New discoveries, new solutions

 It's good to be knitting again, feels like a long time.  And here are some discoveries I've made in the last day or two:

My spinning has improved quite a bit, which means my singles are finer and more consistent, which means my plied yarn is less chunky and random.  Which means I'll have a range of quality in the finished product. Which is okay, but will be interesting.  Possibly I'll be the only person to notice, as often happens.

Anyway, I mentioned that I will be using diagonally knitted rectangles, and I thought since this yarn is chunky and knits up fast, that I'd better get cracking and do some measuring and thinking before I get much further on.  So I picked a jacket I like for size, and measured the various bits I need to know about. And made a very small diagram of what I think I'm doing.

That 5.5" on the sleeve tells me the size, which will be multiplied by two, for the sleeve opening, when I stitch back and front together. And the measurement across the neck reminds me how to set fronts onto back when I assemble the pieces. You'll notice that the back is two inches shorter than the front.  It's good design, the original jacket maker, not me, allowing for the rounder shape at the front than down the back.  Often missing, I've found, in Asian dress patterns, where busts are not quite as much of a feature on the body as western ones.  At least that's my guess.  I've noticed some wonderful Japanese designer patterns with not a single dart anywhere.  Made for a different figure than western ones, where darts are what makes the garment hang well.  I had a western friend who was straight up and down, no waist, tiny bust, tall, and she was given Japanese designer clothes by a designer friend, just because she could wear them so wonderfully.  And she did.  Total elegance. Not a dart in sight. But people with more shapely bods use different design approaches.

Back to the jacket.  Right now I'm working on the rectangle for the back.  And I've found another interesting item: my long needles won't accommodate enough stitches to do the back in one piece.  I don't have any circulars this size, even if I didn't hate circulars with the hatred of a thousand burning suns, not that I have any strong opinions on them, really.

Sooooo, I will do what people did in the past when they only had access to narrow looms and small tools.  I'll make the back in two pieces with a decorative seam up the middle. Is what I'll do. As you see, the needles just about hold half the stitches the back needs in total.  The thing about chunky yarn like this is that it doesn't squash up the way fine yarn does.  So you can get fewer total stitches onto the needle.

Here you see (disregard the sticking out bits, they'll be finished neatly at a later date) the rectangle starting to take shape.  It's mind bending thing, trying to figure out how to knit a diagonal rectangle.  Knitting a diagonally square diagonally is a piece of cake, just increase every row till the sides are the required size, then decrease on every row back to a point. And you have a square.   A potholder.  A dishcloth. A facecloth. The side of a purse.  Pockets for my jacket, even..

Rectangles, however, don't work like this. So I studied Sarah Swett and various YouTube videos on the subject, not all of them helpful, and it seems as if I'm getting this sorted pretty well.

The jacket will be kind of broad tweedy stripes in every color you can think of.  And what I'm doing, since I already designed the plies in colors that work together, is just to randomly plunge in my hand to the bag o' yarn and work with whatever emerges. All the way to the end of the ball of yarn. What looks like a blue stripe above is a nice blue and grey mix, very restful after the black and yellow that happened before. But it will be a kind of lucky dip affair.

When I come to knit the fronts, if I knit them and don't weave them, not positive on this yet, I will abandon the diagonal when I get to the neck shaping, and just knit straight, decreasing as I go to fit the shoulder area. I'm really telling myself all this, so I won't forget what I said!  Good teacher, not such an attentive student at times. 

The knitted fabric already feels very cosy in my hand, so this will be a nice winter jacket, I think.  

As you see, informality reigns in the knitting projects chez Boud.

In other words, leap and the net will appear!