My Silla is finished at last. What a relief it is to finish that eight month-long project! I made many changes to the pattern to achieve the look I wanted, which is the real advantage of slow knitting. I love the modern look of the sleeves, and the way the lace panel at the sleeve cap matches the body of the sweater.
The sleeve is a bit wider than I would like at the top, but I felt it was important to keep the original amount of stitches the pattern required for the sleeve cap so that it would match the body of the sweater. It is tricky experimenting with sleeves, especially when there is a lace section knitted in kidsilk haze. Good luck unraveling it!
I used the sleeves on Madame Butterfly as a rough guide for my sleeve cap for Silla, as there is an opaque kidsilk haze section on the sleeve cap of Madame Butterfly that is meant to match the opaque body of the sweater:
Madame Butterfly by Marie Wallin
http://www.ravelry.com/projects/yarnstylist/madame-butterfly
The minute I start modifying a knitting pattern substantially, I change my focus to that of construction rather than knitting. Before making the sleeves, I sewed the completed front and back pieces together, so that once I finished my first attempt at the sleeve, I could baste it into the body of the sweater and ensure that everything lined up. Not surprisingly, when joining two disparate patterns together, the lace panels were off by 1.75 inches—the lace portion on my sleeve cap extended down farther than the lace panel of the front. I realized I would have to lengthen the cotton portion of my sleeve cap by 1.75 inches before I switched to the lace panel of kidsilk haze to make the sleeve match the body of the sweater. Empowered by the cutting technique I learned from Sarah Hatton (you can read the details here:
http://yarnstylist.com/2014/08/madeline-by-kim-hargreaves.html) I decided that instead of unraveling my entire sleeve, I would cut off the lace portion!
It turns out there is a big advantage to kidsilk haze lace sticking together and being impossible to unravel. Because it sticks together so much, it is easy to remove a panel of it from a project without worrying about a bunch of loose ends waving about. It is especially easy to remove a panel of kidsilk haze when it is knitted one row up from a sturdy yarn like 4ply cotton. All I did was to find the join where my first kidsilk haze row loops connected with my loops of 4ply cotton:
I inserted my scissor there and cut through those loops of kidsilk haze, leaving the cotton knitted stitches intact! As you see, as I cut every few stitches, I picked up the cotton loops and put them on my needle, so that none of the cotton section unraveled.
Once I had picked up my cotton stitches again, I proceeded to knit up 1.75 inches and then switched into the lace pattern in kidsilk haze. Now it all matches up perfectly!
I modified the back of Silla to make it look more modern as well. Instead of creating a long button placket along the two back edges, I sewed the two back edges together, leaving only a tiny keyhole at the top with one button closure that I could fasten myself.
I think the unbroken back lace panel shows off the beauty of the lace as a feature, and let’s face it, who has the time to do up a bunch of tiny buttons in back when getting ready for work in the morning?
I framed every section of my lace with a slip-stitch panel of K2, slip 2 in 4ply cotton. I like the effect overall very much, but I am wondering if it works at the keyhole. Now that I look at the below photo, I am wondering if the keyhole is slightly too big?
What do you think, readers?
For those of you who are familiar with the original design, Silla is supposed to have a high neck:
However, I opted for a low, round neck opening instead:
It is a good thing I had originally preferred a lower neckline, as I struggled with the instructions for shaping a high neck. The idea of the design is to build the “turtleneck” by picking up stitches for the collar from the base of a round neck opening, so the pattern tells you to put the center 17 stitches of the neck opening on a holder and then successively cast off the rest of the stitches, a few over every row, to create the circle shape. Then the pattern tells you to pick up all of these stitches again and start up the lace pattern on top of all the successive stair steps of lace that have been cast off. Frankly, I found this a frustrating approach that was destined to create a weird and wiggly portion of lace where the new lace rows are superimposed over uneven stair steps of different areas of the old lace pattern. But perhaps I am missing something?
I have been knitting intricate lace patterns for over 15 years, and consider myself a fairly advanced lace knitter. Additionally, I am a highly detail-oriented obsessive, picky finisher. But the task of picking up new lace stitches directly on top of the old ones and making it look seamless was impossible for me.
Challenge #1: Reading the lace:
In order to pick up new lace stitches exactly on top and in synch with the previous repeats of the lace pattern, you have to be able to examine the old part that you knitted and “read it” by figuring out the boundaries of the 10 stitch repeat and the through lines. This is challenging in any completed lace pattern once the markers have been removed, but in lace knitted in fuzzy kidsilk haze, the difficulty is increased. Then you consider this is a GARTER stitch lace pattern of raised bumps which further obscure the lace pattern which in itself has lace changes on every row from 1-10 and you can see the difficulty level is magnified by 1,000. Then, on top of that, the lace is not all cast off at once. To shape the round neck, little bits of the 10 stitch lace pattern are knitted then cast off in a stair step pattern up the shoulder so it is actually impossible to start your new picked up stitches from row 1 and correspond to row 10 of the last section. Instead, you are making your new lace row 1 on top of various bits of rows 1-10! Here is the side of the neckline as it stair steps up to the top of the shoulder:
Challenge #2: Vague cast-on instructions
The pattern tells you to pick up a set number of stitches starting from the center back, which means that you are randomly picking up stitches across the back, side neck and front without any regard to the progression of the lace pattern below, and believe me, this DID NOT WORK for me. What happened when I picked up stitches randomly is that the below lace panel became distorted, and the holes created by yarn-overs below become huge, unsightly gaps right at the center neck front where the eye goes first. This means that, as difficult as it is to read the lace and try to match your new lace stitches to line up exactly with the old, I felt I needed to do this. Another reason for reading the lace is that a through-line extends upwards from center points of the lace pattern no matter how many repeats of 10 rows that you knit up, and if you distort this vertial line when you start up the lace pattern anew, it shows. So I had to take out my first attempt, pictured below, which was based on the pattern instructions. The safety pins hanging off the fabric were put in to mark all the areas where gaping holes had appeared:
Challenge #3: The cast off area for the neck is extremely low. Even if you decide to forego the high neck like I did, I still had to pick up stitches and do something to finish the neckafter I had the misfortune to cast off my lace in the first place, because the neckline is very low. My advice is, DON’T CAST OFF! Ignore the pattern and keep knitting up in the lace until the neckline is high enough for you. Then just pick up stitches and do a plain-stitch finish or the K2, slip 2 pattern I used!
However, I was stuck with my cast off. This resulted in a long period of poring over my lace, identifying the boundaries of the 10 stitch lace pattern (separated by safety pins) and finding the central plumb line that extends up constantly throughout, which I marked with stick pins:
After I read the lace, I started my pick ups not at the back edge but at the center front. I did this by picking up the 17 stitches that were on a holder for the center front neck, and then picking up stitches in sets of 10 (1 lace pattern repeat) on either side of those central 17 stitches to ensure that all the lace stitches lined up according to the pattern below. This meant I had to pick up stitches from both the right and left side simultaneously, which I did using a tapestry needle as a tool:
Once I had picked up the stitches working out in sets of 10 from the center front, I was able to synchronize the above and below panels of the lace panels, as I had deliberately picked up center plumb lines to match the ones in the rows below which I had marked with stick pins. However it was still impossible to avoid a line where I had picked up the lace stitches on either side of the 17 stitches of the center front. I think that may be unavoidable. That is why I say, DON’T CAST OFF! Ignore the pattern and just knit up into a boatneck or turtleneck shape. Since I had to pick up stitches, I disguised the line I created where I had picked the stitches up by using the following ruse:
I knitted up only two rows in the lace pattern in kidsilk haze and then switched to 4ply cotton, which is lighter in color, and so draws the eye automatically upward. I executed 4 rows in my K2slip 2 pattern, and then cast off in K2 P2 rib. This trick works because of the way the eye simplifies the contrast between light and dark yarns. The eye travels up to the lighter shade of the 4ply cotton, and so the darker lace rows are blurred together and the line between two of the lace rows is not perceptible to the eye.
It is a good thing the slip stitch edging in 4ply cotton worked out so well, I will definitely use this again in future to create a finished edge for my lace knits. Here is the pattern, for anyone who wants to try it:
Row 1: K2, *slip 2 with yarn in front, K2* repeat to end.
Row 2: P2, *slip 2 with yarn in back, P2* repeat to end
Row 3: K1, slip 1 with yarn in front, *K2, slip 2 with yarn in front* repeat to end
Row 4: P1, slip 1 with yarn in back, *P2, slip 2 with yarn in back* repeat to end.
