Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Scarfvest is finished




Here it is finally, the scarfvest I've been working on forever (it seems like it anyway). Its knitweave, the knitting yarn is Red Heart's Heart and Sole, a sock yarn, superwash wool, spun with aloe. I really like the yarn and will definitely use it again. The weaving yarn is a double knit wool that I bought in a yarn shop in Wisconsin while visiting over Christmas.

You can probably tell from the pictures I knitted it pretty loose because I had a theory that one of the reasons our machine knit edges curl so much is because the machine has it stretched tight horizontally and we have it stretched tight vertically with weights. So--I used no weights and knitted it looser than I usually do. The edges still rolled a little but nothing like they usually do.

I solved the slight roll by doing machine knit crochet edges. I knew that Charlene Tate has several how-to-crochet by machine on her web site at www.charmknits.com/ I did the Crab Stitch which is a backward single crochet all the way around. When I was finished I decided to do 1 more row. Normally you wouldn't do 2 rows of crab stitch but I like the way this looks, probably a bit different than if I had crocheted it by hand but I'll never crochet by hand again unless I have to do a stitch that isn't on Charlene's web page. To make the buttonholes I did sort of a chain stitch (on the machine) as I got to the place where I had left a buttonhole marker, I just knitted 4 rows on 1 stitch, then joined it by continuing on with the crab stitch, hard to explain but it worked.

Tomorrow I'll get my notes out and see if I can write up how I made this thing, right now I can't remember exactly how many stitches I used and exactly how I did the tuxedo ends but I wrote it all down.

3 comments:

Cindy/KS said...

I really like this! Can't wait to see the pattern.

Roz said...

Sorry I didn't get to it today, Promise I'll get my notes out and hopefully make sense out of them, I redid this about 3 times, hopefully I wrote it all down the 3rd time.

Cindy/KS said...

No rush on my part for sure. Have a sweater on needles right now for hand work. Need to get a baby blanket started on the machine this weekend now that our company has come & gone and will be getting up really early to decorate my 9 year old dgd's birthday cake for tomorrow - it's cooling right now.

She is the one who knits by machine with me & I kept trying to think of what to make today at work - just found out today that the party is definitely on & the party store that I get icing colors & such from closed at the same time I got off work. So it hit me about mid-afternoon - a knitting machine cake! I will use 2 cupcakes for a "ball of yarn", angelhair spaghetti with smidges of icing on it for needles, a small rectangle baked in a bread pan for the carriage and then cut 1/3 off a rectangle cake for a 2nd layer to make a taller section for the back on the machine. Am not sure if I will have an icing string just going from the carriage to the ball of yarn or if I will try to simulate a yarn mast, but her mother agrees - she will like her Grandma original cake. Should be able to post pictures on my blog tomorrow or Sunday of the end result.