I actually have been knitting and spinning, believe it or not, but I have more consulting work right now than usual (which is good for me, but not so good for the blog), and I just want to knit in the evenings, not write about it.
Just in time for spring, I'm knitting up the dark brown wool and mohair I spun last fall into a cozy, long-sleeved sweater (it's going to have extra long sleeves with thumb holes and a shawl collar... so springy!). The sweater itself will be simple enough, but it turns out that I'm going to steek the neck opening. (This is slightly interesting because it will be the first time I've steeked anything.)
While I understand steeking in theory, I haven't ever done it because I don't tend to knit or wear colorwork, I don't mind purling, and I occasionally change my mind entirely about a sweater, rip it out, and knit a different sweater from the same yarn--and you'd REALLY need to love your yarn to do that after you'd cut it in pieces by steeking. However, in this case I'd knit myself into a problem, and steeking seemed like the best way out.
I'm knitting the sweater in the round, with a simple, all-over 2-row pattern--row 1: knit all stitches; row 2: knit 2, purl 1. When I was ready to divide for the neck opening and start knitting flat, I realized that the beginning of the round (in terms of the pattern) would fall in the middle of the row if I started knitting flat (with the result that within each row some of my stitches would be on row 1 while the rest were on row 2)--and I thought keeping track of that would be a pain.
Instead, I bound off the neck stitches, cast on 6 new stitches over the opening (the ones I'll cut when it's time to steek), and kept knitting in the round. Easy, at least for now.
Now I just need to not change my mind!
No comments:
Post a Comment