Aunt Toby believes in magic, oh yes she does.

But, as usual, I digress, but not much. One of the truly annoying things of retail life is the absolutely shoddy way that knitwear is put together, gloves, mittens and hats especially. In this case, I am concentrating on the bitter end of the whole deal and it is the same whether we are talking about the end of knit hats, gloves or mittens. What is done at least 95% of the time is that the manufacturer has the operators take an end of the yarn, thread it with a needle through the stitches, take a couple of hand stitches (maybe), and then snip the end off close.

Nice, neat and tidy, but the end just won’t stay inside; it’s not anchored TO anything and the stitches at the end of the finger top, the top of the hat or the mitten end are just hanging there, like beads on a string. If the yarn end somehow works its way out, or gets caught on something, or a child or a pet finds it and plays with it and pulls it, voila! The string for the beads comes out and there you are with, as you see in the top photo, live stitches just hanging there in the wind…waiting to slip down, down, down, unraveling as they go. Oh the horror!

And a complete waste of money for the consumer because then you have one glove or mitten that is ruined (or a ruined hat), and the other half of the pair is still ok but it won’t match anything and there you are. Both of them end up in the trash. Waste. Aunt Toby hates waste. I still have, and wear, a pair of leather palmed wool knit gloves of my departed Pop, who darned them numerous times. They are still better than 90% of what I could find on the market today.

The glove was brought to me by our elder daughter. The annoying thing is that I will probably be brought these gloves again – what I should do is undo and perform the operation I am going to demonstrate here on the other 9 fingers to avoid this but I wanted to get this up in a post for readers today. The one finger took about 5 minutes, tops and most of that was hunting through my yarn collection to find something that was close to the main color of the gloves. If I had not been concerned with that, I could have done the deed in probably a couple of minutes. It is worth doing – saved a pair of gloves for ED at a time in the winter season when we still have at least 8 weeks of cold weather.

Tools:
Set of double pointed needles (I’m using US size 2′s here; it depends on the size of the yarn in the item and the yarn you will be using to do the repair)
Darning needle with a big eye

Material:
In this case, I’m using DK weight yarn in the closest grey color I have to the gloves.

Step 1: Pick up the stitches on the double pointed needles. I found 12 stitches, so, I put 4 stitches on the first needle, then 4 on the next and 4 stitches on the last one.

Step 2: Find the end of the yarn the manufacturer used to string the stitches and keep track of that. Making a slip knot in the end of the yarn you have found that matches, grab hold of the manufacturer’s yarn and holding the two together, do whatever stitch is opposite to the stitches on the outside of the item you are repairing. In this case, this is standard ‘knit one row; purl the next one – that’s the wrong side’, so I’m purling as I go. I’m weaving in the manufacturer’s yarn end and my yarn end for a couple of stitches while I go. Do a couple of rounds.

Step 3: Cast off. If you do not know how to do casting off, go here:Casting off
Otherwise, do a standard cast off (slip the first stitch, knit or purl the next, pull the slipped stitch over; knit or purl the next, pull the stitch before over the new one and so on) until you come to the end. You will have what I have here – a row of cast off stitches (the line that looks like a braid) and one ‘live’ stitch left on the needle with a longish end of yarn. Take the end of the yarn and pull it through the live stitch, and pull the whole deal off the last needle.

Step 4: Neatening off. Turn the finger inside out and pull the yarn end through the hole. Thread that through the darning needle. Put the pointy end of the darning needle through the cast off stitches one by one and pull up tightly; sew a couple of times through the end and make a knot.

Done. Neat, tidy and it will not come out – even if the end somehow works it’s way loose, because you put the end through the last ‘live stitch’ (see Step 3), the cast off stitches will stay cast off.

And why bother to do this? Because you CAN and it’s worth doing, if for no other reason than it took a little bit of time and you did it yourself. Always a good reason to do things.

But, I digress (as usual). This is NOT about the button-down shirt.

Men’s shirts that are considered dressy (i.e., not a button-down collar) and nicely made today usually come with that item that you see sticking out of the pocket on the undercollar in that shot above. It’s called a collar stay. In the UK, they are referred to as ‘collar stiffeners’. Some men refer to them as knuckles, bones, collar sticks or collar tabs. I noticed recently the DH had a shirt from what used to be considered a very high end shirt manufacturer which had them built right into the collar and you could not take them out, which means that this particular shirt can never be taken to the commercial laundry or dry cleaners because the heat of the commercial pressing machines would ruin them. That is another point: Shirts with removeable stays should have the stays …removed… before you take them into a dry cleaner or laundry (or, for that matter, if you wash them yourself at home since those little celluloid buggers will shimmy out of the pockets faster than you can say “Where’s my…”). Just take them out, put them someplace where you will remember where they are (always the challenge – but putting them in the box where you throw your change on your dresser would work), and when the shirts ‘come back’ or are finished drying, put them back in the collar to shape it up properly.

Now, there are all sorts of stores and sites out there that will sell you replacement stays in everything from celluloid to very nice engraved metals, which is a rather unique gift for someone if you can’t think of a thing to get for the guy in your life (or yourself, goodness knows) who wears non-button-down shirts. Just do a search on ‘replacement collar stays”.

But enough of the digression. The point here is that I am laboring over the nice wool challis shirt for the DH, inspired by Gary Cooper, and one of the options in the pattern, strangely enough, is a collar with a pocket for collar stays. This is something I’ve never seen in a commercial pattern and is probably seen as being too fiddly for a home sewer to do. Is it fiddly? Yes. Beyond the skills of a home sewer? Nyet. No special equipment is needed and actually, it was sort of neat to do up the example for you. The one thing you’ll want to have on hand is a collar stay(and you or the guy in your life might already have some of these laying around that got taken out of shirts already). If you don’t, take a firm piece of card stock, a 3×5 card or a business card and cut a piece that is 3/8″ wide by 2 3/4″ long and make one end cut into a point. That’s your test stay.

This collar requires THREE different pattern pieces (and I’m not even talking about the stand which we discussed the last time): The upper collar, an under collar and something they are referring to in the pattern as ‘under collar 2″ but which I’ll call ‘the pocket’.

This is the under collar pattern – I redrew it for you on white paper to make the markings easier to see. As you can see from the photo, there are markings for folds and stitching.

This is the pattern for ‘the pocket’, which basically covers the end of the collar. I have the feeling in commercial shirt making, they don’t use the same fabric as the collar itself and probably use something lightweight but strong or even a type of non-woven interfacing.

Step 1: Cut out your under collar piece and mark the folding and stitching lines. Cut straight down at the ‘v’ and press down both edges on the undercollar.

Step 2: Apply ‘the pocket’ piece and baste on or just pin onto the undercollar. Stitch down one of the lines and using either a collar stay or your ‘test stay’ (see photo), line it up against the stitching line you just did and make sure that the markings for the other stitching line are on the other side of the stay so that when you are all done, you can actually get the stays into the collar. Trust me on this one because I had to rip out my stitches and do this twice. Once you’ve tested and corrected any markings for the other stitching line, do the second stitching line. TRUTH IN ADVERTISING: The collar stays I’m using came to me through Put This On(which is a site I adore and which I feel does a great job in educating guys on clothing and style) as a ‘thank you’ for supporting their video program. They are not available for sale. Sorry.

Step 3: Put together the now two-piece undercollar/pocket and the upper collar, right side to right side (and ‘the pocket’ is on the WRONG SIDE, ok?), sew the outer edges with the appropriate seam allowances, trim the corners and edges down to a really narrow allowance. Turn right side out, steam press, and see! Voila! a pocket, with stitching, and you can put a collar stay in it. And take the stay out! Genius.

These are the directions from the pattern with the diagrams to help you also. The next step will be to attach the collar to the stand, which we’ll take up in the next episode.

The rest of it could, one might presume, look like the proverbial ‘hot mess’ and no one would be the wiser. But it also means that those items – the collar, the center front with it’s button band (whether it is integrated into the front pattern piece or a separate and applied band), the cuffs and the placket where the cuffs open on the sleeve all have to be perfection. And not only technical perfection, in that the sewer has performed all the steps to produce a perfect looking product; but they have to fit smoothly and perfectly to the person wearing it. A collar band (aka ‘the collar stand’) that is too big, or too small, cuffs that swamp the wrists (or get caught on a large wrist watch), and messy buttonholes on the front band just ruin the look of a man’s shirt. There is no way out of this. It is not the same as with women’s clothing where design details (fancy collars, ruffles, pin tucks, seaming and so on) can distract the eye from an imperfection. With men’s shirts, the item itself is so spare, the design itself so boiled down to its essence, that what is seen must be perfect, which is daunting to say the least.

Aunt Toby is very aware that commercial patterns have issues. One of the major problems is that as the grading on the sizes goes up, everything gets graded up. At some point in the deep, dark past, it was decided that as people got taller, everything got bigger and as people got larger, everything got bigger, which ignores the fact that the distance between a person’s shoulders and their chin does not necessarily get longer. It is not as if people who are 6’2″ tall have more bones in their necks than people who are 5’8″ (everyone has 7 bones in their necks by the way). But obviously no one listens to me because the neck band in this particular pattern (which covered three sizes) just kept getting bigger in the width and bigger in length. What to do? What to do?

Well, I’m a big believer in going with what works, that is, I took out one of the DH’s shirts and, as you can see from above, I measured the neckband on the collar in both the width and in the length. It was 18 1/4″ long and 1 5/8″ wide. And that is without seam allowances. I’d already cut out the neckband in fabric and backed it with my super-duper sew-in interfacing and I measured that.

Ye gods.

As you can see, I have marked not only 1 5/8″ width on the paper I placed on top of the neckband, I also marked the two seam allowances of 1/2″ each and we still see a whole lot of challis real estate hanging out there at the top – it’s almost 1/2″, which might not seem a lot but on a man’s shirt, all of these little items just keep adding up. The collar would be attached to the top of the stand (I have not even measured that yet; I’m sure that will be swimming out there as well) and that would add even more extra fabric. Not a good look.

Gary Cooper didn’t have extra fabric hanging around his neck.

The length of the band was out there as well. Even if I used 5/8″ seam allowances (which are the standard in commercial home sewing patterns), I would need a band of only 19 1/2″ which would sew up to one that would be 18 1/4″. This band is 20 1/4″; if I sewed it up with 5/8″ seams, it would be 19″ – 3/4″ too big which would hang around my husband’s neck like some sort of clown costume.

Whole lotta trimmin’ going on…

Cooper, for all of his being known at the time for his Western and frontier movie roles (which he got at the beginning of his career due largely to his riding and other outdoors skills from growing up on a ranch in Montana, though he and his brother were also sent later as teens to a boarding school in England for several years before he came home to attend college), certainly did not come from a poor or un-schooled family and for all the roles that required him to say “M’am” to actresses such as Dietrich, was very well read, was a trained artist and was, in his own way, as concerned about his appearance and the message it sent as Cary Grant was (though for different reasons). And he was seen at the time as a guy who dressed well and who cared about it (which at the time was no big deal; everyone dressed as well as they could afford to at the time; ‘clothes make the man’ was something everyone believed). The photo above was shot while he was touring in Australia entertaining US troops during WWII (which is why I can use it copyright free – it’s courtesy of State Library of Queensland) and he’s signing an autograph for a military fan.

If you look closely at the photo you will notice that the collar on his shirt is, to our eyes, quite long (the standard at the time was between 3″ and 4″ for collar points and men chose their collar length based on how tall they were). And though this photo does not show it, collars and cuffs at that time were quite soft (in relation to what had come before in terms of removable collars which were very stiff, either because they had been starched or made of celluloid). I asked my ‘men’s shirt and interfacing expert,” Pam Erny of Fashion Sewing Supply about this and she was quite clear on this. At the time, this was pre-fusible interfacings and shirt makers either used self-fabric (that is, they used the same sort of fabric that the shirt had been made of) or they used a similar weight of shrunk muslin or other fabric to back up the collar, cuffs and placket. At this time, it was pretty standard for men’s shirts to be starched as either part of the washing process or in the pressing process so having a fabric interfacing that would behave pretty much as the outside layers would in the washing the pressing was probably seen as the right way to go. This would change later with inventions such as ‘Sanforize’(tm) and other fabric labor-saving treatments; at that point, resin-based interfacings came into being basically to replace having to separately starch collars, cuffs and plackets.

But, as usual, I digress. Back to Mr. Cooper, a soft collared shirt and making a new shirt for the DH (who goodness knows has been patiently waiting for me to make HIM something for a change). A couple of years ago, I bought some wool challis on the internet. Now, the moment I saw this fabric, it reminded me strongly of the sorts of printed shirts that you can see in photos from the 1930s and 1940s for men. Men’s clothing in that period actually was far less conservative than it is today and men’s shirts were actually available in far more colors and fabrications than they are now. Additionally, since at that time central heating was not as widespread (nor were buildings and homes insulated very much at all), wool came in far more weights, weaves, knits and fabrications than we find today and people were used to wearing wool in pieces of clothing that we don’t often see today (for example, Viyella was a very famous and valued brand for both men’s and women’s shirts, blouses and dresses and this was a combination of wool and cotton).

But, back to the challis. Now, the background color is pretty much spot on, but I still can’t decide if those reindeer are black or navy blue. The fabric also has a puckered texturizing treatment in it which, when I had washed it in the hottest water my washer can produce, became even more pronounced. This would make a very jazzy shirt for the DH for sure, but I felt that to be fair to the fabric, a more 1940s period look would be in order. It would be a more casual shirt than he usually wears, though he’d be able to wear it with dark dress pants with or without a plain dark tie and either a tweed sportcoat (a la “Coop”) or a corderoy sportcoat or sweater. And yes, I have shown the fabric to the DH, who is quite intrigued and it will be interesting to see how the fabrication works out.

The pattern is one from McCalls from 1977. designed under license with John Weitz (who actually was a very interesting guy: John Weitz ), who did a fairly extensive run with McCalls in terms of their men’s pattern line.

At this point, I will close here because I will be using Pam Erny’s recommendation for interfacing for this to give it the right look, a sew in product that I am getting from her but which has not arrived yet (I’m haunting the post box). Once I get that, we’ll be able to take this project forward.

Onward!!

This year, it was a red, long sleeved sweater, in wool.

I felt I was not being picky. It is not as if it had to have this style neck or that style neck. It is not as if I was wedded to a cardigan versus a pullover. But I wanted real, honest to goodness, red.

Not burgundy, deep rose pink, wine, or rust. Red. English ‘the redcoats are coming; the redcoats are coming’, fire engine, scarlet woman red.

In wool.

It makes no difference if you look on the internet, in the stores, in catalogs, or bargain basements. I can find six shades of pink and six shades of reds with varying amounts of blue in them. And we will not even discuss how much wool gets used in what I could find. The best I could find was a horribly shortened cardi with 50% wool in a weight so light I could have used it for underwear.

People, it’s winter. Long sleeves, a length that will hit me at least at hip level if not below the rearend, and some honest to goodness warmth here.

One of the ‘helpers’ at a JC Penney advised us to sign on to Pendleton and look there. Even at Pendleton’s prices (which give me a nose bleed), no such luck.

So, I faced one of two choices: buy the one v-neck pullover I found (which had 21% wool in it and was a reasonable price at 50% off) or cough up to get red wool and knit myself one. Guess what – I’ve been looking at that situation also and I can’t find scarlet 100% wool yarn for life or limb (actually, scarlet is a tough color; trust me, when I used to dye my own fibers, the closest I ever came to getting it was a batch which ended up the color of tomato sauce. Something to do with iron in the water). If I wanted a red cashmere sweater I could find it. If I was willing to wear a guy’s sweater that was red and made of wool, I could find THAT.

I could, I suppose, just throw in the electronic towel and give it up until scarlet comes back into the fashion color spectrum and snap up the first (at full retail) all wool red sweater I could find, but I refuse. I wear red a lot. I wear red with brown, black, grey, navy blue. Not green.

So, I got the 21% wool pullover, and felt slightly resentful for about 5 minutes.

Annoying, I tell you. Annoying.

A wet diaper is going to move into ‘OMG get me changed!’ territory really fast.

I discovered a European pattern magazine this year (and I am sure many of Aunt Toby’s readers are already devotees, and if you are, bear with me), Ottobre which is produced in Finland. Not exactly a tropical paradise on the best days, and in the winter, even in Southern Finland, daytime temperatures can go as low as -4 degrees F. I’d bought several of the kids’ pattern magazines, and checked the fall/winter ones for patterns and suggestions. Every single pair of pants and overalls for the little kids was made lined with some sort of knit. Genius. Built-in long underwear (here is another beef I have about infant/toddler clothing: there is no such a thing as warm long socks for teeny guys – tights for little girls, yes; zippo for little boys. I suppose this is meant to toughen them up or something…).

I used this pattern from Simplicity, I had some acrylic tartan plaid (is that a tautology?) fabric and some red medium weight cotton knit. I washed them in the hottest water I can get out of my water heater to shrink everything up and cut the overall pattern once in the tartan and once in the knit and sewed them together, as if the knit unit was a facing, flipped it inside and attached it to the bottom of the tartan and sewed both together with the leg band at the bottom. I also installed snapper tape on the inside of the legs and I’m pretty pleased with the result. But, is this the best I can do? Perhaps these are not the most warm pair of overalls I could make.

How could I make even warmer overalls? Well, I could have used microfleece for the lining. Or perhaps I could have found some acrylic sweater knit for the lining. Or perhaps I could have found some bonded wool for the overalls. Anyone else have any ideas? Quilted lining materials? Turn the little tyke into the Michelin Man(tm)?

Inquiring minds want to know!

So, I tried to “frankenpattern” with another skirt pattern I had which seemed pretty nice, only as per my usual SOP, I just gave a quick ‘drive by’ through the directions and the lay out diagram and went at it. Big mistake.

And there I was with two huge pieces cut out of the yardage and that horrible sinking feeling of having not only ruined the fabric but also needing to punt with what was left. Punting is not one of my best things.

BUT. Since I had fabric that did not have a directional print, I had one more trick up the proverbial sleeve, which was making a gored skirt. Now, the theory behind a gored skirt, from a ‘getting it all out of the fabric you’ve got’ standpoint, is that the gores (the pieces) are basically triangles with rounded bottoms and flat tops (ok, so they are really trapezoids with rounded bottoms; I’ll concede the point). And that means that you can flip them, like this drawing, and get really tight and efficient use out of the fabric you have to get the pieces out. Now, every formula I’ve seen for drafting the gore says this:
Step 1: Measure your waistline.
Step 2: Measure your hips.
Step 3: Measure the length between your waist and where you want the skirt to end.
Step 4: Draw a vertical line down the center of a piece of paper longer than the length between your waist and where you want the skirt to end. This is your center line; it is also the guide for the straight of the grain of the fabric.
Step 5: Divide your waistline measure by the number of gores you want and using a ruler, put that number at the top of the line. For example: If you waistline is 30″, and you want 6 gores, then put 2 1/2″ right on the top of the line and draw a line, at 90-degrees to that vertical line from the end of the ruler on the left to 5″ on the right. (ok…30 divided by 6 is 5; half of 5 is 2.5″ and you put that figure right in the middle)
Step 6: Measure down from the top along the vertical line, the distance between your waist and your hips and put a mark there. Take your hip measurement and divide that number by the number of gores you want. Take that number and divide that by 2 and put that measurement on the ruler at the intersection of the vertical line and the line you made for the distance between your waist and your hips. So, for example, the distance between your waist and your hips is 7″ and your hip measurement is 40″ (and we are still working with that 6 gore skirt). 40 divided by 6 is 6 2/3″; 6 2/3 divided by two is 3 1/3 which is slightly less than 3 1/2, so put 3 1/2 at that intersection and draw another horizontal line from 0 at the left to 7 on the right.
Step 7: Taking a yardstick, connect up the end of the waistline on the right and the hipline on the right and with the bottom line. Do the same on the left and you will end up with a trapezoid.
Step 8: At the top, where the center vertical line intersects the waist line, measure down 1/2″ and make a mark. Make a gentle curve between both ends of the waistline mark (if you have a French curve, this is a lot easier than free-handing it)
Step 9: At the bottom, where the center vertical line intersects the bottom line, measure down BELOW the bottom line, 1/2″ and make a mark. Mark a gentle curve between both ends of the waistline mark.
Step 10: Add 3/4″ on both sides of the gore and cut out. Cut out as many gores as you figured.

Now, I’m not sure what I did (other than perhaps sucking in my stomach), but I ended up having to cut out another gore. So I would add another step to this:
Step 11: Make a muslin out of your gores and adjust if necessary.

Sheesh. There are moments when there is a part of me which wants to declare this to be a ‘wadder’, but…I’m…not…going…to…give…in.

What’s she wearing? Don’t worry, we’ll wait.

She’s wearing a white jacket with big shoulders (no mystery there; the movie was released in 1942 – women had big shoulders in everything, even sweaters), and a blouse, a long skirt and a sash that is being used as a belt. I was thinking about that movie recently and it occurred to me (and I suppose no one wanted anyone to think about this at the time) that if Ilse Lund and Victor Laszlo are on the run, hiding out from the Nazis every moment of the trip from France (“remember when I was sick is Lisle…you didn’t leave me then…”), they must have had someone helping them with the luggage.

Because Ilse had SOME wardrobe in that movie (courtesy of Orry-Kelly) – much more than would have fitted into a single suitcase (which would have been, frankly, what one person could have reasonably carried under refugee conditions and we are not talking about a big suitcase here. I sure would not want to have had to walk more than a mile with a big suitcase). We won’t even talk about the hats (quick – how many different hats did she wear in that film? All I can remember right now are the straw hat she wears with the light colored jumper dress with the striped top in the marketplace scene and the felt hat she wears at the end at the airport. Anyone else?) which, given their condition, would have required their own hat box piece of luggage.

They might have been hiding out in a barn, but it was a barn with maid service, a dry cleaner and a very big closet.

But that is NOT the topic of this (see how I get the digression in here?). What IS the topic is the usefulness of a long dark skirt in terms of evening wear.

Now, a couple of years ago, there was a fad for big flooffy (that’s a technical fashion term) ball gown skirts (which of course required big flooffy petticoats underneath them), to be worn with sweaters or even sweater sets. I think that lasted one winter season. It was, in it’s own way, a clever meshing of the casual with the formal and I think it attracted a lot of younger women at the time.

This is NOT the sort of skirt I am talking about. Big and flooffy does NOT compliment Aunt Toby. The last big and flooffy item I had probably dates from when I was in the 6th grade. Actually, the skirt that Ilse Lund wears in the cafe scene is pretty straight down but is not pegged – so it has quite a lot of walking space (which, as we all know, is where ‘the rubber meets the road’ when it comes to evening wear). Now, as everyone knows who comes here, I am very big on being prepared, whether you have in the closet a suit, the little dress, the garment bag all set up for out of town funerals or whatever, but I always get bolluxed up when it comes to the fancy evening out. This is a mine field. Long or short? Black dress or blazing colors? Nice pants and a fancy top? I have an absolute horror of ‘being the only one’ at a party wearing xxx’(must date from my childhood).

And considering how obviously, Ilse Lund was definitely ready to go with her long dark skirt, Aunt Toby has decided to make the investment to put something like that into the closet too. I have in the stash a big chunk of dark blue (not navy) polyester shantung and I’m looking at two patterns, one of which I own already and used to make the skirt for the MOTB suit I wore for Daughter The Younger’s wedding in Scotland a couple of years ago. Which is this:

The other one (and I know there are going to be some readers who will be saying to themselves about now, “mmm, those look almost exactly alike”) is this one:

I’m also sure some people would be saying to themselves, “Why isn’t she making this in black?” Well, it’s true that black would be the standard OP evening wear, but I happen to believe that dark blue is kinder, shall we say, to me than black is; in addition, I feel that there are plenty of other colors and prints that I can wear with it. Thirdly, black is an evening wear cliche and I’m sort of a rebel at heart. Not enough of a rebel to make this skirt forest green or burgundy (those are great colors but definitely limiting), but a bit of a rebel, nonetheless.

So, here we go and production details will follow.

I never forgot that. Later on, when I struggled with my own knitting, I realized that one of my biggest problems in terms of getting satisfaction from my knitting was that whenever I did anything that came in twos, I ended up with ones. Mittens, gloves, socks, sleeves. If it came in twos, I ran out of gas and entered Knitters ADD and ended up with one sock, one mitten, one glove and one sleeve. Oh, I’d also have the front and back done on the sweater, but one sleeve. Which meant that I ended up making a LOT of sweater vests and ripping down the one sleeve so that I had extras for hats, which of course only come in ones so I was safe with hats. But my kids and the DH got a lot of vests over the years.

Which made me feel rather unsuccessful with my knitting until I remembered Mrs. Iacovino (remind me sometime to tell you the story about a holiday party at her house which involved a ham left on the open oven door, a kitchen with a swinging door and a very very large white cat) and her trick with the mittens.

So, here’s my first tip: Finishing projects is Job One when it comes to gaining satisfaction with your knitting. It doesn’t matter if you do perfect gauge blocks, follow patterns to the nth degree or anything like that. If the item is not completed, you will not feel successful with your knitting. So. See the picture at the top? Those are the cuffs from two sleeves for a sweater for my grandson which are on one large circular needle (you don’t have to use circular needles, but it might help). I already did the body in one big strip that I am going to sew up on the side. When I get to the point on the sleeves at the underarm, I will stop, sew up the seam in the sleeves, and put the sleeves in the appropriate places on the big circular needle with the rest of the body (see Elizabeth Zimmerman Percentage System – just search on that one and there are a zillion hits on that). Then I will knit the rest of the sweater in one big piece, getting smaller as I go. At the end, I will have a whole sweater with two sleeves attached with a teeny bit of sewing at the armpits. No sweating, no guilt about one sleeve and no finished sweater. I recommend this method highly. It also will work for mittens, gloves (yes, there are two-needle glove patterns out there), and socks (ditto on the socks but you will have a seam up the back). And for those of us who don’t want to diddle around with knitting on 4 (or, if you following the European needles, 5) needles with the paralyzing worry about ‘do not twist the first stitch’, doing it this way is the answer to a knitter’s prayer.

Second Tip: For those folks out there who are diving into the whole vintage styles/clothing thing and are interested in vintage knits, you will notice (and everyone does – it’s the first thing that smacks you in the eye) that between the mid-30s and mid-50s, sweaters were rather, ahem, close fitting. There are several reasons for that. First, there were two sorts of sweaters at that time – sweaters that were worn right over an undershirt or slip like the knit tops we wear today and sweaters that were worn right over those or were worn over some sort of shirt or blouse. Central heating as we know it today was very different during that period which also coincided with not only the Great Depression but also the Second World War and ‘The New Look”. Shorter, fitted styles were not only in fashion but also took less yarn to knit up and therefore were more thrifty.

If you are going for a vintage look, you can find vintage and vintage style patterns but many times they are not designed for the bodies that people have today. Not only were people shorter and smaller in that period than we are today, they also were thinner primarily for two reasons: The Great Depression and the rationing during WWII. So, finding a vintage sweater pattern if your bust measures 40″+ at its widest point is a challenge. It’s easier to work with sweater patterns of today in lighter weight yarns and put in some features that give them that vintage look. The two biggest are shoulder pads (no biggie there; you can find shoulder pads to either Velcro(tm) attach or sew in) and shaping, particularly at the waist.

Now, there are multiple ways of making a sweater ‘suck in’ between the hips and the bust line:
1) Make the sweater actually smaller there by either putting in knitted darts or binding off a series of stitches at the edges on the front and back sides of the sweater as you knit the waist area. Of course, once you’ve done that and have knitted 3-6″ of waist area (depending on how tall you are and how long or short waisted your are), you have to put them back so that you have room for your bust and shoulder blades.
2) Make the fabric of the sweater smaller in that area by using a smaller size needle for the waist area and then switching back to a larger size needle. A good rule of thumb on that is using a needle 2-3 sizes smaller.
3) Make the fabric of the sweater ‘smaller’ in that area by using some crafty knitting stitches which suck the fabric in but which, when needed, will be flexible. The most common method of doing this is by using ribbing. And that is what is being demonstrated in that photo. The yarn which I used for this has a bit of alpaca in it, which is not the springiest yarn in the world. Which is another thing – certain yarns have more spring and elasticity to them – wool and wool blends are very good for this; alpaca, mohair, silk, linen, cotton, raimie, and hemp are not.

At the bottom of the swatch, I did garter stitch to show you just how wide 24 stitches on this needle are. The next bit is 2 knit/2 purl ribbing, which is a very popular ribbing scheme. See how you can see both the 2 purls and the 2 knits. They are on the same plane. And you can also see from the bending in at the edges that this sucks in the fabric a bit.

Then, I did some stocking stitch to separate this from the next ribbing scheme, which is frankly my favorite: 2 knits and 1 purl. You will see that you can’t see the purl in this ribbing the way you can with the 2 knit 2 purl (2K2P) ribbing, can you? That’s because it’s sucked down to the back side of the swatch. The reason for this is that every time you switch directions on the stitches (from the knit to the purl, you are flipping the yarn to the front or the back of the needle), this increases the tension in the knitting, which pulls it in. This is the same 24 stitches for the garter stitch, the 2K2P ribbing, and the 2K1P ribbing. In those 24 stitches, we get 6 changes of direction in the 2K2P ribbing and 8 changes of direction in the 2K1P ribbing, a 33% increase in changes of direction and therefore in tension in the knitting in the piece. I find 2K1P ribbing to be much more stretchy and elastic than 2K2P but also much more springy even after being stretched out. So, if I want to build in a vintage look to the waist of a sweater, I put in a panel of 2K1P into the waist area and then when I want to go back to regular stocking stitch once I get to area just below the bust, I just change to the stocking stitch. No decreasing the stitches, no increasing the stitches, just go back to stocking stitch.

Now, if you want to make this area fancier and get even MORE ‘suck in’ on it, you can build in cables. Rule of thumb on this one is this: The more ribs you put into the individual cable, the more ‘suck in’ you get. For example, a simple two-rib cable has less ‘suck in’ than a three or four rib cable and so on.

Don’t be afraid to do up swatches to see what the combinations of needs and your yarns do in terms of stocking stitch and then ribbing. This will give you a better idea of what the result will be. But it’s an easy and simple way to get a vintage look for your sweater and still have it be comfortable to wear.

UPDATE FOUR:
Sunday:
9:00 a.m., 71 Degrees F, 76% humidity, winds: 5-10 mph with gusts WNW, Barometric pressure 28.14. Raining hard. Lost power at 8:30. Wanted a second bucket of water for flushing…just in case. Ran around the outside of the house to find… one of the downspouts did not have an extension on it to take the water away from the foundation (not a good thing in general but good for the purpose of putting a bucket underneath it), so I put a five gallon bucket under it, which filled to the top in less than 5 minutes. Now, a downspout extension will go on the hardware store list NOW.

9:30 a.m, 71 degrees F., 75% humidity, winds 5-10 mph with gusts WNW, Barometric pressure 28.11. The DH and our son out in the garage finally able to get the generator to work. The choke needed adjustment. Lesson learned: Having a generator in a box ‘just in case’ is great until you have to use it and don’t know how to make the thing run. Note to self: Next time we have this sort of warning, let’s all not only clean things up, tie things down and get the animals inside, but also do the drill on systems such as a generator.
Regular utility power came on at 9:35. Lucky us.

10:00 a.m., 70 degrees F, 76% humidity, winds 13 mph with gusts WNW, Barometric pressure 28.11.

One of the things I’ve been keeping myself busy with this weekend is making some winter fleece clothes for my grandson. Our house is a lot cooler than his house and he spends a lot of time here with us, so I need to make sure we have plenty of snuggly clothing for him here, especially because he will be starting to walk this winter. I already finished a black set with a sailboat on it. Our son came up with this ‘Buck Rogers’ space ship design for an applique. I put this on by hand, with a buttonhole stitch, which worked out really well, considering we lost the power and I wouldn’t have been able to finish the front if I had been depending on my sewing machine. The zigzag power lines at the bottom are done with doubled up sewing thread, in a chain stitch.
LAST UPDATE:
7:30 p.m., 67 degrees F, 71% humidity, winds out of the SW at 2.9 mph, Barometric pressure: 28.50. Little bits of rain still around. We were lucky here; others in the county and nearby were not so lucky. Lots of flash flooding of the ‘usual suspects’ in terms of streams. Police were evacuating some roads in rural areas. About 50 miles from us, in the Catskill Mountains, a little village, Margaretville, was completely flooded and Governor Cuomo went down there. The water was up to the fenders in his SUV. Margaretville is in a valley which drains from the Hudson, Delaware and Susquehanna rivers so they have had more than their share of massive floods over the years. Everyone will have a big job cleaning up in the coming week. For the moment, though, we’re done here.