Hi, its me Abelene. It has been a long time since Jen has let me out of the closet. Here I am out on the sunny stair landing to model some pretty neck wear thing with pins stuck in me ~~~ ouch! Actually, it is not a neck piece, not really, for although it seems like it is, it is only the beginning of a top-down knit sweater, a little over half of the yoke to be precise. (And actually, I can’t feel the pins either, I’m made of foam!) Jen says this will be the kind of sweater that one cuts down the middle with a steek and picks up stitches for a button band later so it will become a cardigan. At last Jen is satisfied she has got the best fit, using a nothing but instinctive geometry, trial and error, and she insists she did horribly in math in school, but now is rather hooked on it. Rewrite the pattern again with new calculations? Okay!!! A day passes. More knitting. Groans of incessant worry that the thing is not right, so more ripping out, and more calculations, and more days pass (see previous post). This has been the thing, Jen is rather sucked into a math hole of some kind and I don’t know how to free her. Hopefully seeing the yoke pinned on me , with photos documenting, she will agree that its a fine fit for the human torso, and knit on now with confidence.
So Jen has got this thing in her head, she ponders a thing which is a yoke stash and the point of it all is so that she can just knit a yoke to pattern (forthcoming) with no regard to the all-over color of the body or even size, transfer all the stitches on to a flexible holder, and just put it away into the Yoke Box, and start another. Imagine that! Jen says this is an excellent thing for many reasons, but one very good one is that one can get started on the complicated & fun part of the sweater with as little as one ball of three colors, or even just two colors, and decide later what color to commit to, or shop for, or otherwise do at a later time. Maybe knit in a nice neutral scale, and the sizing can be generalized, because from her most recent pattern calculations one can change the all over size of the sweater by just continuing the repeats with more rounds and increases, thereby elongating the radius. At some point when one wants to really rush a complex colorwork yoked sweater project, all they need is to just pick a yoke out of the yoke stash and away you go on a couple of sleeves, and a body ~~~ voila!
Jen has got a recent yoke-in-progress to test-fit on me here, and I must say that I am quite pleased that she feels it to be satisfactory, and I feel very glamorous knowing that it represents bucket load of work. Now Jen needs to put me back into the closet and spend more time with her calculator, which I am worried she cares more about than me.
Ta ta for now,
Abelene
