Done stripin'

I finished the main part of the stripy Mably. I actually finished and photographed it a couple of weeks ago. I have been putting off doing the finishing because it involves lots of picking up stitches, knitting a few rows, casting off and sewing down. I like picking up stitches, but the thought of the rest of it bores me: it seems such a pedestrian way of tackling it. I think Brandon Mably isn't interested in all the things you can do with knitting, that he just sees it as a way of producing swathes of coloured fabric. There's very little shaping or styling in his patterns, and seldom much attempt to fit different sizes. (I still want to knit Shark though. And quite a few others. His colour sense more than makes up for any shortcomings I may be imagining.)

I mentioned this to my knitting-genius friend, and she said, why don't you do i-cord round the edges? Brilliant. First of all, I'm going to get it on the ironing boars and give it some steam: once I've done that I'll sew up the sides and see what it looks like on, and then I'll commence the i-cordathon. I'll need to find a fairly absorbing series of dvds for that, I think, but not with subtitles. Oh, and I did get bored with the stripes in the end. Note to self: next time you want to do a cuff-to-cuff cardi, choose a yarn that requires at least 5mm needles.

I've finished Scarf, page 80. It took me three goes to do the second end, which is executed as a border, because I was too stubborn / idle to look up how it should be done, which serves me right. But it needs to be blocked and I can't find a flat surface right now, so it will have to wait a little.

Back to the stripy Mably

I kept on knitting and knitting, and here you can see that I'm nearly at the other sleeve - only one more stripe. Except that I made another silly mistake when I was knitting on automatic, and the neckline doesn't match. I can solve it by folding in an extra stripe on the left front, so that's two stripes to go.

It looks rather huge, doesn't it? I've tried it on as much as I can, and I like the way it looks, so that's OK. It doesn't look so vast when there's an arm in the sleeve and it's wrapped around a person. The dark navy stripe, which I was worried about, falls at the centre front and it looks very good, so I don't need to worry about that any more. I hope the finishing around the neck is going to pull it together a bit.

I was telling a knitting friend about this jacket and she looked at the photograph and said, 'Isn't it a bit boring?' I felt rather defensive, not about myself and my dullness in being prepared to knit such a thing, but defensive on behalf of the jacket. Daft, eh? All I can say in my and the jacket's defence, is that I couldn't and wouldn't knit it without the stripes: I would find it far to dull to knit it all in one colour, but I still find pleasure in watching the colours change.

Distressed

I mentioned in my first post that I was knitting i-cord to go around the neck of a sweater that I hadn't got right. I anticipated then that I would rapidly tire of this arrangement and unravel the neck so that I could do it again. Well, I did and it's a bit better, but I think I'm going to have a third go at it soon.

It's in Rowan's All Seasons Cotton, in a discontinued shade called Glad which looks like denim which has been faded and bleached. They've discontinued all of these printed shades which I think is a great pity as it's a look which really suits the yarn. On the other hand, it means that I can buy them up at reduced prices, so it's not all bad.

I continued the distressed appearance of the yarn by carefully knitting rips into the pattern, well, apparent rips. I borrowed the idea from Raspy in Rowan's Denim People book, although I did them a different way. In Raspy, you make a stitch and then drop it some rows later: I found this didn't look quite right in this yarn (Raspy is designed for Rowan Denim yarn, the one which shrinks on purpose), but I just knitted a column of one stitch in purl. It now occurs to me that I could have done wider rips, but I didn't think of that while I was knitting it. I knitted it in the round up to the sleeves, and I found it a very easy and fast knit. Knitting with 100% cotton makes my hands sore, but this has just the right amount of stretch and is very soft.

I think the rips look deliberate and that my witty idea has succeeded, but on the other hand maybe I just look like a crazy old woman in a ripped sweater: after all, who would tell me? But at least I look like a happy crazy old woman, because I love wearing it. It's very comfortable and provides a kiss of warmth but not a suffocating embrace. After washing and wearing, it has grown a little widthways, I think, but not lengthwise as a 100% cotton would. You might want to bear that in mind if you're subbing ASC for another cotton.

I used the pattern for Navigator in Rowan mag number 29, which is sort of unisex but has different neck treatments for men and women. The hems and cuffs are left to roll up, which is a look I really like, and I made little slits at the sides to give it a bit more ease. Since the women's sizes don't come up to my size but I didn't want the men's neck, I changed the neckline and that's why I keep having to re-knit it. The bizarre thing is that I don't mind.