A Little Knitting

I am still plugging away on the shaped Entrelac project.  I'm not going very fast.  It's holiday season, and there's a lot of other activity.

While I would love to stop experimenting and chart all the sweaters already, I'll know when the technique is good enough.  I want knitters working from my patterns to feel that the sweaters are superb, and well worth the work.  I don't want them to turn into dreaded UFOs (unfinished objects).   

These are somewhat time-consuming by machine knitting standards; each trip around the yoke with a new color takes me about 30 minutes.  Of course, I still think it's addictive to work on and see how the Entrelac forms with each round.  I sit there, happily listening to my Kindle, as I make the blocks.  They don't require tedious concentration; I can listen to a cute story and knock 'em out.

This is an adult-sized yoke, and the new transition technique has enough stitches around the bottom to allow me to pick up stitches and knit the sleeves and body upside-down.

Changing the knitting sequence to rehanging stitches and making the body later is a real improvement, in my opinion.  I have been making fair isle round yoke MK sweaters for years using the Joyce Schneider method of rehanging, and I like it.  The yoke job takes the most time, and you can even have some yokes done for future use (the yoke size doesn't change much between sizes).  Secondly, if the person is a difficult fit, you could put the body on, baste, and try it on.  As long as you leave the waste yarn on, a second try is possible. 

I have also changed the yoke slightly, modifying the bottom triangles to get a shorter, more typical Entrelac angle to the top of the triangle (but keep my transition to accommodate the much narrow gauge of the stockinette in the rest of the sweater).  Here's a picture where I've held the waste yarn down and put my camera into macro mode so you can see the improved shape of those triangles.

Thisyarn (Vanna's Choice) is still an inexpensive, readily available one, but it has a lot more spring and bounce than the Caron, and it like the way it makes the Entrelac texture stand out.  These bulky gauge ones are thick and warm anyway, so why not have as much dimension as possible?  I chose this soft rose/ivory/mouse brown color scheme for a lady's sweater.  The soft rose is a gentle surprise to keep the sweater from being boring, and the rest of this sweater is going to be the dark brown. 

The neckband pulls in a tremendous amount.  Again, it's that transition from wide Entrelac to very narrow ribbing.  I tried a looser neck ribbing tension on this one, and it goes over the head okay, but I will do a slightly bigger neck for the pattern books.