A Bluestocking Knits

I really did mean to do every project in this book.  It seems a bit of a swiz to say that I’m going to work my way through the Knitter’s Almanac, and then skip a project early on — although Elizabeth herself would probably tell me, gently but firmly, not to be an idiot and knit something that I have no use for!  But it’s March, and the project for this month is a sweater, and instead of Bleak Midwinter or anything even remotely along those lines, here where I live it is sunny and 70° F/21° C — or at the least 60°/15° — as it has been since before Christmas.

Sigh.

I Googled the "Chainmail Sweater," to see if I could find any inspiration, and at Knitty.com was "Knitting for Maniacs" by Julie Theaker, an heir to Elizabeth’s philosophies if I ever saw one.  She includes in her article a photo of her Chainmail Sweater, Elizabeth’s other name for this month’s Almanac project, and it’s incredible.  I’m very impressed — the photos in the Almanac are rather sedate, really, and Julie’s is an eye-popping mix of blue lines against a shifting background of pinks, reds, and oranges.  She also steeked it into a cardigan.  While I don’t think I would ever be bold enough to choose this color scheme, it’s certainly a fabulous piece of work.

But, no, this one still doesn’t do much for me.  I was tempted to do another EZ pattern as a compromise, perhaps one of the lovely 3&1 sweaters in Knitting Around (there is one at the lower left on the cover), but that didn’t seem quite right, somehow.  I thought I should just make a swatch, at any rate.  Elizabeth sounded very pleased with herself for coming up with the trellis pattern of this month’s sweater — and rightfully so, as she managed to overcome that rather herky-jerky shift of colors that comes with colored diagonals in knitting, in that a stitch has to (well, usually) go up and over a stitch to make a diagonal.  She decided to use K2togs and SSKs with our old friend from January, the Left Twist, to make a vertical line that actually flows — very clever.  "Shall we make a colored Travelling-Stitch on a differently-colored background?  We shall"!  So I dug around in the stash and came up with four balls of wool that were fairly pleasing together, and of a similar weight, to give it a try, but all of this improvisation was making me nervous, so I drew up a homemade chart and tried out a few schemes with colored pencils before casting on.

The photo in the book, I’ll admit, is not very inspiring, due I suspect mostly to its being black-and-white.  Funny, how spoiled we’ve gotten with color photos in knitting books!  The pattern is more interesting in color, even as it comes off of one’s needles.

It is also good practice for that Bohus pullover I keep dreaming of, using the Bohus technique of purling on the first row of a new color.  It makes a kind of optical illusion with the colors, pulling a little dash of color from the previous row into the different color of the new one.

(Elizabeth also mentions keeping a record of one’s knitting projects, something I’ve been pondering for a while, but am a bit indecisive about the format.  Does anyone keep a knitting journal that they would be willing to show-and-tell?  Leave a comment here –)

But what will this swatch turn out to be?  Ah —