Garter Stitch Land, Population 2

We have finally welcomed a new addition to the household:

That's the baby girl in the afghan my Aunt Donna made for her. She weighed in at 6 lbs 10 oz at 19 inches long with ten fingers, ten toes, and a slight case of jaundice.

She's 12 days old today and I'm wondering if I will ever get sleep again.

Now that I'm on maternity leave, I have big plans for learning to sew, getting a lot of writing done, and most importantly, finishing Art's Dr. Who scarf in time for Halloween. I'm knitting it in various colorways of Lion Brand Wool Ease.

I'm over 75% finished with the knitting, which is entirely done in a never-ending stream of garter stitch.

Once the knitting is done, I still have a countless number of ends to weave in and a crap ton of fringe to add to either end.

Just to add to the garter stitch fun, I'm also working on a baby blanket for the girl using the Elizabeth Zimmerman baby blanket pattern. The construction just seemed fun. It is done up with four squares knit using two triangles. The first you knit one stitch fewer every other row until you are down to about five stitches. Then, the second triangle adds a stitch back every other row until you are back to the full number of stitches. It's small enough to still be portable for the moment.

With all this garter stitch, I have a feeling I'm going to need a more intricate pattern with some stranded colorwork or lace or cables or something and soon. Anything that requires more than the knit stitch and oodles of time.

But it is nice to work in worsted and bulky weight after finishing that dress and hat set for the baby's home coming day. Better still, the whole thing actually fit her:

I believe I will be coming up with a hat pattern for this one in due course. I was worried it would be too small, but with some intense blocking, it all worked out in the end.

In the meantime, it's just me, the baby, and miles of garter stitch. Wish us luck.

Garter Stitch

I am a bind off away from finishing the penultimate section of the Maize and Blue Stained Glass Blanket. This section is a rectangle, roughly 42 inches wide and 9 inches tall, done in off-white Red Heart Super Saver in a colorway called "Aran." The beauty of this section that makes it such a sigh of relief: it's comprised entirely of garter stitch.

If you are new to the lingo of the knitting world, garter stitch is one of the two workhorse stitch patterns that make up most knitted fabrics. The other is stockinette stitch.

For flat knitting, garter stitch is what happens when you knit every stitch of every row, resulting in V-shaped knit stitches for every other row, with the bump-shaped purl stitch for the rows in between. This happens because knitting creates knit stitches and when knitting back and forth on a flat piece of fabric, the knit stitch is created on opposite sides of the fabric for every row. The purl stitch is really just the backside of a knit stitch, so on one side of the fabric, the first row will be knits and the second will appear as purls and the other side will have a first row of purls and a second row of knits. Garter stitch is reversible, looking fairly identical no matter which side of the fabric faces front.

To create stockinette stitch when knitting flat, you have to learn how to purl. Purling creates purl stitches. Thus, stockinette stitch, which involves knitting for a row and then purling for a row, results in all the knits being on one side of the fabric and all the purls being on the other.

 

When the main side of the garment is the purl bump side, this is called reverse stockinette stitch.

For circular knitting, because you knit every row from the same direction, the reverse is true: knitting every row creates stockinette stitch and garter stitch requires purling every other row.

I love really complex stitch patterns and unique constructions on small projects. It makes them take a little more time, but that's okay, because they really don't take too much time in the first place. A 70-inch by 50-inch flat-knit blanket, however, is just huge, so for something this time-consuming, I'd rather it not take any more time than necessary. Most of the sections, though, required lace patterning or color work, each of which takes a long time to do compared to the ever-efficient garter stitch (not to mention a significant amount of concentration and the added time required to figure out the charting). Hence the year it's taken to get this far.

I'm so into this nice, easy, meditative garter stitch. Just one knit after the other until this blanket is done.

...Well... almost done. There will need to be a crocheted edging. And possibly a fabric backing. But the blanket will be totally done knit-wise. Of course, first I have to buy another skein of the Caron worsted weight in Cape Cod. I've run out of blue yarn, and this last section, all blue.

Swatch avoidance and the third mother bear

Almost every knitting guidebook in existence tells of the importance of the swatch, that it will save heartache, that it will ensure a good fit to that future sweater, etc. etc., but I'll tell you something: I hate swatching. Just hate it. I hate it to the point that I will avoid swatching until I no longer want to make whatever it was I needed the swatch for in the first place, which, of course, means that I no longer have to swatch anymore. See how that works?

Because the blanket I'm making is also a pattern I'm developing as I go, I figured I'd avoided the need for a swatch once again. However, this was not to be. You see, after completing the first corn-inspired square of the Maize and Blue Stained Glass Blanket, I knew that it was too squat. I tried to justify the okayness of its wide rectangularity, but alas, deep within, I knew it would never be okay. Sighing, I unpicked the cast-off and completed two and a half more repeats of the pattern, resulting in a squarish rectangle that seemed much more up to snuff.

Then, I picked up stitches on the right-hand side of the rectangle, one for each row I knit up and I started on in garter stitch. Soon, it became apparent that something was very wrong. The two square was much wider that the first square was long, and the stitched spilled over on both ends of the first square. Obviously, this many stitches was too many, and I realized, with chagrin, that I would have to swatch. Then, I frogged the second square and put the first square, along with yarn and needles, in its project bag and read a book instead.

This behavior continued for many days, until I knew i had to end the procrastination. I had promised this blanket's completion and complete it, I will. With determination, I took out the yarn and needles and swatched a wide, short swatch. The height of the stitches didn't matter, as I could just cast off when I had reached the length specified in my sketched blanket blueprint, but I made sure to make the swatch much larger than the 4 inches necessary to measure gage. As it turns out, according to the swatch, I need to pick up 7/10ths of the number of stitches I originally picked up. I have since made a plan for how to best place this picked up stitches and I will begin again this weekend, having quite learned my lesson though I'm sure it's a lesson I'll learn again soon enough.

In crochet news, I have completed my third mother bear. His legs are shortish, though not as short as Stubby's legs. I had a lot more fun with this little bear's facial expression than I had with the first two and I'm fairly in love with him. I've named him Mark, in memory of my good friend Jolynn's younger brother. I want to make at least a fourth bear before I send Mark and his two siblings off to the mother bear project homebase, but with all the work left to do on the blanket, I'm not sure it will happen. I might end up sending off these three and then taking a break on the bears until my brother has his blanket in hand. We'll see.

Also, happy belated Valentine's Day.