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janestarzLast time I wrote about the neckline band. Today I'll write about continuing the journey down the back panel.
The first thing to do was to park the sides of the band on separate needles, because I would probably need my long circular needle for the back panel. It's great that it's long enough to work on one side of the neck band while the other side is also still on the needles but I thought it more than likely it would get tangled somewhere halfway down.
Doortje helped.
The work was getting more and more a mess of scrap yarn, extra needles, parked stitches and yarn tails and I can see that's not going to change anytime soon. Despite using bamboo to park the neckline band stitches on, they can still fall out, so later on I used more scrap yarn there.
Picking up stitches for the back panel along the longest edge was easy enough. Despite my best efforts I couldn't quite pick up enough stitches, I was short five. I made those extra on the first (Wrong Side) row so I'd end up with enough stitches using a purl-front-and-back at semi-regular intervals.
I also found it hard to centre the back panel properly, but I doubt anyone is going to notice. It looks offset by maybe one stitch or so, and I can live with that. I may be a perfectionist, but I'm also quite practical. I already had to redo the picking up of the stitches once, and it's not my hobby.
Next to the bamboo needles with the parked stitches we also had to make a few extra. These will form the rest of the shoulder seam later on. For my size I had to make 13 stitches extra on either side. While I was knitting on the back panel I thought it looked a little off. The neckline band lies at a 90° angle to the back panel stitches, and I was hoping that wouldn't show up as being wonky later on.
You can see what I mean in the right side of this picture: that looks like an odd angle.
But in the left side of the picture I've already picked up the shoulder seam, started on the front panel and it is going to be alright. There's good shaping going on for a neat shoulder seam and the shoulder seam itself is completely invisible. The neckline band is continued in pattern from stitches that were on hold, so there's no reason it should show up there. I was surprised a bit at how well I managed to pick up the rest of the shoulder from the back panel's extra stitches. You can't hardly tell -- unlike the centre-back neckline band where the lace is broken a bit because you pick up stitches there.
Now for the sad little things.
The back panel is quite gorgeous and the lace pattern is described in a chart as well as written instructions. The problem is that the chart is really big, so the chart symbols are really small. I chose to work from the written instructions because I was used to it by now. (The neckline band was lace worked on both sides of the work, so using the written instructions meant one less translation to do.)
The problem I had with the written instructions was that they started on a different point each row. From knitting socks they establish a section that is repeated a couple of times each round. If you place a marker after a repeat, you can check your progress while you knit. If you reach the marker but have still one stitch to knit in the repeat, you know you made an error right away. It's a simple way to make charts (because they would be quite a lot smaller) and a simple way to check your work as you go along.
This pattern didn't work with repeats. It worked with parts of the repeat in brackets ... but because the pattern shifts over by a stitch each Right Side row, the part between brackets MOVES. You can't place a marker to remind you 'this is the part between brackets' because the next row, the brackets will start on a different point.
Kat was also dismayed the parts inside the brackets would sometimes include MORE parts between brackets, making it harder to keep track of what you need to do.
An example:
k1, p1, (k1, yo, k1, ssk) x2 -- translates directly to: k1, p1, k1 yo, k1, ssk, k1, yo, k1, ssk because you have to do the part between brackets twice.
But if it reads:
k1, p3, (k1, yo, (k1, p1) x2 ssk) x5 -- you can see this is a little harder to count!!
And if you wanted to use markers for the part between brackets, you would need that point to be fixed in the knitting. But the number of stitches before the part between brackets changed every row. In the above example the first row has 2 stitches before the brackets, and the second has 4. That means your marker needs to change places in your row -- defeating the purpose of having one.
For me, a marker is an anchor in my knitting, a fixed point that doesn't move to the left or right. And you can reference it so see where you are in your chart, or your repeat.
But this pattern is not suited for that.
Sometimes knitting is just like programming. You're learning a secret language only some people know, and at some point your hands will do what the code tells you to do.
Thanks to Jannigje's podcast #2 I also found out I had skipped a part! After finishing my 50 rows of lace on the back panel I immediately went on with the left front. I completely forgot to read about the armscye shaping, so I'll have to catch that up first before continuing on the front.
The first thing to do was to park the sides of the band on separate needles, because I would probably need my long circular needle for the back panel. It's great that it's long enough to work on one side of the neck band while the other side is also still on the needles but I thought it more than likely it would get tangled somewhere halfway down.
Doortje helped.
The work was getting more and more a mess of scrap yarn, extra needles, parked stitches and yarn tails and I can see that's not going to change anytime soon. Despite using bamboo to park the neckline band stitches on, they can still fall out, so later on I used more scrap yarn there.
Picking up stitches for the back panel along the longest edge was easy enough. Despite my best efforts I couldn't quite pick up enough stitches, I was short five. I made those extra on the first (Wrong Side) row so I'd end up with enough stitches using a purl-front-and-back at semi-regular intervals.
I also found it hard to centre the back panel properly, but I doubt anyone is going to notice. It looks offset by maybe one stitch or so, and I can live with that. I may be a perfectionist, but I'm also quite practical. I already had to redo the picking up of the stitches once, and it's not my hobby.
Next to the bamboo needles with the parked stitches we also had to make a few extra. These will form the rest of the shoulder seam later on. For my size I had to make 13 stitches extra on either side. While I was knitting on the back panel I thought it looked a little off. The neckline band lies at a 90° angle to the back panel stitches, and I was hoping that wouldn't show up as being wonky later on.
You can see what I mean in the right side of this picture: that looks like an odd angle.
But in the left side of the picture I've already picked up the shoulder seam, started on the front panel and it is going to be alright. There's good shaping going on for a neat shoulder seam and the shoulder seam itself is completely invisible. The neckline band is continued in pattern from stitches that were on hold, so there's no reason it should show up there. I was surprised a bit at how well I managed to pick up the rest of the shoulder from the back panel's extra stitches. You can't hardly tell -- unlike the centre-back neckline band where the lace is broken a bit because you pick up stitches there.
Now for the sad little things.
The back panel is quite gorgeous and the lace pattern is described in a chart as well as written instructions. The problem is that the chart is really big, so the chart symbols are really small. I chose to work from the written instructions because I was used to it by now. (The neckline band was lace worked on both sides of the work, so using the written instructions meant one less translation to do.)
The problem I had with the written instructions was that they started on a different point each row. From knitting socks they establish a section that is repeated a couple of times each round. If you place a marker after a repeat, you can check your progress while you knit. If you reach the marker but have still one stitch to knit in the repeat, you know you made an error right away. It's a simple way to make charts (because they would be quite a lot smaller) and a simple way to check your work as you go along.
This pattern didn't work with repeats. It worked with parts of the repeat in brackets ... but because the pattern shifts over by a stitch each Right Side row, the part between brackets MOVES. You can't place a marker to remind you 'this is the part between brackets' because the next row, the brackets will start on a different point.
Kat was also dismayed the parts inside the brackets would sometimes include MORE parts between brackets, making it harder to keep track of what you need to do.
An example:
k1, p1, (k1, yo, k1, ssk) x2 -- translates directly to: k1, p1, k1 yo, k1, ssk, k1, yo, k1, ssk because you have to do the part between brackets twice.
But if it reads:
k1, p3, (k1, yo, (k1, p1) x2 ssk) x5 -- you can see this is a little harder to count!!
And if you wanted to use markers for the part between brackets, you would need that point to be fixed in the knitting. But the number of stitches before the part between brackets changed every row. In the above example the first row has 2 stitches before the brackets, and the second has 4. That means your marker needs to change places in your row -- defeating the purpose of having one.
For me, a marker is an anchor in my knitting, a fixed point that doesn't move to the left or right. And you can reference it so see where you are in your chart, or your repeat.
But this pattern is not suited for that.
Sometimes knitting is just like programming. You're learning a secret language only some people know, and at some point your hands will do what the code tells you to do.
Thanks to Jannigje's podcast #2 I also found out I had skipped a part! After finishing my 50 rows of lace on the back panel I immediately went on with the left front. I completely forgot to read about the armscye shaping, so I'll have to catch that up first before continuing on the front.
