Christmas was great this year.   Lots of fun presents for the kids who overloaded right about as we were done opening presents; and quite a few toys for us parents as well.  Mike received his secret socks.  He hasn’t worn them yet, because I stole them to put in the wash.  The yarn softened up quite nicely and I think they will wear really well.

The only other thing I was knitting as a holiday gift was The Nanny Sweater.  She is aware that it wouldn’t be ready in time for Christmas, so it was no-stress knitting for me. I have the pattern memorized, and because it’s knit in pieces it is small enough to use it as my take along project! (at least so far).  We’ve determined the proper length for the back will be 25 inches.  The instructions basically say "knit in pattern until you reach 28 inches in length".  No shaping, no fuss, no muss. There is a bit of shoulder shaping, but that’s in the last two or three rows. I’ll be pulling out my short row shaping instructions so I can do a three needle bind off on the shoulders.

So for now, I’m just over 15" along, more than halfway done with the back:

Wait, what’s that in the background behind The Nanny Sweater? Why it’s my brand new blocking board!!! (aka a SpaceBoard)

I was the dutiful wife this year – I emailed my husband several suggestions for cool stuff to get me.  This was one of them. It was one of the largest boxes under the tree.  It folds in half for easy storage and has handles on it so you can carry it.  It’s a padded surface so you can pin into it when blocking things out.

After I opened it and thanked Mike, telling him I was really looking forward to using it.  He looks at me and says, "I’m so glad you like it! What IS it?". 

Apparently he didn’t know what he had ordered.  Too funny!

He was definately the dutiful husband in ordering this thing (which wasn’t really on the inexpensive side) that his wife said she wanted.  (I will have to contemplate this awesome power I have been given for future gift suggestions. *grin*) 

I am looking forward to getting all the pieces of TNS done so I can block out the sleeves and front pieces the same size using the measurements on the board.

The other cool thing he supposedly ordered me?  All the back issues of INKnitters.  Unfortunately, It hasn’t arrived yet.  Lucikly my awesome friend Joann loaned me all of her back issues so I’m reading through them that way. There are definately some great technical articles in them that will be worth keeping.   To that end we had to go to my favorite store in the world, Organized Living, and buy some magazine storage box thingys.

I’m making good progress on The Nanny Sweater.  Not much in the past few days, because I’m trying to finish Mike’s secret socks for Christmas.  I don’t have much farther – just a half of a foot and the toe.  The second sock has gone much faster because I can use the first one to compare it to for size.

So back to TNS.  Here’s the back, in outdoor early morning light, with no flash:

The color shows much more light purple in this picture than it really is.  But the flash kept washing it out and making it look darker. See?

This shows a closeup of the moss stitch (or seed stitch depending on who you ask on which day) and the cable.

As I knit my swatch and started the back, I was concerned that my moss stitch was coming out uneven.  When held up to the light you can see some slight holey areas, where in other places there are none.  Looking at the picture you don’t really see it; and when held up against a person, like you would wear it you can’t really see it either.  However, perfectionist that I am – I wanted to see if I could make it slightly better.  Thanks to some great suggestions from Mandella I tried a few things.

First: tugging on the yarn after each stitch either away or towards me depending on if the last stitch was a purl or knit.  This seemed to tighten the ‘holes’ up a tiny bit; but it was much much slower. 

The other technique was instead of putting my yarn over the top of the needle for a purl stitch, I put it under.  Theory with this would be that there is less yarn to wiggle around between the two stitches, and therefore – less holes.  The problem with this was it wasn’t necessarily slow on by doing the purls this way, but it flipped the front and back loop of those stitches on the next round so that I had to really look at my work to see which ones needed to be knit/purled through the back loop to get the stitches back to right.  Again, it might have helped a little bit, but was still very slow.

Frustrated with the whole process, I set aside TNS’s back for a bit, and cast on with some smooth yarn. (Debbie Bliss Wool/Cotton with 3.25mm needles). I knit up the same number of stitches as in my swatch for TNS.  After less than an inch I could tell my moss stitch looked just fine with the smooth yarn:

So it’s not me, it’s the yarn!!!!  I took all tiny swatch, my big TNS swatch and the back of TNS to my knitting group this past weekend to get some other opinions.  Thankfully, everyone agreed with me that yes, it was the yarn causing the inconsistencies in the moss stitch.

This yorkshire Tweed DK is beautiful stuff, but not easy to knit with.  It’s harder to get even stitches even in the stockinette portion because it catches on itself with the little nubblies and as I’ve babbled on endlessly so far the moss stitch portion is frustrating me as well.  From now on, I’m not going to even attempt to make it perfect, I’m just going to knit it normally without any additional stress; and hope that the moss stitch evens out a little bit more as I go on. For now it looks just fine, and  I’m excited to be making progress.  I’ve got the pattern memorized, which I suppose is good; I didn’t even have to refer to it to make the smooth yarn swatch! :)

The nanny sweater progresses. Here’s the back, which so far is 4" of ribbing and 1/3" of "pattern":

I did do a swatch. I forgot to take pictures of it. Well, I did take pictures but they were so horrible they had to be deleted instantly before they burned my eyes out.

My swatch was approx 6" wide (two repeats of 19 stitches each, plus the 7 stitches of moss/seed stitch to close out the other side), and about 5 inches long. I tried two needle sizes.  Started with 4mm; which is what is called for the in pattern.  I am substituting a different yarn than the pattern calls for, but it’s the same gauge and by the same manufacturer, so I figured I could start with the called for needles.

After 1.5 inches of swatching, I thought my moss stitch (which is really just *k1p1* repeated, then knit the purls, purl the knits, AKA seed stitch in other worlds) looked a bit loose. Laying flat it seemed ok, but when held up to the light there were areas the had some holes.  (Gee, a picture here would be really nice. yeah, right).

So I used my leftover koigu from the cross stitch scarf and knit two rows as a divider, then switched to 3.25mm needles.   It definately drew in a bit more, because you can see it wasn’t as wide. To me the purl bumps on the moss stitch looked not quite as wide, but it still had the same problem with the "holes" occasionally.

A good friend (hi, Judy!) suggested I wash it, as the yarn might bloom out after washing. Well, it did, and it didn’t.  The swatch filled in more, but the holes are still there.  Hmph.  It also stretched slightly horizontally – making gauge go from approx 6.3 st/inch in pattern to 5.6ish st/inch in pattern. This was probably the effect of blocking the cable portions of the swatch.

The fabric on both was fine, although less thick than I expected.  I waffled for about an hour before casting on for the back.  I couldn’t decide if the holesin the moss stitch were something I was doing, or a product of the yarn. I’ve since decided it’s both!

Yarn Consistency?

The yarn has a very handspun feel to it.  (For those who don’t remember, it’s Rowan’s Yorkshire Tweed DK).  It isn’t tightly spun; and has definate thin spots and thick spots, usually where a slub of color is added.  I think the holes in my moss stitch areas are where the thin spots of yarn are, and something wierd is happening because I knit continental.

When I knit ribbing, the first purl stitch to the left of the knit stitches is always wider than the rest.  Only a really picky person would see it (me!), but I haven’t found a way to correct it yet.  Since moss stitch is knit purl knit purl and so on, it must be something happening when I switch from knit to purl.  Again, I have no idea what to do about it, and as long as I don’t mention it to the recipient of the sweater, I don’t think she’ll ever say anything :)

I will be taking the sweater, such as it is to my knitting group this saturday and asking for some collective wisdom on it.  For now, here’s a detail shot to show you I’m not knitting a black sweater.  The center of this picture shows where I’ve crossed the first cable.

I’m going to continue to call this "The Nanny Sweater". The name of the sweater in the book is "Cable and Moss Stitch Jacket and Tunic".  Bleah. I prefer Dale’s bizarre names to that lengthy diatribe of a name even though it really is descriptive.

I might even start saying TNS instead of typing The Nanny Sweater. Consider yourself forewarned.

Here’s what I’m gonna make, and what I’m gonna make it with:

When The Nanny saw the yarn, she said  "I like the color even better in person!".  It’s always a bit worriesome to order yarn off the internet. You’re never quite sure what color you might get.

So, to begin – I copied the pattern out of the book to mangle. I need to make the sweater slightly smaller around. The pattern says the small-medium size is 48" across.  Yowsa. I could wear that!  My nanny is much more petite than I am.  Given that my gauge is usually larger than what pattern calls for, I will assume it would come out even larger than 48" and fit Mike.

Needles?

It calls for 4mm, 3.75mm and 3.25mm needles. Given that it’s knit flat I can be less picky on the length of needle required.   I think I actually have all the needles I need for this project! Don’t quote me on that, I reserve the right to buy more needles on a whim.

To Gauge or Not to Gauge

This is new yarn to me.  I won’t be knitting in the round, so a gauge swatch just might be useful.  Maybe. I’m still undecided.  I will probably do a swatch, just so I can get a feel for the fabric it makes.

Also, there are NO charts. It’s a cable pattern, and NO charts.  That is just sick and wrong.  I really prefer charts.  I’m a very visual person that way.  I spent some time charting the design from the pattern.  I also looked around at some software that might do it for me.  In the end I decided doing it myself inside Excel would be easiest and give me the most control.  I found a really cool knitters’ font here.

I started out typing out the pattern going kpkpkp and so on. Then I reversed right side rows; and swapped knits and purls on wrong side rows.  Into the spreadsheet, use the font, tidy it up, and about 2 hours later, nifty neato chart!  In a way it’s like knitting the pattern without knitting it. For instance, I didn’t realize that the cables weren’t just plain cables. One side of it is in moss stitch. If you closely at the picture you can kind of see this.  It’s very obvious looking at the chart though.  I like obvious :)