Knit/Hack: Hrafn Sweater

[lwood]

So, after having made a sweater for jon_decles over WinterÞing, and collaborated with the excellent dpaxson in a coordinating scarf and hat, dpaxson cheerily discarded my entire knitting queue.

"Dammit, I wish I hadn't left my storebought cardigan on the Transbay bus. Sure, it was cotton, but it was dark blue and I liked it. The fleece and flannel overshirts are nice, but some days, too butch for me. *incoherent muttering*."

"If I bought you the yarn as a Yule present, would you knit yourself a sweater?"

"But but but my knitting queue! It is forever! It has a shawl that you want to have by New Year's, and socks for Mum, and..."

"Well, okay, after those. But before anything else."

"There's a devotional shawl just after those that I kinda needed in mid-February, before the quince blooms."

"You should have it while it's still cold!"

"Yeah, um. Remember where we live? It's sweater weather until, what, August in these parts?"

"Nevertheless. Aren't you needing the sweater now?"

"Yeah, yeah, and I suppose you'll soon point out that it would be perfectly in keeping with what the next devotional shawl's recipient would want--blah blah reduce suffering, blah blah compassion, always next year, and so on?"

dpaxson just smiled as I argued myself around to her point of view.

*thbpt*

---

So, I pulled out one of the first knitting books I ever bought, Viking Patterns for Knitting by Elizabeth Lavold, and we leafed through it.

"Ooh! That one."

"She apparently called it Rafn [raven] because, um, the sweater is almost wholly completely unlike a raven. It is of white, fuzzy yarn. That knot, though..."

(in unison) "--looks nice and corvish."

"Yeah!"

This isn't the book's picture, but another one of these that I found by sniffing through Ravelry and going to Flickr, :

(© Flickr user "polarbears", used w/o permission, theoretically Fair Use, I am not worth suing)

For those of you playing the text-only home game, it is a buttoned cardigan with a V-neck, shawl (wide, floppy) collar, and set-in sleeves.

So! I already had my yarn picked out (and purchased) by this time: Nashua Knits Creative Focus Superwash, a 50/50 merino/wool blend, all superwash, baby. Superwash FTW.

[For the non-fiber geeks in the audience, this means that the scales that make wool itchy and prone to felting have been melted off with acid (well, okay, there's another way...but usually? Acid.).]

Colors? Oh, please. Was there a choice? Look, this yarn comes in midnight blue and black.:

Is no-brainer in LorrieLand. I decided I would knit lapel, collar, cuffs, and hem in black, the rest in midnight blue.

---

Now that we had yarn and pattern picked out, I had a bone or two to pick with the pattern designer...namely that this pattern was flat.

There's no damn reason in all the wide world to knit a sweater flat--that I have seen, anyhow, but I admit I was profoundly influenced by my favorite Knit-Dís in this, but also other sensible sweater knitters, who for decades back have committed sweaters in just that way. It's tradition. (tentacles!)

I espied the pattern, got a rough idea of How It Goes Together, squared my shoulders, and uttered:

"With Elizabeth Zimmerman as my witness, this sweater can be round!"

She's particularly apt here--when a pattern she sold to Vogue that was intended to be knit in the round was published rewritten to be flat, she (arguably after unladylike language) stalked off to distribute her own newsletter called, aptly, The Opinionated Knitter, later renamed to Wool Gatherings. This cheerfully twined around her nascent wool import business, and together they stomped Tokyo fought crime! formed Schoolhouse Press, which is one of the best publishers of toothsome, non-fluffy knitting books today.

---

In order to make good on this oath...I'm going to have to grit my teeth and cut a steek, which, I admit, makes me go..."eek", as well as "meep" and "zomgwtfbbqSTEEK".

Why?

It means I have to cut up my beautiful beautiful sweater! AIGH! Right up the middle! IT IS GOING TO LOOK AT THE SCISSORS AND IMMEDIATELY DISINTEGRATE INTO A PILE OF FIBER!

With what?

I AM AN ANIMIST! THE YARN HAS EYES!

*anxious!kermitflail with incoherent gibbering*

So, um, that'll be exciting. However, I did not find it hard (hahaha, ni ansa) to take the stitch counts of the panels and add them up. Indeed, this matched along fine with the tenets of EPS as applied to My Holy Gauge Swatch. The body is now about 20" long, and I will decide, once the sleeves are done, if that's really and truly as long as I'd like it--if not, the time to decide is then.

---

Now, I have just started the sleeves, from the cuffs. Ribbing at cuffs and hem should be on a slightly smaller needle than the rest of the sweater to help it do its job. According to EZ's Percentage System (EPS), if one would like a bloused sleeve, one casts on 20% (1/5) of the stitches that you needed for the body, knit the cuff in those smaller needles and then, all in the same row, switch to the larger needles and increase all in the same row to 25% of that original cast-on number--and then there's more, but go buy a book, I'm not spilling it all here.

---

As the cuffs are a little too small to fit on a 16" circular needle, it occurred to me that this could become an interesting exercise in learning the Magic Loop technique, wherein one uses one fairly long circular needle instead of a shorter one (that doesn't exist) or two circulars, or a set of double-pointed needles. Indeed, one can even do two tubes, one parallel to the other, in this method and, if one must, do this using both ends of the skein at the same time. The tubes remain separate little entities by knitting thus: the front half of tube one (from the first end of the skein) the front half of tube two (from the second end of the skein is one is inskeinsane), the back half of tube two, and then the back half of tube 1. Starting from the asterisk at the bottom right, it goes like this:

----2b2b2b2b2b--1b1b1b1b---->
|
----2f2f2f2f2f--1f1f1f1f---->*
* - start
<-------> long circular needle
1 - first tube 2 - second tube
f - front      b - back

---

However, a tube of plain stockinette stitch is...boring. I allowed to dpaxson that I think I'd like to put a wee cable up it. You know. Just a little.

She didn't think it would be pretty.

But lookit this, courtesy once more of Ravelry:

© Flickr user mailmuffel, same dodgy claims as above.

So...I daresay I will. That hitch there is half of one of the body knots, and compliments nicely.

Last, there's the question of "what shoulder is Lavold trying for there, and how do I adapt that?" dpaxson and I had surmised it as a set-in sleeve from the directions and the reference picture in the book, and these reference pictures appear to agree. Excellent!

The title of this post is a shout-out to all the old school Angband, Nethack, and other Roguelike games out there--Raven Wronghands, I'm looking at you.

-- Lorrie

Comments

[ivy]

I must admit to some audible cackling at seeing the post title. [grin] It's brilliant.

I didn't even know one could remove the itchy from wool. That's fantastic. Wool is so often the recommended fabric of choice for keeping warm outdoors, and I have sadly little tolerance for the itch, so it's good to know that there is hope. I have a hoodie-crow grey and black half-cape that's wool, but since that generally goes over anything else I might be wearing it's not been a problem. Wool socks, though, I have not thus far been able to abide, and am therefore still on a search for the Perfect Outdoor Trooping Socks. I'll have to add "superwash" to my search terms; my noble cheerful peasant ancestors wore a lot of itchy things.

I can see how taking scissors to something that you'd spent so much time on could be totally nervewracking; I'm wincing for you.

Clearly you have fine and excellent taste in colors.

[knittingwoman.livejournal.com]

I have actually met itchy to the touch superwash wool. I thought that superwash referred just to the process of treating the wool with chemicals so that it wouldn't felt (and shrink less too?). I should add many things are itchy to me that don't bother other people and my daughter is even more sensitive and won't have just about any wool near her because of the itch and scratch factors. I have tried having her touch some very amazing and seemingly soft yarns.

[wednesday]

What size needle are you using? I have some REALLY SMALL circs in US 5 and 8. Like, uh, wristsize.