Month: May 2004

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WPI

While working on my current knitting project I’ve been squeezing in time to practice spinning merino. Eventually I’ll get good enough at it and find enough courage to start spinning the fiber from the Spin-Off sweater kit.

wpi

This week I’ve been concentrating on “wraps per inch” (wpi). In order to get consistent yarn in the spinning world, spinners measure the average width of their yarn by wrapping it around a ruler many times and then counting how many wraps there are per inch. This merino practice yarn is yielding between 13 and 14 wpi. Now I just need to figure out if this will translate into the correct knitted gauge for the project.

Yesterday I received the new summer issue of Interweave Knits and finally took a closer look at the “sources for supplies” section in the back. Not only do they show each yarn used in the projects but they also list the ply and wip of each one. It occurred to me that perhaps I could use this information to compare my handspun yarn to a store bought yarn that is close to the weight I need. Last night I pulled out my old issues and came up with a list of comparison yarns. A couple of the yarns are already in my “stash” so I should be able to find one that will work as a good comparison yarn.

If you’re not a spinner, you might still find wpi interesting since it seems like a good way to compare yarns when trying to find a substitute.

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Knitting Stripes in the Round

jester_brim The pattern says to start out with a 16″ circular needle. Of course I didn’t have a 16″ needle so I attempted to use a 40″ and reduce the circumference using the magic loop method. With 160 stitches to manage, I twisted the stitches to form a moebius. Now I sympathize with Rob who recently mentioned unwittingly doing this while knitting the hem of a tunic. As you can see from the photo, I switched to a 16″ needle.

After the brim, stripes are next. Since knitting in the round creates a spiral, stripes will jog where one stripe ends and the next one starts. The book mentions hiding the jog when sewing the ends of each stripe. Well I don’t intend to leave any ends between stripes; I’d rather avoid sewing so I’ll carry the unused color up the “side” by twisting the yarns together at the beginning of each round. So to avoid the jog I’m going to use the Danish method described in Simple Socks by Priscilla Gibson-Roberts.

On this hat I’m knitting white and blue stripes that are three rows in height. When I transition from a white stripe to a blue one, I knit the first stitch of the first blue row with both colors and continue knitting the first row of the blue stripe until I come across the blue/white stitch that started the round. I knit these stitches together with the blue running yarn and then pull on the end of the white yarn until the jog gets hidden. I’ll repeat these stepswith the next stripe, reversing the colors and hopefully end up with jogless stripes.