Steek and Ye Shall Bind

Allow me introduce you to a real beauty in my knitting gallery. Imagine this piece with plush ropes around it, and little laser motion detectors. That's how proud I am of it.

Several years ago, when I started visiting the yarn stores again, I came across the Dale of Norway Baby Collection No. 129, and wanted to make everything in it. I especially fell in love with this pink and zebra-striped cardigan, and a lovely red and blue jumper. (That's jumper in the North American "dress-without-sleeves" sense, not the British "sweater".)

Anyway, the store wouldn't just let me buy the pattern book without buying Dale yarn to go with it. So I went home and downloaded the PDF version of the pattern book, and kept it on my computer desktop for a while. Every so often I would look through it and admire the designs and imagine which one I would knit.

Then on one visit to the yarn store, I couldn't stand it any longer. I needed that pattern book. So I found a design I wanted to make that didn't take too many balls of Baby Ull: the Hedda vest (size 2).

I started knitting this lovely fair-isle concoction in May 2003. [Can I first say, Dale Baby Ull has got to be the softest, most exquisitie superwash fingering weight wool in the world. Okay, it's the only one I've used, but I adore it. Why shop around?] I had to special order Crystal Palace bamboo circulars to get the sizes I needed (2.0 mm and 2.5 mm in 12" length). [Can I next say, I do not like you, Crystal Palace Bamboo circulars. Your joins get caught on every frickin' stitch.]

I zipped through the ribbing, and the first several inches of patterning were intoxicating. This piece is my first real fair-isle, if you don't count the worsted-weight dog sweater. Then I stalled out at the armhole shaping. You know, where the instructions get all "working back and forth" and "at the same time" and steeks and crap. I did a few rows, then put it down and lost all track of where I was in the complicated directions.

I finally returned to the vest in September 2004, and spent some time charting out each row of shaping, and where the steeks and cast-off stitches and decreases should be. I needed two tries to get the section knitted right, because the first time around I didn't double-check my stitch counts, and 20 rows in I was off by one stitch. RIIIIPP!

Here's a close-up of my six-stitch neck steek. I was too nervous to make do with four-stitch steeks just yet.

At last I finished the body and cast off for the shoulders! And it came to pass that I was home miserably sick with a cold, and needed something involving but not too complicated to occupy my stuffy head. And I decided that it should be steeks.

I sewed the little lines on my sewing machine, to anchor the stitches in place. And then I brought out the scissors.

Click here to see the steek cutting [viewer discretion is advised]

Hooray! Now the sweet little v-neck looks as it should, and the armholes are ready for their facings.