I’m not working on anything green, but hopefully a green background for the occasion will suffice? Although, I suppose you can’t see much of it!

I’m still working on Vivian. Slow and steady wins the race, right? I’ve gotten through one ball of yarn and although I’m not quite up to where the directions said to start on the sleeves, I started them anyway. I’d rather leave the body incomplete and start the sleeves with a fresh ball of yarn than have a mostly-full skein attached to my body piece, laying dormant. This is entirely a personal quirk, but with a cat around unfortunate things can happen to yarn that is just lying around.

Cabling is a curious beast. They take up more yarn than stockinette and yet take up a smaller space. This particular yarn also has a very strong relief. The relief is what creates the beautiful dimensions and shadows, but a deeper relief takes up less room than a shallow one. This sleeve looks like a sweater for a snake, but I keep trying it on and it fits just fine! Have no fear. That’s the nice thing about knitting – it stretches. For this particular pattern the sleeves are worked in the round. I’ve moved my body onto scrap yarn for the time being, and using the same needles in a magic-loop technique for the sleeves. Again, it’s entirely a personal decision. Mine is entirely based on availability. I do not have size 8 double points, so I make do with the needles that I have.

And the body. I focused the picture on the center back, since that is where my additional cables are. I am loving these cables immensely. As you can see, the center section is seed stitch. What you might not see is when the cables became 2 stitches apart I started purling those two stitches exclusively. The outer two stitch borders are still seed stitch.

As an aside, I can’t ever seem to photograph this blue to it’s true nature. The best way I can describe it, it’s like a sapphire chunk that has just been mined and hasn’t yet been polished: saturated, still dull, but none the less vivacious.

Stats:
Body progress: Row 108
Sleeves progress: Round 64

One of the several projects on my needles right now has been a pattern that I fell in love with the moment I saw it. This little gem is called Vivian by Ysolda Teague, from Twist Collective Winter 2008.

Isn’t she a beaut? What you can’t see on this first picture is that the cables from the sleeve and the front flow up onto the hood and around the face. It’s a beautiful effect that the photographer completely ignored. Not a single picture in the article for this pattern shows this detail. I find that to be a grievous error on the photographer’s part. However, props to Ysolda! because the jacket is still stunningly gorgeous, and the first person to make that pattern must have had a wonderful surprise waiting for them!

Lucky for me, they were kind enough to post pictures on Ravelry, showing the hood details. I studied these and found the finished result nearly perfection. Sorry, Ysolda, but there’s one thing that I can’t leave alone. It only had one, tiny, small, glaringly painful (to me) problem. Look at it again, with the hood up:

She has orphan cables on the hood! There’s a second, less-noticable problem in the article photograph. The waist-shaping is gorgeous, and on the model, looks beautiful. But the other side-effect is the empty space in the center of the lower-back. In a larger size, on a more curvaceous person, I fear this would be much less flattering. Compounded with the possible “wide load here” effect on the rear, I decided I couldn’t let the orphan cables slide. It had to be altered! Do I ever knit a pattern without adjusting it in some way? … probably not.

The Fix

After reading the pattern and understanding that the decreases of the back take place on the edges of the center seed stitch panel, I know that the center, at it’s widest for my size is 36 stitches. At it’s narrowest, it’s going to be 10 stitches wide. Two cables will take 8 stitches, and I want to separate the cables from those on either side and each other. This means adding 6 stitches, and that the narrowest section can be no less than 14 stitches wide. Grabbing some graph paper, I charted my blank space – starting with 36 stitches for row 1. I followed the pattern and narrowed my chart on each side by a space for each decrease row, up to and including row 50 where it is 14 stitches. This means the decreases that take place originally on rows 54-57 will be left out.

Then, starting at the bottom of my newly charted center panel, I drew in two cables – the right cable leaning left, and the left cable leaning right, to mimic the two orphan cables of the hood. I drew in the rest of the cables, up into the 14 stitches remaining on row 50. Visually, I decided I wanted to maintain a 6 stitch border between my additional cables and the edge of the seed stitch panel until row 36. I will shift these cables to help them curve and maintain a seed stitch border by increasing on the border side of the cable (KFB) and decreasing on the center side of the cable. Both the increase and decrease take place in the seed stitch on either side of the cable, not within the cable itself. At the end of my decreases, I have 2 seed stitches in each border section, and 2 in the center. That takes care of my additional cables throughout the decrease shaping.

For the increase shaping, I have to be aware that the cables on the hood are a certain distance apart. Looking ahead in the pattern, I see that the cables are 12 stitches apart. I will then work the cables as in the chart in reverse as the center seed stitch panel widens, and stop shifting the cables when there are 12 seed stitches between them. The center panel will increase on its edges as though the changes never happened – not including, though, the first two increases, as the last two decreases were also left out.

Did you follow all that? You’ll see how it turns out in future posts!

Stats:
My Yarn: Cascade Ecological Wool, color 9332 (Sapphire)
My Size: 40
Current progress: Row 24