The Independent Stitch

Norsk Strikkedesign-inspired sweater: Yoke planning

So a while back I was knitting the tops of the sleeves of my Norsk Strikkedesign-inspired cardigan-to-be.

I finished the green-on-black bands around both sleeves and around the top of the lower body. The body is all in one piece, with three steeks (for the front and both armholes). The time to make decisions about the yoke patterning could not be delayed any longer.

I had intended to draft freehand designs with swirls in the yoke area, similar but not identical to the charting in Lise Kolstad Yuen's design in the book, which I am using for inspiration. While turning pages to look at the way she put the yoke pattern together, I flipped open another set of pages with a yoke design for which the chart was significantly easier to read. I thought, “Hey, that looks like it would be compatible with what I'm doing. . . .”

I was not altogether surprised to discover that the second sweater was by the same designer. No wonder its motifs felt compatible with the concept I'm working from. In this photo, the pages for the sweater that is my primary inspiration are on the left; its neighbor is on the right.

I took a couple of the motifs from the second sweater, used in its sleeves and the sides of its body, and started exploring how they might fit into my yoke sections. I worked with gauge-correct graph paper printed out with Print-A-Grid, taped together and measured off to the actual stitch count and the planned row count of my yoke area (I re-measured my gauge and re-counted my live stitches before I drew the lines).

I could place the motifs on both front panels and on the back so they'd fit nicely. Initially I didn't pay attention to how the designs would crop at the armholes, front edges, or shoulders—sometimes I focus on those areas first, but in my opinion this design needed to be centered on the back and to be placed judiciously within the fronts. I did match the baselines of the patterns on the front and the back. I was about to say "of course," but I can imagine situations where I might not do that. Few, but possible.

Here's how I set the motifs into the front panel:

And here's how I set them into the back:

I used highlighters in a variety of colors to trace out the sections of the motifs. While I intended to knit the design in two colors (black on blue), a multicolor chart is easier to draw (fewer errors) and later is easier to knit from. A few bright white blobs indicate where I colored the wrong square anyway and had to touch up with error-correction fluid.

Because I only need to make one size, I could fudge the edges to suit myself. Below are the back and the front charts bumped up against each other so I could look at how the armholes worked, and when I took this I'd started to sketch in the edges on the front (left piece). These are working drawings; I didn't redraw when I repositioned the band motif—the green—in relation to the armhole decreases on the body, so there's one row of chart sketched in below the squares on the chart for the front (on the left). I didn't bother redrawing the band on the chart for the back (on the right). I'd already figured out how the horizontal repeats would work and that was all I needed to know there. Sometimes I am more compulsive about redrawing the whole chart, but I was impatient on this one.

As I mentioned, I didn't focus on how the patterns would meet across the shoulders, and I still haven't worked that out. Here's the situation I'll be dealing with, though. The patterns don't align from front to back. There are the same number of stitches in each shoulder; it just looks like the front has more stitches in this photo because I didn't tape the charts together. I'm going to find it an interesting challenge to figure out how to bridge the pattern across the shoulders. But not yet!

I also haven't decided whether the front neckline will be V or crew. I don't have to make that decision now, either.

Here's how I resolved my patterns at the edges. To make it easier to see what's going on in the photo of the charts (a funky way to convey the information, but it's what I've got right now), I outlined a few critical edges in green and joined the shoulders accurately with removable tape.

• 1a and 1b Front armhole edges and front cardigan edges. I added some color patterning here to keep from having long floats leading up to the edges, since the full motifs didn't fit and I didn't want to just put in partial motifs that would look like fragments. I don't mind partials, but they need to look like they make sense.
• 2 The back armhole edge could accommodate a swoop of one of the motifs in a way I could live with. I charted off the edge so I could be sure I was getting the squares laid in accurately.
• 3 Unlike on the original, I'm going to do a little shaping on the back neckline. Between the 3 and the 1b, I'm going to do something about a front neckline!
• 4 Here's the shoulder area that I'm going to need to resolve in a way that blends the fronts and the back. I have some ideas. One involves drawing a swoop (like the motif that's drawn in pink, only customized to the space) that bridges the two pieces of knitting, which will be joined with a three-needle bind-off. Another involves taking a different motif from the second sweater and playing with it. I've put myself into a situation where I need to solve this problem because I decided to center the motifs on the back upper body and the front upper body pieces.

Once I had filled in the side edges on the front and back, though, I could start knitting again. Often I work out only enough of the design questions to pick up the needles again and go. The bright pink sticky flags show my current location in the work.  I'm knitting circularly, so there are stickies on both front and back. No, I don't knit with the charts like this! They're just temporarily joined for designing (and explaining) purposes.

I've got maybe a dozen rows to go before the V-neck decision. I could start a V now if I wanted a deep one.

At first, I wasn't sure there was enough contrast between the blue and the black to warrant all the color work I was doing. I kept peering at the blue-and-black on the sleeve cuffs—there was just a touch of that color mix there—and it looked fine. You can't judge these things until you've got a chunk of the patterning worked. I think the contrast is going to be okay.

Next post about this sweater: a few tech points about the knitting itself.

Can we just skip January?

Ah, January. In addition to the snow (see previous entries' photos; not much has changed), a normal January crams in book distributors' catalog deadlines, freelance work to make up income for time taken off in December, sales tax filing dates, use tax filing dates, 1099 preparation and sending-out, and more (it used to also involve filing financial aid applications, which required doing a whole tax return in not much more than an instant, but that's over . . . it should be easier now, right?).

I've also met with the illustrator about the fall Nomad title, shoveled snow, taken the cat to the vet frequently (she's nineteen and doing fine today, but requiring more attention than usual), shoveled snow, e-mailed back and forth with the cover designer (yes, an extension over the weekend would work), (snow), completely reorganized a book that will be released this fall by Free Spirit Publishing, (snow), and started writing the introductions to the subsections for that book, which need to happen because of the reorganization.

I forget what else.

I'm transitioning from one type of software for financial management of the publishing company to another. I've been engaged with this for all of 2006, so I've been entering everything in both programs all year. I think I'm almost done, although the numbers in the new program still show some anomalies, so I can't just cut loose yet and go with it.

As soon as I get that straightened out, I am going to start working with a different piece of software for managing the publishing-specific aspects of the business, including inventory, invoicing, and royalty calculations (yes, it's also time to calculate and pay six-month royalty statements, and I need to call one account that has two overdue invoices and remind them to pay . . . these folks always do pay, but they often need to be reminded). I'll need to run both programs side-by-side until I'm convinced that the new one is giving me good, accurate data—the plan is that it will give me even better data than the existing program, of course.

A good thing: yesterday I requested quotes from the printer for the fourth print run of Arctic Lace. Author Donna Druchunas' signing at The National Needlework Association's January trade show went really well, and our distributors were already low-stock on the title.

Nonetheless, I have been thinking it would be kind of nice to skip January, as long as I could arrive on the threshhold of February with all the deadlines met and official forms filed and catch-up work done.

Ahhhhh.

Okay. That was a nice idea.

Back to work.

At least there's no fresh snow this morning that needs to be shoveled.

P.S. I have been making progress on the Norsk Strikkedesign-inspired sweater. I'm into the upper body, which has black patterning on a relatively dark blue background. For a number of rows, I wondered if there was enough contrast for the pattern to show up at all. I know better than to make judgments about these things until I've got several inches worked, and indeed the pattern's starting to become evident.

I haven't decided yet what kind of front opening and neckline the sweater will have. I'll need to make up my mind in a few inches, when I will need to start the V-neckline shaping if that's what I decide on. I'm knitting a row or two or three a day, so I may have as much as a week before I reach that point. Deadlines permitting, I do have a number of planning and progress photos of the sweater project to get posted here.

Perseverance furthers, as usual

The phrase "perseverance furthers" recurs frequently in the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes. I use this as a mantra and have for years. Not intentionally. It just comes to my mind on a regular basis. It's a helpful reminder for projects that take a long time, a description that seems to characterize many of the things I decide I want to do.

Speaking of things that take a long time, we still have snow.

The photo was taken last Friday, but not much melting has occurred since then and more cold (with snow) is predicted for the weekend. I have shoved the snow in that photo off the car and dug our means of transport out again, of course.

There's a nifty thing about this snow. Although it took a long time to excavate a parking spot from the drifts, and I can only leave the house in one direction because the spot for the car is surrounded on three sides by piles of snow so it's kind of like parking in a big chute and the driveable portion of the street is only two tire-ruts wide, I also feel like my car's really safe within its private, handmade, custom-sized space.

This afternoon when we walked the dogs, the day felt almost balmy. Very slick underfoot, though, even more than it has been, and the piles of white-with-gray stuff have not diminished.

In this snow-surrounded state, I find myself counting progress in small increments that add up, by teaspoonfuls (or shovel loads), to major accomplishments.

While visiting with relatives over the holidays, I knitted a bunch of swatches that will show what the color patterns will look like in Ethnic Knitting: Discovery, the book I am working on that will be published next fall. Here they are, pinned out on the blocking board. What a lovely feeling to have them turn from curled up little pseudo-washrags into nice, clear samples!

Here's another major accomplishment for this week. I've worked on the book for enough months, one bit at a time, that it is now, temporarily, off my desk. It's even out of my office. I've turned this:

Into this:

and shipped it off to a copyeditor I trust. Copyediting is one of the skills that I learned years ago, but I send books that I'm publishing to be copyedited by sharp eyes that have not already seen these pages so many times that everything begins to blur.

Meanwhile, I am turning my own copyeditorial attention to three freelance copyediting jobs.

It's weird, but it works. Sometimes it's best to ask someone else to do a job you're quite good at yourself.

I also have a meeting next week with this book's illustrator. We've been poking at the illustrations since last summer—talking about them, planning them, formulating ideas, making sketches—but it doesn't make sense to prepare final illustrations until most of the editing has been done. Otherwise there's too much risk that something will get drawn wrong, or that we'll end up having to do a lot of back-and-forth because we discover we need two steps in a sequence rather than one, or four instead of three, or any of an infinite number of possibilities that make the job of getting the right pictures in the right places harder than it has to be.

In the days of pasting up books by hand, I would occasionally have to modify a drawing with an Xacto knife while we were getting ready to send the pages (called "boards") to the printer. In these days of electronic images, I have moved a cable on a drawing of a sweater with cut-and-paste, and I've erased pixels and redrawn other bits to fix errors in illustrations. Sometimes I've even made up whole sequences of pictures out of bits of other images. It's so much better to have the drawing done correctly in the first place, if that's humanly possible.

Wow, am I ready to have illustrations for this book! It's so much fun to get the visuals into the layout file!

And also a cover! The cover designer will be showing us ideas soon. That's a magic time in the preparation of a book.

I'm also glad to have this particular book leave my office—in a nice neat package—for a few weeks! The transformation for this particular title appears far less drastic than most, because the author sent me well-organized materials and there aren't a lot of other components that need to be tamed. (Arctic Lace, by contrast, contained lots of items of many different types and the photograph of its raw materials would have been . . . well, not just one photograph.)

By the end of next week, we need to provide our distributor with a whole package of information about this book that doesn't really exist yet. We have to tell them how many pages it will have, what it will cost, what size it will be, and how many copies will be in a carton. Talk about guesswork. . . . We also have to write the catalog copy.

A few weeks later, we need to provide the real cover image (which I haven't seen even first thoughts for yet). And not many weeks after that, we need to have sample pages, with illustrations in place, to begin the marketing.

Lots is happening around here, one tiny task at a time. No one day feels particularly productive, but we travel miles by inching along.

Meanwhile, I have begun to knit again on the Norsk Strikkedesign–inspired sweater. It didn't travel with me over the holidays because it's become too large a project and because the swatches needed to be knitted. But every morning I knit two rounds on the body before I get out of bed. That's not a lot of progress, but it's so much better than none.

I have photos of the next phase of that sweater and will talk about it here soon (as far as I can predict right now!).

Our wonderful vet, Dr. Julie Gamble, brought our nineteen-year-old cat back from the brink of beyond yesterday. We're grateful.

Incremental actions. Perseverance furthers.

The cat looked kind of like a curled-up old washrag, the result of an imbalance in the several old-cat conditions that we generally keep under reasonable control. She'd gotten dehydrated. She's had two treatments with subcutaneous fluids—a batch yesterday, and another today—and now feels like eating again (so she is also ingesting her meds). This morning she stalked over while I was doing yoga and head-butted me to demand a pat.

Incremental actions. Perseverance furthers.

More soon.

One thing at a time.