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Friday, January 13, 2012

Eek! A steek!

This week, I cut my first steek. Well, sort of.

A year and a half ago, I went to the Nordic Knitting Conference and took a class with Danish designer and fabu knitter Ruth Sorensen. While there, I mentioned in passing that I had never cut a steek. She grabbed one of her projects, forced the scissors in my hand and had no mercy. But in a kind way.

But, that was her knitting. This is mine. In September, I cast on a lovely little kid cardigan by Mary Scott Huff called the Bee's Knees. It is in her book The New Stranded Colorwork. I knit it up rather quickly, but it is a steeked cardigan. The concept behind it is, one knits a long tube of fabric using multiple strands of yarn in multiple colors in order to get a colored pattern of some kind. Patterning is much easier if one is always knitting it looking at the right side of the work - not turning and purling on the wrong side. When one turns the work, it is much easier to get the patterning wrong, or twist the different colors around each other in the opposite direction from the right side of the work. All that can effect the finished product.

The downside to knitting a huge tube of fabric is, when you knit all the way to the shoulder height and cast off (or reserve stitches for a three-needle shoulder bind-off), you then have to cut up the front for the cardigan opening, cut down the sides to insert the sleeves, and cut a shallow opening for the front of the neck.

Yeah, I know.

Well, I've done my first real steek now. I called my hubby down and he documented it for me. In the middle of the video, the sound diminishes for around 20 seconds, but it comes back.

(Sigh. The video will not load. I will try to upload it on another post.)

Even though I am now a steek graduate, of sorts, I still haven't cut the armhole steeks and the arm steeks. That was another cool thing in this pattern: Mary had us knit both sleeves at the same time with 8 waste stitches between the two. That way, all the patterning and stranding is done at once. When done, one secures the stitches with machine stitching, and cuts the sleeve tube into two sleeves.

I hope to do it today.

2 comments:

Barbara said...

I saw a video - I think on the Sat am knitting show - about steeking. It looked so scary I could barely watch. Hope your video loads and that you can stop by sometime with the sweater. Were you hyperventilating where the sound diminishes?

Barbara said...
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