I haven’t forgotten that I promised some more construction details for the Fishtrap Aran. Mr. Garter has been wearing it regularly (I think he slept in it one night when he crashed on his parents’ couch after a late-night work session with his dad) – so regularly, in fact, that he’s already fuzzing up the collar lining. It didn’t begin to occur to me that the mature gentlemen among us grow bristly little hairs out of their necks and chins that have the same effect on soft wool yarns as wire brushes. Curses! Mr. Garter is under orders to shave twice a day if he wants to zip his Fishtrap all the way up. I’m partly kidding, but he gave me this innocent look and said, “Well, isn’t that why you put a liner in it? So you could take it out and knit me a new one whenever I need it?” I think I hardly need to describe the dirty look he received in return. Here’s the collar lining all pretty and new:

For those of you wondering about the zipper insertion and finishing technicalities, here’s some more detail. I began with a crochet steek. There seem to be several different methods floating around on the internet with excellent tutorials, but I did it the simple way Jen taught me.

1) Leave an extra allowance of three stitches for the steek when you begin the knitting. Twist the stitches on either side of this column for a neat, crisp edge.

2) Weave a line of bright waste yarn down the center of the stitch you’re going to cut – the middle column of the three.

3) Here’s a diagram of your three stitch columns:

\/ \|/ \/
\/ \|/ \/
\/ \|/ \/
123456

The numbers correspond to each side of the stockinet V’s. The vertical lines down the center are your waste yarn, marking the steek line. This is where you’ll cut.

4) Using a finer weight yarn that matches the main sweater yarn (I used Jamieson Shetland Spindrift in Moorit, which matched the Ballybrae Blainin Tweed beautifully), crochet a single chain line by inserting the hook under 5 & 4, drawing through a loop, inserting the hook under 5 & 4 in the next row down, etc. Then chain together the 2’s & 3’s in the same manner up the other side. For an armhole steek, you’ll work a continuous chain down one side, under the bottom of your steek line, and up the other side. For full cardiganization, you’ll want to let your chain trail off to either side at the tops and bottoms for a few extra stitches to secure your work. Later you can unpick these extra stitches and weave in the resulting end. At any rate, you never want to cut across your crochet chain.

5) Cut along the line between 3 & 4, which you marked with your waste yarn, pulling the waste yarn out as you go along. It’s really easy to see the little horizontal bars to cut if you’ve done your crocheting properly – you’d have to work at it to cut in the wrong place.

6) The cut edges will naturally roll inside, and with some handy steam action from an iron, you can easily persuade them to stay there. You want the crease to leave your neatly twisted edge stitches, well, right on the edge.

For the armholes, you’ll want to tack down the cut edges on the inside in the same yarn you used for the crochet job. I used a herringbone stitch per EZ’s instructions – very tidy indeed. As you can go along, you can tuck in any raggedy cut strands that might be rearing their heads, and the herringbone stitch will batten them into place, never to worry you again. Skim the thread or light yarn through the body stitches so it won’t be visible from the outside of the sweater.

Now sew in your sleeves, attaching them to the running bars between the twisted edge stitches and the crocheted edge. I promise, it will be obvious what I mean. This leaves your twisted stitches as a neat divider between sleeve and body.

Time to sew in your zipper. For the love of Pete, make sure it’s the right length. Insert yourself or your subject into the sweater and double-check your zipper length. Begin by pinning the zipper in place. I used these nifty two-prong pins my mother-in-law gave me. I have no idea what they’re actually called, but they worked perfectly. Make sure the steeked edge stays rolled under as you pin. With thread that matches the sweater yarn, whipstitch the 1’s and 6’s to the zipper about half a centimeter from the teeth. Use small stitches, or the zipper won’t feel firmly attached to the sweater fabric and may not stand up to manly tugging. (I wouldn’t want to test it, would you?) The whole zipper sewing process is easiest if you unzip the portion you’re working on.

Once the zipper is in, you can sew in ribbon facings to cover the back of the zipper, or you can do as I did and knit contrasting facings. A six-stitch stockinet strip worked well for me. Again, when sewing it in, skim the needle through the surface of the sweater fabric, but do not penetrate or the stitches will show through. Last of all, work two lengths of i-cord in the sweater yarn – I made a four-stitch cord – to conceal the zipper from the outside. This also has the virtue of covering any ugliness that may have happened in the whipstitching.

Pictures. Want pictures? Of course you do.

Clockwise from upper left: the sleeve join, right side; inside of armhole steek showing herringbone stitch; different view of armhole steek; zipper, showing slatternly whipstitch attachment; zipper facing on the inside; i-cord concealing zipper from the outside.

I know it’s hard to see the herringbone stitch. If this were a proper tutorial, I’d have done it in a bright color so you could see the thread. But I was going for tidy and unobtrusive.

I’m intrigued by the sculptural and textural properties of this sweater, especially when it’s all crumpled and inside-out. The Fishtrap pattern is a freaking piece of art. Elizabeth Zimmermann sure knew what she was doing.

I’ve been meaning to get a short haircut for a long time, and the Katies in my life finally pushed me over the edge. First I met Katrin/Katie, who is now my regular companion for Sunday knitting lunches in downtown Portland. She has an enviable short haircut that I’ve been coveting since my first visits to her blog last summer. Then Spider Katie withstood a total makeover in front of two hundred people, and I knew it was time to pull up my big-girl pants and go pixie. I felt a twinge of empathy for the sheep we knitters so merrily denude as I watched sheaves of my hair slide down the black robe into my lap. Then I was worried that I look exactly like my brother (not that that’s a bad thing – my brother’s a good-looking dude – but I wasn’t sure I wanted to look like a dude). But ultimately, I like it very much. I’ll let you judge:

Yes, I’m a lamentable Pollyanna and I really do smile that much in pictures, and also in my unphotographed life, but Mr. Garter was making me laugh. And it’s only fair to post some goofy pictures of myself after plastering his silliness all over the blog last week.

Next time, back to the knitting content. I promise.

Thank you all so much for your lovely comments and generous praise for the Fishtrap Aran. I’m working up a post on the technical details for those of you who wanted to know more about the finishing process.

In the mean time, I’m struggling to keep my eyes open. Whose bright idea was it to kick Daylight Savings three weeks up the calendar? I think I get to pin this one on the Republican party, no? Dadgummit, it was just getting easier to decant myself out of bed at 6:20 because it wasn’t pitch dark anymore.

Happily, thoughtful Mr. Garter thought to put some fresh undies in the dryer for me long before dawn when he got up to drive Cousin Ewa to the airport. Clean laundry eases the pain of forced reentry into waking life considerably. It’s been Cousin Central chez Garter this past week as the whole clan assembled to remember Mr. G’s Great Uncle Wilbur, who passed away in January. Last night we had cousins festooning both spare mattresses and the couch, and we all stayed up much too late in gales of laughter over family quirks and anecdotes. Uncle Wilbur painstakingly recorded his entire life on typewriter, along with helpful chapters of advice directed at his descendents. “Who Am I Going to Marry?” was a particular favorite (take note, ladies: a career at a newspaper — or, one assumes, any career at all — may signal “marriage is not a priority”, and your suitors may turn elsewhere), as were his ruminations on the benefits of child labor and a wholly speculative account of his parents’ courtship. I give you this sage and somber observation:

“A pitchfork is a terrible thing to run across in a haystack.”

I don’t believe that adage came from the courtship chapter, but it may have. I was laughing too hard to make a proper citation.

I feel as though I’ve run across just such a nettlesome pitchfork in the freelance work I do in my non-knitting life. A project for my father-in-law has eaten far more of the past two months than I ever intended to give it, and it’s become an obstacle to a lot of the work I’ve wanted to do with patterns and with this blog. I had hoped that by now I’d have a snazzy page full of projects for you to download, because the ideas keep coming and I’m only lacking the hours it takes to write up sound patterns and knit up samples. John made me think about what we take from the online knitting community and what we give back, and now I’m feeling obligated to do my bit. Unfortunately, the freelance beast has managed to coincide with a final exam and another deadline I’m hoping to meet, but I hope that April will bring some new life to Blue Garter. Stay tuned. And watch out for pitchforks.

It springeth!

And in Portland, days like this in the month of March are the result of divine intervention. I snatched up the camera and went hog wild. And then I sat out on the deck and finished the Fishtrap Aran, because I knew it could be weeks before I got such another opportunity to bundle Mr. Garter into it and capture the momentous occasion on film.

Drumroll…

Elizabeth Zimmermann’s Fishtrap Aran, the January project from Knitter’s Almanac

Ancient Brunswick Ballybrae Blainin Tweed, resurrected from a 30-year-old project of Mr. G’s mom’s, plus some Rowan Yorkshire Tweed DK for the collar lining and zipper facings. Psst, want to see?

(Apologizes in advance for any retina damage caused by Mr. Garter’s T-shirt. My man likes a little color.) The zipper is not original to the pattern, but I decided it would look more youthful and fresh on my hubby than a button band. Plus, it was a challenge: I’d never sewn one in before. Of course, cardiganizing* the sweater in any fashion was going to reveal the private insides. Not that Fishtrap’s insides are unsightly, but you all know what the back sides of cable patterns look like. I felt they could use a little tidying, and I definitely didn’t want my less-than-Victorian handstitching skills to show around the zipper. Grosgrain ribbons are favored by many for zipper facings, but they don’t seem all that manly, somehow, and they stiffen the edge in a way that I worried would compromise the fluidity of the knit fabric. So knit facings it was. And i-cord trim to hide the zipper from the outside. Oh, let’s have some more pictures.

Mr. Garter gets a little twitchy during photo shoots, but as the recipient of a such a nice sweater, I thought he owed it to me to submit to my every whim a few pictures. Okay, maybe thirty or forty pictures. He got a little goofy on his catwalk, as you can see. Doesn’t he look like a beefcake in his handsome cardi, though?

It’s a snug fit, as he wanted. He particularly specified that the body should not hang like a tent, and that it should fit closely at the hips. I went down a needle size for the first ten inches or so to ensure that this would be the case, and I think it was the right move. I’m particularly pleased about the sleeve length, too. Mr. Garter has very long arms, but I stayed the course. Actually, I’m particularly pleased about the whole darn sweater. It was a lot of work, but it was worth it.

Do I get a w00t, honey?

* Thanks to apparently blogless fellow Zimmermaniac MeowGirl for introducing this great verb into the knitterly lexicon.