Blackwater Park

the long & the short of it

I've been mulling over what to make.  What direction in which to strike out.  You may have noticed, I had that long Gunex skirt out again to go with the North Sea Sweater.  Partly because I haven't made anything in months, so my wardrobe, always sparse at best, needs refurbishing, but I also love it's length.  I'm like the Olsen twins: I like long things better than short things--skirts that is.  I just love the long line of a long lean a-line skirt (on the other hand, I cannot stomach a long FULL skirt of the sort we all wore in the 90s. I cannot bear the fit or cut of anything from the 90s.  So dowdy).  I can't help it somehow.  AND I've been looking at so much short that long somehow seems fresher.  Oh, long has bobbed up as an option these last few years, but no one seems to be taking it seriously, at least not here in the US (except for those maxi summer dresses, and, of course, the Olsen twins). 

That early 70's silhouette is totally on my mind:

And:

 

I won't make these; my feelings about Vogue Couture patterns haven't changed (still thoroughly disgusted with them), but the silhouettes are on my mind.

So's this, though:

Remind you of anything?

The suit Maggie Evans wore when she went to see Elizabeth Collins Stoddard?  Why yes!  Not identical, 'tis true, but quite similar:

 

 

I have a terrible fondness for these mid 60s' boxy suits (though I'd skip the bit of yarn tied around my hair).  I'm sure I don't know why, but I do.  I'd really like one.  As I said, I won't make a Vogue pattern ever again, but maybe there's something in Burda that can be morphed? 

A slightly older Burda, that is.  Poor Burda.  The last three months have been, well, disappointing (the nicest word I can come up with).  I suppose the economic situation has hit them hard in that they don't seem to be spending as much as before on development.  The offerings, aside from a piece here and there, have been rather on the sorry side. Hideous, even--at times.

But anyway, long, short, I don't know.  I feel torn.  No clear direction.  Just two contradictory poles of appeal I guess.

The North Sea Sweater

Mirror, mirror. It's always a good day when you look thin in a photograph.  Ha.

This is the North Sea sweater I started, oh, a good more than a year ago--in March or April of 2008?  When we were selling the house etc., and I had ALL my stuff packed away, and we had workmen constantly in and out, not to mention buyers.  NOT the best time to start a new knitting project (I managed to lose the sweater schematic in the process of moving, which sucked).   But, I got the body done, and then the poor thing sat undisturbed in a bin until this summer, when I did the sleeves, then let it sit again till a couple of weeks ago, while the last design details worked themselves out in my unconscious. 

  

It's a cropped fair isle with a non-functional wrap front, shaped shoulders, set in sleeves, and an untraditional arrangement of traditional patterning.  The cuffs are not traditional at all.  Once again, no peasant shaping.

This project was rife with experimental steeking--I think I steeked things no one's ever heard of steeking, plus I did the usual re-engineering when shaping the sleeve caps and armholes (actually more so than with the green cardigan I showed previously).

Here is is under construction, looking rather miserable:

It was really a lovely, absorbing, interesting project to work on, & I'm so glad I pushed the boundaries.  One is hesitant to do so because of the small gauge, which means reknitting bits is a terrible labor.  Plus you have to break yarn during rounds, so ripping out  means a lot of waste.  However, the only way to get ahead is to go forward, so....

 

Despite the year and a half interval between starting and finishing, it was also a short project, being cropped!  But cropped is good.  Initially I'd planned a long rib, but something inside just wouldn't let me execute that, hence the sweater sitting for so long.  Cropped is better--it makes it into a layering piece rather than just a sweater.  Layering pieces give you more options I think.  At any rate, it's what's interesting to me at the moment.

This time, I wouldn't change a stitch.  Actually, the poor dear had an accident about a week ago that necessitated taking off & replacing the ribbing and making some repairs in the fabric.  What a nightmare.  All the steeks had been finished off, tacked down, & the piece washed and blocked.  But what remarkable wool shetland is, is all I can say.  I can't imagine any other kind of wool letting you undo finished & washed steeks without unraveling into dismay.  Shetland also permits repairs.  It's all those grippy little hairs, you see.  They hold on. I would defy anyone to tell that anything had gone wrong at all with the sweater. In fact, it's better than it was before, since I had to opportunity to alter the ribbing a little when I redid it.  Anyway, all's well that ends well.

Yay! :)

My shoes are Vivienne Westwood.  They're made of rubber.  I love them.

a slight sea change is in order, I think--the merest lap of the waves, really

My most recent post notwithstanding, this is still a sewing blog--or, rather, a making of clothes blog.  Thing is, though, knitting very much comes under that rubric, or it should anyway, 'cause knits are permanent in my wardrobe. 

But over the last 3 years or so, sewing kind of took the upper hand (so much to try and do and learn--and still so much), leaving all knitting to fall by the wayside.  However, the worm is turning (as it always does), and knitting is clamoring to resume its rightful place.

Besides, all my knits are old now, and I'm sick of them.  They're also just sweaters.  I want new things, & I want to explore knits as clothes.  So inevitably knitting talk is going to creep in.  You know, I've been experimenting with knitting since I was 6-7 years old, I've worked in a yarn shop (where Helen Gurley Brown came in to buy more cashmere-- what a cheapskate, I couldn't help thinking, buying one measly ball at a time, like she couldn't afford to have an extra one she never used--and if she couldn't, who could, I ask you), knit for hire, etc., and knitting's always given me the greatest personal pleasure, which means that it's just unbalanced not to mention it because it isn't sewing (not that there's not a lot of sewing involved, mind you, because anyone who knits knows there is, and sewing up knits is beginning to fascinate me, because that means you're sewing up pieces of things, which have to be structured and drafted to accomplish certain effects on the body.  Ah!  Light breaks through the clouds.  It's all connected after all.).

 But, I promise you there will be no rolling about in rhapsody of yarn or needle.  Instead, I thought that rather than "here's the latest thing I'm making from x, y, z, or Rowan,"--I don't make anyone else's patterns anyway--what I'll have to say will be more along the lines of something about knitting (making & working with a hand knitted fabric) that might be interesting from the making of clothes perspective (for me, anyway).   So don't run away if it looks like sewing went westward, because it didn't.  But it has to be integrated better with the rest of everything.  It can't just have all my efforts to itself anymore.  And anyway, whoever said you can't just skip the knitting stuff if that's what suits you.  

A murky pond, or, sewing, of a sort

I feel like being back now, I do. I really do.

I meant to start in by finishing up that jersey dress, which wouldn't have taken very long, but just then, just when I thought of doing so, fall fired its warning shot across the bow, and I realized that what I needed was a warm cardigan. 

At which point I found (like I didn't know without asking) that, sadly, yet again, I could not afford a $2000 designer sweater.  And nor, maybe, did I really want one.  Even the finest manufactured knit lacks, I don't know, the honesty of the sheep, for want of a better way to put it.  The honesty of the sheep in its ingredients and elusive intangibles of the handmade in its manufacture.  For better or worse (both), manufactured knits, even the best, are not the handmade, just as, for better or worse (both again), handknits are not like their factory cousins.  

But all of that notwithstanding, I still needed a sweater.  It was--is--cold. I was, am, freezing.

Plus, I had yarn.

A lot of yarn.  Yarn on cones.

So I browsed net-a-porter & made my decisions.  For some time now, I'd been wanting to shift away from thinking of knits as sweaters (so boring--two arms and a neck, with decoration. Whee.) and approach them more as clothing, bringing in what I've learned about drafting sewing patterns.  This was my chance (well, my 2nd chance; I've already applied some of my new thinking to something else, which I will reveal in due time).

I set to.

When it had sapped all my energies and I wouldn't, couldn't, have reknitted any bit of it even if you'd paid me, then I knew I was done, for better or worse.  Better, I hope.

Notable Features

• The side cables are in the style of some of the first cables, i.e. they cross 2 over 4, which is an uneven amount (the standard sort of cable with which we're familiar these days usually crosses two equal halves).  There are two, and I invented the one as a variation of the other, but it's not an especially innovative invention, so no doubt it's in Barbara Walker somewhere.  I also tinkered with the spear and chain pattern (that's what BW calls it), altering it just a little.  It doesn't look like spears and chains to me, though.  More like seaweed fronds waving at the bottom of the ocean (or horns, but that's another story).  That plus the other cables, which I think of as wavelike, plus the tweedy, dull green, make this cardigan redolent to me of the ocean or the murky bottom of a pond.
  
• It's neat inside, neat outside, especially vis a vis the attachment of the collar and front ribbing.  There's nary a seam to be seen in either place. Had to be: with no buttons or fasteners, and with the collar folding over, any seams could be easily seen.  You can make seams as neat as possible via various selvedge treatments, but I preferred in this case not to having collar or front ribbing seams at all. So I took steps and used a little known method of attachment.  
• I couldn't get a picture of it (even a tripod doesn't make up for having to be your own photographer and model--and how I hate being my own model), but one of the things I am especially pleased with is the shaping of the sleeve caps.  The conventional handknit sleeve cap is too blocky for my taste, so I dragged in what I've learned about sleeves from drafting sewing patterns and improved the fit and structure.  
• There are other things, but they're really too little to be mentioned, since they don't make sense out of the context of invention.  Though I will say this: I'm a stickler for having exactly matching row counts in all places, including shoulders, I don't accept the formulaic rules of shaping dispensed in "how to design a knit" books, and I will go to great lengths to achieve the fit and structure I want.  This has only gotten worse the more I've learned from drafting sewing patterns, but I love the challenge. There's an awful lot of shaping in this seemingly simple sweater (the fit's the thing after all) and integrating it with the cabling was no small undertaking.

Speaking of challenges

Aran knitting is some of the most challenging of all--oh, not the formation of the cables or keeping track of them.  That part's easy.  It's musical, you know?  The constant traveling ebb and flow of the cabling--the making the stitches move.  That's the delight of aran knitting. 

What isn't so delightful: the gauge difficulties inherent in the fabric you get.  The best swatch for an aran knit is, unfortunately, the entire sweater itself.  This is not so true of other kinds of knits, save lace maybe, but it is true of an aran. Designing them (in the sense of working out fit and structure for the particular fabric you've chosen, the least of which is the motifs you've chosen to put together) can be unusually painful.  Especially if you choose a long cardigan, which adds a certain hang factor into the equation.  But one thrives on solving the problems that come up.

The reasons being

An aran knit is, of course, a ribbed fabric, which mean all the difficulties come in with structure, design, and fit, since ribbing does not have a stable gauge.  It can, in fact, have any number of gauges, depending (even just laying there).  All knits are stretchy, but aran fabric multiplies the difficulties (fair isle fabrics--the real thing that is--on the other hand are less complex because the fabric is less stretchy and far more stable).  Plus the cabling adds visual weight even if the sweater itself is light AND the patterning makes complex shaping more complicated than with a plainer knit.  Aran knitting is a technique that evolved on and for garments with the so-called peasant shaping, i.e. a big straight tube for the body and smaller straight tubes for necks and arms.

So you up the ante when you ditch the peasant shaping, but ditching the peasant shaping is my thing, and upping the ante is like breathing.

Yeah there were some moments in which air seemed less available (cough, choke, gasp, my isn't the altitude getting a little thin, and damn it I'm going to have to reknit this for the five hundredth time), but it was like working out really hard and knowing you can totally do it 'cause you've trained for it for a long time now.

Not that I wouldn't make any changes, because I would (I have a list).  But isn't that always the case?  In the end, all you can ever really produce is a sample, and on the basis of that sample, you immediately see what you could do differently.  How you can build on what you've done and take it to the next higher level.  It's called having ideas.  Which is good.  But for now, what's done is done.  Time to move on.

Oh, and I'm not so cold anymore.