Y2K Called, It Wants Its Duster Back

I have a second knitting machine that lives at my daughter’s house in Wisconsin, a plastic mid-gauge LK150 with different capabilities than my electronic standard gauge KH965i that lives upstairs in my daughters’ childhood bedroom. I was thrilled to discover that the yarn feeder on the regular, standard knitting carriage of the LK150 was equipped for plating as a built-in feature. Plating is a way of knitting two different yarns together, with one yarn in one feeder slot and the other in a second feeder slot, and the yarn in the number 1 slot mostly shows up on the stockinette side of the fabric and the yarn in the 2 slot predominates on the purl side, with a bit of bleed-through of the subordinate yarn on either side, although apparently the subordinate yarn isn’t supposed to bleed through. But I like the effect. The design possibilities began filling my head.

Since both sides could serve as the public-facing side, I began thinking of garments that could feature the purl side as well as the stockinette side. I also thought about designs that gave equal prominence to each color. I also thought about my stash, which is full of Wollmeise lace in solids and multis, some of which sing like angels in heaven, and of some of which make other kinds of sounds, metaphorically speaking. So I looked for yarn in the latter category, because the ugly ducklings inspire my imagination more than the cherished pretties. Because of the bleed-through, I was looking for combinations that wouldn’t muddy each other, unless that was the effect I wanted. So I chose two colors that were already muddy. At first I wanted to use a Dijon mustard color with gray, but the gray yarn wasn’t in good condition, so I paired it with a Wollmeise multi in dark brownish red and a muted mid-green, with the descriptive colorway name Rhabarber (rhubarb).

A very helpful video on a website called picturehealer.com showed me the basics of the plating operation, which boil down to putting the stockinette-side-facing yarn through the yarn mast on the left and into the number 1 slot, which is the main feeder slot located in the center of the feeder, and the purl-side-facing yarn through the yarn mast on the right and into the number 2 slot off to the right of the main feeder slot. I read somewhere that the tension dial should be the number you would choose for a yarn the total thickness of the two yarns. My two Wollmeise lace yarns equated to a DK weight yarn, so I used tension 5. I think I could have gone down a click to T4.1, since my fabric seemed a bit loose, but I decided to not risk the problems that come with too tight a tension, so I stayed with T5 for my first foray into plated knitting on the LK150.

By the time I got to the point of threading actual physical yarn through my actual physical LK150 that is installed on the far side of my daughter’s kitchen island, of course I had a design in mind. The plan was for a loose-fitting coat/jacket/cardigan with two panels in the back , 16 inches each, connected after the knitting with a visible crocheted seam, dropped shoulders, and a wide shawl collar panel on the two fronts, which would be 16 inches wide plus 8 inches for the shawl collar overlap. That would allow the purl side to show when the cardigan was open. I would reverse the dominance of the two colors in an irregular sequence that would be followed in reverse for each piece. And of course pockets. I ran across a brilliantly simple method of knitting pockets into a piece of machine knitting whereby you just select the needles for the desired width of the pocket and put everything else into hold, then knit until you have a strip of knitting that is twice as long as the desired depth of the pocket, at which point you put all the needles back into work and proceed along your merry way with the rest of the piece. This leaves you with a loop of knitted fabric whose sides are subsequently seamed together to make a sack dangling on the inside of the garment.

I calculated my numbers based on the swatch I knitted at T5. I’ve been knitting with Wollmeise for a long time, and have learned that gauge swatches are not fully informative. They’re pretty accurate as long as the garment is 300g or less, but heavier weights will stretch the yarn and it will grow in all directions, but especially lengthwise, when it’s washed and the superwash processing relaxes. It’s possible to get a more accurate swatch by hanging it to dry with weights hanging from the edge, but I’ve never done that. My strategy is to wash my swatch and dry it flat, and calculate the minimum acceptable measurements for my garment according to the stitch and row gauge I get from the washed and dried unstretched swatch. I assume I’ll get several more inches in width and length after the finished garment is washed and blocked, but if that doesn’t happen, the smaller pre-blocking size will be wearable, and if it’s excessively big, it will shrink back to human proportions if I throw it in the drier for a while. This isn’t at all scientific, but fitted garments make me feel claustrophobic, so my sloppy methods work for me.

The gauge I got came to 4.25 stitches per inch widthwise and 7.5 stitches rows per inch lengthwise. The cast-on for the 16″ back panels would be 68 stitches each, and the 24″ front panels would require 102 stitches each. The minimum acceptable length from nape of the neck to hem was 26″, which came to 190 rows at the longest point of the shoulder sloping. The neck would be 17 stitches on either side, leaving 51 stitches for the shoulder sloping, consisting of 9 short row back-and-forths of 5 stitches each and the final one of 6 stitches, for a total of 20 rows, starting at row 170. The front would have the same shoulder sloping sequence over 51 stitches, but the remaining 51 stitches would be knitted upward for 30 rows to fit the 17 stitches of the back of the neck, attached after the knitting with a seam. The pockets would be started at row 74, 23 stitches from the seam edge, 22 stitches wide, for 88 rows. As I worked, I figured out the sequence of my color reversals: 50 rows for the first sequence, 20 for the second, 10 for the third, 60 for the fourth, and a fifth and final color reversal for the rest of the piece.

It might sound as if I had worked out all these numbers before I cast on, but actually the only numbers I knew ahead of time was how many stitches to cast on and how many rows I needed for the length. I worked out the other numbers as I got closer to where I needed them. Since this was the first time I was using this technique and was unfamiliar with how the fabric would behave, I made a number of decisions that played it safe but added weeks to the time it took to assemble the garment. The first decision was the hem, which was 10 rows in only one yarn, then added the second yarn at the fold line, but I didn’t close the hem by lifting the cast-on stitches onto the needles of the corresponding stitches on the 10th row of the plated fabric and knitting them together. Doing that by hand took hours, spread out over days.

Also I knitted each of the four pieces separately instead of modularly in panels, by looping the edge stitch of the already-knitted piece to the end needle of the knitting in progress to connect the pieces without seaming them together. That would have made it easy to align the color changes while I knitted the new piece and spared me a couple of weeks of tedious and meticulous mattress stitching to get the color changes to align precisely. I didn’t do that on the side seams because I hadn’t decided where the sleeves would fit in, and I didn’t do it for the back panels because I wanted to join them with a decorative crocheted seam. That also took much longer than I expected because my stitches wanted to lump up and look sloppy. In the future, I will streamline the construction of such garments with modular joins, and if I want a decorative crocheted join line, I’ll add it afterward, on top of the join.

Somewhere in the knitting of the second panel of the back, I began to realize that plating was eating up the yarn I had on hand at a much faster rate than I was expecting. This was good, because my life goal is to use up my Wollmeise lace before I die, and plating a garment like this used up two 300 g skeins in a few days, but also not good because I didn’t want my knitting falling off the machine in the middle of a row because I ran out of yarn while I was away from my stash. I weighed my knitted pieces and what remained of the yarn in the cakes and determined that I could knit the backs and the fronts up to the throat with what I had on hand, but I was going to have to go home to my stash to figure out a solution for the sleeves. As for the 30 rows for the back of the shawl collar, it was possible that I could win at yarn chicken, but it was possible I could lose, so I put those stitches on waste yarn and put the project on hold until I could get home to my stash and Melissa’s bulky machine at the shop.

I decided to switch my yarn to Wollmeise DK for the sleeves and the back of the neck because the doubled lace yarn roughly equated to DK in weight. My standard gauge machine doesn’t like knitting Wollmeise DK, so I was going to have to move my operations to Melissa’s shop to finish the knitting of this garment. Besides, my machine has been kind of inaccessible since we got home from Wisconsin because we have been occupied with a major project to make that bedroom and our spare bedroom habitable for human guests. It has been a serious disruption to our normal activities, but there will be some interesting projects resulting from this endeavor that I’ll blog about someday when they’re closer to finished. Anyway, back at the ranch and my Wollmeise DK stash, I chose five colors for striped sleeves and the remainder of the shawl collar. I decided on bright versions of the muted colors of the lace yarns, including neon orange and lime, as well as a plum purple, an autumnal orange/red multi, and a black and white multi. Then I settled in for a long slog of finishing.

Writing about boredom is boring reading material. The remainder of the machine knitting was the least of the task, since I had my numbers to finish the shawl collar. I waited to knit the sleeves, because I needed to find out where the dropped shoulders would fall on my arm so that I could get the right length for the sleeves. That meant doing all the seaming first. I like seaming, but this wasn’t quick and easy seaming because the color alternations needed to align precisely and the double-sided fabric made it hard to find the corresponding stitch on each side of the seam for even, aligned mattress stitching. The hems wanted to lurch to the side if I didn’t exercise extreme diligence. Everything buckled and ruffled, and I just had to hope really, really hard that it would come out ok in the blocking.

After I had assembled the body, I did the numbers for the sleeves. I measured 13.5″ from the edge of the shoulder to the middle of my hand, plus three inches for a folded hem, and a maximum width of 14.5″. My gauge for the DK weight yarn at T4.2 on Melissa’s bulky machine was 4.5 stitches per inch and 6 rows per inch, coming to 66 stitches (a fraction over 14.5″) and 81 rows plus 18 rows for the folded hem, after which I would reset the row counter to zero, to make it easier to keep track of the increase rows and the color change rows. The cast-on for the cuffs was 50 stitches, and there were eight increase rows, six rows apart, starting six rows after knitting the cuff closed on row 18. Color changes were nine rows apart. I noted these numbers on the back of the envelope on which I had jotted down all my other calculations. That’s how I design garments without a pattern or Knit Leader.

The last bit of machine knitting was the idiot cord around the fronts and neck to finish the raw edge, with the hope of flattening the stockinette curl. It helped a little, not completely, but I can live with it as it is. I used the five bright colors without a rota and changed colors when I felt like it. I stuck a stitch marker into the place where I wanted a button loop and knitted five or six unconnected I-cord rows, right side knitted, left side slipped to form the cord, then reconnected it to the shawl collar edge. After that, the sleeve seams and the ends. There were a lot of them. No need to say more. The button was a souvenir from a visit in Munich back in 2018. It’s a shiny orange watch face that was made into a button, and I paid a shocking amount for it because I was pretending that euros equated to dollars and euros spent abroad weren’t real money anyway. By now I’ve forgotten what I paid for it and now the button is holding my coat closed when I want it to, so all good.

The next and final step was the blocking, on which all my hopes of taming the buckling seams depended. How much would the jacket grow vertically and horizontally? Would I have to throw it into the drier to make it a wearable size? I laid it out on a mesh drying rack out on my front porch after washing it and squeezing out as much of the water as possible, ignoring how much it draped over the sides of the rack. Knitted Wollmeise stretches massively when wet, so it’s best to not overreact when the wet garment seems to be two feet longer and wider than it was before it went in for a dip. After it’s dry again, it will be longer than it was before, but not two feet longer. In fact, it grew about 4″ longer than the length I had calculated on the basis of my gauge swatch. That brought the garment length from long cardigan to short coat. The width across the back actually seems to be 4″ narrower than the numbers from my gauge swatch led me to calculate, which is all right, since I had built in more positive ease than I really need. Most importantly, the washing and blocking tamed the buckling seams and curling hem. It didn’t totally vanquish the inward curl of the i-cord trim on the front, but it did flatten it somewhat so that the colors of the i-cord are sometimes visible. If I was really that insistent on eradicating the stockinette curl, I might have hand-sewn a nice grosgrain ribbon onto the inner edge. I wasn’t, so I didn’t.

So now I have a short coat that is exactly the right weight for spring. With pockets! When I sent modeled photos to my daughters, my older one said it reminded her of the duster coats everyone wanted when she was in middle school. It hadn’t occurred to me that I was resurrecting a retro style, because I hadn’t associated a loose-fitting, shawl-collared long cardigan with any particular era. But my millennial daughter would know what the “it” garments were at the time when she was becoming aware of fashion trends, even if I’ve been around long enough to see trends come and go and come back again so often that I don’t associate functional design with any one specific era. So Y2K might be calling for its duster, but it’s not getting it back.