VKC: Tension, puckers & even stranded knitting

Today, let's talk about how to keep your stranded knitting nice and even looking! I'll cover a few things that tie together to make that happen, and give you my best advice for lovely looking stranded knitting.

Tension

You may or may not find that your tension changes from knitting with one color to knitting with two colors. Many people say your tension tightens up when you knit stranded (producing more stitches per inch than when you knit with one color), or that you get more relaxed as you go. You won't really know until you try it out for yourself.

Using the same yarn, my gauge is pretty much consistent whether I'm knitting with one color or two. What's this all mean? That you will need to do a gauge swatch for a stranded knitting project. Period, end of story. It's okay though, because you'll want to do one anyway to make sure you like how your colors play together. (We'll cover that in another post soon!)

Floats and puckers

When you work in stranded knitting, only one color is being used in a stitch at a time, obviously. So the other color waits for you at the back of the work, to get knit with the next time it's needed. That strand of yarn between the stitches of a given color is often referred to as a 'float'.

So each little float is what makes up the stranding, when you talk about stranded knitting or fair isle. It's that stranding on the wrong side of your knitting that gives stranded items that particularly squooshy feeling and makes stranded knits thicker than normal knits.

You want to make sure that your floats are not too tight. I can't emphasize that enough.

How? When you stop using color A and start using color B, do not tug tightly on that strand of yarn or you'll pull your float too tight. If you do that, your work will end up puckered. You can block some of this out, but you simply can't beat your knitting into submission, much as you may try.

When you go to knit with the next color in your pattern, knit that stitch but don't yank on the yarn to tighten it up, just keep it nice and loose. That will help keep the float loose at the back of the work, ultimately leading to nice and even colorwork. Because it's worth repeating: you want the yarn at the back of your work to be carried along loosely. You can always tighten up a stitch or two here and there but it's almost impossible to loosen up floats that are too tight. Really!

I pulled out an old work-in-progress to show you a comparison. This isn't an extreme example, but you can kind of see the puckered part from the strands between the red and black colors being pulled too tightly as I knit. (This project was on double-pointed needles, not my favorite way to do stranded knitting. Hence this being a WIP a few years later.)

Now, don't panic—your work may be a little puckery looking as you knit it. That's okay, and will block out. (Actually the above might even block out, but it's best to not chance it.)

Take a look.

But if your work is severely puckered, it's time to relax a bit and loosen things up.


My secret to even stranded knitting

I've been thinking for weeks about what I do to keep my stranding nice and even, and I've really only come up with one little trick, but it's the best tip I can give. It's so easy, too!

I think some people have a tendency to scrunch up all the stitches close together on the needle when they do stranded knitting. Here's what that looks like, with the stitches on the needle in my right hand scrunched up together, i.e. the stitches that just got knit.

Don't do this.

Instead, when you're knitting, keep the stitches on your right-hand needle slightly spaced apart. Give them some breathing room.

It's easy to do with a little motion of your right hand or fingers every so often to keep things spaced apart a bit. It helps give extra room for your floats and it helps keep you from pulling too tight. If you find you don't have enough space on your knitting needle to do this, switch to a slightly longer needle.

When you get to the next color in your row, make sure those stitches on your right-hand needle are nice and spaced apart.

You can see the difference in how the floats (strands at the back of the work) look when you do that, too.

This also must be done when you go from one needle to the next when knitting with double-pointed needles (DPNs), or knitting with 2 circular needles. Your floats between the needles must be kept loose, otherwise you'll get a pucker between each needle.

And that's my main advice for lovely and even stranded knitting. Don't knit it with a vice grip, and make sure your stitches are nice and spaced apart, especially between color changes. And remember, all the small puckers and wrinkles will smooth out once you block your knitting. Keep these tips in mind and you'll churn out beautiful stranded knitting projects.

In my next post (which will be very soon!), I'll talk about dealing with vintage stranded patterns that do not have charts, how to chart them to save yourself oodles of time and frustration, and how to work with charts easily. Then we'll talk a little bit about colors and yarn, and swatching!


Now do you have tips for what keeps your stranded knitting looking great? Please share in the comments!

My lovely stranded cardigan!

Hi everyone, I'm back home! I have massive catching up to do on my feed reader. My, how everyone's been posting like a maniac!

We had a lovely, albeit somewhat brief, trip to my mom's outside of Washington, D.C. I'm sorry I didn't get to meet up with any D.C. bloggers, however with Thanksgiving and a family party, and my best friend from college visiting too for part of the trip, time was very limited.

Just before we left for our trip, I finished up my latest sweater! I'm over the moon about it. The pattern is Bestway B2637, called Fair Isle Cardigan. You can purchase the .pdf here, and find it on Ravelry here. I don't have an exact date, but the pattern is from the 1940s.

You can see I didn't stray very far from the original pattern colors. I liked the color scheme so well I didn't see a need to go in a different direction. Lately I've been more inclined to do that with vintage colorwork patterns, because I like the original so much.

While I kept the color scheme about the same, I made a few other changes. The first change was gauge. The pattern was knit at 9 stitches per inch in fingering weight yarn. As someone who loves vintage styles, I knit a lot with fingering weight. However 9 stitches an inch is generally a bit more dense than I like to knit sweaters. I prefer to knit fingering weight on somewhere between 7 to 8 stitches per inch for a sweater, obviously depending upon the yarn and pattern. So this pattern I knit at 7.5 spi, though in the end I blocked it closer to 7 spi.

Changing the gauge as I did, I also had to tweak the sizing a bit. The final width around the bust is 1" larger than my full bust. While it looks like there is shaping to the body, there isn't. The ribbing is knit on about 10% fewer stitches than the body, then in the first body row I increased to the full number of stitches that was knit with all the way up to the bust.

(Oh yes, here's the new haircut too! Only this isn't representative of how it looks after a fresh set, but is how it looks the day after if I don't put rollers back in at night, except for my bangs. So they are much softer curls.)



The complicating factor about changing the sizing of an allover colorwork pattern is making sure the colorwork lines up the way you'd like it to. That took a little bit of doing. I started by charting out the pattern, so I knew it was 16 stitches across for one pattern repeat. I decided where I wanted the center stitch across the back to be, and worked around to the front from there.

I knit this with a combination of yarns. Mostly St-Denis Boreale, with a bit of Jamieson's Shetland Spindrift and KnitPicks Palette. I knew the Shetland yarn was stickier than the other two, but it was just the right gold I was looking for and all the yarns played well together.

Because I changed the sizing in the pattern, I had to change the sleeve cap. I wanted the rows of the pattern to match up from the sleeve to the shoulder, so I had to make sure the sleeve cap was two things: 1) exactly the same number of rows as the upper body of the sweater (from armhole to shoulder shaping), and 2) started at exactly the same row on the chart as on the body after the armholes. The excess ease could not be worked in along the pattern, otherwise it would throw off the row-to-row seaming. So I gathered the sleeve caps at the top when setting in the sleeves, which I did with mattress stitch.

The chart doesn't flow from the sleeve to the body (even I'm not that anal!), but the rows line up quite nicely. The gathered cap works great with this style, too.

This project was steeked. A steek is a bridge of extra stitches knit where you would like an opening to be. You later cut through the steek, leaving the opening. One major benefit of steeks when used in stranded knitting is not having to slow down to purl in a stranded pattern, as well as being able to cut away all loose ends so you don't have to weave them in.

In the body of this sweater, the front of the cardigan and the armholes were steeked. I also knit the two sleeves together separated by steeks for the length of the sleeves, then for the sleeve caps. Once they were cut, I seamed up the sleeve seams. I could have knit them separately, but it ensured they were perfectly matched and I didn't have to weave in any ends.

I reinforced the steeks with sturdy hand stitches prior to cutting. This wasn't really necessary with the wool I was using, as it's grabby enough not to ravel, however it leaves a very neat and tidy edge inside. I didn't even bother to tack down my steeks. (Incidentally, these are all topics I'll cover in the long term in Colorwork: 101! But I'll be writing up more posts about basics, first. I did post a number of photos with explanations on my Ravelry project page, if you'd like to see more.)

The lumpy bits you see at the top of the shoulder in the below photo is from the end of the sleeve cap steek and the gathering of the top of the cap. This actually worked a little bit like sewing in a shoulder pad, so I didn't need to make any!

I'm just in love with this cardigan. The fit is perfect and I love the design and colors. I've worn it several times since I finished it, and I only finished it last Monday. Even though I have a million other projects planned, it makes me want to run right out and knit one just like it, but with another colorwork chart. I had a couple of people yesterday on Ravelry say it reminded them of the 1940s Shetland fair isle cardigan that knitwear designer Kate Davies posted about on her blog, which is a huge compliment to me.

I hope my sweater looks as good in 70 years as a real hand-knit one from the 1940s does now!

Saturday evening outfit & haircut

We're off to my mom's tomorrow. So before we jet, I thought I'd post a quick outfit, mostly to show you all that I got a haircut last weekend! I'd been debating about chopping another few inches off for awhile, and went for it.

Now you'll never see me wearing my hair down like this, but you can see the length. We went out with friends Saturday night and I didn't feel like doing anything to my hair after the cut that afternoon, so I just did a little front roll and plopped on a trusty beret. So easy in autumn.

I'm really pleased with how the cut worked out. I set it last night for the first time since the haircut using my trusty setting pattern. And the style is just what I was looking for! Very late 30s. So you'll have to wait to see how it looks set until I have photos. :)

Outfit details: variety of yellow Bakelite bangles, wool gabardine trousers from Allure Originals,  mustard blouse with pintucks from Small Earth Vintage, vintage shrug from forever ago (probably one of my most frequently worn staples), fair isle beret hand knit by me. Can you tell I've been on a yellow kick? I just can't seem to get enough of it this autumn!

Have a wonderful week, and a very Happy Thanksgiving to my fellow American readers! I'll have lots to share when I'm back!

Jitterbuggin 30% off sale through Sunday

Hi everyone! I have continued the trend of being head-spinningly busy lately! I was hoping to get not one but two Vintage Knitting College posts written up this week, and have come up with a big, fat zero! We're off to visit my mom and step-dad outside Washington, D.C. next week for Thanksgiving, so I'm hoping to have a bit of free time to work on at least one then.

In the meantime, I thought I'd alert you to a sale I found out about. Jitterbuggin is having a 30% off sale through Sunday!

When people talk about vintage vs. me-made vs. repro, such as Stephanie of The Girl With the Star-Spangled Heart did last week in this thoughtful post, my first thought in the repro category, with a few exceptions, isn't the bigger companies that focus on repro or more frequently retro/pin-up-inspired (i.e. not actually trying to recreate a vintage style, but running with the feeling).

Instead, I first think of the seamstresses who sell in small online shops or Etsy, like Nudeedudee, Jitterbuggin and Allure Originals. Yes, you'll likely pay more money for a custom or small run piece than you would with a large retro brand, but let's face it—even some of those bigger brands are very pricey, and not even necessarily using quality materials or craftsmanship. (Stretch bengaline comes to mind... I'm not a fabric snob but good gracious, I hope I never wear that fabric again, I've done my time with it. lol)

When I'm able to, I like to support the smaller repro companies, who are sometimes a company of one! I just don't sew enough to be able to bring to life everything I want to wear, and when I can't find it vintage or would prefer a more longer-lasting alternative (for, say, a particular work piece that gets a ton of use and needs to be hard-wearing), I turn to gals like these. Instead of "me-made" I think of it as "she-made". ;) Plus it gives me such a warm and fuzzy feeling to support an indie business, when I can put names to faces and have an ongoing relationship. It's just something I've always liked to do when I can.

So when I saw Jitterbuggin was having a sale, I wanted to pass on the love. I have a few pieces from Kim, and I love them all. In fact now that I think about it, the red checked bow blouse in my blog header is from Jitterbuggin and damn if it's not one of my favorite summer tops.

Pop on over to Jitterbuggin and take a peek around. Use the coupon code "Autumn Leaves" for 30% off through Sunday. I'll leave you with a snap of my new favorite piece of hers, my green pinafore dress!

Autumn day outfit #2

Goodness, where has this week gone? That's what happens when you have a cold. Suddenly it's Friday and you feel like you haven't accomplished anything.

Since I haven't had the time to write up a blog post, you'll have to make do with another outfit post. Last weekend we went to the International Expo of Sculptural and Functional Art and Intuit Show of Folk and Outsider Art. My tastes definitely lean to the latter.

This was my first time wearing this dress, a handmade vintage wool dress with (what I think are) dolman sleeves. I absolutely love it. The woman who made it took such care, too. It's meticulous on the inside, including Hong Kong seams. What era do you think it's from? I'm frankly not sure.

This brooch is one of my favorites, thrifted at some point in time. It was a really windy day, but warm enough that the dress was enough, so I pinned the shawl on and through the dress so it wouldn't keep blowing away.

I love these gloves with this purse. When I knit them, I had forgotten I had a perfectly matching wicker purse. Kismet! It makes me think I may actually knit more gloves, after all, even though the fingers are such a chore. Or perhaps I shall be on the hunt for some fantastic vintage ones, like Charlotte of Tuppence Ha'Penny detailed in her recent post. I always long to have more matching accessories, but never seem to do anything about it.

Outfit details: vintage dress from La Poubelle Vintage; 30s/40s shoes from a vendor at Randolph Street Market; thrifted vintage brooch; Bakelite earrings from Etsy; gloves, beret, shawl all hand-knit by me.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

My guest post at Elegant Musings

Hi everyone! Ever wanted to sew a ribbon button band onto a cardigan? I'm excited to point you to my guest post today over at Casey's Elegant Musings, where you can read my tutorial!

See, I told you that you'd hear more about the Campus Compliments cardigan pattern I posted. ;)