Slider Lace Poncho and other projects

 Diana Sullivan Facebook Seminar

I am attending a virtual seminar with Diana Sullivan on Facebook over the course of the next two weeks.  She sent the materials list in plenty of time with instructions to be ready for the seminar.  Knowing I've got thousands of cones of yarn available, I procrastinated on choosing my yarns till the seminar began.  

The first session was for two projects, a Slider Lace poncho, and mukluks.  I cast about for a suitable yarn and found a random beige cone which I think is cotton, and decided to spice it up with a lace-weight skein that has been calling to me every time I walk past saying "knit me, knit me"!  The lace weight is by Premier Yarns and it is wool-free Lace.  The color is Limestone Glow.  It was in my sock yarn basket, so I assumed there were two skeins. 

The two yarns complement each other very nicely. I knit a gauge swatch and found that the "slider" in the stitch pattern tended to slide a lot with these smooth yarns, losing the definition.  Diana had warned us that this could happen, but she also encouraged us to use our stash yarns.  Her yarn choice was "shawl in a ball", which I've used before.  It has a "hairy" texture.  The original technique was to leave two needles out of work between each vertical column of stitches, and move edge stitches from one column to the next.  Here's my swatch. 

Swatch for slider switch using generic cotton and Premier Wool-Free Lace. 

I decided to modify the stitch pattern.  Instead of just moving the stitch to an empty needle, I "pegged" it to another stitch by hanging it on the needle that already had a stitch on it.  I knit a row, then "made" a stitch by lifting the top loop from the butt of the adjacent stitch.  

Slider 2 lace with anchored stitches. 

I am pleased with this stitch.  The poncho should not take too long to make, as it is two rectangles.  Unfortunately,  now that I am half done with the current rectangle, I realized I cannot find the second ball of Premier Wool-Free Lace that I thought I had in my sock yarn basket.  Did I only buy one? It's possible.  I have begun a search for another skein of this yarn.  My first place to look was on Ravelry.  They have a feature where people can enter their stash and indicate whether it is for sale or not.  I did find several people who have this yarn stashed.  I sent off messages to them, in case they are willing to part with their stash,  but to date I have not heard back from anyone.   I also did a google search, and found a listing for WalMart.  Unfortunately, no stock.  Same with Mary Maxim, Herschnerr's, Yarn Barn, JoAnn Fabrics, Michael's, Hobby Lobby, and a bunch of other yarn stores.  I looked on ebay and Etsy.  I looked on Craiglist.  I looked at Letgo, only to find out it has been acquired by another company.   

In the process, I discovered a few sources that had the same yarn but in different colors.  I ordered three skeins of lavender-colored yarn.   If all else fails, my poncho will be color-blocked, or I may decide to frog what I have done and re-knit a solid color, use this yarn for something else.   

Bicycling in the Mountains Hats

In the meantime, I have completed my etsy orders for hats.  This one was inspired by another Ravelry user, but I used my own hat shape and her stitch pattern. 

This hat used a 20 percent angora, 80 percent acrylic.  I love this yarn!  It is so soft.  And I really like the color.  I have it in sky blue, teal, and this raspberry.  I don't think it is produced any more.  I am thinking of making a sweater for myself with this yarn down the road. 

  I am working on the pattern for this one, which I plan to release on Ravelry and Etsy. It uses the same shape file as the other one, which is my own design.  It is very simple design, so if anyone else has already made a hat in this way, my apologies, but I did design it.   My pattern will include four colorways, one for each season.  This version will be "summer".   

I was asked to knit a sweater in this pattern.  There are a lot of possibilities.  I did a few designs in Designaknit, with a bottom border, a top border, an all-over pattern, and also gave the person a photo of a similar round-yoke sweater.   I worked up some pricing.   We'll see if anything comes of the request.  

Setersdal Sweater

This week I photographed some punchcards from Rowan's book of designer machine knits for the Setersdal pattern.  I knitted this sweater long ago on a punchcard machine,  in Yeoman Yarn 50-50, a blend of 50 percent acrylic and 50 percent wool.  This yarn DOES shrink.  Especially if it gets washed with a bunch of jeans in the washing machine and dryer.   And because I made it a cardigan, with a zipper, the zipper buckled.  So although the design makes me happy, I cannot wear the sweater, at least in public.  I really should just take out the zipper for recycling and throw the sweater away or use it for a dustrag.   

This time I intend to knit it in a  Wool-rayon blend I purchased from Made In America yarns.  The design is classic and timeless.  Here's a link to a photo published in Ravelry.  Setersdal Sweater 

I was able to successfully use the graphics import feature in Design-a-Knit to import these photos into stitch designs.  I had to do a little touch-up editing.  Because my photos were not 100% flat, I had to use the checkbox to "move corners independently" to capture the dots.  I corrected the third punchcard, which I believe is missing a dot in rows 1 and 2, the XO row of the design.  My original sweater also had this mistake, because I was faithful to the punchcard as given in the book.    If you look carefully at the photo from the book (shown in the Ravelry picture) it appears that possibly these stitches were duplicate stitched after the fact.      But I have them now!  These stitch designs may be useful to incorporate into other designs sometime in the future. 

Translating hand-knitting to machine

My final project this week was to pick up a request from a few months ago to translate a hand-knit pattern for a child's bunny toy to machine knitting.  My initial reaction, when I was asked and saw the hand-knit pattern, was that it would not be very good pattern for machine knitting.  The reason is that there were increases on almost every row in the middle of the row.  The client asked to proceed anyway.  

I picked it up and realized there was no way to get that many increases (for the head) on the machine.  There wasn't enough yarn to stretch between the needles.  So I turned the head around, cast on with waste yarn and open stitches, and knitted it using decreases.  Then I re-hung it on the needles and proceeded to the back.  Again, there were both increases and decreases in the middle of the row.  I attempted using the garter bar,  but because of the way the increases were mirrored on each side of the rabbit's back, it was quite awkward.  I tried to use a lace tool I had inherited, which is similar to a transfer tool, to move twenty stitches at a time.  Unfortunately the quality of the tool was bad (or perhaps it was a slightly different gauge?), the prongs to transfer stitches did not line up with the needles of my machine.  So that was out.  I tried using the 7-stitch transfer tool, but this required multiple moves within the row.  I looked ahead and found that the upper thighs of the bunny required short rowing on each side of the body.  It could be done, but since it only used a few body stitches, I thought perhaps it would be easier to take the body off on waste yarn and rehang, using a sew-as-you-go technique. 

Then I took a deep breath.  The body of this rabbit was only about 70 stitches wide.  It would be so easy to knit it by hand.  And so hard to knit it by machine. And frustrating! 

I messaged the client and told her it was not going to be a fun knit, and I really did not recommend going forward.  She accepted my advice!  So I'm off the hook.  Yay!