Speeding to Peak Color

Buffy, fabulous!  The sleeve is fabulous! And I knew it would be--I just knew it!

I thought of your Kaffe Romeo and Juliet Coat  when I watched a documentary film of traditional Chinese (Taiwanese) holidays throughout the year. The traditional costumes were huge. Sometimes when the arms were held out, the sleeves hung straight down from the wrists almost to the ground. The clothes undulated and flowed with movement. I think that might be a "secret" of the Romeo and Juliet Coat: Just keep moving!

There are 160 stitches across the back of Kaffe's Long Leaf Coat, 20 less than the amount around one of your (new) sleeves. Although I am sure I have sped up now that I am using charts I can see (!), it is still taking me an hour to cross the row. The stitches go fast enough, but the color swaps are frequent. Sometimes the colors that make up the strands are of different lengths and I find myself attaching a single strand of yarn. This would all go a little faster if I was more willing to waste a bit more yarn. I can hardly make myself do that!

It is especially slow when I tuck in those wiry metalic threads. I am using them less now although I like the look because I read in a knitting "hint" book that the metal threads could act as "knives" and cut the wool yarns. The wool stretches with the weight of the fabric and the metal threads will not stretch.  But that 3rd (and sometimes) 4th wiry strand is exceedingly slow to manipulate. One has to look closely to see the minute glitz (the near yellow leaf)--unless it is after dark and the light makes it sparkle. Otherwise glitter is not really visible. All seven leaves across the bottom of the coat contain some of the metalic threads.

I've still eleven colors to select overall. Each color is combined at times with many others so this truely is a coat of many colors. It's fascinating to watch them combine, and I love this project.

One might think that these leaf colors are a bit "neon."  NOT! Here's proof!

The leaves are turning quickly, and picking up speed! Just as I am....

No sleeve contest: Kaffe was right!

Well, LuLu, I'm about half way up the full part of the 180-stitch sleeve, and my hunch was correct. Once I finished the 120-stitch sleeve, I could see that it would sit like a big round balloon on my arm, while I suspected that the 180-stitch sleeve (as designed by Kaffe Fassett) would undulate in and out. Guess what? He knew what he was doing! Here's the 180 sleeve.

And here, for comparison is the 120 sleeve:

There's just no question: the big sleeves, regardless of what they weigh or how unusual they will look, will be much more interesting and graceful than my attempt to scale them down.

Here are a few close-ups:

By the way, I decided to knit in the round, and it's going well. I have to change direction at the beginning of each stripe in order to switch from stockinette to reverse stockinette. Back when I started the first sleeve, I worried about getting confused, but now it's easy to know when to turn around. No purling!!!

These yarns are the foundation yarns of the coat: L to R, a mohair, a single-ply, worsted-weight tweed, and a fine single-ply, also tweed. Tonight I'll be knitting 9 rows of the three yarns held together to produce that very wide, fuzzy-looking stripe around the sleeve in the classic photo at the top of our blog.

Knit on! Buffy

On the boards

Hi LuLu,
One of our wonderfully encouraging readers commented on how fast I'm proceeding. Trust me, I'm no speed-knitter. In fact, I'm an English-style "thrower," and we all know that the Continental-style "pickers" are the queens and kings of speed.

No, the answers are (a) mostly stripes--just knit or purl an entire row, no picking up or setting down as with your Long-Leaf intarsia, and (b) Size 9 and 10.5 needles, and knitting with two and three (and on the sleeves, FOUR!) strands at a time. So the key is BIG stitches.

In truth, though, I'm wasting no time, not I letting myself work on any other knitting projects (of which I always seem to have three or four going at a time). It's strictly the R&J coat, whenever I can squeeze in a few minutes of knitting.

The two front bodice pieces are now "on the boards" (the ironing board, that is). They're still on the needle because the shoulders will be joined using the 3-needle bind-off. You can see my preferred method of blocking wool, pieces pinned to the size and shape I want, and then pressed with a damp pressing cloth so everything is steamed into place.

Fortunately, the front pieces decrease at the center edge, so there was less knitting than the back bodice. That sped up the intarsia. Now just the second sleeve remains.

The second sleeve, at 180 stitches around...now THAT part IS going slowly. It's a lot of stitches! And on these big #10.5 needles, it just isn't possible to knit as fast as on smaller needles. If I never had to stop to adjust the stitches on the needle or shake out more yarn, I could knit a row in 3-5 minutes (about 1 stitch/second). But it's more realistically taking 10 minutes per row. I have about 120 rows to go, and 17 days until Kaffe comes to town, so I'll need to carve out about an hour/day for knitting. Oops, I forgot--I also need to sew the pieces together, somewhere in there...

Ta-Da! (Sneak Preview)

Another drumroll, please, LuLu.
Just for fun, I laid out the finished pieces on the deck so we could get a preview of the final effect. All the skirt panels are now complete, and I'm about half-way up the two front bodice pieces. Gotta pick up the pace here, because Kaffe Fassett comes to Vashon Island on October 9 -- only 24 days to go! My present plan is to have the bodice and skirt panels sewn together. Then I hope to have the two sleeves, one at 120 stitches and one at 180, pinned in place.

(I'd be a whole lot further along if it weren't for two very serious tax deadlines on September 15 and October 15. Why, oh why, did he choose to come to my part of the world right before the very worst, drop-dead tax deadline of the year? You thought it was April 15, but we can get 6-month extensions in April. No more extensions now; this is IT.)

I'll be in the presence of a whole roomful of Kaffe Fassett admirers, and I should get lots of helpful comments about the sleeve decision. But I suspect such a group would tend to vote for the 180-stitch sleeve that's true to the original, rather than what looks flattering, don't you think? I mean, if we KF followers wanted clothes that were ordinary or made us look slender, we certainly wouldn't be doing THIS!

Kaffe's Long "Elm" Leaf Coat

Buffy, the new big sleeve will be some sleeve, indeed! I'm rooting for the big sleeve, just like the one on the pattern. A whopper of a sleeve, it's the one everybody loves! It will billow and furl and wave about, and you will feel so grand!  Can you tell I love the big sleeves of Kaffe's Romeo and Juliet Coat?

Progress has picked up on the Kaffe's Long Leaf Coat, not in small part because so many people have it on the needles!  I'm invited all the coats here to Vermont in the Autumn of 2011 whether finished or not! We can compare the coats with each other, and to the glorious show of color on the trees outside. As my daughter says, Autumn is Nature's Las Vegas. The Kaffe Long Leaf Coats will be the chorus line!

You know, of course, that the most colorful tree here is the climax tree of the Green Mountain Range, the Hard Maple. If the forests are left alone, it will be the most frequent tree in the maturing woods.  It's also the tree that produces wonderful maple syrup.

Kaffe's Long Leaf Coat is composed of elm-like leaves, probably because they are easier to overlay one on the other. Everyone knows the shape of the maple leaf--it's the centerpiece of the Canadian flag. Imagine designing a coat with those shapes one over another. Impossible!

The American Elm is a wonderful tree. Most have died off, but there are a few left here and there, and new disease resistant strains are being developed for replanting.

I saw this elm tree in Canterbury, New Hampshire last weekend. Those darker green trees behind it are maples.  A plaque on the rock marks the elm tree.

Color season will be here soon. The trees start to color often before the first frost, and the color moves south from Canada through New England along with the cooler weather and shorter days. I'll post some pictures of the ranges of colors that can be found all around the neighborhood.

Those really, really big sleeves

LuLu, I'm seriously considering knitting the second sleeve with the full 180-stitch circumference (as called for in Kaffe's pattern) and then comparing the effect to the sleeve I've already knitted (with only 120 stitches around). Here's why: the 120-stitch sleeve (above) seems to just sit there as one big solid balloon on my arm, with perhaps one or two half-hearted inward folds. I've lightly steamed/blocked it, so the between-stripe colors are more visible and it's flatter from shoulder to wrist. But that didn't change the way it lay around my arm. I'm thinking that the 180-stitch sleeve might have multiple undulations (judging from the photo in the book), making it more interesting. And quite possibly no larger around, in the end, simply because of the undulations.

At least that's today's thought...

Stripes abounding

Hi LuLu, I'm making great headway on the panels, as you can see. AND today I signed up for a day with Kaffe Fassett and Brandon Mably on October 9. So the knitting's getting really serious here.


The panel on the left is one of the first two, and on the right the final two panels (knitted at the same time). The next two photos are more of the same, but closer up.