January 2024 Swatchathon

Last year’s January Swatchathon, my annual month dedicated to making swatches and trying new techniques, was a particularly productive one for numbers of swatches and new techniques attempted. But in terms of completed garments based on the swatches, it was a bit of a bust. I was overly ambitious. When I first started dedicating my Januaries to swatching and experimenting, the point was just to try things out and see what new things I liked enough to do again. It was a theoretical exercise, and whether I actually did anything with the things I tried was secondary to the information I gained. But I did a lot with that information, and it became part of the fun at the end of the year to look at the projects I had finished and relate them to what I was trying out during the previous January. But in November and December when I was starting to think about the 2024 Swatchathon, I looked at the swatches for things I had fully intended to make and hadn’t, and I decided to scale back the swatching this year and try to restrict it to things that I’m very motivated to make as finished projects.

I got what I thought was a late start on my swatching because I decided in late December to knit my older daughter a bonus sweater, after her birthday sweater, when she told me that it was in single digits Fahrenheit where she was, and she was freezing, while I was luxuriating in my very warmest sweater made of Re:treat bulky roving from West Yorkshire Spinners. I had just seen a very simple, very cute pattern that looked as if it would knit up in record time. The pattern, Fika Jumper, was knitted top-down in a 1×1 stranded yoke of different colors of super bulky yarn on enormous needles, and Melissa had the yarn I wanted at the store, Re:treat super chunky roving. I had been eyeing the yarn all autumn long, but I didn’t have a project for it, and my stash is such that I avoid buying new yarn unless I have a specific project in mind for it. In late December, a lot of the colors Melissa originally had were no longer there, so I chose a brick red for the main color, and orange, yellow, lavender gray, and French blue as the contrast colors. I bought the amount of yarn the pattern called for and the biggest needles Melissa had in stock, which were a size smaller than the pattern specified.

My gauge was slightly smaller than the pattern’s, so I used the numbers for the next size larger than my daughter’s measurements. I wasn’t exact in following the color sequence the pattern specified, because I got confused by which color was A, B, C, D, and E, but it really didn’t matter. The enormous needles were awkward to knit with, and at first I didn’t have enough stitches to knit comfortably, but the yoke increases were very quick, an increase every three stitches every four rows, so soon I had enough stitches to knit comfortably. Then I had too many stitches to fit on the needle, so I got another needle and used them both. It took only hours to get to the bottom of the yoke, where I followed the numbers to divide the stitches for the sleeves and body. After a few rows/a couple of inches into the body, I decided it wouldn’t have the ease I wanted, so I frogged back and added a couple of stitches at each armpit, which gave about three additional inches to the circumference. I lost a day of knitting in the frogging, but I still finished the sweater in six days, even though I added several inches to the body and arm length and improvised patterning at the cuffs and hem that is not included in the pattern. By the time I got to the patterning at the bottom of the sweater, I decided that I hadn’t delayed my January swatching by taking a detour to this pattern, and in fact had gotten a jump on the swatching, because this sweater was serving as a swatch for ideas that I can apply in other contexts.

The first applicable idea was the round yoke that is the same front and back and increases a stitch every three stitches, with an increase round every four rows. The second applicable idea was the design possibilities for 1×1 stranded color alternations that shade and contrast the colors. The third applicable idea is how fast and fun it is to knit with huge yarn on enormous needles. But the most immediately applicable idea was to use the leftover yarn to make a Fika Jumper for my younger daughter right away and get it into the mail to her in time for the sub-zero Fahrenheit weather that was in the forecast. I didn’t have enough of any one color for the plain knitting in the body and sleeves, so I bought another skein of the blue. I was pretty sure I was going to have to optimize the yarn I had (a fancy engineering term for winning at yarn chicken), so I planned to use my three accent colors, the yellow, orange, and lavender in stranded rows every four rows in the body and sleeves so that I would have enough of the blue to get down to the red for the bottom ribbing. I knew I was going to be cutting it pretty thin, because the amount of yarn I had left was almost exactly the weight of the first sweater.

This second time I just ignored the color sequence specified in the pattern and went for bands of high contrast 1×1 color alternations interrupting wider bands of 1×1 color alternations in the colors of equal value. The effect was color blends like a sunset. Sunsets are always a good look. I had the benefit of recent experience making a very similar sweater to speed me along, but my method of optimization added a day, since I didn’t do the math. If I had done the math, it still would have added a day, because then I would have had to relearn the math and stumble my way through the calculations experientially by discovering that my calculations were wrong and I was still losing at yarn chicken. So I cut to the chase with the experiential optimization when I got to the sleeves.

I knitted the first sleeve down pretty deep into the arm in orange and yellow, which I had plenty of, then blended in the blue, which I had very little of, and knitted it until I ran out. Then I took the needle out of the first sleeve and knitted the second sleeve with the same sequencing of yellow and orange, and knitted the blue parts in the second sleeve by unraveling the yarn of the first sleeve until both sleeves were even. I finished both sleeves with the yarn I had left, although I ran out of red and didn’t have enough for the bottom of the second cuff, so I repeated my optimization procedure to knit the second cuff, and finished both cuffs with a row of yellow. Then I rushed to package this second sweater to get it to my younger daughter in time for her to take it with her on a snowshoeing trip to Lake Superior.

This is what remains of the yarn:

Meanwhile, the first sweater got to my older daughter. She unpacked it as soon as she got the package in her hands and immediately sent me this bathroom selfie:

As for the second sweater, I watched the tracking obsessively and rejoiced when it was out for delivery a day ahead of schedule. And then the tracking stopped and my daughter didn’t have her sweater. I fretted for a couple of days, and then I called the local post office. They were very nice, but they couldn’t locate the package, and the mail carrier couldn’t remember what they might have done with it. They told me to file a claim and maybe I’d get $100 back for it. $100 would barely cover the materials and get nowhere near the actual value of this one-of-a-kind labor of love. For a couple of weeks I felt too ill over the thought of this wonderful gift lost or in the wrong hands, to bring myself to file the paperwork, and then I felt too physically ill to do it because I caught my first case of covid, a mild case, but I wasn’t up to a soul-sapping effort.

In the couple of weeks between mailing the second sweater and contracting covid, I swatched productively. When I cleaned the fluff out of my knitting machine’s brain so that it would read patterns correctly again (can someone please do the same for my literal brain?), I programmed a knit-purl Stitchworld pattern for two-color stranding, and I started thinking about making a sweater using that pattern in a pullover with positive-negative panels, connected at the front and back with a visible seam. I chose two skeins of Wollmeise lace, one a greenish light gray and the other a tonal medium-dark grayed blue. I made two swatches of equal size, one with the gray dominating and the other with the blue dominating, and put one on top of the other on the machine to pick up stitches for a visible seam in a multi of vivid blue and dark gray. I pondered various ways to make the sleeves that would continue the positive-negative idea.

Then someone on a machine-knitting group on Facebook started showing dresses she was making with a sideways construction, knitted in a Stitchworld pattern of slipped-stitch waves, oriented vertically. That made me stop thinking about the idea of juggling the positive-negative theme for sleeves in stranded knitting. I found a fingering weight skein of Wollmeise in a blue that was compatible with the colors in my positive-negative swatch, learned which levers to press for slipped-stitch knitting, and in a few minutes I magically had a really good-looking swatch. I decided that the sleeve would be a simple unshaped tube knitted side-to-side for vertically oriented waves, with a horizontally-oriented cuff knitted in the same wave pattern and sewn to the bottom edge of the sleeve, which would be 3/4 length. So I have a plan for the next machine-knit sweater that I’m going to knit after I get my current project off the machine.

Next on the machine, I did another quick and easy stranded treatment of a knit-purl Stitchworld pattern, a checkerboard. I used random bits of fraying yarn just to see how the pattern looked, and the random bits looked surprisingly good together. I wish the rectangles were about two rows shorter in each half of the pre-programmed pattern to make them squares. There is probably a way to program in modifications, but that’s more advanced than where I am now. I can live with the pattern as it is, but I think that if I get serious about turning it into a garment for myself, I will swatch again at a looser tension to see if I can get the positive ease that I like without having to knit in panels or side-to-side as a design feature.

My daily knitting routine is to do my machine knitting for a couple of hours in the afternoon upstairs in what used to be our daughters’ room, and hand knit in the evenings downstairs on the couch. So while I was making machine-knit swatches, I was also making hand-knit swatches. The first one (after the big wearable swatches that I mailed to each daughter) was for a version of the Robinia sweater that I knitted for my younger daughter a year or so ago. This time I used bulky yarn from ancient stash. For the purposes of experimenting with the colors and seeing what gauge I got with the chunky yarn and U.S. size 9 needles, I cut back the number of plain rows that the pattern calls for. My gauge was larger than the pattern’s and will require me to recalculate the numbers and reduce the number of plain rows in the color sequences. I might need to cut back the number of color sequences from seven to six, which is fine, because I don’t think that the white and purple sequence really belongs with the other colors.

The Robinia pattern has a very cool and sneaky trick for looking as if there isn’t any shaping in the knitting but fitting as if it does have shaping. The trick is that each color sequence between the shoulder and the bottom of the sleeve has a set of short rows that is almost invisible. Unfortunately, the pattern doesn’t have a schematic that would make this immediately understandable, so following the pattern is surprisingly complicated. You have to wade through a long mass of written abbreviations to glean this simple concept that could have been clarified at a single glance if the pattern had had a schematic drawing. That seems to annoy me more than it annoyed the hundreds of other knitters who have knitted Robinia, but that’s me. Now that I have decoded the trick, I can apply the concept to my own needs. But this is a swatch that might not result in a sweater during the year, although it will knit up fast. The next five swatches are higher priorities.

The next pair of swatches are for a sweater I’m fully committed to knitting as soon as I’m done with my current hand-knitting project. The reason for my commitment is that I bought the yarn at last year’s Maryland Sheep and Wool festival specifically to make a sweater full of bobbles, cables, and texture patterns. My days of buying yarn just because it’s pretty resulted in a stash that’s three or four times more than I can knit up before I die, SABLE (stash acquisition beyond life expectancy) x 3 or 4, in knitter jargon. It’s a real thing. I have some very nice garments made of the yarn from dead knitters. The pattern I had in mind is Anna and Heidi Pickles xoxo sweater/xoxogenser, which I wouldn’t ever have noticed if it wasn’t for a particularly nice version by a German knitter who made it shorter and wider than it appears in the pattern page. The numbers and gauge will be very important in order to get the shape I want. The yarn I got comes from a local farm, Flying Goat Farm, spun from the fleece of goats I met a couple of years ago during an excursion with Melissa. In fact, it still smelled like the goats until I rewashed the yarn to get the farmyard out of my nose. I’m holding it double with undyed alpaca yarn that is close to the same color as the goat yarn.

I swatched the chart for the motifs on the yoke, using U.S. size 11 needles that were a bit larger than the needles specified in the pattern. I got gauge, but I didn’t like the flabbiness of the fabric, so I tried again on the next-smaller needles I have, U.S. size 10.5, slightly smaller than the specified needle size, which isn’t easily available in the United States. I liked that fabric better. My gauge is slightly smaller than the pattern calls for, but I did the math for the larger size’s numbers, and I should get the size I want.

I had an idea that embellishing the texture in colorful embroidery might add an attractive folkloric design element. It ended up looking like graffiti, not in the good way. I might embroider the outline of the leaves in dark, undyed alpaca yarn, because that’s the only embroidery that I like on the swatch. That’s the point of swatches. Now I know what not to do.

The next swatch is for a Junko Okomato pattern, Ogawa, that I fell in love with a year ago. I bought the pattern almost as soon as it came out but never had time to make it. It’s a simple sweatshirt shape in sideways crocheted ribbing, not one of Junko’s more popular patterns, but I wish I had already made it every time I feel chilly. I crocheted my swatch using three strands of leftover alpaca yarn in my stash, and I’ll swap out a strand at a time in a different undyed color to get vertical gradient stripes. The gauge of my swatch is slightly larger than Junko’s, so I will factor that into the pattern size that I choose. I might use the leftover goat yarn in my yarn mixture, so this sweater will be next in the queue after the cabled and bobbled sweater. I really want to have this sweater by next fall. As for following Junko’s instructions for the stitches, Junko is much more a knitter than a crocheter, and English isn’t her native language. Her terminology was her own idiosyncratic description of the way the stitches are formed rather than standard U.S. or UK terminology. I know how to crochet ribbed ridges, so I crocheted ribbed ridges and ignored her instructions.

I was still trying out machine-knitting settings during my daily machine knitting time, but they were not quick and easy things. I tried out some of the knit-weave patterns, but I think there’s something wrong with the machine and was causing it to skip stitches, resulting in an unreadable mess. Could it be the plastic wheel from the under side of the knit carriage that fell off when its screw fell off and dematerialized? After a couple of failures, I decided to move on because I wasn’t that committed to knit-weave. What I moved on to was entrelac, after a phase of non-stop entrelac a couple of years ago that resulted in my readiness to purge entrelac from my mind. That meant I had to take some days to relearn entrelac, because what I wanted to do this time wasn’t in the instructions I used last go-round.

My plan for this machine-knit entrelac project is to use thin undyed cotton thread that I inherited from a weaver, to make a summer top with a deconstructed look, a wide, short rectangle with rolling zigzag edges and dropped shoulders. In the course of flailing about with the mechanics of getting this going on the machine, it occurred to me that the slipped-stitch pattern I had tried out earlier would be a nice design element and not that hard to do. I had a thought that I wanted a zigzag edge for the dropped shoulders, but the swatch showed me that the geometry of entrelac makes it impossible for the edges of the two sides to mirror each other. I’ll have to relearn making triangles with straight edges when I make the garment. I laddered the squares of the top row to see if the tops of the squares would fold over and make a nice zigzag neck treatment. It might work.

Then I got covid, and that was the end of my machine knitting for a while. Machine knitting is more physically and mentally strenuous than hand knitting or crochet, and it was freezing cold in the room where my machine is. I retreated to the living room couch to sit on the heating pad and knit, and nap when sleepiness overtook me. Like about a million other knitters, I had been instantly infatuated with the Fibonacci op art checkerboard of the Fortuna’s Wheel pattern in the final print edition of Pom Pom magazine, and I had bought a huge amount of green yarn from Melissa, enough for both the sweater and the pants. The yarn is sitting in a big bag next to my couch, so I am committed to knitting it, no matter how much of a cliché the pattern turns into because of all the other knitters with the same infatuation. The pattern looks like a complicated headache to decode, as is often the case with Pom Pom patterns, and I expect that among the millions of infatuated knitters who bought the pattern and yarn, in the end the number of completed projects will whittle itself down to dozens. The Fibonacci checkerboard is an enjoyable knit because the logic of the numbers is so simple and mathematically elegant, so I got that swatch done while I was still too sick and tired to get out of pajamas. My swatch, knitted on U.S. size 7 needles, is slightly larger than the pattern’s, so I can use a size that is printed in the magazine rather than go through the rigamarole of typing in a passcode to access the charts online.

The final set of swatches for this year’s Swatchathon are gauge and color swatches for the Mercerie’s Tessellation Nation crocheted blanket course that I’m participating in. It’s a pilot course for a new design by Sue Maton that is based on the awkward geometric characteristics of pentagons, which initially seem to tessellate in a well-behaved fashion but then go off in weird directions unless you connect the ever-expanding gaps between the various pentagon shapes, using stars, diamonds, and boats. Sue’s courses are practical explorations of color theory, with an initial series of videos demonstrating exercises that use paints to make color swatches and provide guidance for moving around the painted swatches to create “color stories” that will unlock the artistic vision of people who think they lack artistic vision. The videos are beautiful to look at, but the one thing I bring to the party is vision. Don’t envy me for having the ability to visualize unless you’re prepared to pity me for my inability to understand and follow step-by-step instructions based on someone else’s thought process. Vision is the one thing left in the Pandora’s box of all the things I can’t do. As soon as I saw Sue’s gorgeous prototype blanket, I instantaneously envisioned the color families I wanted to juxtapose and ways to blur the borders and surprise the eye and mind. Anyway, I was sick and didn’t have the energy to do painted exercises with paint I didn’t have.

But I did have the energy to make the gauge and color swatches for the motifs that Sue charted as an exercise to test colors and yarns for the sizes needed to make the interlocking motifs fit together. I got gauge the first time out, and I love my colors. I also learned Sue’s way to finish rounds invisibly and how to weave in ends so that they don’t poke out, which I had never found a good way to do on my own.

After four days of sitting on the heating pad on the couch in my pajamas, my phone started sending me rude messages that there was a downward trend in my activity level, as if I hadn’t noticed. So I took a shower and got dressed, and found the fortitude to submit a post office inquiry about what the heck happened to my daughter’s sweater. Then Charles and I went out and took a walk around the block for the first time since he contracted the covid that he kindly passed on to me. The Madison post office sent me an automated acknowledgment of my inquiry request, but the stated deadline for an actual response came and went with no response. But at the very time when our daughter was supposed to have picked us up at the bus stop for the visit that covid cancelled, I got a jubilant text: “it came!” Then this photo:

Apparently the sweater had been dropped off at the mail room of another property owned by my daughter’s landlord, and it had been sitting there until the property manager emailed her to tell her that the package had been sitting there for three weeks. My compensation for the duress I suffered was her telling me repeatedly how perfectly the neck fit her, and she couldn’t wait to get home from work so that she could put the sweater on, and that she’d had no idea how much she needed this sweater. Isn’t that why anyone knits for anyone else?

January 2024 Swatchathon Class Picture

Not to forget the class members who graduated early.

January 2023 Swatchathon: Where are they now?

Now that I’m looking at the 2023 class picture, it wasn’t really as abundant as I remember, but it was also more actionable than I thought when I started writing this summary of the 2024 Swatchathon. True, I’m probably never going to crochet the jacket using the technique I used for the mittens, but I wear the mittens every day in the winter. The crocheted eye granny square has become a cliché and I have moved on. The stacked stitch swatch at the bottom of the picture will probably never be knitted as a sweater, because the fact is, I just don’t really enjoy knitting stacked stitch patterns.

But I wear the sweater from the cabled swatch all the time.

The machine-knit 1×1 and 2×2 vertical striped swatches turned into a series of socks and another version of Junko Okamoto’s Kurt, and I’m using the 2×2 vertical stripes in my current machine knitting project.

The machine-knit intarsia swatches were especially actionable, although not in the form of a million tiny diamonds. Yet. And that modest little striped gauge swatch was my gateway to a still-continuing series of garments using Uneek cotton.

The other actionable swatches are the pink roosimine-woven art yarn and the stranded improvised circles with embroidered bullions, which have turned into the monster I have on the needles right now. That’s a yoke of 930 stitches of unrelieved stockinette for a massive yoke that goes down to my ribcage, whose increases were based on what I learned from the Fika Jumper sister sweater. This is what I knitted on my covid vacation.

I have goals and intentions for every January Swatchathon, but a lot can happen or not happen in the months that follow. The next January always brings surprises when I reassess which ideas from the previous Swatchathon sprouted roots and grew into something. It’s never exactly what I thought it would be, and I expect that will be the case when I write the January 2025 Swatchathon post.