06 September 2009

Wisteria: fibre to FO in a month

It turns out that there were a couple of errors in the stitch-count calculations for Wisteria that I was talking about in my last post. It further turns out that I shortened the body length on the fly (the stated length might have nearly reached my knees!), and that when I double-checked the weight of fibre, it was even more generous than I had thought. The upshot of this is rather than needing to buy more fibre to finish, I've actually got about 110g leftover - enough for a pair of socks, or a hat, or a laceweight scarf. The leftovers might end up being my first attempt at dyeing fibre, but in the meantime I present my finished Wisteria!

Finished Wisteria

Apart from the body length, I made two other mods: my first ever short row bust shaping, which has worked well, and a split double-faced hem in place of the hem cables. I wasn't keen on a horizontal band of cables around the widest part of me, and I like split hems for fit, and I'm very pleased with how it's worked. I came up with about four different ways of working the hem, swatched a couple, and decided on this...

I put the back stitches on a spare needle, and worked across the front, knitting into the front and back of each stitch, doubling the stitch count. Then I worked back across the wrong side, knitting each stitch that was created on the previous row, and slipping the 'original' stitches with the yarn in front. Then back to the right side, I knit the 'original' stitches, and slipped the 'new' ones with the yarn in front. Lather, rinse, repeat.

The effect is like double knitting, takes a bit longer, but is less fiddly because it only needs one end of yarn at a time. It creates sealed sides as well, which gives it bonus points over just knitting the hem flat and folding it. I used a standard cast off, except with k2togs for each pair of stitches instead of plain knit, thus attaching the front and the back to each other and making a pretty chain of stitches along the bottom.

The other I'm-so-pleased-with-myself idea in the hem is that the yarn is made from the same singles as the main yarn, but in two-ply instead of three, so the hem is barely any thicker than the main body of the jumper, while not looking and different.

I'm wearing the finished item as I type, and loving it :-)

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3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Lovely! It looks really cosy :-)

6 September 2009 at 16:16  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Is the pixelly face a semi-anonymity measure or was it a really bad photo of you?

6 September 2009 at 21:09  
Blogger Triskellian said...

@bateleur Both! I usually do pixellate full-face photos that are linked with this pseud, but I was also looking at the camera rather than the mirror, so my eyes look peculiar ;-)

7 September 2009 at 10:12  

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