Crackpot Quilters’ Blog

Here are the results of some of the fun I’ve had with beads recently. It’s addictive!

This bag matches a vest I made. Now I need to go somewhere appropriate for glitz…

This started out to be a frame for a nametag that would be worn at a conference. It got more and more elaborate, and the occasion passed. I still need to do the engineering part so that it can be used as a frame for something.

I found some tri-fold cards with a window at Michael’s, and I can put little beaded squares (4.7 cm) in the windows. This is the perfect project for beads as the beaded projects have the potential to be actually useful!

Marty

Here’s my first big crocheted project. I’m not converting away from knitting, but crochet is theoretically faster and produces thicker fabric than knitting, which sounded perfect for what afghans for Afghans is currently looking for.

Nothing too exciting here – the squares are made in the stitch known as “I thought I was doing half-double crochet but once I looked in a book of crochet stitches it turns out I misremembered it”, sewn together with single crochet, and with a double crochet border. The yarn is mostly Brown Sheep Naturespun Worsted, with leftovers of other worsted-weight wool yarns. Cathy may recognize the gray yarn, which she sent me a while ago.

Ann asked some questions about my sweater, and I figured I’d answer in a new post

I’m curious about whether you had any problems with your yarn getting sucked down into the bobbin area in your sewing machine as you stitched. The proprietor of our local yarn shop told me that that is her greatest worry about steeking – not the cutting, but the stitching – and we discussed the wisdom of basting some tracing paper to the back side of the sweater to prevent that problem. Or did you stitch with the wrong side of the sweater up?

I was nervous about problems when doing the sewing, but it went much more smoothly than I’d feared. The hardest part of the process was remembering to breathe while stitching the seams. I did the seaming with the right side of the sweater up and had no problems with yarn getting caught in the feed dogs or sucked down into the bobbin area. I used a stitch length of 2 (I’m not sure what the units of stitch length measurement are – millimeters, maybe?). The major change from my usual sewing was to use a different presser foot. According to my sewing machine manual, it is the Satin Stitch Foot. Most of the foot is clear plastic, and there is a handy arrow pointing toward where the needle is, so that helped immensely in “aiming” exactly where I wanted to sew into the needle. There’s probably some technique for taking good pictures of small, transparent plastic things, but I don’t know it, so here’s my best shot:

I do admire your persistence in redoing your sleeves to get them to fit just right, but why did you cut off (aaaaaagh!!!) the top of the sleeve before redoing it rather than unravelling it?

I had a couple of reasons –
1. I put a bunch of effort into those sleeve tops, and I figured I could re-make the sleeve tops into hats or something else useful.
2. I’d already blocked the sleeves, so the unravelled yarn was really, really crinkly and would’ve require re-conditioning to be knittable. I had plenty of extra gray yarn, and bought more off-white yarn (which is a good thing, because I had to use some of the new skein to finish off the body knitting). This picture doesn’t fully convey the 3-dimensional crinkliness, but you can get an idea:

To avoid disaster when cutting off the sleeves, I ran smooth cotton yarn through the row of stitches where I wanted to begin knitting again, then skipped three rows of knitting, and ran another length of yarn through an entire row. I cut through the middle of those three skipped rows, then was able to put the yarn-held row of stitches onto a circular needle, unravel the row above it, splice in the new yarn, adn begin knitting again. On my sleeve comparison, you can see the yellow “holding” yarn on the sleeve top.

And call me old fashioned, but I really don’t understand why anyone would choose to “cardiganize” a sweater. If you want a cardigan, why not just knit one?? I guess it’s just a Scandinavian thing.

The sweater pattern is for a cardigan – it’s just the Norwegian style to knit the sweater in a big tube with extra cutting stitches in the middle front, and then steek it.

And now, off to work on picking up stitches for the neckband!

Once the major parts of my Dale sweater were knitted, the next step was to cut the steeks to cardiganize it and provide a place to sew in the sleeves.

First, I assembled the necessary supplies:

I used my swatch to practice sewing on knit fabric and adjust my sewing machine setup.

Then, it was time to sew the first reinforcements on my sweater. I started with the front neck steek, sewing two lines of stitching on each side of the cutting line. Here’s what it looks like on the wrong side – the yellow yarn is used to indicate where I’ll cut.

After cutting the steek, the neckline is now separated, and you can see the curve formed by the decreases on each side of the steek:

Next, I sewed the reinforcements for the center front steek. Here you see the cutting in progress. I put cardboard (an empty cereal box) inside the sweater to prevent accidentally cutting through the back of the sweater.

It’s a cardigan!

Then it was time for chocolate consumption. I also sewed the body and sleeve hems yesterday.

This morning, I sewed and cut the sleeve steeks. Unlike fair isle sweaters, traditional Norwegian sweaters don’t have extra cutting stitches added for the sleeve attachment – the sewing and cutting happens through the patterned stitches.

The aftermath:

At lunchtime knitting at work this week, one of my coworkers asked what the hardest part of knitting a sweater is. It took me some thought to come up with an answer – for me, the most difficult part is having the patience to get things right – especially when I need to re-do a part of a sweater.

Speaking of re-doing, those Dale sleeves which I’d decided were too wide at the top? I cut off the top and reknitted with smaller needles (.25 mm really does make a difference – the second time around I used 3.0 mm needles instead of 3.25) and I didn’t do all of the prescribed increases so there were 10 fewer stitches.

Here’s the result: re-done sleeve on the left, old sleeve top on the right.

And, to prove that the second time is the charm, here’s my sleeve compared to the sleeve of the Norwegian sweater I got from Dad:

I’m plugging along on my Dale of Norway sweater, and am approaching the top of the body. It’s going well, but I think I’m going to re-do the tops of the sleeves (the whole 2-color part) because they’re wider than I’d like. My gauge was a little off (I’ve been using a 3mm needle on the body and that’s turning out better than the 3.25 mm needle I used on the sleeves), and I think I’ll also not do any increases through the upper arm. This will make it much closer in size to Dad’s sweater.

Now, as to the picture of the body – the top is scrunched because my circular needle is 24″ (and the sweater body is closer to 40″ around). In the picture, the funky stripey thing to the left is where I’ll be cutting the front opening (this is a cardigan). I was trying to hold down the hem (which likes to curl as it hasn’t been blocked) with my toes, but I missed part – hence the folded up gray part at the bottom.