A Bluestocking Knits

The Pearl Buck Swing Jacket is a wonderful design — simple and classic.  It comes together easily, and requires only a bit of care when blocking and piecing together to look very elegant.

The Jaeger Extrafine Merino is beautifully soft on my skin.  The elderberry color is lovely, too, full of depth and drama — it looks rather more purple in some lights, but usually tends more towards the burgundy with purply-blue undertones.

(Julia, who is usually so camera-shy that she is pouting in all of her school pictures this year, decided that this time she did want her photo taken, and so she refused to move out of range, and in fact climbed into my lap for quite some time.)

The pleat at the back is the most unusual thing about this jacket, but the half-diamond edging at the front and the back yoke worked from side to side are also subtle but interesting details.

I made a minor adjustment to the length of the sleeves as follows: in the first decrease section (at the lower arm), instead of 11 plain rows between the decrease rows, I worked 13, giving a total of 14 rows for the shaping, worked 5 times altogether.  At the "continue even" section just before the beginning of the cap shaping, I worked 12 rows straight, and the piece measured 11 1/4 in. instead of 10 1/4 in. as given.  This kept the stitch count on the needle the same as in the instructions, but added about an inch to the length.  I could just as easily have worked an extra inch straight at that last section before the start of the cap shaping, but this would have made the bell-shape end lower down, and I wanted to extend it closer to the elbow.  (The bell-ness does not show much after blocking.)  If I’d thought about it ahead of time, I might have added an extra inch to the length of the body, so that the sleeve/body proportions would have been the same as in the original — as it is now, after I lengthened it, the sleeve is just a smidge shorter than the body, and would look a bit better if it was about two inches.  This is a minor quibble, though!

It is also very comfortable, partly from the lovely merino, but also the shaping and fit.  Ten out of ten!

Beth writes, "Another crazy busy week – I’m only just finishing up the second sleeve.  Then on to the real business, I’m going to tackle the back."

As for me, I finished knitting on Thursday night, and started sewing up on Friday!

I actually have not had much experience in putting together a fitted garment — in fact, I’m wondering if this is my first one — have done drop-shoulders before, and the raglan-like sleeves of the top-down style, but nothing like these beautifully rounded ones.  I was a bit apprehensive, and so I got out my old Vogue Knitting reference for reassurance.

I found it much easier to sew in the sleeve cap before sewing up the sleeve and side seams, rather than sewing the sleeve and side seams first as the pattern says.  I speak from experience, having done the first sleeve cap first (the way that VK recommends), and the second cap after the straight seams just now — it was considerably less awkward doing that curved seam with the sleeve flat, so that I could hold the two pieces together more comfortably and smoothly.

While I doubt that sewing up will ever be my favorite part of knitting a garment, I must admit that I am more interested in it than I ever was.  I took a great deal of pleasure in watching the way that the mattress stitches went from loose …

to snug with a single smooth pull on the working yarn.  (It’s almost like the way an invisible zipper pulls the two sides together.)  I did have a lot of trouble with matching the lengths, and frequently ended up with about half an inch more on one side at the end of a seam — on average, I think I did each seam three times — and so I started putting in markers to match up as I went along, usually four on each long seam, so that any extra length would be distributed more evenly.

I also used a safety-pin version of Vogue‘s and Knitty’s marker method of picking up stitches along the curved neckline, dividing the length fairly evenly by 10 (for the 97 stitches — a.k.a. almost-100 — to be picked up).

For those who, like me, are still fairly new to mattress stitch, I found myself dropping into this hypodermic position — oddly enough, it was quite natural, even though I have never actually inserted a hypodermic needle.  It felt much easier on my wrist than holding the needle in the usual manner, since I could aim and scoop up a stitch simply by moving my thumb, instead of my whole wrist.  It wasn’t always possible to do it like this, because of the way that some of the pieces fitted together, but it was helpful, and so I pass it along.

I sewed in the twenty-seven ends — would have been twenty-nine, but I knitted in two of them along with the collar — last night while watching "Jericho" and "Rosemary & Thyme", two, er, rather disparate mystery series, the one grim and hard-boiled and the other a more typical English "cozy" mystery, light-hearted and not terribly demanding. 

Pictures, as they say, to follow!

We have a new face in the knitalong this week, Bec of Glamorouse, who writes, "I’m feeling a bit of a fraud that I’m yet to cast on, but somebody has to be last, right?  My last hurdle is that I’m still waiting on my Bendigo Wool Mills colour card to get yarn (Suse’s recommendation and I trust her completely on this one!) but I have the needles, I have the pattern, and I’m returning to my normal job today after three months of an extra-demanding project so hopefully I now also have the TIME to knit!"

As for me, well, I didn’t think I had the time this week either, since my choir had not one but two performances of Mozart’s Mass in c minor, involving numerous trips both "home" and "away" for rehearsals, and the concerts this weekend.  This was more than a bit of bother, but on the other hand I had Mozart in my head all week, and that can’t be bad. 

Now, I can’t make any particularly educated statements about the Mozart effect one way or the other — but I wouldn’t be surprised if this time it was just the adrenalin —

as I finished both of the sleeves this week, and everything is blocking.

Pass the Chibi!