Talking about Taikatalvi

I'm working on another design.

I've named it Kaikatalvi, "Magical Winter" and it's a top down funnel neck contiguous tunic knitted in the round, and I'm very, very excited about this project. I bought 20 balls of Elann Peruvian Highland Wool, which is about my favorite yarn for designing it seems. I have no idea how many of those 20 balls this project will take.

I don't try to design with current fashion in mind. I design to please my inner fantasies about clothes, and this design touches on so many different dreams, and for so long. I have to design because I rarely find things in the store that match my mind's eye. This is filling the need for a sweater dress that I can wear with knitted tights and boots (or ice skates) so I can stay warm in a hard winter beautifully. It needs to have ease so I can layer beneath it, and it needs to have flare so I can move in it (in winter I continue to walk for transportation, as well as ride my bicycle and ice skate outdoors. maybe one winter I'll add cross country skiing or snowshoeing.)

The visual interest is the cable running down the center front. No one is surprised, as cabling is probably my favorite knitting fabric texture. The cable makes me think of ornamental braidwork on coats and scrolling flourishes of script calligraphy and wrought iron - if I wanted to push the art nouveau feel I would do the cable in black - and I'm mighty tempted to do a swatch just to see what it would be like.

I'm not very good at writing my designs out. I'm much more prone to swatching it out. I'm actually working on a mockup in leftover yarn balls, just going on the fly to see how my guesses work out, and then I plan on binding the edge, washing it, and blocking it to see how the needle size works with the yarn and the technique, and get a nice accurate gauge.

I'm also going to do a shoulder sloper, to work out any of the faults I find in the first sketch. The problem is that I don't generally do this stuff on paper. I just knit. I don't write stuff down. I need to find a way to record what I'm doing, because what is natural and unthinking to me has been examined by other knitters as extremely difficult and complex, and when I try to explain what I did, I lose people in the bushes.

But I'd really like to have a detailed series as I go through this design, to help me articulate what I'm doing, so maybe I could write a pattern that someone else could follow. Maybe not for this pattern - I still feel like I'm learning my craft when it comes to designs like this, but in the future.

High learning curve, little time

One of my other interests is cycling, and luckily my city has a pretty good social bike scene. we've started a semi-annual event called the Tweed Ride. This isn't original to us here in Calgary by any means.

I didn't go to the spring Tweed Ride because... well I didn't have any tweed. I did want to change that in time for Fall Tweed, which is the last Friday of the month. And I still didn't have any tweed!

Well, I've changed that a bit. I now have a nice tweed blazer, and it's something that i will wear all the time, rather than relegate it to costume status. I also picked up a pair of tweed pants that I'm going to cut to calf length to wear as cycling knickers. I already have a couple pairs of knee high cuffed socks that would work well.

And i'm knitting a waistcoat of my own design.

i swatched for it eight times before I settled on the cable pattern I wanted. I took my measurements and drew a quick schematic and I just started knitting it today.

I have...twelve days to complete the knitting, so time for blocking, and putting on the buttons and such.

I haven't found the blouse I'm going to wear under it. I might just wear my merino base layer and call it good. But the designing was an interesting experience. I'll keep track of it.

The freestyle top-down femme tee

I wrote plenty on this piece in my project notes, but a bit of a retrospective might not hurt.

This was my first project in a fibre that wasn't animal based since I started to knit seriously. I love the yarn. I adore the yarn. I praise this yarn to the skies. It's so very soft - something that turned me off cotton was the rough feel of cotton.

To knit it at first, my right hand got sore. But I set it down and worked with sproingier wool when I knew I had to stop knitting but didn't want to stop knitting. I think I will always have a sproingy project going at the same time as knitting something with cotton or...*gulp* linen.

I started this from the top down, in the round. It is one piece. I did not break the yarn anywhere on this project.

I used stitch markers to keep track of where my shaping was at. I kept four markers on this project, though their positions changed.

The noticeable bust shaping on this piece, it is joyfully deliberate. It's done specifically to draw the eye. It's my adaptation of a popular in the late 50's and early 60's bust darting, where the seam was definitely part of the point. the darts are in a V shape, meant to give the visual effect of more bustiness and to play on the fact that my overbust measurement doesn't have as much difference to the full bust measurement as my midriff to full bust measure does. And the visual effect works. *evil cackle*

The waist to hip increases are *not* where one would expect. instead of being at the center side, the shaping goes over the hipbones. The other good place would be at the back, where skirt darts would accommodate the buttocks. since I was looking to create a visual hourglass, I went with the increases at the hipbones, to emphasize the flaring from waist to hip. the curving is something I would really exploit in a ribbed/cabled style, and that's something I may do in a future design.