaters done using long color repeats. My repeats are much shorter and more subtle (there really are sections where it’s hard to tell the brown from the orange/red, and vice versa), but so far I am really happy with the results.

The one fly in the ointment is the corrugated rib. I absolutely love how it looks, and I think it will do a beautiful job of tying in the green sleeve/side panel yarn with the rest of the sweater body, but if it’s not held firmly in place it does this:

There just does not seem to be any way to make it lay flat. I did quite a bit of reading about corrugated rib before casting on, and the results were unanimous: it doesn’t stretch well, and you should not go down a needle size to knit it. That surprised me, but I knit my swatch and it worked beautifully, so I decided to bow to the wisdom of the internets and knit it on the same size needle.

I’m not sure that the flipping up is a matter of gauge, though I do think that it would have worked out better knit on a smaller needle. Playing with the fabric, I think that the problem might be that I have two layers of very thick fabric (the corrugated rib and the colorwork are both double-thick) separated by 4 rows of stockinette, which is less thick. Those few rows are just enough to make that section of the sweater want to bend, and then the stiffness of the corrugated rib does the rest.

I’m hoping that it will relax into place with blocking, but if it doesn’t I may need to sew in a strip of grosgrain ribbon to hold it in place. If that doesn’t work, I’ll snip a stitch, remove the rib, and reknit it from the top down. A good blocking cures a multitude of wrongs, though, so hopefully it will decide to behave once it’s been finished properly.

The first week of classes is over, and survived by all. It was an exhausting, hectic week,  but a good one overall. From faculty orientations to convocation ceremonies, to department meetings, technology help sessions, and teaching, there was never a dull moment.

By the end of it all, my brain was pretty well spent, so I’ve spent the weekend doing almost nothing that requires thought, and shirking off on all my chores. Instead, I spun some of this:

into this:

This is my favorite of the three colors so far (I thought it would be, so I saved it for last). The upper picture is a little truer to color; it was a gray morning, so it was hard to catch the light just right.

That meant that I had three bobbins ready to go:

So I plied off the first skein of yarn. I really wasn’t sure what to expect with the plying; I’ve experimented with mixing variegated rovings before (see here for a before shot of the orange yarn in the fall colors sweater), but never with quite this complicated a mixture. I love each of the colorways separately, but really wasn’t sure how they’d look when I plied them together. Turns out, I needn’t have worried.

It makes a beautifully variegated yarn, with changes that are subtle enough to make a uniform skein, but varied enough to stay interesting.

I’ve been thinking about this yarn for quite a long time. Branden had a wonderful sweater that we bought years ago with slate blue, dark green, and black all mixed together in a single yarn. (I never pulled it apart to figure out, but I am pretty sure it was a three ply yarn in three colors.)  It was a really nice sweater, until it got ruined in the wash when a different sweater bled all over it and stained it in spots. I had washed both sweaters often enough to be pretty sure they were colorfast and safe together, but that day they weren’t, and that was the end of that.

When I knit my sunset sweater, I discovered how much I liked the color effects of a mixed-ply yarn. The tiny specks of different colors gives the fabric an almost impressionistic feel.

I wanted to combine those two effects together to achieve a yarn I have been unable to get from dyeing a single colorway.

I wanted to capture the colors of Branden’s eyes. They are blue in some lights, green in others, sometimes flecked with gray. And always, there are those tiny bursts of brownish-yellow and the ring of darker green-gray at the outer edge. I have very uniform (boring!) brown eyes, so I find it fascinating that his contain so many different colors.

I’ve tried dyeing and spinning these colors before, but they always end up muddied. The yellow mixes with the blue and I get a green I don’t want, or the weighting of the different colors comes out such that one completely overpowers the rest. This time, I made them separate and then spun them together, and I think we have a winner.

I’d have liked a tad bit more of the darker gray, but the rest is there. And, just like his eyes, the color changes from moment to moment and in different lights.

You know that moment, just before the first big drop in a rollercoaster ride? Even if you love rollercoasters (I don’t), there’s just a little bit of dread mixed in with the excitement, knowing what’s coming.

That’s kind of what this weekend felt like for me. Those last few moments of calm, as the car rattles its way up to the precipice. You know that nothing really bad will happen, everything will be fine, and that it will probably even be a fun ride, but there’s that little part of your brain that is very, very aware that you are about to play chicken with gravity.

The new semester starts tomorrow. I had my new faculty orientation today: complete information overload packed into just a few hours of time. I am so glad that I came to campus early rather than starting on the 1st as per my contract. I can’t imagine being one of the people walking onto a new campus for the first time, getting ready to teach a new class (and in some cases teach for the first time) starting on Thursday. Absolutely crazy.

(Not that I feel all that much more sane for the extra 3 months.)

Everyone keeps asking if I’m ready. My favorite answer is that I’m as ready as I’ll ever be…some things you can never be fully prepared for. We’ve reached the top of the track, though…here goes!

I spent the weekend busily starting a crazy new knitting project to go along with my crazy new semester. You may remember the fall colors sweater that’s been waiting in the wings for almost a year now. I’ve decided to go with the last sketch in that post, and even did some swatching back in May to figure out the colorwork patterns that I’d use.

I thought that the design was pretty well worked out, actually, but then I sat down to start and realized that I still had some work to do. First, I completed the charts for the stitch pattern. I tried two different edge patterns, and decided that I liked the one on the right the most. Then I modified the same version for the band on the back of the sweater, where the two sections will run together (I think I’m going to go with the top one).

I’d been planning to knit the ribbing in green and work the body in orange and brown, but I didn’t like the way the solid green looked against the other two colors in my first swatch (barely visible in the photos). I just kept stubbing my eye on it, and that’s never a good sign.

So I did some thinking, and then a little poking around online, and decided that a corrugated (two color) ribbing was probably what I wanted. The poking around online also revealed that there are lots of ways for corrugated ribbing to behave differently than you expect, so that meant another swatch. I had wanted to do a more complete one anyway, and I wanted to make sure that the colorwork design would look symmetrical enough, since it goes around a corner and might get distorted by the fact that knit stitches are not square. So, on Sunday, I made a swatch, in the round this time to keep the tension more even.

I have to say that I am rather smitten, especially with the corrugated rib. It’s slow to knit, and I had to invent a kind of finicky set of gymnastics to hide my floats on the first pattern round, but I really love the results. The main body colorwork also looks like it will work just fine, so then it was just a matter of finalizing the construction.

I’m knitting this on size 0 needles, and am getting 8 stitches to the inch. It makes a beautiful fabric, but this sweater is going to take forever and ever to knit. I cast on 328 stitches in the round for the hem ribbing, with an 8 stitch panel for the front zipper steek.

This sweater will also have two side steeks, to be filled in later with the solid green panels in the drawing. Once I finish the ribbing, I’ll transfer about 2.5″ worth of stitches on each side of the garment onto holders, cast on a new steek band, and then knit the shaped front and back body panels. Once the main part of the body is complete, I’ll cut the underarm steeks, pick up the stitches from the ribbing and along the edges of the steek, and knit in the solid green panels, attaching as I go. Once the sleeves have been added and the sweater is complete, I’ll go back and steek the front panel and install a zipper.

This has to be one of my craziest constructions yet (anything that involves three steeks in a sweater that takes this long to knit qualifies as crazy, I think). I’m most worried about getting the shaping right, since there will be no trying on as I go. Still, it should be an interesting ride. I cast on yesterday….here goes!

I can’t quite believe it’s Labor Day. Classes will start next week, and I’ll be full and officially into my first year of professoring. Crazy.

But, much as I’d like to believe that summer will last forever, I’ve been noticing the sun sinking down below the horizon earlier and earlier each night, and coming up later and later each morning. I’ve even seen a couple of leaves beginning to turn, but only on the most pioneering of trees.

Yesterday, I took advantage of my last Friday off of the summer to sit myself down and finish the Mike sweater. It was at the stage where one good push would finish it, and this morning I bound off on the second cuff and wove in all the ends.

Here it is in its pre-blocked state. It’s clearly a bit too big for me, especially in the shoulders, but I think that means that the fit should be just about perfect. And it is really comfortable. This is one of those sweatshirt sweaters that you could live in, and I think he probably will.

The whole way down the sleeves I was sure that I would run out of yarn. I had weighed the sweater before pulling back to the armpits to rework the sleeves with a little less bulk, and I wasn’t sure I’d even make it to the end of the sleeves, never mind through the cuffs and ribbing on the body. And yet, somehow, the ball of yarn just seemed to last forever. I got to the cuff on the first sleeve, and it was clear that I’d have enough to finish the second. Then I finished the second, and still had enough yarn to try for the neck ribbing, then the hem ribbing. As it turned out, I even finished both sleeve cuffs on the same ball of yarn. It just stretched forever.

I even had one tiny (0.5 oz) skein left over, perfect for mending and repairs as the sweater lives its life.

I forgot to get a final weight on the sweater before soaking it for blocking, but I think it used almost exactly 25 ounces in the end. I had 1094 yards of the lighter Harriet yarn, and added in about 200-250 yards of the darker MacGyver yarn to stretch it out. I used size 2 needles, and got about 6.5 stitches and 8.5 rows to the inch.

I decided to do the bind off in the darker yarn to match the chest stripes. Walden used an accent color to bind off for her Spiral Shawl, and I loved the way it tied in colors from the main body of the piece, so I used the same trick here.

I used a bind off with an extra yarn over thrown in to make sure it was very stretchy. It does flare a bit at the edges, but I don’t think it will be noticeable when worn. Here it is blocking:

In all, it took me 35 hours to spin the yarn, and 52 hours to knit it. Next time someone asks me how long it takes to make a sweater, I’ll know the answer. I think this is just about the perfect way to start the fall.