Friday, January 05, 2007

The current thinking on the Calcutta Cup sweater is to knit the sleeves separately and join all at the underarms, EPS fashion. I’ve fished out Knitter’s for 2000, the four issues in which Meg expands on the EPS theme.

Then what? In my Fair Isles of old I did faux raglan seams all the way up to the neck, so that the pattern stayed on the same line all the way around, sleeves and body, but was of course not continuous, as the raglan shaping gradually ate into body and sleeve alike. Some necks I left round, in others I cut a v-neck. It’s almost as easy as that.

Maybe I could go for the seamless-hybrid shirt-neck finish after all? Plenty of time to think about it. It would be tricky, and would involve the dreaded purling, but might make up for having to jettison the Prince of Wales joke.

Miscellaneous

Has anyone ever knit cashmere socks? HipKnits has a couple of skeins of cashmere sock yarn on sale. k1 Yarns has more, more expensively. I know they would be heavenly to knit and to put on, but would they wear? My husband’s present bedsocks, knit of various leftovers of serious German sock yarn, have gradually with the years become loose. They now tend to come off at night.

Bedsocks are subject to more wear than you might think, as I have mentioned here before. The first pair I knit for him, made of various DK pure wool oddballs, went into holes almost at once. I could reinforce the entire foot, of course.

I discover this morning that the alarming drop in readership claimed for me by Google Analytics was due to the fact that the necessary bit of code didn’t transfer, when I switched from one New Blogger template to another. I hope I’ve now put that right.
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8 comments:

  1. Helen10:55 AM

    I haven't knitted cashmere bedsocks, but I have worn them. The first pair were 100% cashmere and they were delicious to wear, like warm clouds, but the soles wore through literally within a two or three weeks, just from the amount of walking about in my bedsocks and slippers between getting up and getting dressed.
    The second pair are from Land's End and have a percentage of nylon in them. I think it's 10%. They aren't actually sold as bedsocks but that's how I wear them. They have lasted about three years now and look set to last for a while yet. The cashmere has worn from the soles but they are still held together by the nylon and are comfortable to wear.

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  2. alltangledup12:42 PM

    i've bought some of the hipknits sock yarn and am waiting for it to arrive. It seems pretty generously length-wise (750 yds), so I was thinking to knit it doubled on 2.25mm needles. I'm really skeptical about how well the cashmere will wear esp as the last pair of cashmere sock that I bought lasted about 3 wears

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  3. Julie4:07 PM

    I've heard that cashmere socks don't wear well at all, but those were being worn with shoes. Perhaps in bed they'd be all right. Even if you only wore them once, I imagine they'd be a decadent experience (with no calories!)

    I've done two-color saddle-shoulder sweaters a la EPS, and the purling isn't that bad - there just isn't that much of it. And the final product was worth it, at least to me.

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  4. Anonymous4:28 PM

    Jean, it's funny you bring up the issue of cashmere bed socks, because I was wondering myself how they would hold up. I would likely never make cashmere socks otherwise, but as you point out, they still do wear. In the end, I'm probably better off sticking with my old cotton ones.

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  5. Anonymous5:30 PM

    Oops. Now I can't find that picture of the vertical Fair Isle in any of my books; it may have been on the Scottish Museum website. There was enough creative variation in the early 20th Century to allow for almost anything.

    If you do the seamless hybrid, would you mark the shapes with a line /column of a single color? I think I'd have to spend hours with colored pencils and graph paper to compare effects (of course savvy people would use a computer program).

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  6. Anonymous6:17 PM

    I have been an avid reader for over a year now and I just wanted to say how pleased I am with your new site. It is attractive and loads flawlessly on my computer. (Your old site never did--but I read on regardless.)

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    ReplyDelete
  7. fleegle12:03 AM

    I ordered yarn from HipKNits, and frankly, I was disappointed. It didn't feel very nice and the color wasn't even close to what they showed on the site.

    Subsequently I purchased sock yarn from Jojoland, and have been delighted with the results. They are for special occasions, true, but oh so luxurious.

    http://jojoland.com/

    ReplyDelete
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