The Interior of My Brain: A Knitting and Fiber Arts Blog

If you have read this blog in the past, you probably know that I have a love for color. But I’m also very attracted to cables and texture knitted in undyed, natural yarn. I have also talked a lot about my late-life goal of knitting my stash before I die, so I try to knit from stash, and when I do buy new yarn, I have a specific plan in mind for it. I feel bad about myself if I don’t knit it within a year of buying it, and a year ago I bought yarn at the Maryland Sheep and Wool festival to knit Anna and Heidi Pickles’ XOXO Sweater, a yoked sweater with a million big bobbles, puffy cables, leaf shapes, and traveling stitches crossing over each other. The yarn I bought was undyed mohair farm yarn from a local producer, Flying Goat Farm, to be held double with alpaca yarn that was almost the same color as the goat yarn. I think I’ve met those goats. The yarn still smells like them, faintly, which actually is kind of pleasant and very exciting to my sisters’ dogs. My failure to have knitted the yarn nagged at me until I started it almost exactly a year after I bought the yarn and well over a year since buying the pattern.

I was very determined to correct that failure, so I swatched it during the January 2024 Swatchathon and cast on as soon as I had finally dispatched another longterm millstone around my neck, Old Weird Barbie. The pattern was translated into English from Norwegian, and while I deeply appreciate the difficulty of communicating in a non-native language and designers’ willingness to make the effort, I’m not great at understanding patterns under any circumstances. The good thing was that there wasn’t very much text in the pattern, and the instructions were mostly pictorial, on charts. But the charts were blurry and used non-standard symbols. Also the explanations for the cables worked so hard to avoid cable needles that they called for contortions that seemed physically impossible.

I don’t like to admit this, because I like to think that I’m a clever and resourceful knitter who can sort out her own problems, but I misread the chart so badly at the climax row at the widest part of the shoulders, where the cabled X’s form a diamond shaped cage around the bobbled O’s, that I couldn’t ladder my way down to correct the problem. I couldn’t even figure out what the problem was. I handed my knitting over to Melissa and she started tinking. It’s never good when she says, “What exactly did you do to put in these increases and cross these stitches???” And it’s worse when I can’t tell her. Then she said, “let me take this home to sort it out, and I’ll give it back to you in the morning.” And worst of all was admitting that I was so defeated that if I didn’t accept her help, I might have to abandon the project and admit total defeat.

Honestly, I’m still shaken up about not having been able to figure out where I went wrong and to find the fortitude to frog back the problem rows and take a fresh go at them when I was thinking more clearly. I’ve done that plenty of times in my years and years of knitting, and it isn’t and shouldn’t be a big deal. But Melissa understands patterns for a living, and I have my own idiot savant way of thinking that erects barriers to understanding other people’s way of thinking. Melissa figures out everyone’s patterns, but I’m a conceited snob who thinks she’s better than everyone, and I didn’t want to take the role of the sweet dotty older ladies with limited bandwidth who Melissa promises me I won’t be in 15 years. But Melissa showed up at my door 15 hours later for coffee, as is our Friday morning ritual, and handed my knitting back to me with the three problem rows perfectly knitted and the last row in the sequence also knitted as a bonus. It had taken me a week to knit those three rows all wrong, and she knitted the four rows in an hour or two, perfectly. She succeeded where I had failed because she did common sense things that aren’t new concepts for me, but I didn’t do them this time: marking off the pattern repeats with stitch markers to keep track of the increases, and disregarding the instructions for making the cables if they didn’t make sense, and they didn’t, and using cable needles when needed and cableless methods that actually work. She’s also a much faster knitter than I am. It was a humbling experience, but I had it coming. It doesn’t necessarily mean I’m losing my cognitive abilities. I hope.

Now that Melissa had gotten me back on track, I could knit onward down the yoke chart through the cables and leaves. At this point, I was well past my shoulders with a lot of chart yet to knit, and my armpits were a long-ago landmark as the yoke marched on into my torso and toward my elbows. I decided I’d better abbreviate the leaves and the last of the cables while I still had the chance, so I cut out four rows in the tapering of the leaf shapes, making the yoke about an inch shorter than it would have been if I had continued the chart as written. Finally I got down to the sleeve-body divide, and I suspect that I might have been off by half a pattern repeat when I divided the stitches for the armpits, because there’s a peculiar pair of detached V’s at the armpit that I think were supposed to have been X’s in the ideal world. Once I got past the final X-crossing in the body, I disregarded the pattern’s instructions for the length of the final stretch and the length of the ribbing and abbreviated that part too. The sweater was quite oversized, as I prefer my clothing to be, but if it was also overly long, it would look as if it was eating me alive.

Regarding the pattern and its sizing, and the decisions I made to get the fit I wanted, the Pickles provided information for only two sizes, and they put a slim model into their sample for the larger size. She did indeed look as if she was being eaten alive, a fate I wanted to avoid, although I am shorter and wider than the model. I also was pretty sure I wasn’t narrow enough to get the fit I wanted in the smaller size, so I chose to knit the larger size with a slightly smaller gauge than the pattern called for, making the modifications I mentioned. As a last-minute feature just before the ribbing, the pattern put in short rows to lengthen the back and prevent it from riding up. It works, it’s very simple to do, and I think I’ll adapt this idea to machine knitting, especially when I’m knitting for my husband. I also like the pattern’s final bind-off edging of the cuffs and hem, which is to end the ribbing with a purl row and then cast off in knit. Just before the start of the ribbing, the chart said to do a great many decreases to make a transition from the texture patterning in the body to the 1X1 ribbing, but it seemed like such a lot of decreases that it would produce an enormous pouf at the hips, and might not even fit around the hips. I disregarded those instructions. That poufy ribbing that we all did back in the ’80’s and earlier looks very dated to me, and very unflattering. But I did go down a couple of needle sizes for the hem ribbing.

I finished the sweater on the last day of my recent visit to my younger daughter in Madison, Wisconsin. I felt a lot of time pressure to get it done there so that I could do a selfie photo shoot in the woods near her house because it’s a nice wild-looking backdrop, and also because it was a week into June and modeling such a heavy and warm sweater during a climate-change summer in Baltimore is not a pleasant prospect. I got the ends tucked out of the way as early as I could that morning and went up into the park in search of the gnarly roots and trunks and branches and vines that were very close to the undyed color of the mohair and alpaca I combined to knit the sweater. Too bad that I was remembering the park when we were there in late October and late March, after the leaves fell and before they had reappeared in spring, and this was June when everything was covered in bright green leaves.

I came to the park alone and without a tripod, searching all over for that magic place where I could safely prop up my phone while it faced a nice brown and gnarly background where I could stand at the one angle that flatters me, without tripping over a root and rolling down a bumpy mountain bike trail. I had a couple of kitten-in-a-tree, now-what situations at the top of mountain bike trails before I realized that my continued intactness was a matter of luck that I needed to stop pushing immediately. So I stopped looking for that magic place and had to settle for leafy backgrounds and strange angles and one or two shots in which I looked like a geriatric wood sprite, but at least I got out of there without broken bones, head injury, or internal bleeding. When I got back to Baltimore, I still had to do a selfie shoot on the front porch, which wasn’t as interesting but didn’t risk bodily injury.

And back on the front porch on flat terrain.