The first struggle [...]]]> So yesterday, you got the pretty tale of Rose of Sharon: symbolism and style, with which I am immensely pleased, and for which I am immensely grateful, get thou not me wrong. But this was probably the most difficult design I have ever completed, and today you get the Rest of the Story.

The first struggle with this pattern was acquiring the yarn. I was determined to use Madelinetosh’s Tosh Merino Light, which even after this struggle I think may be my favorite yarn in existence. But I really wanted a particular colorway, and I wanted to support my local yarn shop (and place of employ), so I put in an order. In July.

I wanted to start the test knit in October, giving myself plenty of time to complete it and test it before sending it off to the test knitters. But the yarn didn’t arrive. I even discovered that no amount of pestering my boss would make it arrive. I did something like a test knit in some fingering weight I had around, expediting the process by just knitting one quarter of it. As a result, this terror was all I had as a “sample” by November 18th:

I know. Try not to vomit. (Recognize the yarn, Jonica? I promise I’ll knit it into something actually pretty.)

The company kept pushing back the estimated arrival date, and October came and went. Halfway through November, I knew I couldn’t afford to wait any longer. Nowhere on the internet had the colorway I wanted, so I caved and went to Jimmy Beans for help. I ended up ordering the colorway “Rose,” which is not only more thematically appropriate for the shawl, but in fact prettier.

By this time, it was so late that there was no way I was going to finish a proper sample in time to get it to my test knitters to knit separately. So I contacted them, and they signed on to the ridiculous task of knitting it along with me – starting halfway through December, giving up precious knitting time during that worst of knitterly crunch seasons. My task was to stay one step ahead of them, sending out bits of pattern as I completed them, and trying to keep corrections straight. The version files on my computer tell me that we went through at least eight official iterations, and I don’t know how many corrections. It was like our own little private knit-along. They were up to it (one despite a serious family illness), and performed beyond my greatest hopes. Between the three of us, I think we ended up with a pattern that is actually clear, despite being 23 pages long and including one chart that is five pages wide. (With accompanying written directions. Really, we did that.)

As we went, the thing kept growing. What I had originally advertised as a “shawlette,” requiring 800 yards of yarn, soon required 1200… and with twelve rounds to go, I realized I would need a fourth skein. Through an incredible trick of providence, this was around the time that my original order finally arrived at Yarns Unlimited, miraculously including four skeins of “Rose.” I snagged one the moment it came in the door, and finished the last leafy border bit on the first day of Jan terms.

You know that nagging feeling that something isn’t quite right? That you ignore because you know there’s nothing you can do about it?

I blocked the finished shawl on the futon, and oh, how I loved it. I dragged Jared outside to take pictures during a blustery snowfall.

But there was no denying it. Something was wrong. The center of the shawl was… sagging. I had doggedly hoped that a severe blocking would fix it, and it did for a little while, but soon the knitting relaxed. You can see it even in this immediate post-block picture:

There was no getting around it. My shawl had grown a boob.

This was not okay.

It didn’t take long for me to figure out what had gone wrong. After the center section, I switched from pi-style increases to integrated increases, but I’d included one last “pi” section before starting the integrated increases, when I should have started increasing right away. In other words: I did it wrong. If it was just something I’d made for myself, I could have ignored it, but this was a straight-up design flaw that I could not in good conscience offer for sale.

What was I going to do? I could re-design it easily enough and just take out the offending rows, but I’d probably have to change them without test knitting (against my policy, since that never ends well), and besides, my sample wouldn’t look like the finished project without re-doing a good 80 hours of knitting. After two nights of tossing and turning, between weeks of intensive January classes, the lightbulb came on. All I had to do was choose rows to remove that had the same number of stitches, and I could remove them not only from the pattern, but from my shawl.

So on another blustery evening, I found two US4 circulars among the detritus on the coffee table, and threaded them oh-so-carefully through two rows. They framed what I call the “Donut of Offense,” that ring of thirty-some rows that Should Not Have Been. I cut the yarn below the top row and picked out the row below, leaving live stitches, then ripped the DoO to oblivion.

Then came the Longest Grafting Job Ever. I have to credit this at least a little bit to the Holy Spirit, but it worked out perfectly. I even managed to graft the purls into place.

I blocked it again, and now I have a shawl that matches the adjusted pattern perfectly. And  You can sort of spot the irregularity in the grafted row, but I think it’s pretty well perfect. Spot the line below, if you can: this is my favorite picture in the world right now – the shawl splayed out in front of the sunset in the study window.

Lessons learned: 1) Madelinetosh is fantastic, but order it when it’s in stock. 2) Solid test knitters are worth their weight in cashmere, and I hope one day I make enough off these patterns to pay them accordingly. 3) I should trust my instincts, not logic built on a distinct lack of experience. 4) Despite everything, circular shawls are still about my favorite thing to knit.

I was lucky to have my camera [...]]]> The idea for this shawl happened all at once, as these things often do. And it happened in church, as it often does to me. We were visiting the Church of the Ascension in that fancy area of Pittsburgh called Oakland, and over the side chapel I spotted this.

I was lucky to have my camera on me to snap a reference photo, and this fuzzy little image was what drove me to make the circular shawl that I call “Rose of Sharon.”

The term “Rose of Sharon” as a title for Jesus caught my attention. I don’t know how it got into my head as a Christological title; all that Wikipedia knows about it in relationship to Jesus is a song by Petra from 1985.

But it is a Biblical term, and a mysterious one at that. It turns up in at the start of the second chapter of the Song of Solomon. “I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys,” said the King James Version, making a wild stab at what that particular Hebrew word for flower might mean. According to the Harper Bible Dictionary, the writer of the Song of Songs was probably thinking of a crocus-like flower that grows on the coasts of the Mediterranean, near which can be found the Sharon plain.

The “Rose” part of the pattern shows up most notably in the center. Following the rose window from Ascension, this section consists of a series of concentric quatrefoils of different types. (I do love quatrefoils; they seem to be everywhere I look in church architecture.)  At first I thought that the particularly open part of this center would look like Christmas trees, appropriate for the epiphany season. But now that it’s blocked, they look more like flying buttresses.

After that center section, I switched from a pi-shawl series of increases to increases integrated into the pattern. The “wings” were drawn directly from the rose window, filled with lily-of-the-valley motifs from Estonian lacework. Again, I wish I could claim this was planned, but I only discovered the Song of Songs reference while writing this post, which plants lily of the valleys right next to the rose of sharon.

The last floral influence is at the top of the column that separates each pair of wings. The rose window had a trefoil, which I could not replicate to save my life. So in the end, i decided to make it a tribute to the crocus, the reality behind the Biblical reference. This about the time for crocuses and snowdrops to start making an appearance around here, during the warm snaps that fool me during the depths of January and February.

I am often asked, what do you do with a circular shawl? How do you wear it? Or do you just put it on a circular table and admire it? I don’t actually own a circular table, and if I did, it would be too continually covered with books and papers and yarn labels and leftover bits of wool for me to admire anything on it. (I imagine, one day, being one of those lovely old ladies who has a house so clean she could display lace and storied knick-knacks on antique side-tables. Shush and let me dream.) But it is absolutely possible to wear a circular shawl. My favorite way is to fold it in half and drape it around my shoulders as above, with or without a shawl pin. You’d be shocked how helpfully warm it is, especially with the flimsy blouses they make for women these days.

When I’m feeling bolder, I open it up like this. It covers most of my arms, and I can still pin it in the front if I wish. This is particularly fun to do with a contrasting shirt underneath.

Yarn Review: I can say with all honesty that I am madly in love with Madelinetosh Tosh Merino Light. At a generous put-up for a hand-dyed yarn at a very good price, if I were to be trapped on a desert island and could knit and re-knit nothing else for the rest of my life, it would be this stuff. It’s like knitting with butter. You can get it at local stores like Yarns Unlimited, or from some of the bigger (but still independently-owned) online retailers like Jimmy Beans.

So that’s the pretty side of the story behind Rose of Sharon. I hope you consider it next time you have a hankering for epic lace. It’s not that hard, really, but the pattern is 22 pages long. It’s because I give written instructions to go with all my charts, even when it’s unreasonable. Myself and two (intrepid, unspeakably incredible) test knitters, Sherrie and Connie, have been over both chart and written directions with a proverbial fine-toothed comb, to make your knitting ride as smooth as possible. If you want to hear about the blood, sweat, and tears that we all went through to get this far… come back tomorrow.

Here’s the story: Mattress stitch is a lovely technique which, if you [...]]]> Hello, everyone! This will seem terrifically random and out of context if you are reading it before April 8th, 2012. But it may still be useful to you, because it is a Tutorial on how to perform mattress stitch between two garter stitch selvedges.

Here’s the story: Mattress stitch is a lovely technique which, if you hate seams, might get you right over that unfortunate prejudice. It is a way to make seams beautiful every time, and nearly invisible. For some videos on how to do normal mattress stitch, check out these videos:

Bind-off to bind-off: http://youtu.be/1mqDnU4laSU

Bind-off to selvedge: http://youtu.be/7EO9UeEFhrA

Selvedge to selvedge: http://youtu.be/ajEITYFPKQM

(If you’re wondering, a selvedge is the side edge of a piece of fabric.)

The only possible downside to mattress stitch in most situations is that, although it’s invisible on the outside, it leaves a bit of a seam on the inside, which gets bulkier with bulkier yarn. This is almost never an issue, but you would get around it if you could, right? Well, you can, if you have knits and purls right on the edge of your garment, like with garter stitch or seed stitch.

The first thing you will look for, when you lay your two garter stitch selvedges side-by-side, is what the garter “bumps” look like on the very edge of the fabric. Garter stitch ridges look like two rows of bricks stacked on top of each other, off-set by half. But on the very edge of a garter stitch row, there’s another “step” down or up at the very edge. You see it in the unsewn edges below?

For mattress stitch on garter stitch, you have a choice on where you are going to sew. You can sew in that extra “step,” or in the last regular garter bump closest to the edge. For any given seam, I usually pick whichever of those two I can find most consistently. What matters most is that you are [more or less] consistent.

With mattress stitch, the needle is always going the same way: parallel to the seam, away from the beginning of the join. Below I’ve started on the left side, sewing into the “step” down, with the needle pointing away from myself.

Now I’ll go into the “step” up on the other side, going the same direction.

After doing a few stitches, you can see the seam yarn making a zig-zag between the edges. This is trademark mattress stitch, no matter the type, and the fun comes when you zip it up.

Pull it tight to see what the seam looks like. With mattress stitch generally, but particularly with this variation on it (since it’s looser), when the seam yarn is pulled tight, it actually makes a straight line within the seam. This makes it easy for the seam to get bunched up, or to be tighter than the fabric. So when the seam is done, but before I tie a knot or sew in the end, I go along the seam, stretching the two joined pieces of fabric along the seam yarn as much as possible. This is because I want the seam to be able to stretch as much as the finished fabric, so I have to make sure the amount of seam yarn is equal to the length of the fabric when it is most fully stretched.

Because you are sewing at the very edge of the piece, you have no bulkiness inside – in fact, it looks the same on both inside and outside.

The only possible drawback to this technique is that, since you are essentially only sewing in every other row, it is a looser seam. This means it might not be appropriate for tightly-knit or very bulky sweaters, where it might leave gaps. But for an open knit, or a cotton yarn, this is perfect, and I have used it many times.

This will be a little redundant to those who are linking to this tutorial from the Lily pattern, which comes out on Easter (hi people from the future! Wave at us back in January), but this is a good a time as any to announce that I did finally make a decision about what yarn to use for this fun pattern. It is called Aya, by Noro, a worsted-weight blend of cotton, silk, and wool. I used color #12, and I loved it dearly; it made me forgive cotton of nearly all my spite towards it (though I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive it for that whole linen stitch in Lion cotton thing). The Liturgical Year page has been udpated accordingly, but here is a picture for you:

It’s just come off the blocking wires, and the pattern will be winging its way to test knitters before the night is out, barring any snags. Metaphorical snags, of course. Although literal snags are also very upsetting.

My idea: A hat, big and slouchy, with a loud combination of three colors, definitely combining [...]]]> I have a bag of Kirby Meritime samples – one of each, to be precise. What would you do, if you had a bag of colors sitting by your side, and a paper to avoid writing? You play, of course.

My idea: A hat, big and slouchy, with a loud combination of three colors, definitely combining warms and cools. But which three? It’s hard to pick a wrong combo when they all go together so well. So I put a bunch of combinations together; you tell me what you think. Or go to the Meritime page and come up with another combination. I’ll probably decide by tonight and knit it over the weekend, and if you like more than one of them, I’ll have to knit a bunch of little swatches up…

#1: “Iris” – Mystic Mauve, Groovy Green, and Golden Delicious.

#2 “Meadow” – Naked Apple, Winter Sky, and Groovy Green

#3: “Jewels” – Mystic Mauve, Sprout Sage, and Peach Orchard

#4: “Bouquet” – Magentastic, Mystic Mauve, and Nectar

#5: “Rosebud” – Raspberry Rouge, Nectar, and Sprout Sage

#6: “Posies” – Golden Delicious, Groovy Green, and Magentastic

#7: “Drifted” – Magentastic, Groovy Green, and Naturally Neutral

#8: “Punch” – Naturally Neutral, Raspberry Rouge, and Peach Orchard

#9: “Peat” – Naturally Neutral, Black Walnut Brown, and Sprout Sage

How to decide?! I shall employ my favorite tools: procrastination and delegation. In other words, you decide while I go do other things. Today I have three scottish side dishes to make before 6, and a book on buddhism to read while things boil.

The launching of a brand new yarn is a freakishly exciting thing, especially when you’ve been working on it as long and hard as my dear mother has. If we were a big name brand, we would have a widely published newsletter, a whole team of [...]]]> It’s time? It’s time? Did she just say it’s time?!

The launching of a brand new yarn is a freakishly exciting thing, especially when you’ve been working on it as long and hard as my dear mother has. If we were a big name brand, we would have a widely published newsletter, a whole team of designers filling pattern booklets out months in advance, and a trio of impossibly skinny models to make everything look extra glamorous. We’re not Berroco, or Lion Brand, or Madelinetosh, and I have a long way to go before my photography looks anything like Brooklyn Tweed’s, but believe you me that Kirby Meritime is going to get all the fanfare I can muster. Because this, folks, is a very real, very cool, and very fabulous addition to Osborn Fiber Studio’s growing line of yarn.

In case you forgot, here’s the deets: 109 yards of Aran weight (4 st./in. on US8s), 50/50 merino/tencel, 12 colors dyed in the hues offered by nature.

Of what fanfare do I speak? Well, if you are surfing Ravelry’s general forums during the next month, you might see this:

That makes me just as pleased as punch; I don’t know about you.

Then of course, there’s the store; you’ll see a link to your left, and scroll down to see close-ups of all the marvelous colors – including three never-before-seen hues, and one brand-new natural dye ingredient that mom will be sharing with us soon.

And what’s a new line of yarn without pattern support? These fun colors go together so delightfully that we can’t help but mix and match them into bunches of different sets – cool and warm, and all different seasons. Mom’s working on a five-color pullover pattern in two colorways (“feverishly” doesn’t quite describe it – when was the last time you knit an adult sweater in eight days?) and I have a hat idea that will use three colors, if I can manage to fit it in between the epiphany and lent offerings.

BUT believe me, each color looks gorgeous on their own, as well. The natural drape of the tencel would make a lacey sweater look particularly gorgeous. If I had time to make myself another sweater, this would be my new pick for the Hampton Cardigan, probably in the dark purple Mystic Mauve. If time and money were no object, what would you make out of Kirby Meritime?