A Change is Gonna Come

and it will be a good one for Looking Glass Yarn. Beginning Monday, September 10, 2012, the store will be open on Mondays from 10-5. No more waiting from Saturday night to Tuesday for that yarn ER visit!.
The other change is that Looking Glass will now be closed on Wednesdays (beginning Wednesday, Sept 12). That day has historically been a very slow one in the store, so the change to Monday openings will be good for business.

Please spread the word among fellow yarn people. While you're at it, go to the Looking Glass Facebook page and "like" us to keep up with all the announcements.

Early Morning Knitting by guest blogger Annie

 I’ve been enjoying the lovely early morning temps the last few weeks. I try to get a good uninterrupted hour or so of knitting in before 6am when I have to feed animals and head to workout. It has been wonderful waking up to temps in the high 50’s or low 60’s to sit down with a yummy larger knitting project. I’m working on a sweater dress with Imperial Stock Ranch yarn and I’ve made it up to the neck and sleeves which makes for quite a bit of squishy Columbia yarn on my lap. The cool morning temps are just perfect for working larger projects that may need to be worn in just a few short weeks. I get so excited every year around this time and it never fails that a bout of startitis runs through most knitters I know. What are you itching to cast on now that fall is near?

Exciting New Patterns

by Jana

I've come across a couple more pattern collections I want to alert people to.

Cookie A (of sock fame) has an e-book collection of 13 patterns called Cookie A Knitwear Volume One: Shapes+Form. Very intriguing approach to garment shaping (only one sock pattern).

Ann Weaver, whom I've praised here before, has a new e-book collection through Knit Picks called Twentieth Century Graphic. Her interest is in color theory, but the shapes are interesting also.

It's great to see these new designers finding an audience and to see how technology is changing the way they do their work.

The Gauge, She Lies

by Jana

I’ve been thinking lately about the whole notion of gauge and gauge swatches in knitting. It’s taken as the First Commandment of Knitting that you must do a gauge swatch of at least 4” square and then wash and block it in order to determine your gauge for your garment. The assumption is that, if you do this, you’ll get the exact size you choose to knit. Some of you may belong to this school of belief – I’ve even had one knitter near and dear to me claim that she always gets gauge and it always works out. If she’s not just messing with my head, then I’m happy for her. But I have to tell you, that ain’t my experience.

Let’s start with the gauge for a pattern. Even using the exact same yarn in the same color as the pattern, I’ve almost never gotten the gauge called for using the recommended needle size. I always go down at least two sizes to get anywhere near the gauge the pattern requires. I remember one Vogue Knitting pattern where my gauge wasn’t even in the same zip code as the pattern. By going down to practically sock needles and knitting as tightly as I could with that bulky-weight yarn, I finally got the gauge called for – but the resulting fabric could stand on its own and serve to insulate the space shuttle, it was so dense. When I looked at the picture of the sweater in VK and used the model’s hand as a relative size measurement, it was obvious that the sweater pictured could not have been knit in the recommended gauge either.

I recall reading somewhere that Elizabeth Zimmerman said that she believed the gauge listed in patterns was as tight as humans could conceivably knit. That’s not how I knit, and that’s one reason I say that gauge is a lying liar.

Here’s the second reason I question gauge’s honesty: the gauge you’ll get over a 4 inch square is nothing at all like the size the garment will be once you’ve knit something 44 inches or whatever around. A 4 inch square cannot really account for drape or the effect of thick and thin yarn over a much larger area. It’s really frustrating to knit the whole back of a sweater and have it come out at 50 inches wide when you were aiming for 40.  Even if you take your ruler and measure your gauge over 4 inches at various places on the sweater back and are getting 4 stitches/inch, and even though you cast on and worked 160 stitches, which ought to equal 40 inches, you’re still likely, if you’re me, to get something a lot bigger.

What’s a knitter to do? My only solution has been to cultivate a relaxed attitude about how something fits. I don’t mind clothes being a bit oversized. I also measure the total width of garment pieces early in the process and decrease (rarely, increase) to bring things back in line. I can do that because I don’t care to knit garments with lots of “sewing pattern shaping,” as I think of it. I’d be curious to hear how the rest of you feel.