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.
