Holli Yeoh Knits

I’m currently having problems with my host which will take some time to fix.  In the meantime the Bee’s Knees Knits email address is not working.  If you need to get in touch please email me at hollister @ shaw dot ca.  Sorry for the inconvenience.

I’m still plugging away at my various projects.  It’s Eloise’s turn now.  This project was stalled at one point because it was time to measure for the buttons and buttonholes.  I generally think it’s a sign of poorly written knitting instructions when you are directed to measure the placement of your buttonholes.  You know, the pattern says the first button is 1/2″ below the neck shaping and the last one is 3/4″ above the cast on edge and remaining button(s) should be spaced evenly between them.  Even worse is when instructions say,

“… working buttonholes to correspond with positions marked for buttons on left front …”

Even though I don’t like instructions like that, I must confess that I’ve been waiting to use my handy dandy tool for measuring the distance between buttonholes.  I received it as a door prize at a Guild event a few years ago.

It’s called an Expanding Sewing Gauge and it opens like an accordian to establish equidistant measurements. After I marked the first and last button positions with pins I just layed it over the cardigan front and expanded it until the first and fifth indicators were pointing at the two pins.  It can be used for pleats, smocking, drapes, shirring and of course, buttonholes.  I must say, I’m really happy with how easy it was to use.  As easy as …

PIE!  We celebrated Thanksgiving with family this weekend and I baked the pumpkin pies and made the Waldorf Salad.

Last night I sewed in a lot of ends. Fingers and thumbs for two pairs of gloves, plus colour changes makes 56 ends. Yikes! The sample gloves are for my new pattern and now I just have to wait for a non-rainy day to take the photographs.  Good luck in Vancouver in the fall!  The forecast is rain, rain and more rain all weekend long.

Tonight I plan on working on Avery.  Time to get this one off my plate.  I need to block the sleeves and knit the neckline and shoulder button bands.  Then it’s time to sew it all together.  Looking at the long list of projects I want to complete in the near future, I think that if I always have something blocking on the blocking board that will be half the battle to complete the list.

For every pattern I design I need to figure out how much yarn is required to make it.  Usually what that boils down to is knitting a swatch and then ripping it out so I can measure it.  Before ripping out the swatch (which is knit to my predetermined gauge) I measure it and take note of the number of stitches and rows.  This swatch is knit in the round because the final project (gloves) is also knit in the round. Sometimes gauge can differ when working in the round or working flat.

I measure the amount of yarn required to knit the swatch.  I have a handy dandy yarn meter for doing this.  I measure it at least five times and then take an average.  This swatch took 54 feet of yarn.

I also weigh the yarn and then throw all the numbers into a spreadsheet I’ve developed for calculating yardage.  It gives me the amount of yarn required to knit one square inch of fabric.  In this case it’s 41.8302 inches.  I compare my findings for both the yardage calculations based on weight and those based on length to make sure I haven’t made an error somewhere. 

Then I figure out how many square inches of fabric are required to make the project.  In the case of a sweater it’s easy because it’s mostly comprised of squares and rectangles.  For instance, a baby sweater back is about 10″ wide by 10″ long.  10×10=100 so the sweater back is 100 square inches.  It would take 4183.02 inches or just over 116 yards of yarn to knit the back of the sweater.  Gloves are a little trickier because of all those fingers, but it still boils down to dividing the project up into rectangles.

This is what remains of my swatch after establishing yardage.

Yikes! I forgot to post this one!  It’s been sitting around waiting to be published for over a week. 

Last night (Sep. 27) I finished up the pink Ruby I’ve been working on.

Project Stats:
Yarn: Opal Petticoat 1295 and Shelridge Farms Soft Touch Ultra 3-Ply Fingering Weight Yarn in Thistleflower
Pattern: Ruby (my own)

My plan was to show you how I sew the sleeve in, but upon writing the step by step, realised it makes a lot more sense to talk about mattress stitch first.  I have another project coming up soon that I can photograph as I seam it together.  Then I’ll show you my hybrid mattress stitch/grafting that I use for sewing row selvages to stitch selvages.

In the meantime my pink Ruby went on her merry way to Salt Spring Island to have a great time at Lucy Neatby’s Adventure Knitting camp without me.  Hopefully she sold a few patterns and kits for me.