Knitting in the Shadows: Ethnic Knitting Discovery

I'm thrilled to be part of Donna Druchunas' Ethnic Knitting: Discovery: The Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, and The Andes Blog Tour.

When I first signed on for this event, I was looking at Danish sweaters (since my mother's family is from Denmark, it seemed appropriate). Then, I got to thinking that I might not be able to whip out a whole sweater in time to go through it with you on the blog by my Blog Tour Appearance Date (October 24, as you can now see). So, I thought I'd test drive some traditional Danish patterns with a Seaman's Scarf.

Yes, I know. The Seaman's Scarf appears in the book under the Netherlands.

But this book is about DISCOVERY, not slavish adherence to set designs and patterns. That is why, for example, Donna doesn't give you a full bore pattern for the Seaman's Scarf. Look, there on page 42, she shows an idea, but when you look to the instructions on page 47,what does she say? She says: "Work a full repeat of the texture pattern stitch of your choice." (emphasis added).

See. I'm supposed to choose.
So there.

And thus, I duly began to dither over stitch patterns, and swatch some, and chart -- merrily trying different combinations, plugging them into Knit Visualizer so that I could see how they'd work together.... for HOURS! It was really rather pathetic. I grabbed some additional resources for more Danish options, and got side tracked into Scandinavian designs, and Norwegian designs, and then rejected some I liked on the basis that I was supposed to be doing DANISH (for a scarf in the Netherlands Section) designs. That's the problem with designing. It's so very easy to get side-tracked into pulling out every relevant reference you have to pick just the right stitch patterns, until you've spent enough time to knit seven scarves but haven't knit a stitch yet.

Turning to page 46, I filled in my planning worksheet. I'm aiming for a scarf that is approximately 60" long and 8" wide.

Naturally, I swatched. I was a bit lazy, having worked with this particular yarn before, and didn't make a very BIG swatch.

But since scarf dimensions aren't critical (Donna even says so, right there on the page), I was mainly concerned with liking the fabric I got with the needles in question, and with getting a close enough guesstimate to be sure my scarf would meet OFA's prescribed dimensions as I plan to donate this scarf to the Red Scarf Project.

I'm getting 6 stitches to the inch, and thus needed 48 stitches to achieve an 8" wide scarf. Recognizing that I still had dithering to do, but also that I had a deadline to meet (October 15 for mailing, and October 24 for posting this entry in the blog tour), I cast on right away.

To be sure I made progress, I cast on before I'd made any solid decisions. Because I cast on my 48 stitches before I was sure which pattern came first in the scarf's tail, I warped Donna's basic pattern for a seaman's scarf. I pretended that I was doing this in the interests of making sure my tail ends matched exactly, but really, it's because I wanted to get knitting sooner rather than later, and I hadn't decided what the first band of pattern stitches on the scarf would be. Therefore, instead of casting on at one end, knitting a tail, kitting the ribbing, and knitting another tail, then binding off (as Donna quite reasonably recommends (see page 45), I provisionally cast on enough stitches for an 8" wide scarf (using Judy's Magic Cast On), slipped the second set of live stitches onto a holder, and began my ribbing first.

This allowed me to have both tails with bind off edges (another method of doing this, of course, is to cast on and knit both tails, knit the ribbing onto one tail, and graft it to the top of the other tail, but that means grafting, and not everyone enjoys doing Kitchener stitch as much as I do). This also allowed me to have a second go at measuring the row gauge I get with this yarn once I relax from my swatching body tension to my knitting along tension. Although a ribbing row gauge won't ever exactly match the row gauge in other stitch patterns, it was close enough to give me a guesstimate for how many rows I'd need in each tail, and thus to enable me to plan my pattern to get something close to the desired length.

Donna recommends k1p1 ribbing for the neck section. I've never knit a seaman's scarf with k1p1 ribbing; I've always worked either k3p3 or k4p4 ribbing, having heard from various folks that it was "better" for reasons I've long since forgotten. But... I figured I'd already messed with the plan by working the ribbing section first, so I stuck with her guidelines and churned out a nice foot of ribbing:

I liked it! I even draped it around my neck, and said "ahhhh".

At this point, I should have been ready to break into the stitch patterns I'd chosen. I launched into 4 rows of garter to set myself up, but I still hadn't made any decisions about stitch patterns. I'd come face to face with the bitter truth of designing: there are too many options in the stitch pattern directories! I'd browsed through Sheila McGregor's The Complete Book of Traditional Scandinavian Knitting, and found a bunch of things I liked. I particularly liked the "netting and stars" combinations but many of them had pattern repeats of 17 stitches or more (some were 32 stitches wide!). I wanted something that I could repeat three or four times across the scarf rather than something I pretty much had to center in a field of blah. Thus, I went back through again, and scouted things with pattern repeats of 11 or fewer stitches. This allowed me to have a three stitch garter border on each side.

That garter border was a choice that Donna anticipated on page 44 in her technical note: " The edges of the scarf will undulate as you change from garter ridges to knit-and-purl pattern stitches worked on a stockinette background. I like this effect. However, if you prefer straight edges on your scarf, work a garter-stitches border along each lengthwise edge..." I didn't want an undulating edge, so I planned for those 3 stitches of garter on each side of the scarf. This of course ate up a good five stitches on either side of potential design space, leaving me with 38 stitches to play with.

At first I worked up a rather intricate pattern of stars and diamonds. I really liked this chart. It alternated between stockinette ad reverse-stockinette ground, mirroring itself all over, so that it would look good on both sides of the scarf. I really like it when scarves look as good (or close) on the back side as on the front. They do tend to flip. Alas, when I applied my complex chart to my yarn, the combination did not work well. Because of the softness of my yarn, and it's glossy sheen, I'd have had to knit at a very firm gauge to get the single purl stitches that were key elements of my design to pop. But doing so, would cause the scarf to lose it's lovely drape.

I went back to the drawing board with another designer lesson under my belt. Drapey fabrics don't lend them selves to crisp designs. I knew this, but I hadn't focused on it. duh.

Having saved that complex chart for future use somewhere, I started over with a simpler design, and knit merrily away.

Soon I came to the point where I'd have to decide if my tail was long enough. The design I came up with began and ended with the same pair of stitch patterns, and cycled through three others up the scarf. The pattern, as charted, uses a total of five distinct patterns. I'll call them A, B, (the end pair), C, D, and E, because I'm mightily original. My plan had tail one using them in this order: A, B, C, D, C, E, C, D, C, B, A and tail two using them in this order: A, B, C, E, C, D, E, C, B, A. This meant that both patterns D and E were used equally over all, but each was "centered" on the tail on one side only. I'd completed a cycle and a half, ( A, B, C, D, C, E, C, D, C,) as planned, and needed to decide whether I should add another repeat of E and C to make it long enough before working the end patterns.

Part of this question is simple: how long will it be? But that's not quite as nice as seeing how it sits on a body. So, I slipped those live stitches onto a stitch holder, and picked up the provisionally cast on stitches that had been waiting on a holder from the beginning of my ribbing.

I worked my four rows of garter, and began the end pattern again...

Once I reached the same point on both tails, I gave the whole seaman scarf magic some thought. Regular scarves are 60" long, in part, so you can wrap them all the way around your neck and keep your throat warm. But doing that means that you inevitably sacrifice a bit of chest warmth. Seaman's scarves, on the other hand, hug your neck with their nifty ribbed centers, and their tails meet nicely and want to overlap naturally just a tad, so they keep your throat warm without having to be double wrapped. Then, they lay flat covering your chest as well.

It was clear that my scarf would reach 52 inches without adding another pattern set, and that I could work it to 58" or more with the additional pattern set. But it seemed to me that a seaman's scarf shouldn't be the full 60" -- it won't work well that way! So I opted for the way I originally planned it, and finished off both tails.

I wove in my ends using this technique. It's really rather like duplicate stitch, and hides the ends as invisibly as any method I've found while allowing the garment to stretch naturally.

Then I put the whole thing in a nice tub of cool water to rinse and prepare for wet blocking. Because I'd been VERY careful to keep this scarf clean, and had knit it pretty quickly, it didn't really need a full bore laundering, but everything needs a good rinse before blocking. This turned out to need three. The first rinse did what many do when presented with red yarn -- it's water turned all pink. So I ran a second rinse with white vinegar to reset the dye a bit better, and then a third to rinse out some of the vinegar smell. That worked.

I gently squeezed the extra water out of the scarf, and rolled it in a nice big beach towel, which I then folded and stomped on to get as much water as possible out of the scarf. Then, I carefully applied my blocking wires to the edges, working it under a purl bump in the garter ridges all the way along both sides.

Then I stretched it out on a towel on the guest bed, and let the air do it's work.

This led to a lovely finished scarf ....

That looks even better on people than it does on the (clean) floor!

My pattern for this scarf is available for download here. Please do let me know how it works out!

I had so much fun with this, that I am immediately ready to embark on an actual sweater now. I knew I wouldn't be able to finish it for the blog tour, but I'll keep you updated as I go through the process (rather like additional episodes to this Blog Tour)

Comments

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Perdy scarf! Perdy scarf!
And I noticed the emphasis on you choosing. You can do whatever you want, as usual, :-).
Kitty in the costume box at my place. Mom, take a picture of Zara going into our costume box.
And post about my wonderful present to you!

Posted by: Jessi | October 24, 2007 at 07:08 PM