Knit Sisters

Chez Les Eskimaux, the furnace is roaring away comfortingly,

and Shelley and Zeno are luxuriating wantonly in the warmth (note how the animals have literally unfurled from their body-heat-preservative tucks and have arrayed themselves in a curiously symmetrical formation around Alex…one almost suspects that they are planning something untoward…). Meanwhile, Alex and I have finally had the courage to strip off the top two of the four layers of clothing we had become accustomed to wearing in the house.

When you’ve spent nearly a week dressed like Anne Frank going into hiding, you don’t want to de-layer too quickly. You can get the bends.

It’s true. You could look it up.

If you will bear with me this evening, I would like to backtrack a bit and say a few words about how “Time Out of Mind” went from having the Neckline of Doom:

to having a Neckline that Rocks:

As Polarbears (sadly blogless) astutely noted last week, the problem was largely too many stitches, but since I was ripping that sucker out anyway, I decided to make a couple of other modifications that I think made the whole neck element work better.

I ripped the Neckline of Doom out while I was with my knitting friends at Woolcott, mainly because if I have to frog, frogging in public lessens the incidence of cursing, weeping, howling, and making dramatic claims that I later must disavow (e.g., “I hate knitting and I never want to knit again,” and “F*ck this ribbing and the horse it rode in on”).

That sad task accomplished, I set about to build a superior neck, much like the biotechnicians on The Six Million Dollar Man in the 1970s: “We CAN rebuild him. We HAVE the technology…”

This time, I picked up twelve fewer stitches on either side of the neck. Like so:

and like so:

Since the stitches for the cable panels were live to create continuity, those were moved back from waste yarn onto the 24″ circular needle I used for the neck. I knitted seven rows in the established pattern, then continuing in that pattern, I decreased four stitches (purls) between the cable panels on rows eight, ten, and twelve—ultimately losing 12 stitches total, six in front and six in back. Those stitches were decreased at the edge of the cable panels so that they would be less noticeable.

I did row thirteen in seed stitch to lessen the roll and rumple of the bound off edge where the cables were, and then I bound off in the contrasting color.

In the final analysis, I got a much neater bound-off edge and a much cleaner-looking neckline. With a total of thirty-six fewer stitches! I also learned a valuable lesson about necks.

Less is more.

From my perspective as a feline, the same could be said about dogs.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 13th, 2007 at 8:57 pm and is filed under Heavy sweaters, Time out of mind. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.