another knitting blog

Playing Checkers

Still working on that pesky intarsia sweater. I picked it up last night and remembered that I hadn't gotten around to weaving in all the ends from the yarn changes. Maybe tonight once I get started doing that I'll just keep going and begin sewing on a sleeve. Yeah, right.

The sweater is a design from Shelridge Farm called 'Checkers'. [If that link doesn't get you right to a picture of the sweater, look here]. The idea for this sweater grew out of a swatch Buffy Taylor, one of the owners, was knitting to show all the colors of the fingering weight wool they sell?37 in all. Her daughter liked the way it looked and urged her to turn it into a sweater.

I bought the yarn as a kit at Stitches East 2001; I saw the sweater from across the room and was drawn to it. It has a geometric, retro look I like, but right now I have a love/hate relationship with it. On a good day I think it looks pretty funky, on a bad day I think that it looks like it smells pretty funky.

Here's what one of the four-way intersections looks like from the back before I weave in the ends.

One color was woven in along with the purl bumps when I joined the new color, I just snip that off. The other is looped through and later woven down along the color boundary below.

Here's the public side.

Expectations

I'm still working on cables and lace, but I have to get back to finishing my intarsia sweater. I'm so close. I actually don't mind finishing, so why don't I just do it? I think it has more to do with my hopes for the finished product than a dislike for the fiddlely work. If I finish the sweater, then I have to face whether it matches my internal picture of what I thought the sweater would be. [Can we say perfectionist?] While I don't want to get obsessive over each stitch, I also don't want to just say, 'what the hell', and slap it together without thought. I put a lot of my disposable income into my knitting and a lot of my free time that I could be spending doing other things for myself, like exercising or cleaning the house. [Things I should be doing anyway, but that's another story]. I want to make that investment be worth it, and at this point my, criterion for 'worth it' is knitting something that I can wear to work in a semi-professional setting.

So, at some point this weekend, I'd like to pick up the separate pieces of this sweater and make something that I can wear to work on Monday morning. But right now I think I'll go and work on 'cables & lace' some more.

First Post

OK, my first real post about knitting. This is the sleeve of the sweater I was supposed to have finished for Christmas. So close, but it's not going to happen. Still too much to do, including finishing cleaning the house before I go. Oh joy.

Perhaps this is why some people don't like intarsia: it can be a mess. Oddly enough, this doesn't bother me. I will knit a few rows until the tangle becomes unbearable, and then on the next row I will untangle each color as I come to it. On one level it can be very satisfying to remove all the tangles. Sometimes I will cut the yarn into smaller lengths and make little yarn butterflies but these blocks are really too big to bother with that; leaving the balls attached actually aids with untangling.

Because this is a pattern of blocks (more on that later), all the colors change on the same row. Then things really get ridiculous.