A Bluestocking Knits

Kid Mohair Wrap Post-Mortem

Well, this wanted to be a pretty lace wrap, but -- alas.

It is the Kid Mohair Wrap from Susan Cropper's Pretty Knits: 30 Designs from Loop in London of 2007, reprinted in Canadian Living a year or so ago (there's no date!).  I was a little surprised to find almost no mention of this around the blogosphere, thinking that surely I could not be the only one seduced by the photograph.  I wonder now if knitters just gave up.

As I mentioned before, there are a few errors in the border pattern, not earth-shattering ones, but enough to be worth fixing.

This is a fairly-standard lace edging, found in Martha Waterman's Traditional Knitted Lace Shawls, among others I'm sure, and there called "Ocean Waves".  Here it is written worked in opposite directions on the right and left edges, so that they are mirror images.  The right-side edge has a three-stitch "wave" that swirls upwards towards the left, while as written here in the Kid Mohair Wrap the left-side edge has a two-stitch swirl.  It is not entirely noticeable at this lacy gauge, which is one of the reasons (the other being Kidsilk Haze's resistance to being picked out and re-knitted) that I simply left it there and went on.  The decrease used in the pattern is a left-slanting sl1-K1-psso, but it should be a right-slanting K2tog.  I worked the second repeat this way, and to my eye it looks much better, certainly a mirror image of the right-side border.  After working the second repeat, I realized that the one triple-decrease on the left-side border should be changed as well, from a sl1-K2tog-psso to a K3tog -- you can see the second repeat's sl1-K2tog-psso at the top of the first "swirl", just to the left of the last yarn-over hole, where the triple decrease is leaning the wrong way.  I worked a K3tog instead on the third repeat, along with the line of K2togs, and it looks much tidier.

So my recommendations: In Row 3, change the second sl1-K2tog-psso to K3tog, AND in Rows 5, 7, 9, and 11, change the second "skpo" (i.e. sl1-K1-psso) to a K2tog.  This will also need to be changed in the crossed-eyelet section, thus: In Row 31, change the second sl1-K2tog-psso to K3tog, AND in Rows 33, 35, 37, and 39, change the second "skpo" (i.e. sl1-K1-psso) to a K2tog.  There is another typo in Row 35: after the second "slip marker", K2 should be K3.

There also should be an asterisk in Row 39, after the first "slip marker", but this is only a slight hiccup.

The scarf version apparently simply continues a narrower version of the knot-stitch section all the way up, omitting the crossed-eyelet section -- but a commenter on the Canadian Living version of the pattern notes that Row 28 in the scarf version says to repeat Row 14, ie. Row 4 of the knot-stich pattern, but that this should be Row 2, not Row 4.

But the biggest problem for me is that two balls of Kidsilk Haze is not enough by some way to complete a 30x60-inch wrap.  I pin-blocked what I had worked so far to a 30-inch/76cm width, which to me looked far too stretched, so I repinned it to what looked good, which was 28 inches (71 cm) wide -- although certainly this was not proper blocking, and the results may have been different, but I suspect not much.  The result was a 28x22-inch piece, which of course with only one more ball of Kidsilk Haze would not have made a wrap that measured 60 inches by any means.

So, well -- it's pretty, but the yarn is now well on its way to becoming nona's Tie One On after all ...

An Elizabethan Shirt and Smock

It has been quite a long time since I finished the first part of our Elizabethan garb, and I have let myself get distracted from even starting the rest of it, but here are the shirt and the smock -- David's and mine respectively.

There are a number of shirt and smock patterns available for free on the internet -- both Grace Gamble's shirt pattern and the one from the Elizabethan Smock Pattern Generator seem to be historically accurate and used often by re-enactors -- but I decided to stick with the basic patterns from The Tudor Tailor book. 

These are both fairly simple to scale up from the graphs, as almost every piece is either a square or a rectangle.  I made the shirt with a plain collar and cuffs, and the smock with a ruffled collar and cuffs; both have tie fastenings.

I used the IL019 linen -- 5.3 oz per yard -- from Fabrics-Store.com, and washed and dried it in the machine three or four times before cutting to soften and pre-shrink it.  It is the mid-weight linen, with a bit of that lovely linen slubbiness and heft but is not too heavy.

I decided to flat-fell all of the seams, which with french seams are the two most common period seams.  I like the look of them, and the flatness.  They turned out well on the whole, although working the underarm gussets was a bit awkward, and so I did them a little differently from the book's.  I attached this square gusset as instructed, but instead of sewing the side seam first and then inserting the sleeves, I started working the flat-fell at the bottom of the underarm gusset, sewed up the front of the armhole to the shoulder and down the other side, and then straight into the side seam, all in one go.  Trimming this for the second pass of the flat-fell was a little awkward, but it turned surprisingly neatly, towards the back on the side seams and towards the sleeve on the armholes.

I'm in two minds about the ruffle -- it is obviously too short to iron, so that it has a kind of solidity to it which is not especially handsome, but under a waistcoat will perhaps not be so obvious.

David was looking at my blackwork sampler one evening and said, "You know, I really like this one.  And this one.  I like all of them.  Can you do some on my Ren Faire shirt?"  Well, this was like saying, "Honey, could you knit me some socks?" -- of course I said yes, although I didn't really know at the time if it would be as simple a matter as it seemed.  The biggest problem was that all of the borderlike patterns I knew of were a bit girly, so I thought of Celtic knotwork and wondered if I could find a chart.

This was actually quite fun once I realized the trick of it.  I couldn't find any suitable chart online, so I had to "unvent" a couple. I liked a twist-straight-twist-straight sequence I saw somewhere, so adapted that, a narrow one for the cuffs and a wider one for the collar. 

You can see my thought processes in the page of sketches below.  The top one (which has a height of 10 stitches) is finished at the left edge and increasingly draft-like as you go towards the right.  Basically, all you have to do is draw the squares, then fill in the edges slanting to the right or left depending on whether the ribbon should cross "over" or "under".  This seemed quite miraculous to me when I saw how it worked!

In theory, this is infinitely expandable, although the ends of the border would have a greater and greater number of "unconnected" ribbons depending on how many you use.  The 4-stitch border (which is the one I used for the shirt cuffs) has only one ribbon, the 8-stitch border (which I used on the collar) has two, and the 12-stitch one has three.  (Whoops, I see a mistake on that one now!)

I actually did the blackwork without my contact lenses.  The only benefit I have ever found to being extremely near-sighted is that of having Super Microscopic Up-Close vision.  If I look at something at a normal hand-working distance without my glasses, it would look like this --

but if I hold it within, say, two inches of my unaided eye, it looks like this --

which as you can imagine is perfect for counting those very fine threads of linen!  (And for removing splinters, but that's another story.)

I worked this particular piece in two strands of regular embroidery floss, each stitch over four threads of the linen.  I'm not entirely pleased with this result, but for a first effort it's not bad.  The pictures above are my sample -- when I worked the shirt, I basted the "safety box" one stitch out from the design, as stitching into it sometimes incorporated red fibers into the black floss which remained behind when I pulled it out.  I highly recommend the basted outline, by the way -- enough said, I think.

I added a "turning" in the knotwork at the center back of the collar as I was working it, in order to lengthen the design enough to fill the ends of the collar, but I think unless you actually count the turns you'd never know.

I did do all of the blackwork before cutting the pieces to size, for ease of handling, having heard this advice from a number of sources, luckily for me well before-hand!

The man's shirt differs from the woman's smock mostly in that it has neck and side gussets.  I'm not sure why women don't need the neck gusset, but the side ones, because of the shirt's much shorter length, need a little extra room and reinforcement at that point to keep from tearing.  Also different, at least in the Tudor Tailor versions, is that the shirt is gathered a little between the collar and the straight top of the shirt, whereas the smock has a curved neckline and fits smoothly where it joins the collar.

I haven't decided yet what kind of ties to put on the shirt -- for my smock, I simply braided three strands of crochet thread, but I was thinking for David's I might try a lucet braid.

Mistakes: I wasn't very careful when I cut the shirt pieces, and so the front and back are slightly on the bias and don't sit quite straight.  I had no idea how to set in the side gussets -- maybe this was after I decided to flat-fell all of the seams, which then meant that the "flaps" at the bottom of the shirt had turnings that sometimes had to go first one way (for the flat-fell seam) and then the other (for the turned edge) -- I sewed in one of the side gussets and hand-sewed the other one simply on top of the seam and turnings, but wasn't especially happy with either method.  I assumed that the generous-seeming size of the shirt would mean that it would fit the 5'11" David easily, but the collar is barely long enough, and the length of the shirt itself is a bit on the short side.  I haven't seen anywhere what a "typical" length is for an Elizabethan man's shirt, but the book's illustration is just above knee-height (the idea being that the side slits allow you to wrap the tails between your legs, fore and aft as it were, and this is what serves as underwear).

I cut the neck slits the length in the pattern, which is far too long.  Since at the time I was sewing it was approaching winter, I also ran up a version of the smock in flannel just to use as a nightgown, and made the neck slit half as deep, which is much more comfortable and a lot less drafty.

Right!  On to kirtles and doublets!