It has been getting colder, but Bruce and I have been happily installed in our office with multiple cups of tea, working on our respective books and not paying much attention to what’s going on outside. So you can imagine that we both had the “deer in headlights” look when I checked today’s weather and it said we could expect snow beginning at about 11 this morning. We haven’t winterized the deck yet, and there are still leaves to rake, so out we went — in the rain — to at least get the worst of it under control. The bluejays were squawking at me, at least in part because I think when they see me I’m supposed to provide seeds and peanuts. Sorry guys — that only happens AFTER it starts snowing and you can’t easily find any more seeds on the ground.

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I did notice when I was cleaning out the flower pots that all of the herbs and flowers that have gone to seed have pretty well been picked clean, so the feeding schedule will have to begin soon. They are kind of picky eaters — the cardinals only come when I have sunflower seeds to offer, but there is always considerable competition with both the jays and the squirrels for that delicacy.

MEANWHILE

In the knitting department, I’ve been working on three designs (including the red sweater of too many stitches) which will turn up here when the sketches look a bit more finished. Most of this work is pretty straight-forward. Once I have an idea and have swatched the yarn to see how many stitches will fit in side-to-side and up-and-down, I’m left with the mathy bits. And, as you all know, math and I are at best uneasy friends.

It’s all about the armscye. I’ve known this word for many years, having come from a background that included quite a lot of sewing, and never questioned where it came from. Opinions on that are mixed, but I like the one that supposes it to be a Scottish term — pronounced something like arm sy, or arm’s eye. It also has been proposed as a typographical error of arm’s eye losing the apostrophe and becoming arm seye or eventually arm scye. Which ever it is, you still have to fit that wacky curved flat piece of the sleeve cap into it.

The issue is putting the piece on the right into the piece on the left without lumps and bumps, and so that you can move your arms around. If the space isn’t deep enough, you feel strangled; too big and there is excess fabric under your arm and it looks sloppy.

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From the simplest view, if you measure all around the armhole (left), then the top of the armhole (right) from the point of the brown line on the left, around to the point on the right, should be exactly the same number. It makes sense, but it’s not something you can estimate or knit on the fly (my usual approach to anything involving calculations).

I confess that my approach from sewing has always been to draw the curve (freehand) based on an understanding of where I’m trying to go, and fitting the stitches into that space. It’s a wholly intuitive approach that often involves quite a few adjustments (i.e., ripping back). The armscye is actually pretty easy, but oh, that sleeve cap! What a nightmare.

This year I decided to get serious about it, and flew to Tacoma, WA in February to attend the Madrona Fiber Retreat in order to take a class from Jean Wong. Jean is the only graduate of the Nihon Vogue Academy teaching in the western hemisphere. Her course in Japanese design crams a semester’s worth of information on the basics of sweater construction into two days, at the end of which I was so exhausted that I could barely speak, let alone drag myself onto the airplane to go home. The sleeve, of course, was the focus, and at the end of 2 days all of us had a very accurate drawing of that curve based on our specific body shape. Although dozens of measurements were involved, the drawing was actually made free-hand around the measurement points and then pain-staking adjustments calculated to insure that stepped increases or decreases were placed along the lines to make the number of stitches completely equal to those in the armscye. After that, all (ALL?) you needed to do was calculate how much to add for ease and redraw the pattern for the garment.

Fast forward to the present: I do have the pattern for a round-neck, pullover sweater from Jean’s class — that I haven’t tried to knit. So I’m once again taking a sweater construction class (from the yarn store Webs) in order to fulfill my last class requirement for Expert Knitter Certification. The approach from this class is enshrined in Shirley Paden’s book Knitwear Design Workshop. This is both measurement and math intensive, and works through a system of ratios to determine the location of increases and decreases through the “magic formula,” well explained by Ann Budd. It’s really not magic at all, but a diophantine formula (an algebraic equation with several unknowns and integer coefficients). Yeah….math. Enter the engineer!

There are quite a few online tools for the calculation of rows between the increases and decreases, but Bruce has also made a sort-of chart/slide rule that works equally well (for me better because it’s both visual and intuitive — without MATH). Again, I can’t pretend that I understand how it works, but it does. My opinion is that while it is interesting to understand a variety of ways to get to the answer, you should use any tools that work. After all, while I could pound a nail into the wall with the heel of my shoe, a hammer just works better. So, why would I do all of those mental gymnastics when I can skip the math? I’m a firm adherent to, “I don’t know, but I can look it up!”

I did all of the Shirley Paden math for the red sweater sleeve, and just for grins, am going to try to duplicate the same sleeve based on the Jean Wong method. I will post them as soon as both are done so we can see if there are any important differences. There is also the question of how to make those stitches appear or disappear, and I’ll save that for another time. I like fashioned decreases (K2tog, SSK) rather than bound off stitches, but that is another discussion.

At the same time….

Although “at the same time” is often found in knitting instructions for times when you have to combine more than one action, I’m actually thinking about what I’ve been working on for my Knit (spin) Sweden book, which inches closer to completion. I’ll pose this little bit of research (currently at a dead end) to see if any of you out there have any information to contribute.

I checked museum collections I thought might have examples, and came up with a small bag/purse in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY). Its attribution is circa 1830 and it is supposed to be German. That is the earliest example I can find.

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I contacted one of the German Ravelry groups to see if they could shed any light on the subject, and they pointed to some mid-20th century printed patterns. Kristi Jõeste and Külli Jacobson came up with information on mittens in the Eesti Muuseumide Veebivärav (Estonia), all from the late 19th/early 20th century, and Kristi suggested that there were German pattern books circulating throughout Estonia at that time. There also is an example of an entrelac sock from Gotland Island dating to the last decade of the 19th century…and given the commerce and connection between Estonia and Sweden, that is no surprise. But where does this originate? Any ideas?