the big reveal

the secret is out. part of it, anyway.

i'm sorry it's not a box with an embarrassing spongebob photo inside. but it's pretty sweet anyway.

please give a standing ovation to my first published pattern. let me repeat that last bit. it's a pattern. which i designed. on my own. i'm awesome.

i give you nineteen twenty.

as of today it will be available for your purchasing pleasure on ravelry or the sweetgeorgia shop for a very reasonable price of $6.

it's a weird but oddly fascinating combination of a wrap, and a shrug, and a cardigan, and is modeled here by the ever-gracious jing, who makes everything look good, for which i hate her.

it's made with 2 skeins of sweetgeorgia merino silk fine, in a brand new fall colourway called mink (i know it's not fall yet, but we're thinking ahead, like newton, or vanilla ice). it comes in two sizes, both of which can accommodate a wide range of female anatomies. the pattern comes with instructions on how to customize the sizes too, to make it more or less drapey and to fit those oddly shaped bodies which are still (mostly) beautiful.

buy it, and make it, and wear it, and post all your praise in the comment section below. thank you.

reine

i'm such a brooklyn tweed whore. you know that much if you've read any of my stuff anywhere, ever.

give me any pattern curated by the magical jared flood, and i'll be salivating all over it like them more girly knitters are doing to pictures of ryan gosling right now.

(personally, i don't find him that hot. but that's because my girly bits have recently dried up and withered away because of an involuntary and tragic lack of use.)

reine by alexis winslow

ravelry link

size 33.75

bc garn semilla dk (350g / 4mm)

reine was the ultimate piece of comfort knitting back in october. just a smooth relaxing sailing from skein to skein, from piece to piece. the pattern was extremely knitter-friendly and the top down, short-row set-in sleeves produced a sweet fit at the shoulders. it was such a perfect pairing between yarn and needles that i just wiggled my fingers every now and then and somehow from that a cardigan emerged. the sleeves took maybe 3 hours each, that's the level of simple comfort we're talking about.

but because i'm not very smart, it never occurred to me to consider some of the essential differences of semilla and the intended yarn. you may or may not know (and if not, why the hell not?) that BT loft and its delightful woolen texture allow it to be knitted up with a gauge of anything between light fingering to DK without losing any fabric integrity, drape or general awesomeness.

at 250 meters per skein, one could squeeze out this cardigan with just 200 grams of loft. semilla, as wonderfully soft and ever-so-slightly rustic as it is, is just 160 meters, so for me it took 350 grams--which is just enough for gravity to do its dastardly deed. and so the cardigan turned out droopy.

oddly, back in my LYS days, i was definitely smart enough to publicly ridicule anyone not familiar with the pitfalls of substituting yarn, i.e. those considering only one factor of the holy trinity of needle size, gauge and yardage. material obviously plays into it as well, but i don't know what you call a holy foursome in a fancy biblical way. quadrility? anyway. i know i'm a horrible person.

horrible, AND with a stupid face

but i can live with the droopyness, because the cardigan is just so freakin' comfy. and the pockets are perfect for those moments when you're feeling awkward among half-strangers and know that if you resort to your usual i'm-uncomfortable-so-i-need-to-do-something-with-my-hands routine and keep on twirling your fingers and tearing off pieces of fingernail in a visible manner, it will only contribute to making you seem even more out there than you actually are, therefore rendering the moment unbearably awkward and possibly fatal. but with this cardigan--voila! pockets.

my hand could be doing anything in here, and you would never know

not a word about the quality of seaming, though. i'm a knitter, not a fuckin' seamstress, okay? seaming makes me aggressive, which doesn't go well with my otherwise gentle manners. fuckin' seams.

again thanks to miss R for the photos!

cutesy

picture july.

a girl walks into a yarn store.

she finds three gorgeous skeins of hand-dyed sock-weight yarn. on sale. and on a very generous sale too, she mumbles ecstatically to herself whilst attempting not to foam from her mouth like a rabid dog. she's been looking for the perfect fingering-weight yarn for a certain cardigan for ages, and this is it. she buys all three skeins and trots happily along.

unable to postpone the merryment of starting a new project she casts on, thinking it will be finished in a couple of weeks.

well. it wasn't.

instead, it lay practically unaffected on my (as you, my cunning reader, may already have inferred) dining table for five months after the sizing/frogging disaster that left me so emotionally drained that i wouldn't have pissed on it if it's kidneys were on fire. or something. i've been reading too much stephen fry lately. point is i didn't want to have anything to do with it. i was only able to muster up a couple of rows at a time.

but one night after christmas, having finally become sick of looking at the messy ball of fabric on my table, mocking me and reminding me how much i suck at all things unpleasant, i somehow summoned up enough willpower and stamina to knit the remaining sleeve. i just sat there watching five hours worth of TV and squeezed the thing out of me like some morbid life-to-hairy-purple-things-giver.

so allow me to introduce...

smaragd by svetlana volkova

ravelry link

size makeshift xs

araucania ranco (300g / 2.5-3mm)

i know i sound like a broken record here, but after all the clusterfucks this top-down cardigan put me through i'm really really happy with the result. it's a defining characteristic of my knitting to be completely unenjoyable to make but in the end satisfy me on all levels but the sexual one. and sometimes that too. why is it that i always associate woolly things with sex?

see? boobs.

i love the lace part although i couldn't find a way to block it properly to really open up the stitches. but i'm sure it'll even out in use. and the color is pretty awesome, which can only be attributed to my impeccable eye and the uncharacteristically far-sighted idea to knit alternately from all three skeins. it was pure torture all the way but in the end it produced an amazing flow of the slightly different tones that works really well with the otherwise boring stockinette. shows too how variegated the colors can be in handdyed yarns.

starting the cardigan twice from scratch was a devastating decision that resulted in me smashing stuff and swearing something along the lines of "i'll never fuckin' touch those fuckin' needles again". both times. but eventually it rewarded me like it always does because now it fits like a dream with no excess fabric in the top part. originally i was making the smallest size but it was still too big for me so i deleted one vertical lace chart repeat (8 instead of 9) and cast on 122 stitches instead of 131. it's only 11 stitches less, but just enough to turn a purple burlap sack into something that makes me look all lovely and stuff.

even the model is doing the twirl,
and only partly because i forced her to

so once again i've succeeded in making something completely awesome. i rule. i totally rule. bow down to me i'm the queen of knittingdom YE-HEARGH.

many many thanks to miss A for modeling!

my man paulie

you know paulie.

he's the type of dude that's all over you. like, really gets under your skin. he's kind of hairy. a little prickly. and smells funny too. it was love at first sight, sure, but later you've come to realize he can be a real asshole sometimes. on a good day he's all warm and fluffy, on a bad day you want to stab him in the face.

but still he keeps hangin' around, and you like it. kind of. sort of.

paulie by isabell kraemer

ravelry link

size modified small

fortissima alpaka & drops baby merino (270g & 50g / 2.5mm)

yes it's me in a skirt, get over it

i made some modifications to both the size and style, because let's face it, no man nor cardigan could ever satisfy me the way god intended them to. i started out with size small but realized it would be too small, so i added a couple of increase rounds and regular garter rounds before separating the sleeves. then i knitted all the way down, finished the hem and added the collar and front bands, went "oh god not again", and started over.

i didn't like the garter hems so i made a wide ribbing instead. at first the edge seemed to flip over because of the wide stockinette parts, but binding off from the wrong side makes it sit nicer. left out the waist shaping too, because as you can see i have absolutely no waist anyway. pretending i do would be cheating, and cheating is lying and lying makes you sterile.

"eww, there's nature in here"

for some reason the front garter parts seem to bulge out a little. it's not that it's too wide. i guess garter just doesn't work with my saggy boobs. also the collar won't fold stay folded like it's supposed to. and the left sleeve is wider than the right. what else? oh yeah, i sewed the buttons at the wrong places. point it out and die.

i dare you

but paulie grows on you. like most guys do. and by most i mean anyone who tells me i'm pretty.

hit the jump for more info and photos.

welcome to planet torture knitting

so i'm making another cardigan.

to counteract the terror caused by the previous cardigan.

with a gauge of 30x40 stitches.

after six days of maniacal handiwork, the body is done. the collar and front button band alone took a whole day.

then it comes to me to try the thing on.

and before i can say "HOLY FUCK IT'S TOO SHORT" i realize that it is, in fact, too short.

i knew i had to make at least 13 stripes instead of the 12 in the pattern, because i have a freakishly long back, and because i prefer my cardigans a little longer anyway. i also clearly noted how majorly anal frogging the hem would be, because the front band attaches directly to the side of the hem, rendering any alterations to the length both futile and unsightly. but did it occur to me, at any point, to count the freakin' stripes? the short answer is, no. the long answer is, due to a critical risk of me starting to break things, also no.

not that i didn't do that too. TV remotes, flower pots, nokias, whatever. in real life she was so calm and composed and boring. on planet torture knitting she went freakin' berserk.

just because you think there's 13 don't make it so

i've heard it said that knitting is a metaphor for life. you try your best to make good, but sometimes life (and yarn) just wants to throw turd-covered curveballs at you, and all you can do is enjoy the taste.

but why is it that when it comes to me and knitting, everything has to go through the fuck-it-all amplifier before any good can come out of it? it's like i'm subconsciously sabotaging my own work. maybe i don't feel like i deserve any yarn-related happiness. where's freud when you need him?

i'd like to say, next time i'll count the stitches, next time i'll be super smart, next time i'll be so careful and conscientious that i'll get it right from the word go.

but that would be a lie, and you and i both know it.

go ahead & panic

so i'm making this cardigan.

313 yoke stitches per row.

with three alternating skeins of the same yarn, because it's hand-dyed and i want to avoid pooling and other color-related disasters. 

my hands hurt and my already crippled back is twisted into some kind of contortionist nightmare.

i think, "gee, i hope i don't screw this thing up, because frogging into three live skeins at the same time is surely not a pleasant thing to do".

i also think, "nah, i'm not going to count the stitches at this point where the correct amount of stitches is a matter of life and a supernova-type death, i'm sure the number is right".

so i go ahead and knit one row. purl one row. knit. purl. knit. purl.

"i don't see how this thing could go wrong"

seven hours and 8136 stitches later.

the yoke is done and i'm marking the stitches to separate the sleeves. front piece, sleeve, back piece, sleeve, front piece. but... the numbers don't add up.

terror fills my head and panic starts to tighten its death grip on me as i realize i've had too many stitches all along.

i failed to read the lace chart properly at the beginning, so i now have 26 extra stitches, which means the yoke is going to be way too big for me. i would have noticed this had i counted the stitches at the point where i knew i should have. but i didn't. and now it's too late.

the vision of frogging seven hours' work into three live skeins at the same time suddenly becomes very real.

bob, you fucking asswipe fartface. kill me now.

seven-day cardigan

so i made a cardigan. in seven days. you heard me. to the question, "have you no life" the answer is a loud and resounding "no". but instead i have a sweet cardigan, so, there.

the pattern is a simple top-down model with 13 buttons and some pleats in the front and back. i used a smaller needle and thinner yarn so went one size up to get a nice fit. in the end it took exactly five skeins of yarn, which is odd, because the plain and simple took seven and it didn't even have sleeves. bob, the patron saint of knitting, indeed works in mysterious ways.

georgia cardigan by jane richmond

ravelry link

size 32" to get 30"

grignasco flavia baby  (250g/2.5-3mm)

i had stashed the yarn sometime during the winter when there was a sale on my absolute all-time hands-down favorite yarn at a local shop. (the final tally came out at somewhere beyond 20 or 30 skeins but, you know, who's counting.) originally i meant to knit the thermal sweater with this color but at some point went "nah" and made this cardigan instead. in seven days. the phrase "zombie madman on acid" is once again a pretty accurate description of my person during that week.

but like most of the stupid shit i do, voluntarily i might add, it was worth it. it fits well and isn't too girly for my butch trucker lesbian style. the color is a bit hard to combine, seeing that i'm just now realizing it's the first blue top i've owned in a decade, but i'm pretty sure i'll find some use for it. if not, i can burn it in a ritualistic fashion and have my universally allotted moment's fun that way. and before you ask, no, i didn't run out of yarn. the sleeves are meant to be that short.

to the pattern designer i raise my proverbial hat for creating realistic proportions as opposed to idealistic. unlike garnstudio seems to believe, people slouch. thank you, jane, for realizing that the back piece needs to have more stitches than the front. and the fit at the shoulders really is freakin' gorgeous, don't you think? yes, you do.