busy as a bee

 Everyone I've been talking to has said I'm as busy as a bee. They certainly aren't wrong.  I finished the enormous task of painting the house (well, touching up where it needed it, I'm not insane!)  It was a lot of work though. I've finished getting rid of all the big things I can't do alone as well as several dozen bags of stuff I don't want to bring with us.  All I have left is to pack the rest of my stuff.

busy bee, indeed.

Well, this bee needs a break now and then!

I've been working a lot on my Nightscape sweater.  The upper front and back pieces have been joined and it's a tube of knitting at the moment:

This is actually a fairly color accurate representation.

I'm working on this sweater in a helical fashion to minimize pooling.

Pooling is a phenomenon where certain tones or colors end up collecting together in a part of the knitted fabric.  It can be a neat effect in socks, sometimes spiraling around the leg.  I don't worry about pooling in socks, because well, who is looking at my feet?

In the indie dyed yarn market, as opposed to yarns from a Michael's or Joann, it can be really difficult to buy a sweater's quantity of yarn that are all the same exact color, dyed uniformly in the exact same way, especially in yarns that are meant to be tonal or variegated.

Ironically, the first time I knit this sweater (previously I said it was 2016, it was actually 2018!), I didn't worry about it, so you can see where the darker parts of the yarn "collected" in the fabric:

 You can see under the arm on the right side, the shadow that is not a shadow.

 I've worn and worn (and worn) this sweater and you can hardly notice the pooling in the wearing.

All this to say, the skeins I bought for the new iteration are much more different from each other than the ones from the first iteration, and if I knit them one after the other, it would look like I was using completely different yarns. So, to solve this I'm helically knitting, which is a fancy way of saying I'm alternating skeins.  It's more than that though, and I'll definitely get into it.

Knitting in the round is essentially knitting in a spiral.  There is no beginning of round, there is only continuation of a spiral.  You can mark where you started, mark the sides if you're adding shaping, but the beginning is an illusion.  You see this if you knit multiple rounded stripes in the round, there's always a jog.

Helical knitting is understanding the spiral and taking advantage of that property of knitting.  You can do this with multiple colors, but it works just as well with just the one.  Sometimes to avoid a hole when you change colors, you twist the yarns, but in helical knitting you do not.  Essentially you take turns with your skeins, do one round, drop the yarn and pick up the second yarn, do a round.  If you looked on the inside of your helically knit tube, you wouldn't see a jog at all, because there isn't one, the yarn continues to be knit like a barber pole.

There's actually a neat story of a famous knitter and her daughter knitting on the same sweater at the same time on opposite sides of the body and they did this because they knew that intrinsic property of knitting in the round. That it is just a spiral of stitches stacked on top of each other.  The sweater in question was a cabled jumper, and one of the knitters was always stuck with the job of crossing the cables while the other got off scott-free doing the plain rounds!

Sometimes people will stop a few stitches early, slip those stitches and continue with the next ball till three stitches before the switch, but it isn't actually necessary.  This can help with the yarn transition tension, but I'm not doing that method this go because I'm cabling stitches and I don't want to deal with that added complication.

When I get to the sleeves, I probably will do the slipping method since it is stockinette.

If you're confused and want to know more, it's worth looking it up.

I hope you enjoyed this mini lesson in advanced knitting in the round!  I'm off to pack a box, shovel my driveway and get back into the knitting later.