Einer Kleiner Nacht Knitting
I managed to get a couple rounds done on the Aran last night. I also discovered from reading Alice Starmore’s Aran Knits that my sweater, strictly speaking, is not an Aran. Well, for starters, I’m not Irish. I’m a Texan Jew. But that little ethnic quibble aside, Starmore claims that Arans are knit flat and then seamed.
Having done side-seamed sweaters (CDS, and the sweater for my sister, for those of you who’ve been following this last year) and non-seamed ones (the Aran and the Sooper Seekrit Projekt), I can’t imagine why you’d do a seamed garment unless you were making something really form-fitting and complicated. Even then, it seems like it would be worth the trouble to sit down with some graph paper and figure out how to incorporate increases and decreases to get rid of those nasty seams.
Any thoughts from the garment designers out there?
I slept until almost 10 this morning, still having freakish fever dreams. Driving a bus on the Continental Divide in an alternate universe, then riding the same road on a three-person tandem with no stokers*. Real, real weird shit.
I was fuzzy in the head when I got out of bed, so I did some mental calisthenics. I popped open the code for the cable grapher and added row numbers to the right-hand edge of the graphs. Put that in your printer and laminate it, baby.
*On a tandem bicycle, the person in front is the “captain” or “pilot” and the person/people in back are the “stokers”. Stoker is taken from a Norweigan word meaning “Has no problem staring at their friend’s butt all day.”
February 15th, 2004 at 4:01 pm
AS always knows best …NOT !
She has strong opinions.Arans are a development of fisher gansies,recent at that,which are always knit in the round.So there !
Why complicate life with seams. :0)
February 15th, 2004 at 4:49 pm
My personal take on it is that seams suck and I take them out whenever I can. HOWEVER, I think they do serve a structural purpose on some knits. If I’m knitting a very loose yarn, such as my current Chamonix sweater, I’m gonna do it flat with seams b/c otherwise it’s likely to either stretch forever or get deformed. I think seams add stability. In circular garmets you also sometimes get that obnoxious “biased” look and you can avoid that by knitting flat, too . . .
February 17th, 2004 at 7:51 pm
Seams do add stability, thank you, Ivete. I love them.