The recent kerfuffle about whether a blog is more like a tea party or a house party got me thinking about blogging in general and my own blogging goals. I enjoy blogging and I enjoy designing, but unfortunately those goals have been at odds lately. It wasn’t a huge problem with quick projects like socks and hats. I designed those and knit them on the side, and my blog didn’t suffer too badly for lack of content. With big projects like blankets and sweaters, however, the relative silence is pretty noticeable. We’ve all seen blogs go down hill when their writers switch from public knitting to secret designing. I don’t want that to happen here, I enjoy blogging too much.
My two favorite blogging Ruths have been a real inspiration lately. Ruth S. of Knitting on Impulse recently revealed a beautiful sweater with interesting construction that she’d been giving us glimpses of for months. Ruth H. of Ruthless Knitting has shown us the full design process of several sweaters over the last few months, Tokyo Top most recently. Blogging and designing can be excellent companions when one is willing to actually show the designs in progress.
With that in mind, I’ve decided to share one of the sweaters that I’m working on. This is not the secret project I mentioned last week, which to be honest is in Slog mode.
Those of you who have known me for awhile know that I am a huge fan of Noro. The big challenge of designing with Noro is getting it to do something other than orderly horizontal stripes. Not that there is anything wrong with horizontal stripes, but they’ve been done. I wanted something more interesting.
This is fitting the bill so far. What you’re looking at is the back of a sweater that will one day hopefully look something like this:
It will have a scoop neck, and the stripes will be diagonal. There will be raglan sleeves, and the seams will be formed by grafting the body to the sleeves. I started in the center bottom with two balls of yarn going, and added stitches every other right side row until it was as wide as I wanted it to be. Then I turned the corner by decreasing instead of increasing. It is not perfectly square yet, but I’m confident that a good blocking will make it work.
I decided to knit the back in one piece, twisting the two strands on the wrong side of the work. I could have knit the pieces separately and then seamed them, but this method allows the piece to stretch very evenly while a seam would not have. It looks very neat, even from the wrong side.
I feel a bit exposed showing you this, after keeping it a secret. I hope it works out!
