Knitting for yourself
I haven’t always knit sweaters for myself. For a long time it seemed like an infinite amount of knitting. I’d knit sweaters for our patterns in our usual sample size (M-ML) and tons of kiddie sweaters, but a sweater for me (I’m somewhere around an XL-XXL) just seemed like too much.
This made no sense of course, if you add up those sweaters for the kids and pattern samples (not to mention the BLANKETS) of course it adds up to more than a few sweaters for me! So one day I decided I needed a sweater too. A sweater, while a large project, is indeed a FINITE amount of knitting and wearing a hand knit sweater you lovingly made for yourself is a beautiful thing.
In the past couple of years I’ve embarked on a sweater wardrobe for me. I’ve learned a lot of things about how I like my sweaters. I like a little positive ease, I like them longer than most, with loooong sleeves too (I like the to hit just before my thumb). I make sure to take the time to try on my sweater as I go, even though it’s annoying to put all the stitches on waste yarn and try ‘er on. With sweater success has come confidence, and I currently have more than a few WIPs with my own name on them.
Making Adjustments
Not every sweater has come out perfectly the first time. Trying it on as you go helps to make sure the sizing is right (the yoke depth is as you like it, the ease at the chest is what you want), but sometimes after blocking and wearing my sweater a few times I’ve needed length adjustments. A longer cuff, a little short row shaping at the hem to make it longer in the back, that kind of thing. I learned the importance of making those adjustments, rather than letting a perfectly good sweater languish in the closet, unworn.
What’s next for the wardrobe?
I started with worsted weight sweaters, they seem to go so much faster! I have a DK weight Strange Brew sweater in my wardrobe now too. I usually run a bit warm, so this year, even though it once again feels like an infinite amount of knitting, I want to add a sock weight sweater (or 2!) to my wardrobe because I think they will get a lot of wear. But first I’m going to have to finish the 4 sweaters I have on the go!
On the needles I have just a few sweaters….okay, this year has been a bit of a cast on frenzy! I’m working on a bulky weight Almanac sweater in Brooklyn Tweed Quarry, a sock weight Trek sweater in Sweet Fiber Super Sweet Sock, a Love Note (for the Love Note KAL) in La Bien Aimee singles and silk mohair, a Cartography in Spincycle Dream State and Stone Wool Cormo, and a Compass sweater in Quince and Co Owl. They are all in various states of finish, but I think I’ll have them all done by September when the fall comes to call here in Vancouver!
I also stepped out from behind the camera a bit for our Paris collection! I got to wear both of our new sweater designs, Penny and Love Note about town while Emily snapped my picture. Both sweaters are cropped, and I loved wearing them over a dress (with big pockets of course, they are from Haven for those who want to know).
What are your sweater fears?
Here at Tin Can Knits we would like to help all knitters feel confident and adventurous. We take a can-do approach to knitting and hope it inspires confidence in you and your knitting if you need it too! We often hear from knitters that they are particularly nervous about garment knitting. We want to know, if you are afraid to venture into garment knitting, is there something holding you back? Tell us, what are your sweater fears?
Vintage Green Strange Brew
pink and green – fresh new territory
Green isn’t generally one of my go-to colours. As you’ll see from this post on my very favourite colour combinations, I tend toward the primaries, with orangey reds, teally blues, and golden yellows featuring heavily. So this green + pink concept… it’s colouring WAY outside my usual box (which of course, as a designer is where I’m interested in going).
My exploration of machine knitting (more on my machine in a later post, I promise!) has opened my world to 4-ply yarns, leading to a collection of Jamieson & Smith 2 ply jumper weight, Jamieson’s of Shetland Shetland Spindrift, and JC Rennie Supersoft Lambswool. During the 2018 Edinburgh Yarn Festival I was SMITTEN with this cone of ‘vintage green’ Rennie’s Supersoft, and spent the better part of the show collecting other shades of green and pink to coordinate with it. You know how it can be when a project idea strikes!
51 weeks later
One week before Edinburgh Yarn Festival in 2019, I realized with a sense of embarrassment and impending doom that all that ‘perfect green sweater’ ambition had come to naught in the previous 51 weeks. I love a deadline, so I decided to ‘bang out a Strange Brew’ in the week that remained before the show. A solid plan if ever I’ve had one.
Imagining a cropped / kinda baggy silhouette, I began with the Strange Brew women’s size L (42.5″ chest), following the sock weight instructions. I made a short unshaped body, and long unshaped sleeves on the machine. Then I decreased to half the stitch count to hand-knit the cuff ribbing, which made for these (very comfy) relaxed sleeves with a slight bell effect.
At the yoke, I began with a pattern which I’d tested out in swatch format. From there, I alternated the larger motif with a narrower motif, working the decrease rounds in between.
colourways I used:
- JC Rennie Supersoft Lambswool: Vintage Green (VG 1194) the MC, Shamrock Shake (SS 1298), Grenadine (G 1414)
- Jamieson & Smith 2 ply jumper weight, 82 (the edgings), 34, FC12, 9144, 101, 28, 9113, 71
As you can see from the chart and the finished knit, I experimented with different options for the small-scale motif; I think I prefer the 3rd option, which reads more clearly as a little string of boxes on a deep pink background.
It’s also useful to note that in rounds 1-28, I was able to control the vertical alignment of the patterns one to the next, because there are no decrease rounds between these patterns. So I was able to offset the larger patterns a half-stitch-repeat relative to each other, and align the small pattern between. However, with the decreases in rounds 29 and 47, alignment above was not consistent, as it may seem from the chart. But in the finished knit I don’t think it particularly matters, given the horizontal ‘banded’ nature of the design.
I have been loving this sweater since I finished it (a day after EYF finished, of course! because as much as I love a deadline I also love to miss them….) I took it to Paris with me to show it off to Alexa when we met up. While there are things that I would change if we published this as a pattern, I am very pleased with it as a knit, and I’ve learned by 37 that perfect is the enemy of ‘finished’.
Will you ‘Strange Brew’?
We have documented a number of finished Strange Brew sweaters now! Here some others which you could make using our Strange Brew colourwork yoke recipe in your own size and palette, using similar charts to the ones we developed.
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Posy
I’ve always loved the extreme increase and decrease moves you see in Estonian lace patterns. I remember first coming across them in the Laminaria pattern, a really excellent free lace shawl pattern published in Knitty way back in 2008. Knitting that pattern began my interest in this sort of lace.
Designing lace is always a bit of a journey. I think the Posy shawl started with a round lace pattern from Barbara Walker’s Treasuries (but I’m not 100% sure). From that starting point I swatched and tested many iterations. I imagined a field of flowers, some with buds tightly closed, then enlarging with the vivacious living energy of spring and sunlight, until they burst open into the beautiful organic shapes of blooms.
This shawl is a narrow crescent that’s nice and long. This means it’s very easy to wear as a scarf. This is the sort of shawl that I tend to be most comfortable wearing day-to-day, as it simply wraps around and looks great without any fussing required.
sister shawls – different yarns create distinct effects
The two finished Posy shawls have quite different qualities, which brings me a lot of pleasure! Made in a single-ply lace, the pattern is sharply defined. Julie Asselin’s Nurtured fine yarn holds a block beautifully, it has this crisp, papery, and slightly stiff quality that really makes the structure of the pattern itself shine.
After knitting several versions of the Love Note sweater, I became more and more obsessed with the joys of combining sock yarn with mohair lace (more on combining these yarns here). The painterly exploration of colour you could enjoy when layering one colour over another was just fascinating, so decided that making another sample that utilized this yarn combination was a solid plan!
On the right are the skeins of La Bien Aimee singles in ‘romance’ and the mohair silk in ‘yellow brick road’
Knit in mohair & single ply, the shawl is much floppier and soft than its crisp and structured cousin. It is a soft warm hug around your neck, bringing a lot of warmth for its ephemeral weight. The lace is not as crisp, of course, but it has a subtle beauty nonetheless. I love both of these shawls, which do you prefer?
In Praise of Partnership
Being self-employed isn’t easy. You not only have to MAKE the work (and that work must be of high quality), but then you must also sell the work.
You sell the work either by publishing and promoting your work to customers (that’s what we do), or as a freelance designer / writer / artist who works for clients who will use or publish and promote your work.
While it might look, from Instagram, like Alexa and I are knitting all day, the reality is we juggle a lot of balls to bring you inspiring new patterns!
thanks partner!
I definitely wouldn’t be able to call knit design my career if it weren’t for my partnership with Alexa. Thanks again friend!
I write this to share with designers or business people who may be at the beginning of their journey, first because it’s useful to recognize that everyone in business who has reached a point of relative stability in their work didn’t start there. Alexa and I started in a morass of uncertainty that you may find yourself in! Secondly, when you’re aiming to do something difficult, like starting a business, it can be really useful to find other people you can lean on for support.
can I really do this? My suspension of disbelief
One of the big hurdles when getting started? Building your own self-confidence and believing that you can do it, and that your work has value. There are so many doubters out there that your own confidence has to keep you going at times.
Alexa and I both left more ‘conventional’ career paths in education and architecture respectively. It took what I thought of as an extended ‘suspension of disbelief’ on my part to get started with Tin Can Knits.
There were doubters, who thought I should just ‘get a real job’ and stop mucking around, wasting my time on something that would never pay the bills. I was even one of the biggest doubters – I really had to battle to keep my own self-critic (who worried all the same things) in the corner in order to give myself a couple years to turn Tin Can Knits from a wild dream into a paying job.
I had a couple good stories to tell myself to keep going. My dad told me that when starting a business, you won’t make any money for the first 3 years. This helped me keep expectations low. Tin Can Knits didn’t start out as a full time gig. I had other jobs and would work in my free time to make Tin Can Knits a reality. A family friend I respected also said that before 30 is a great time to try a business venture and fail! This helped me accept that failure was likely. These stories I told myself helped to rein in my self-critic, and maintain my suspension of disbelief a little bit longer.
is it any good?
Assessing the quality of your work, on your own, can be tough. You have only one set of eyes, and your eyes are so very close to the work. Having a partner to assess and give the green light to publish designs helps.
you’re not brilliant when you begin
A tough nugget… you’ll need to do crappy work before you can do good work! I’m going to be really honest here: when you start something new, your early work may not be that great. But, you’ve got to be willing to COMPLETE, and get feedback on that early work in order to move through to doing better work. You need to practice to gain competence in anything. It helped me to have a partner who was enthusiastic about launching!
But be nice… don’t judge your own FIRST work by the POLISHED, 10-years-into-the-game work of industry leaders. Just don’t! Instead, scroll back into the archive of what they produced at the beginning to see how human and amateurish that stuff looked! It’ll help you realize that you can do this too.
getting it out the door
Because I am accountable to Alexa, I have to come through on my commitments, and get designs done and out the door. Procrastination can be a big problem if you are on your own, so having another person in the mix can be really helpful.
I personally suffer from perfectionism, so decision making and completion is difficult at times. When I notice that I’m putting off acting on or finishing off something because I’m having a hard time deciding, I can bring it to Alexa and we can decide together how, and by when, I will take the next step.
bounce that ball back and forth
There’s SO MUCH that Alexa brings to a problem that I never even thought of and vice versa. It’s a testament to my self-centeredness that I am surprised by this nearly EVERY TIME. When I’m sure I have considered all the angles, Alexa brings up 2-3 more issues, possibilities, or potential ways of viewing the problem. She’s one smart cookie!
It’s taken the better part of a decade for me to learn to really take advantage of this major upside to our partnership. There are simply some problems, questions, and opportunities which are more effectively tackled as a team.
Alexa wrote last week about how we use ‘bouncing the ball back and forth’ as a way to move design projects forward, to great effect!
* fools jump in…
Now, I’m NOT saying you should jump into a partnership.
I didn’t know, when I got started working with Alexa, what a partnership would mean. I didn’t know that it would be like my second marriage (my third, really, as I’m on my second husband!). I also didn’t know how carefully you ought to pick a person to go into business with.
I just got Lucky Lucky Lucky, because Alexa is a gem. The right sort of hard-working, big-idea-creating, uncomplaining, let’s figure out how this can work sort of positive thinker to be my other other half. And she can knit like nobody’s business!
Alexa jokes that the first time she went to see our accountant, they said, “OH, you’re in partnership? Is there any way you can buy out your partner? Partnerships are the worst! They never last.”
So bear this in mind before you ruin your relationship with your best friend by going into business with her!
can I pick your brain?
We’re often asked, by people starting out in the industry, for advice on getting started. My best advice is that, partnership or no, you might benefit from some of the aspects of partnership we’ve mentioned (confidence building, other eyes, accountability).
There are other ways to get some of these benefits, without having a business partner. You can hire a coach, who can be the person you bounce ideas off of, and who holds you accountable to your goals. Or you might join a group of other people who are also starting a business or side-hustle; this kind of group often can be found (or you can start one) on sites like Meetup.com, Craigslist, or via your local library.
Meeting with people who are working through their own business problems can be very inspiring. Also, to counterbalance those people in your network who are casting shadows of doubt over your plan, it helps to know other people who are practicing their own ‘suspension of disbelief’ in order to try something uncertain.
In fact, I personally meet with several such as part of my creative work: Nina of Rainbow Heirloom and I have a weekly work meet-up, where we meet, have a bit of chat, and then get down to an hour or so of work. Jess of Ginger Twist Studio and I meet up for coffee every month or so, and check in with the big things we’re each planning, debating, or struggling with. Find someone you trust to bounce those ideas off of!
Penny: A collaboration
One of the questions Emily and I are asked most often is : how does your business work as a partnership? It seems that many people find the creative process impossible to imagine as a collaboration, but Em and I? Nearly a decade in, we can’t imagine it any other way!
When we did our first book, 9 Months of Knitting, the designs were mostly easy to identify as something Emily designed or something I designed. But now? Our design process has only become more collaborative over time; now sometimes even Emily and I forget ‘who thought it first’!
Some of our pattern designs start with a swatch or a sketch, some begin with a baby-sized knit, and others with a bit of text describing the idea in words. Read more on design origins here. In some cases, the originator of the idea will take it and run with it, but sometimes it takes outside eyes to perceive what is really magical about the idea, and develop it. Penny was one such design.
Emily knit up the original idea for the Penny sweater, whipping up a teeny size for little Max. We both loved the idea of an all-over lace design, and were charmed by the way this particular lace sort of rippled away from the central double twist, and worked well with the v-neck.
With that in mind, I took over the design, swatching the lace a few different ways, grading the pattern, and eventually knitting up not one, but two kiddie samples, (neither of which are exactly to pattern, because sometimes it takes 4 tries to get it JUST right!). Once I had finished all of the pattern writing etc, we also decided cropped sweaters are so hot right now so we had to add a cropped and speckled sample too!
We finally arrived at the right combination of lace panels and flattering v-neck shaping. Penny was born of a genuinely collaborative process! Each step of the way we would photograph, discuss, and brainstorm the next adjustment to try. Working together allows us to get fresh eyes on any situation, which often results in a brilliant suggestion for something else to try or a detail that might make it all work!
Working as a creative on your own can be difficult! I’m sure the way we do it wouldn’t work for everyone, but for Emily and I, working collaboratively is exciting and productive.
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Penny in La Bien Aimee Merino DK in ‘blush’. 
Penny in SweetGeorgia Superwash DK in ‘grapefruit’.
Em made a yarn at the Border Mill!
Last summer I was treated to a very special ‘behind the scenes’ visit to The Border Mill, a small mill in the Scottish borders, where husband and wife team Juliet and John make beautiful yarn, with particular focus on processing alpaca fibre. One thing that is special about their business is that they don’t have minimums; they will process as small a lot as a single fleece.
What surprised me was learning that the making of yarn, they way Juliet and John do it, is a CRAFT process. I suspect that the word Mill had led me to make assumptions of a much grander scale and automation. After spending a hands-on afternoon looking at the steps from fleece to skein (and even to hand-woven textiles), I have a new appreciation of the level of time, attention, expertise and craft that go into every part of the process.
how yarn is made at the Border Mill
Juliet and I spent an afternoon going through the process from fleeces arriving at the mill from all over the UK, to finished yarn all ready for your knitting, crochet, or weaving pleasure! While The Border Mill does process both sheep and alpaca fibre, they specialize in alpaca, which requires care and special handling to achieve the best results.
checking the fleece
Juliet and John receive fleeces from clients across the UK, and first they assess them for quality and feasibility. There are some kinds of fleeces that the mill can’t handle (for example, if they are altogether too dirty).
tossed
Next, alpaca fleeces go into a ‘tossing basket’ outside (this is probably not the technical term!), in which they are tossed and tossed, like in a tumble dryer. A good deal of the dirt and dust plus many of the guard hairs are shaken out through the mesh of the basket.
washed
Next the fleece is washed in big commercial washers. This can take a long time. Sheep fleeces can be relatively easy to wash because they have lanolin, and when the detergent washes out the lanolin, it carries a lot of the dirt and grime along with it. As alpaca fleeces do not have lanolin, they hold onto the dirt and dust more stubbornly.
air dried
After the first wash, fleeces air-dry for a day or two on mesh racks.
into the blower
Fleeces are sent into the picker room next, which is a very basic method of opening up the fibres.
through the pre-drafter
The fiber next travels through a pre-drafting process, which opens up the fibres and separates out a lot of the shorter staple lengths and guard hairs, improving the fibre that remains.
a second wash & dry
At this point the fleece goes back into the washing machine, and out onto the drying racks for a second cleaning, now that the fibres have been opened up significantly, and any of the shorter fibres removed.
dyeing
While much of the yarn that the Border Mill’s produces are undyed natural shades, Juliet also creates EXQUISITE tweedy colourways. Fibre is dyed into several different shades ‘in the fleece’ – that is, before spinning – and then these different colours are blended together in in the following steps to form tweedy and heathered yarns.
carding
On the carder, we begin to blend fibres for the finished yarn. To make my yarn, we combined different colours and fibre types, layering them one on top of another on the conveyor belt that fed the carding machine. I chose to combine dyed black British BFL wool with red and pink dyed British alpaca fibre. What came out the other end of the carding machine is called a ‘sliver’ – a long snake of partially-drafted fibre, ready for further blending.
combing & blending
The slivers were blended together further as they travelled through a combing machine called a drawframe, creating the final ‘semi worsted’ sliver which has partially-aligned fibres. The number of times that the sliver passes through this machine impacts how aligned the fibres are, and also how evenly blended the colours are.
Because I wanted my yarn to have a ‘tweedy’ finish, with hints of the base colours that we began with showing through, we didn’t want the fibres to be too evenly blended.
spinning singles
Next the completed sliver is spun into singles! The spinner looks like a pretty complex piece of machinery… I was very impressed.
plying singles to make the final yarn
Once singles are produced, they are plied together on a machine similar to the spinner, to form a 2-ply (or more) yarn. We designed my yarn as a 2-ply, and between fingering and sport weight, so that it would match well with Border Mill Alpaca Tweed Silk, and I could pick some contrast colours from the shop’s delicious rainbow!
finishing touches
Once the spinning process is complete, yarn is finished by steaming it, which helps to set the twist so it doesn’t split too easily. Lastly it’s wound onto cones, and then off onto balls or skeins, and labelled for sale.
For some Mill customers, Juliet also creates custom hand-woven textiles. She really stewards the entire process, from fibre off the back of the beast to a fabulous result! Visiting her weaving studio brought home once more how artistry, craft, and care are woven into every aspect of the business.
I designed the Tortoiseshell shawl for Laine Magazine issue 6 in Border Mill Alpaca Tweed, a tweedy worsted-weight.
Plus I’ve gotten part-way through a sweater for myself in the yarn custom yarn that I made! I’m still planning to adjust the yoke design slightly before I call it ‘done’, but here are a couple of ‘work-in-progress’ shots. What do you think?
Love Note
Once upon a time, at EYF, I saw, from across the room, a skein of hot pink mohair. It was love. I needed it. ‘I don’t even like pink…’ I told myself. But somehow, I crossed the aisle, picked up that skein of Skein Queen Floof, and it came home with me (don’t worry, I also paid for it!). At that same show I also snagged two skeins of La Bien Aimée merino singles, in ‘neon static’ and ‘Aimee’s sweater’. I knew they were delicious, but I didn’t know what they might become, so they joined the rest of my (significant) stash!
When I’ve got a wedding to go to, first thing I wonder is (DEEP SIGH), what will I wear? For this one, I pulled out an old favourite dress (one that my former flatmate said was ‘probably too short for a family wedding)’. HAHA. I love it to bits and discovered I could still, with some aggressive zippering, maneuver into it. BUT, it needed just the right sweater to go with it. Head to the shops for something? Of course not! I had a whole week before the wedding, so it was clearly time to cast on.
The results of this cast on frenzy became the Love Note, a sweater with much to recommend it: a little lace, cropped, a soft like a springtime duckling, and PINK! What more could you want in wedding attire?
I’m not gonna lie, my thighs were COLD, but damn, was that sweater ever fabulous! And like a true professional who pays her mortgage by designing, I told the whole extended family “yeah, it’s my own design”, with that sort of pride and earnestness displayed by children to adults who respond with a kind of tolerant disregard. Sometimes family doesn’t ‘get’ your job, especially when that job looks, from the outside, to be little more than going to coffee shops and knitting all day! Ah well, at least my husband, business partner and I recognize that I do indeed have a real job.
I cropped this number hard, and it’s great over a dress, but to be honest I’m not a big wearer of dresses, I nearly always wear jeans and a tank top. So it works this way too. I’ve worn this sweater nearly every second day for a year, so that’s a pretty solid recommendation for its usefulness in a non-fancy wardrobe like mine. I love the floaty fabric, the lovely halo, and the delicious colour always lifts my mood.
#LoveNoteKAL with us!
Usually by the time Alexa and finally complete and launch a new design, we aren’t too keen on knitting it again… at least not for a little while! But Love Note? We can’t get enough! we both immediately wanted to cast on another! Alexa’s making one in La Bien Aimée in ‘shire’ mohair over ‘shire’ merino singles. I’ve got some Rainbow Heirloom Kidsilk Cloud that I really want to make into another for me… So we’re going to Knit Along together! Starting now (Alexa’s already begun) our super serious deadline is July 15, 2019. Just kidding, it’s not serious at all!
So, cast on for your feather light, warm and fuzzy Love Note today, and KAL along with us on Instagram using the hashtags #LoveNoteKAL #LoveNoteSweater and #tincanknits! Or participate in our Ravelry Group if you don’t do Instagram.
