wip: fair isle sweater

i hope you aren’t getting bored with this ongoing project of mine, because there’s more yet to come! i’m certainly not sick of it, which i find surprising, considering i’ve been working on it for almost three months! yikes.

when we left off i was working on the sleeves:

i’m not sure why they take longer to knit. i know part of it is correlated to the sighs i got whenever i thought about knitting the sleeves. but finally i finished! i was asked to show the front of the sweater, which i had been avoiding photographing… the back was a lot more cohesive and pretty, with a lot less yarn ends hanging about. you can see the striping between the two dye lots in this picture, and also my ‘steeking zone’ in front.

blocking, in the daylight, on the radiator. trying to speed along the process so i could get to the fun stuff: steeking!

once again, i used eunny jang’s tutorial for a crocheted steek. i looked at some other techniques, but i still felt most comfortable with this technique, for the majority of the reasons eunny lays out: it is the most secure steeking option, especially if you’re working with yarn less ‘grabby’ or less naturally felting than the yarns originally used for fair isle steeking. and it is more of a natural extension of the knitted fabric than the sewn steek.

so then i sewed down all of the crocheted edges and here we are now:

and those edges look so much better than the rest of them!

i decided to knit the button band separately and then graft it on at the end. when i have tried to pick up stitches from the garment, i am never pleased with the result. i always pick up too few or too many, which affect the edges. so i’ve cast on 350 stitches, and i’m hoping to work a shawl collar along the top. just the act of casting on 350 stitches is time consuming! and i was doing that while the oscars were on, so i kept getting sidetracked in the middle and having to re-start the count.

i want to do afterthought buttonholes, but i haven’t found a tutorial for a description that i find satisfactory. i might just wing it as i have a fairly concrete idea of how to go about it. but i think somewhere along the line i heard a mention of elizabeth zimmerman having an afterthought buttonhole technique, only i can’t find it in any of the three EZ books i own. so i might try to dig that up before i just wing it.

this may very well be my best documented knit of all time. what are you guys working on?

Posted by ifandany in knitting Tags: blue, colorwork, green, in progress, knitting, wip