This seemingly simple project is turning into the most challenging thing I have ever knitted. I have never had to redo this much of any other garment.

New roadblock: tension. I have knitted numerous sweaters and cardigans and shawls never, I mean never, had trouble with tension. My stitches are even and smooth, no matter whether I’m knitting flat or in the round, stockinette or ribbing or lace. Until now. Apparently I am unable to maintain even tension with this yarn. My purl rows are looser, the fabric is looking sloppy and uneven, and the gauge doesn’t match so the armhole sizing is entirely off. (The bottom part was knit in the round so there were no purl rows involved. Switch to knitting flat, and boom, a mess.) So – rip it back again and redo it. I guess it’s back to two different-sized needles for me, 3.5 mm for knit rows and 3 mm for purl rows.

Attempt #5 of the knit top is progressing well. It was on hiatus for a while, waiting for armhole and neckline calculations, but I did the math this weekend and now I’m on track again. Just using a single circular needle, not having to switch between two different-sized ones, definitely helps the work go faster.

I made another attempt at the lacy top, still using a smaller needle for the lacy part but with slightly looser tension this time. and it didn’t take long for me to see that it was not going to work out this time either. Same gauge issues as before – the lace has the right stitch gauge but not the right row gauge.

Then I made a fourth attempt. Gave up on the whole diagonal, asymmetric design, and just went for a lacy back and a stockinette front. This way I can use the same needles all around. The lace will have the same row gauge as the stockinette, so I won’t have any skewing or pulling going on. And I can easily adjust for the difference in stitch gauge by allocating fewer stitches for the lace (back) section.

That’s what I was working on at the knitting club today, and explaining to the other ladies there. As I explained the difficulties I’d been having, and my thoughts about how I could work around them, I worked up my courage for a fifth attempt. The current version is a cop-out. It’s missing the key element of what first caught my eye about this top – the asymmetric design. That was the reason for choosing this pattern. If I’m giving up on that aspect, then why even make it? There are definitely more interesting garments I could make than this simplified version.

I’ll put this one aside – the yarn has been through four attempts already, so I’ll give it a rest – and start on a fifth version using another ball. If it fails again, then I can still come back to this one. If it works out, I can rip this up later.

Went to an exhibition. Was a bit disappointed.

“En svensk klassiker”, the Swedish Classic Circuit, is the challenge of performing a 30-km run, a cycle race around lake Vättern, the Vasaloppet ski race, and a 3-km swim, in one year.

Some years ago, the wife/partner of a man doing the Swedish Classic Circuit wanted something similar for herself. A challenging, limited-time project within her area of expertise, that she could really invest time and energy in, and afterwards feel a true sense of accomplishment. Instead of sports, she had knitting. Thus was born “En svensk stickklassiker”, the Swedish Knitting Classics.

In one year, participants knit four specific projects based on traditional knitting patterns and techniques from different parts of Sweden. There are two sweaters/cardigans, and two glove/mitten projects. I’m not going to go into detail – you can read all about it on their website. Side by side with the main Knitting Classics, there’s also the Mitten Classics, within which people knit five pairs of gloves/mittens from five countries around the Baltic Sea.

Today I went to see an exhibition at the Almgren silk workshop, showing off the creations of people who have completed the Knitting Classics. I was looking forward to admiring their craftsmanship up close, and maybe learning something along the way.

A lot of sweaters and mittens were on display. While they clearly all arose from the same specific traditions, there was also individual variation.

Unfortunately, the works were displayed in a way that made it really hard to appreciate the craftsmanship. Most of the knitted objects were hung way up, close to the ceiling. Some that were at eye height were on a far wall, with old weaving equipment or other furniture between the viewer and the object.

The Mitten Classics were literally hanging from the ceiling, metres above our heads. All you could see was that there was a bunch of nearly-identical mittens, but it was impossible to appreciate the details. Look at these visitors craning their necks, trying to see the mittens! Just… why?

There were some sets of sweaters hung in a way that you could see them up close. The knitting was incredibly fine, and the quality very impressive. On the whole, though, just as with the sports Classic Circuit, it’s impressive in a way that holds no temptation for me. I love knitting, but I am most certain that I would not enjoy knitting these projects – neither the process nor the result. I’ll stick to my admiring.

I finished my lacy summer top, and I deem it a failure. I will not wear it in its current state, so I’ll be frogging it all and starting over. Won’t wear it this season, after all.

The problem is still the gauge difference between the stockinette and the lace part. In my first attempt, the lace was too loose by far. Now it was too tight. Not as badly, this time: the first time the lace came out 20% larger than the stockinette; this time it was 10% smaller. Unfortunately the difference was small enough that I didn’t realize the extent of the problem while I was working on it. I could stretch into shape, and it looked like it would all just even out.

It did not. Those 10% were quite sufficient to throw everything out of whack, and when I tried it on, the problems were glaring.

Because the lace part is basically too small, the whole top is too narrow, so it clings instead of draping. The gauge mismatch makes the whole thing skew – the bottom edge is not straight, and neither is the back of the neck.

Laid out flat like this, you can see how the seam on the right shoulder doesn’t end up at the top – the front part (all stockinette) is noticeably longer than the back part (all lace). The front and back hems also don’t line up at all.

It’s not quite unwearable, but… no, actually, I find it unwearable. Starting over.

Working on ways to do something with all the sock yarn I have that are almost-but-not-quite enough for a full pair, and don’t pair up well.

This attempt came out quite nice, if I say so myself. A colourful gradient yarn combined with a neutral, with a simple slipped-stitch pattern to make it slightly more interesting than just plain stripes.

Not quite as mindless knitting as socks have become for me. The pattern has a three-row repeat, and it took me a good while to get used to it. I kept forgetting that I had an actual pattern to pay attention to, and tended to just keep going with whatever row I was on when I picked them up.

The top of the top goes faster than the bottom of the top. The rows get shorter, and then shorter again. I’m almost done.

It felt a bit silly to start working on a summer top when summer was already here – it was too late, really, it would have made more sense to make it in good time before. But it looks like I’ll have time to wear it before the season is over.

Yeah. I didn’t get very far on the knit top before I had to start over.

The stockinette part (which is the part that is just flat, normal knitting) and the lace part were coming out at very different gauges. The lace was a good 20% looser. It looked sloppy, and threw off the sizing entirely. Plus, the stockinette section gradually widens while the lace section gets narrower, so if they don’t have the same gauge, the width of the garment as a whole will change as one takes over from the other.

My new attempt is with 3.5 mm needles for the stockinette part, trying to keep the knitting relaxed, and with 3 mm needles for the lace, knitting as tightly as I reasonably can. Maybe I should have gone down to 2.5 mm for the lace, but I really don’t want to do another swatch and wait for it to dry for two days. The result looks reasonable enough.

At first the ends of the two needles got tangled with each other all the time. Now that there’s more fabric, it’s more stable and I can manage them better. (I’ve had a fair bit of slow stuff to wait for at work, so I’ve made lots of progress.) Twice now I’ve mixed up the needles somehow and done the entire lace part of a row with the larger needles, and then found myself with a loose needle in my hands.

Got started on my new knitting project.

I’d made up my mind about which pattern I liked, even confirmed that it should work with the yarn I bought, and then I found out that the pattern seller had closed their shop. Bleh.

Well, it doesn’t look all that complicated, and I was already pretty sure that I would need to change things about the shoulder section, so I guess I’ll just reverse engineer the bits that I like and make up the rest as I go along. It’s a top, knit bottom up, with a lace section that gradually gets narrower along the slant of the lace, so I can just get started and then do that until I get to a point where other things need to start happening.

I’m all ready to start a new knitting project. Before I can actually start for real, there’s a whole lot of swatching to do. And after every swatch, I realized I needed another one.

First a swatch with 3 mm needles. Then one with 3.5 mm needles. Then I realized that, since the top I’m planning to knit has a large lace section, I should also knit the lace pattern with both needle sizes, to figure out whether I liked the look of it with this yarn and these needles. And then of course they all need to dry before I can get proper measurements. This cotton-linen-viscose mix takes even longer to dry than my wool sweaters, which I hadn’t thought possible.