The past month has just been a busy one at work; midterms are upon us, and everyone is realizing that it’s time to buckle down and get serious coming into the home stretch. It’s hard to believe that Rhinebeck was 3 weeks ago already, and it’s also hard to believe that it’s only been three weeks. It feels like an eternity, probably partly because I haven’t been knitting.

The festival was an almost-overwhelming glut of fiber, but since then there’s been hardly anything happening on the crafting front. Fun as it was, Rhinebeck weekend came between my two busiest weeks so far this semester (it was 80+ hours of work there for a couple of weeks), and it takes a lot of energy for me to be out and engaging at an event like that. No complaints about Rhinebeck, but I feel like I am just now beginning to repay some of the energy deficit I built up by not having downtime between those busy weeks.

One sure sign of energy (and time) returning is the return of crafting. I wasn’t quite ready to work on my current “big” spinning project (for Branden’s sweater), so I decided to try some of those batts that I carded up earlier this year.

This skein came from about 4 oz of blended batts, made of seconds from the dye studio. The base green is a corriedale, and the accents are BFL and polwarth, I believe. There’s also a tiny bit of banana viscose in there, just for fun.

This is the first batt I have ever spun, and I learned a few things doing it.

1) I like spinning from batts just fine. This is good to know, because I don’t like all of the fiber preps I’ve tried, and I wanted to make really sure that I would enjoy batts before making a final decision on the drum carder. I’d say they’re about equal to commercial top, in my opinion. Slightly less smooth to spin, but really nice and fluffy to make up for it. Definitely something I’d like to do again.

2) I expect batts to be very soft, and full of very fine, luxurious fibers. I did not know that I expected this. In fact, it kind of surprises me that I do. But when I looked at those batts and dreamed about the yarn they’d make, a practical corriedale sock yarn was not what came to mind. It took me a while to forgive the fiber for being coarser than my mind had imagined it, even though I knew full well that it was from a not-terribly-fine batch of corriedale. I’ve been thinking a lot about this expectation, and I think that part of the reason for it is the way that I blended the colors and the textures together. I made it look like an art batt, but it didn’t feel like an art batt, and I think that’s what lead to discontentment when I sat down to spin. I plan to check this theory by spinning up some of the batts of plain wool that I made from processing my fleeces, and see if I have the same dissonance with those. Either way, this is very good to know.

3) Generally speaking, I want a larger proportion of accent color relative to my base color to really make an interesting yarn. This one is just  fine, and I like the way the colors blended into a toned-down semisolid, but in future I think I would use less base color to mix things up a bit. What looks like a lot of accent color on the carder doesn’t look like a lot on the wheel. Again, good to know.

I’ve also spent the past couple of weekends washing my new fleece from Rhinebeck. I do not store dirty fleece for any reason, so when a new fleece comes in there’s always a bit of a push to get it washed up and tucked away. This time I used our new washing machine to do the dirty work, and it was a lot easier than lugging 5 gallon pails.  We bought this machine specifically because it was a top-loader with a soak cycle, which is perfect for washing wool, and I knew that that was a feature that I’d like to be able to use in the future.

Unfortunately, it turns out that there is no way to avoid agitation during the soak cycle, so I ended up having to abort that plan and do some more manual manipulation of the settings instead. It worked out ok, though, and the changes meant that I got to use the washer’s allergen setting (30 degree hotter water) to fill the tub, which helped a lot with removing the lanolin.

This was a very clean fleece, but there was still a lot of “sheep” in there, so it took me three soak cycles per batch to get it completely clean. Since it was a huge fleece (7.5 lbs), it took me three batches to wash it all. My office has looked like there was a sheepy explosion over every surface for the past week, but it’s finally dry now, and so I gathered it all up into a pile to put away. I swear there could be a sheep hidden in there somewhere…

That’s a 6′ x 8′ carpet it’s sitting on; this is a lot of fleece.

I still need to go through and sort it for quality; there was a section at the bottom of the bag that was badly sunburned, and has a really bad break in the fiber. (Branden got to experience firsthand what you’re not supposed to hear when you snap a fleece to test it. It’s a dramatic difference.)

Fortunately, I think the damaged section is pretty small, though, so I may be able to trim it down or just comb it carefully to get out those broken tips. It’s also easy to find, since the tips are all sunbleached as well. At worst, I’ll just lose some of the fiber. Most of the fleece is perfect, though. No bits of hay anywhere to be seen, very little suint, and the locks are so open that I could probably get away without any carding at all if I were going for a slightly more rustic yarn.

And finally, I have been working on a swatch. My train knitting has been completely eaten up by work overflow lately, but I’ve managed to steal a few minutes here and there to play with my new Briar Rose yarn.

I’m going for a very simple, knit-purl texture, something cuddly and casual for a sweatshirt-like sweater. Most of the sweaters I’ve knit lately have been very fitted and shaped, almost tailored. This one is going to be plain and simple, and minimally designed to really show off the yarn.

I’m still quite torn about which stitch pattern to use; I kept adding more hoping to find one clear winner, but there are still several options on the table. It turns out that it’s very difficult to photograph the textures in this yarn, but here are the finalists.

The first is a broken rib:

I really like the depth of texture on this one, and I love how it plays with the color. This was one of the first patterns I tried, and I liked it right away, but somehow my instinct tells me that this is not a ribby sweater. I would love to convince myself otherwise, but my internal auditor is having none of it.

This is the same rib worked with alternating blocks, separated by two rows of stockinette stitch. This had a delightfully pebbled texture in the swatch, and both Branden and I liked it a lot. The fabric was a little stiff, though, and when I washed the swatch all of that 3-D texture stretched right out. If I weren’t already concerned about the fabric stiffness, I’d just go down a needle size, but I think that would make something very rigid, which isn’t what I’m going for.

This next one is a modulation on the idea of a broken rib. I was swatching away on the train, and decided to replace the seed stitch columns in the broken rib with a welted pattern instead (2 rows stockinette, 4 rows purl).

I am unaccountably drawn to this one. If I look at each of the patterns individually, this isn’t my favorite. Branden doesn’t like it much at all. It still has a lot of that ribbed texture, and I already said that I didn’t want a ribby texture. And yet I keep coming back to it. I like the waffle weave texture, and the feel that it gives the fabric. Because the ribs are offset by the welting, the structure isn’t as stiff, and it does interesting things with the texture. It’s certainly not the showiest of the lot, but it’s a strong contestor.

And finally, there’s a more traditional basketweave. This one is 6 rows of k2 p2 rib, separated by two rows of stockinette and offset by two stitches.

This one retained the best visual texture in the washed swatch. The rib sections stayed nice and crisp, but the overall fabric still has pretty good drape. It feels thinner and less cushy than the welted ribbing, but it’s a good, solid fabric that would do the job well.

So those are the four choices. The swatch is still a little damp and I’m waiting for it to fully dry before actually making a decision, but it’s going to be a tough one. Branden votes basketweave (the last one). I’m still stuck on the welted ribs, even though I really can’t say why when I look at it next to the other patterns. Branden says I should just go with my instinct even if I don’t “like” this pattern as much as the others (and yes, he’s probably right). What’s “the blog” vote?

So, there we have it. Three weeks worth of fiber. It’s been a little thin around here lately, but I have a sense that things will pick up again soon. Thanksgiving break isn’t far away, right?

Remember the Cascade Eco Wool sweater that I knit for Branden while he was in Atlanta?

I finished it in September of 2010, and it has been worn at least once a week through the two cold seasons since then. Sometime around this time last year, we noticed that there was a dropped stitch at the back sleeve shaping on the raglan. There wasn’t any damage, so the only way that I could have ended up with a dropped stitch was if I had made a mistake in one of the decreases, and just hadn’t caught one of the loops when I was knitting the sweater.

It surprised me that it took us so long to find the drop, given how frequently people talk about how knit stitches can run (!), and about the horrors of a dropped stitch. (I always find it a little bit amusing when I run into a knitter who feels that stitches are just waiting to jump from the needles and run away to unravel a whole garment in an instant. That might be true for silk or tencel, but really, really not for wool.)

When we found the errant stitch (several washes and a full year after it had been knit), it had dropped down one row. One lonely little ladder…that was it.

Between needing to remember to fix it, and needing to remember while it wasn’t being worn, I didn’t get to this right away. Then, it kind of became a game. How long until it actually had to be fixed, anyway?

A year later, this is how far that one stitch has run.

See that? A whole two ladders!

Eco Wool is a fairly grabby wool, and I knit at a pretty firm gauge. I would have thought that this would be a pretty high-tension area, but maybe it’s stabilized by the shaping decreases nearby. Even so, though, I think this shows just how unlikely it is that a sweater will completely unravel just because there’s a dropped stitch or a loose end nearby. Considering how much reinforcement there is in a steek, and the fact that there are usually several “buffer” stitches between the garment stitches and the cut edge, I figure that I’m safe for at least a few years on any steeked knitting (and yes, my first steek was machine-reinforced on superwash wool, and no, it has shown no signs of going anywhere after being tucked neatly away behind a zipper).

I did decide to end the game and just fix the stitch in Branden’s sweater this morning. Two ladders seems like enough, and I think two years is enough to prove the point.

I can’t believe that I forgot the punchline in my last post! Branden snapped this photo as we made our way back to the car on Sunday afternoon after the second day of the festival. (Click to embiggen.)

The license plate kind of sums it all up, huh?

The fall colors sweater was not finished in time for Rhinebeck. In fact, I have been so swamped with work this week that it still isn’t any further than it was at Rhinebeck. (It also doesn’t help that I decided to pull back one sleeve a couple of inches to tweak it a bit. Perfectionism strikes again.)

In the end, it really didn’t matter whether the sweater was done or not, though. I have plenty of sweaters to wear, and the festival wasn’t any different with or without it, so we managed to have plenty of fun anyway. I was much better than usual about taking pictures. And, since Branden was along this year, together we have a pretty big collection of things to show (and some video that he took from his phone.)

It turns out that we arrived just in time; Thursday and Friday were wet and rainy, but for the weekend, the weather turned glorious. The fall colors were out in full display.

Everywhere we turned, we were met with oranges and golds.

Our first stop of the day was the fleece sale,

where I fell prey to some beautiful crimp.

That lock belongs to a 7-lb Romney-Corriedale cross (from Melanie Chittenden at Dutch Hollow Farms in NY), in a dark chocolate brown. I started washing it today, and boy, do I have a lot of fleece. It’s a tiny bit tipped in places (looks like it has a little sunburn), but otherwise it’s in absolutely beautiful condition and is really very clean.

After the fleece barn we went over to the Golding booth to ooh and ahh over their spindles, all neatly lined up in rows.

And then Ellen took a turn on their new mini travel wheel.

Of course, since Ellen tried it I had to try it too, and it is a very comfortable little wheel. It spun a huge range of weights with no problem; all the way from heavy/bulky yarn down to laceweight or even cobweb without changing the settings. I love my Kromski, but this is a great little wheel.

After the Golding booth, we made a beeline for Yarns International. Both Ellen and I had fallen in love with their natural colored shetland designs last year, and were eager to take another look. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a booth with so many stunning shop samples. They sell their patterns as kits, with a blend of their farm Shetland and Jamieson’s when they need a different color.

The samples themselves are very well knit up, but the colorwork designs are really just amazing. The shop owner was gracious enough to let me snap a few photos, just to give you a sense of the array that they have available. Take a peek at their website; they have even better photos there (I really love the sheep blanket about halfway down the page).

Really, it’s like knitted poetry. Every color has a very specific role to play, and without it the design just wouldn’t sing. I could spend hours just studying how they put all those patterns and colors together. I didn’t end up buying a kit, because I know myself and I wouldn’t knit it from the pattern. And, because I wouldn’t be knitting from the pattern, I would end up having the wrong ratio of colors in the yarn, and it would sit in the stash forever. Perhaps sad, but almost certainly true. For now, I’ll content myself with just looking at those beautiful patterns.

Browsing through shop samples is one of my favorite parts of the festival. The items themselves are seldom things that I feel that I must knit, but it’s really interesting to see all the different ideas, and find out what other people are doing with the same materials. I really liked these asymmetric shawls, for instance:

And the lace in this booth was absolutely amazing (and again, the sheer number of beautifully executed shop samples.)

I also made a stop at Spirit Trail Fiberworks, where I picked up a small skein of silk/tencel that is destined to become a woven scarf with a cone from my stash. The picture is a little dark here (it is a very gray day), but it gives you a good sense of the color of the dark, saturated yarn.

I wasn’t looking to buy much yarn this year – I have a lot in stash, and I’ve been spinning most of what I knit in the past few years – but I did want to get some goodies that might go into the drum carder when I do finally get one. To that end, I picked up some Bombyx top, some silk caps (on the right in the picture below – like Mawata, except much bigger), and some firestar, which I hear takes dye like a dream. I imagine that there will be some fun experiments from these in the months to come.

We spent a good half hour talking with Otto Strauch (of Strauch drum carders), and I’m pretty sure that there is a Strauch double wide in my future. It’s big enough to do 3-4 ounce batts, which are big enough to sell, so I think there may be some fun things in store for the DesigKnit Etsy shop, as soon as I manage to find some time away from work and a little room to breathe.

I also picked up a few ounces of roving that I thought I needed for my spinning class on Sunday morning. It turned out that they provided the fiber, though, so I have some green and blue of an unknown wool (probably merino or corriedale) that may also make its way into a blend, or possibly a marled yarn.

I had been planning to visit the Briar Rose booth during their Sunday sale, but I realized on Saturday that my spinning class was at the same time. So, we stopped by Briar Rose to pick up my one anticipated yarn purchase of the trip. Turns out that it was a really good thing we went early; the booth was so full of people that we had to wait 5-10 minutes just to squeeze in. I was really sad to find out that my favorite yarn (Legend) has been discontinued, so I went with the slightly heavier weight Fourth of July. It was hard to find three skeins that matched, but we picked out a blue-green colorway that I liked a lot, and got in line. Just as we got to the cashier to pay, I saw this sitting on a chair behind the counter. I had to ask if it was reserved for someone, and by a minor miracle it was not. Someone had taken just one skein of the dye lot and left the rest, and the booth had been so busy they hadn’t had time to put it out yet. I wasted no time in switching that out for the brighter green, and can’t wait to cast on for a new coffee and charcoal Briar Rose sweater.

We ended up going back to the Briar Rose booth on Sunday afternoon, too, and Chris had put out a huge tub of her dyed rovings as seconds; all the short bits and pieces that she can’t quite sell for whatever reason (as a dyer, I really sympathize). The seconds were marked down to $1.50 an ounce, so I went a little crazy and bought what I thought would be a few ounces. I thought I was restraining myself by putting it in a little bag (they kept asking if I wanted a bigger one, and I kept saying no), but it turns out you can fit a lot of fiber in one little bag.

Twenty ounces, to be exact. Roving is like the fair’s maple cotton candy that way; it’s so light that you don’t feel like you’re getting a lot of it, until all of a sudden you realize just how much you’ve had. (It was also really fun walking around eating the white maple cotton candy and having everyone think you were munching on wool. Joce, we tried bringing some home to ship to you, but it had completely deflated by Monday morning. You’ll have to come in person to get that one, I’m afraid.)

I’m thinking that Chris’ roving might also make good fodder for the carder, since some of it is a little compacted by the dyeing (which is exactly why it was seconds in the first place). At twenty ounces, I have enough for a pretty substantial project, and with some creative pairing might even get enough yardage for a sweater. And it really does all fit in that little bag. See?

While I was digging around in the roving bin, Branden took a quick video of how busy the booth was. This is the Sunday afternoon crowd, waaay less busy than Saturday’s had been.

Here’s another video of the crowds on Saturday.

It’s always a little hard for me to convey the sheer size of Rhinebeck, but I think these videos do a pretty good job of giving you a sense of the fair.

There was an apparently impromptu alpaca (llama?) parade

And some very cute faces in the show barns

And, of course, there was a sheep shearing. This first video is the “before”:

and here’s the “after”:

You’d hardly believe that’s the same sheep, would you? She went right back into her pen and started scratching her shoulders on the bars…you could tell she’d been wanting to do that for a while.

We also spent some time watching the sheep dog trials. It always amazes me how fast the dogs move.

And then we ended the day waiting for our group under the maple trees.

Sunday was a quieter, less shopping-heavy day. I took two classes (Drafting methods, where I made my peace with worsted spinning, and Seams for sewing handwovens…I really need to get weaving!). While I was in class, Branden poked around the town and festival a bit on his own. One of the women in our group had found some beautiful cones of fingering-sock weight wool, and Branden went over to check them out for me. It turns out that they were out of cones, but he asked the shop owner if he could take a photo to show me the colors. They got to talking about how hard it it to take photos that do colors justice (Branden has a lot of experience with this from the shop), and before he knew it she’d given him a skein of each of their colors. We’re both a little amazed by her generosity, and I’m really looking forward to working up something with these beautiful colors from Sheldridge Farms. They’re very nicely heathered, and I think they’ll work up into something great.

And that, I believe, pretty much sums up Rhinebeck. It was a really fun (and really busy) two days. As always, the best part about the festival was the people we were with, and we had a great group this year. If you’re dying to hear more, head over to Jan and Ellen’s new podcast to hear all about it from them. (I believe I’m even quoted in there somewhere…I really do need to go have a listen and see if Jan managed to make me sound halfway intelligent. After two days of crowds like that, this introvert is lucky to be able to put two words together!)

Here’s looking forward to 2013!

When I started the fall colors sweater, I had the crazy thought that I might finish it in time for Rhinebeck. I quickly pushed that idea to the back of my mind, knowing that that was a lot of knitting on very small needles for just a few weeks, and that this is a busy time at work for me. That way lies craziness.

And then the knitting went faster than I had thought it would. It kept flying along, and I started to think that maybe, just maybe, it would work out.

It’s been just on the very edge of possible the whole way through this sweater. Just outside the realm of the completely achievable, but also not quite far enough to be in the impossible.

I don’t do deadline knitting. The fastest way to make myself unhappy with a project is to add pressure where it doesn’t need to be, so I have kept pushing the thought aside, knitting on with a “we’ll see” attitude.

Last week, I thought that I’d be able to make it. The weekend was pretty open, and progress was pretty good. Then a bunch of things came up, and the weekend wasn’t as open as I’d hoped. I made good progress on Monday night, though, finishing the front zipper bands and neck so that I could block the sweater overnight. On Tuesday, I installed the zipper.

That left just the sleeves to finish and graft, and things were looking good. I started to think that I probably would make it.

Then our department meeting ran over last night, and someone needed to talk to me afterwards. I got home an hour and a half later than expected, and 2.5 hours later than usual. So much for the final sleeve.

I worked from home today, and was hoping that work would go quickly and maybe I could make up some time there. But work takes infinite amounts of time, and just prepping my class for tomorrow and Monday took several hours, and then I had to write a practice exam and two real exams for next week. Three 5 page exams took 7 hours to write, format, and proof (they’ll also take about 14 hours to grade, if it’s like the last one, but that’s a problem for next weekend). These are things that would often happen on weekend time, but can’t because I will be gone this weekend. There’s also a pile of grading I’ll have to catch up on next Monday to “make up” for having two days off. Between packing to leave and baking a cake (it’s Branden’s birthday), there wasn’t much time left for knitting.

We’re leaving straight from work tomorrow. If it’s not done tonight, it’s not done at all.

And so, I am knitting away, with only hours left to go, and it is clear that I am not going to make it. There are two inches left on one sleeve, and about eight on the other. Both sleeves need to be grafted on, ends woven in, and the sweater needs to be blocked again. The blocking is the hard part; I can do the finishing on the way out there, but it takes more than a day to dry because the fabric is so thick. I’m hoping for dry air so that I can wear it on Sunday, but I’m not holding my breath.

If I’m lucky, I’ll make some progress on the train tomorrow, and there’s a good chance that I will at least finish the sweater at Rhinebeck. But at this point, I think I need to throw in the towel and say that it won’t quite be done in time. So close!

This weekend, I worked away on the sleeves for the fall colors sweater. Then, we went and got supplies for the finishing (zipper, grosgrain ribbon in case the hem insists on flipping up after its finished, and bias tape to tack down the steek edges).

Last night, I cut the last steek.

Look at all those floats! They make the fabric beautifully thick and warm.

The edges are picked up, button bands, collars, and sleevecap shaping knit.

The sweater needs a good blocking, a couple of sleeves, and a zipper. (And, of course, the ends woven in.)

All along, this project has been just far enough along for me to hold out the barest of hopes of finishing for Rhinebeck, and also not quite far enough along for me to be sure that I can make it. We leave on Friday. Chances?

Despite my trepidation about steeking the fall colors sweater sight unseen, I have to say that it is kind of fun to watch a design emerge one steek at a time. I started out with the lower side panels (the hem to the armpit).

Once the steek was cut, I picked up stitches all along the side, and then knit my way up the underarm panels with short rows, adding in some shaping as I went.

As I got nearer to the armpits, I reached the point of no return. I needed to steek the armholes to be able to maneuver the knitting to finish those short rows. I took one last careful look to make sure that there was nothing that I needed to pull back and reknit in the neck area, and snipped.

When the side panels were done, I picked up stitches around the arm holes for the sleeves.

Then, I put some quick machine stitches in the neck steeks, and went for the grand finale.

It’ll clearly need some ribbing to hold the collar flat, but I’d say it’s a pretty good fit. The neck falls just about exactly where I wanted it, and it’s a good width, too. The sweater is possibly a tiny bit broad in the back shoulders, but it’s hard to tell for sure  without the weight of the arm in place. I’ll have a closer look at that tomorrow, and decide whether or not to try to fold that steek a bit further over to bring those seams in a little.

They don’t look so bad here, though, so maybe it’s just the angle of that first shot. It’s hard to tell with the steek stitches all rolled up inside the body; it bulges in a weird way, but will calm right down once those steeks are tacked in place.

I really like how the square neck turned out, and am very happy with the colorwork band position on the back panel. I wasn’t sure exactly where that would fall in the final garment, but I think it’s just about perfect.

There’s also a tiny bit of bulging in my first side panel; I probably picked up a few too many stitches near the hem. I may snip a stitch, drop down, and work back up, but I haven’t decided yet if it’s enough to bother me.

All in all, though, I think it’s coming out very well for something knit blind from the armholes on up. Two sleeves and one steek left to go!

I love steeks. This is my third sweater that uses them, and I just love being able to knit in the round as I prefer, and then magically turn my sweater into a cardigan. In fact, I love all things to do with surgery on my knitting – it speaks to the tailor in me. (I would love to teach a class on the various ways to cut, unravel, unpick, and otherwise surgically alter your knitting…they’re such wonderful techniques to have in your design repertoire.)

That said, I am feeling just a teensy bit of trepidation about this:

See that misshapen lump of knitting? Somewhere between a sweater body and a potato sack with holes?

That’s the completed colorwork section for the fall colors sweater. Depending on how you count, there are either 4 or 7 steeks involved in this one piece of knitting (some of the steeks are split into multiple sections to add ease where necessary).

There are two steeks that run up the sides of the sweater where I will insert the green side panels. Those get split at the armpit to add ease to the arm shaping.

Then there’s the neck steek. (One in the front, one in the back.)

This is where it gets tricky. I measured the neck opening carefully before deciding on a final number of stitches, but there’s no other way to know if it will turn out as expected until I snip those steeks open. By then, it will be too late to go back and fix if things are wrong.

I did go ahead and finish the shoulder seam grafts, just to reassure myself that the pieces would at least fit together, but between steek bands covering the arm holes and steek bands holding the neck opening closed, there’s really no way to tell what this garment will look like until it’s cut. I’d call it blind faith, but at least I took measurements first, right?

I do like the way the patterns come together at the shoulder. The original plan was to have them continue uninterrupted up and over the shoulder, joining the front and back seamlessly. This was all well and good until I misread my chart. I only realized what I’d done about 2″ later, and decided that that one design detail wasn’t important enough to me to rip back 2″ of colorwork with yarns carefully interlocked every 4-5 stitches.

Going from this to the actual garment should be relatively easy; just a few snips here and there, and everything will be freed and should fall nicely into place. I’m really excited to see how it turns out. I’m also a little terrified that something will be wrong. This has to be one of my craziest garment projects yet.

But then, just look at how nicely knitting in the round has preserved the color changes in the yarn:

A result like that has to be worth some risk, right?

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!