Life At Villa Boswell

Every sweater knitting experience has an abundance of lessons, so why not learn from them?  I finished my Winter Joy Jacket and was not happy with the button band, since I hadn’t paid attention to the exact number of stitches I should have picked up.  By the time I got to the band, I was dying to wear the sweater and impatient to be done with it.  But when I complained about it to my friend Josie, she said to me, "When you spend that much, you gotta love it."  She was totally right.

So, I ripped out the button band, and therein learned the importance of good finish work on the inside, because the process was a total pain due to my inconsistent threading. But, I realized that a new button band would not make me "love it" as Josie said.  I wanted a bit more control over the color and a more fitted look to the sides.

So I ripped out the whole dang thing, excepting the sleeves, and started again with the intention of doing better seaming, a better button band, better attention to color, and finally a more shaped fit, since my first pass according to the pattern produced a pretty bulky sweater for me.

You can see the results here.

 

Swatching, Oh Mighty Swatching

I never thought about yarn as a "fabric" until I got a copy of  No sheep for you by Amy Singer. This book changed the way I think about yarn and knitting, not to mention fueling the desire for yet more projects… they are so very yummy in this book.  It was in this book that I read my first really good rationale for getting "into the swatch." Afer all, you are creating a fabric, so it only makes sense that you need a certain quantity to see how it will behave in the garment.  When you visit a fabric store, you’ll see people rolling material off the bolts and draping it across their arm or hand to see how it lays, tugging at it to check its stretch and strength.  Could you imagine having to sew a shirt based only on a 4" square size of material?  And what about working with color based on the same kind of swatch? (How they expect us to do that with carpeting is beyond me.) Not much to work with there, I had to admit.  Suddenly, swatching seemed to offer its own particular lure.

After that I picked up the December issue of my beloved Knit ‘n Style and read another article (by the Real Men Knit guy!) who talks about how he not only started to do bigger swatches, but how he also works "full scale construction swatches" on unfamiliar features that he’s about to knit.  Sounds a little over-the-top at first, but after the Winter Joy Jacket re-do, it has a whole new appeal.  I had never attached an open-loop sleeve to a body using crochet-chain stitching.  What made me think I could do it right the first time on my real sweater? And with yarn that does NOT handle repeated stress well? And costs $19.95 a skein?  Sheesh.

But, it’s not just about doing the swatch.  It’s about knitting a big hunk of the sweater fabric and then analyzing that fabric with respect to the pattern.  Think about fit, about drape and stretch, about how your row gauge plays out in the pattern.  Even though I was careful to swatch and make sure that my gauge exactly matched the pattern gauge, a larger swatch and some forethought would have saved me a re-do.

For the Winter Joy jacket, here are some of my "swatching" lessons learned:

• Gauge. When I first did a 4" swatch, it seemed that I would need to down-size a half needle size in order to meet the required # of stitches per inch.  I started the piece with the down-sized needles and, guess what? I found that actually the recommended size needles were the best for me, once I got past the first few inches of the piece.
• Fabric behavior. I’m pretty happy with my sweater results, but notice how the shoulders hang down a bit? I’m holding my arms out in the photo to give a view to the side shaping, but with my arms down, the material bunches up in front of the upper arm area.  This is because the fabric has a natural relaxed drape to it so the shoulders will hang lower and so will the sleeve, creating more fabric where you don’t want it.  Had I looked at a larger swatch with this, I would have seen better how maybe the shoulders would naturally hang down a little more, and could have adjusted the fit accordingly.
• Construction swatches for finish work and garment shape. Had I just knitted an open-loop band to correspond with my sleeve width, and a corresponding "sweater arm hole" I could have practiced doing the crochet chain bind-off on a big piece of "fabric" and really have seen how it would have tended to pull in a big tight, not to mention just getting the technique down in the first place.  I was also very interested in making sure that the fit of the sweater was appropriate.  I wanted something more fitted.  Here, would have made total sense to do a large side "band" to check out what would be the correct decrease/increase process to attain the fit I wanted. As it was, the recommended 7 rows for the "decreased" portion was far to few; I changed this afterwards to 13 rows!
• Color. I didn’t get a sense for the self-striping repeat at first, and a large swatch could have alerted me to this so that I could have started each section with a fresh skein on the same end, for more parallelism of color design.  When I first finished the jacket, one half the sweater had no purple in it, so as part of my re-knit, I made sure the missing piece had some purple in it.  As an added note for another color benefit to a large swatch: I learned after many hours knitting a very fancy cable jacket that dark colors are NOT the best choice for showing off cables.  I had chosen a single color, beautiful dark brown yarn that had its own beauty when worked in stockinette, but which was really not shown to its best in a cable knit sweater.  And the cables were not shown to their best effect either.  The jacket is still very nice, BUT… doing a large swatch in the cable would have shown me what I was in for with the end result. A bit disappointing after all that effort.
• Gauge changing. I still wonder what this Winter Joy Jacket would have been like had I knitted it one-half needle size down. Had I swatched this out? Even if I didn’t have the right gauge, I might have preferred a tighter knit with this particular yarn. In that case, I could do the calculations necessary to knit the sweater at a smaller gauge.