I know you’re all waiting for pictures of the finished Fishtrap Aran. And since I’m the kind of person who can’t stand suspense, I’ll relieve your minds by revealing that the 30″ zipper turned out to be just fine. I was saved from more ripping and gnashing of teeth. But it’s taking me an age to sew on the darn facings by hand, and I still need to attach i-cord to conceal the zipper from the outside before I’ll consider it really done.

So this post is the equivalent of those old cartoons where the action pauses and there are birds tweeting and maybe some classical music and it says INTERLUDE across the screen.

I give you the beginnings of the Elizabeth Zimmermann Rorschach Jacket:

It begins with a gigantic cast on for the center front and back and works out to the side seam and the sleeve, with some nifty miters along the way. The side seam stitches are live and hanging out on spare needles; I’ll graft them together when the sleeve is complete, pick up stitches along the bottom for the hem, and voila, half a sweater. Then I make the right half, add some buttons and button tabs, slap a belt on it, and Bob’s your uncle. (Where the heck does that saying come from, anyway? Seriously, I want to know.)

In other news, we don’t believe in dieting here at Blue Garter. Especially when there’s a chance of snagging a whole sweater’s-worth of beautiful and DISCONTINUED yarn. So when Knit/Purl had a President’s Day sale, I found I couldn’t resist Rowan Yorkshire Tweed Aran at 40% off.

If Mr. Garter is very good and wears his Fishtrap Aran every day for the rest of the year frequently, he may be lucky enough to get a Seamless Hybrid out of this plummy goodness.

That’s the sound of me applying the brakes to this whole zipper odyssey. Oh lordy, you’re all right: of course the sweater is going to spread width-wise and get SHORTER when it’s on an actual man and not just my ironing board. (And of course Grumperina thought of that ahead of time, as I clearly failed to.) We may be going back to the 28″ zipper, in which case I’ve ripped out a perfect good half a sewing job and – you guessed it – spent an hour and a half of Grey’s Anatomy last night on a new half a sewing job. Let’s see if I can wrestle Mr. Garter into this thing without perforating his handsome torso to check.

Hmmm, where is he?

Mr. Garter is conveniently not located in the house. Either he went running or he’s holed up in some coffee house having a codefest with his geek brethren. What is it with men (or maybe it’s all domestic partners) and their inability to leave a note? Can he not feel the tug of my fevered brainwaves longing to bundle him in wool and pins to ascertain my fate?

Whatever. I’ve spent so many hours on this sweater already that a third zipper installment is a mere drop in the ocean. It will be perfect, dammit.

noun

a pithy observation that contains a general truth, such as, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

or, “don’t buy a zipper until you’ve cut your steek.”

But let’s begin with the steeking:

1) Weave a contrasting piece of waste yarn down the steek line to be darn sure it’s going in the right place.

2) Crochet a chain down either side of the stitch column to be cut.

3) Muster courage, and Ancient German Scissors; haply some Grandmamma Craft Juju doth linger in their blades.

4) Very. Carefully. Snip. And snip, and snip, and snip.

As you drag most of a worsted wool sweater all over town for months, it gets bulkier and bulkier. It fits into fewer and fewer of your knitting bags. Soon you’re lugging it about in one of the canvas grocery totes. It has grown so large and obstinate, so awkward to manipulate as you knit in the round, that it seems to have a certain indestructible life of its own. But when you vivisect it from stem to stern, how delicate the fabric feels! How vulnerable to the dangerous steel of the scissors!

At last, the steeking was done. I fired up the iron and dampened a dishtowel to steam the cut edges into submission. I pinned in the zipper. And this is where I should have stopped.

You sharp-eyed readers will already have stooped on the problem twitching in the tall grass: the 28″ zipper, which seemed so perfect pre-steeking, is no longer long enough. The darn front of the sweater GREW. Maybe it was the release of tension from the neighboring stitches after the cut. Maybe it was the steam ironing.

There’s a formula I need to learn:

when subject = craftsmanship and thought = “I can live with it”, action = force quit

Why did I think it wouldn’t be all that bad if the zipper was 3/4″ shy of the bottom and 1 1/2″ shy of the top? What possessed me to go ahead and hand sew half the cursed 28″ zipper in anyway?

This morning I came to my senses. I carefully measured the front against the back. Maybe the cut edge was just drooping and I could re-sew the 28″ zipper, carefully squinching the fabric back to its former shape along the way. The photo above makes it look like that’s the real problem, but it isn’t so. I needed a 30″ zipper.

Grumbling about Mr. Garter’s long torso, I drove all the way across town to the best place for zippers, the place I found the offending 28″ jobbie. I marched to the zipper section. Oh horrors. There were no brown 30″ zippers. The saleslady thought there probably never had been; it’s an unusual length and they mostly stock black or white ones. No, she didn’t advise buying the 36″ brown one and cutting it; this would only cause me grief with a molded-tooth dual separating zipper. I gnashed my own molded teeth. I thought about substituting an off-white color, but Mr. Garter had been so taken with the brown, and I’d bought a dark brown tweed yarn for the facing and neck lining to coordinate with it. I looked at all the options. I would have settled for a single-ended model, but they didn’t exist in the right length and color either. I even crawled in under the dangling zipper ends in the display to be certain no 30″ browns had fallen of their hooks and might be lying forgotten in the dark.

And just as I was about to admit defeat and drive home empty-handed, there it was, skulking behind some black zippers. 30″. Cloister brown. (This must be the dual separating sport zipper the Franciscan monks favor for their parkas.) It felt warm and pliable in my hand as I lovingly bore it to the cash register.

Mr. Garter’s Fishtrap Aran now has three zippers, hence today’s aphorism. Hopefully Goldilocks has got it just right this time. Now to unpick all my careful little stitches of last night. A six-year-old living a hundred years ago would have laughed at my slatternly basting job, I’m sure, but I was sewing the stitches as evenly and unobtrustively as I could and making sure they were sturdy enough to stand up to man-handling. The mens, they are not so gentle with the garments, after all. Ah well, I’m going to think of it as practice for the real zipper insertion, which will commence post haste.

You get to be in my special high-school drama geek club if you knew right away whence cometh the title of this post. For those of you who didn’t watch enough Monty Python as teenagers (or since), it’s from the bit in The Holy Grail where the peasants are grubbing about in the muck and they get into an argument with King Arthur about the legitimacy of his government. And what do I have in common with medieval peasants these days? A condition in the blood vessels of my fingers that I’ve only ever read of in historical fiction of that vintage. I’m going to show you a picture, but you needn’t click for big unless you’ve got a morbid fascination with skin conditions or you’re thinking you might have the same thing:

See the inflammation on the right fingers? At first, I thought it was some kind of repetitive stress syndrome from too much knitting and writing, but the trouble was in spots that didn’t make sense. When the first joint of my right pointer flared up, I got scared. I’m a thrower. The swelling is in just the place where the yarn crosses the back of my finger. What if it was some kind of nascent wool allergy? But the pinky I loop the yarn around for tension is fine. I asked my doctor about it, and she gave me a blood test for rheumatoid arthritis. Yikes. The same day, I was browsing over at Domesticat and read about her recent finger trouble. I relaxed a little about the arthritis, because her fingers looked as puffy as mine and she said she had something called Raynaud’s Phenomenon. But I read up on that, and my symptoms are decidedly less transitory. Plus the swelling was turning red and itchy. Something tickled my brain. What was that problem people used to get in the winter on their hands and feet before the days of indoor heating and Thinsulate? Chilblains, my friends. Chilblains occur in folks with poor circulation who are exposed to prolonged damp cold. It’s damage to the small blood vessels, and once you have it there’s nothing you can do except try to keep warm and apply corticosteroids for the itching. Oh, and try to keep the skin from breaking, because then you can get nasty lesions. Ew. They’re supposed to go away in 7-14 days, but I’ll probably get chilblains every winter for the rest of my life, although in some people they don’t recur. (I’m crossing my fingers as much as possible.) We’ve turned the heat up, although I hate to waste the energy and money. I mean, why else do we have heavy wool sweaters?

The upshot is it’s tough to knit these days, especially with wool. And you know how it breaks my heart to have to cut back on the knitting at all. I can still knit Continental fashion, but it’s so much slower for me. I am soveryclose to finishing the sleeves of Mr. Garter’s Fishtrap Aran, and then I get to steek. And I have this waiting for me:

This is undyed Unspun Icelandic wool from Schoolhouse Press, in Cream and Blacksheep. (Psst, don’t miss the shameless plug for Zimmermania at center top!) No, the pictures aren’t out of focus; the yarn really is that soft and loose. Icelandic wool has quite a long staple, which is why it hangs together at all in this state. As far as I can tell, it’s just been gently pulled into yarn form – there’s really no twist at all. I’m guessing it won’t do so well for projects requiring stitch definition, but it should make a very soft and warm simple sweater. My pick? EZ’s Rorschach, which is so shockingly underknit that I can’t even find an example on the internets to show you. It’s from Knitting Workshop, and it’s also available as an individual pattern from Schoolhouse (scroll down to #30). I guess I’m just going to have to hurry up and knit it so I can spread the Rorschach gospel myself. As you probably guessed from the yarn I chose, it’s a white sweater with a black stripe – a cardigan in Elizabeth’s beloved garter stitch with a black stripe running up the back, around the neck, down the front, and around the hem to accent the mitered construction. It’s worked, with EZ’s inimitable and original genius, in two halves from the center out to the 3/4-length sleeves, which are blousy and narrow suddenly to hug the forearm at the cuff. Then it gets six i-cord button tabs up the front for big black buttons, and a belt at the natural waist. The overall effect is very ’60s mod, and it feels au courant right now. I love it. I hope you’ll see it here soon! Although I may have to pause to knit myself some more gloves…