Long Leaf Coat knitting solutions

Buffy, I really am fortunate to have this large colored grid remake of Kaffe's Long Leaf Coat pattern. It is easy to keep my place and make the color changes correctly,  now even more so that I have marked every tenth stitch with a small black synthetic rubber O-ring. The O-rings are soft and easy to slip.  Purchase them in a packet of two dozen at the local hardware store for about $2.

Now my LL coat "reads" just like the 10-grid in the pattern, with it's heavy black line every 10 stitches.

I mark the pattern line I am knitting with a strip of post-it tape placed over the working line so that I can see the stitch pattern that is on the needle along with the one being knitted. The tape is easy to move up to the next row each time I finish the visible row, and it is easy to lift for a peek if it covers one of the boxed color notations.

A small change in yarn handling -- a more accurate term would be yarn "wrangling" -- is making a large difference. Note in the first picture that the yarn is always composed of two strands of color. At first I changed each strand of the 2 colors in a different spot, thinking that it would make a stronger fabric. In reality, I was stopping twice as often as I knit with short pieces of yarn. Now I make sure that the two strands are identical in length and add length to both of them at the same time. cutting my stops and starts in half. I don't think the fabric is any less strong, and now I can knit across a row in less than an hour.

Happy holiday tomorrow!

LOLOL Yarn: A time for this and a time for that

Buffy, you know that lolol is internet speak for "laughing out loud on line," but I like to think of it as Lots of Little Old Lady yarn. I find LOLOL yarn at garage sales, yard sales, thrift shops and on eBay.

It was on eBay that I hit my first bonanza. I found over six pounds of wool needlepoint- and crewel-weight yarns in short, cut pieces for the very small sum of $9. Or maybe it was nine pounds of wool yarn for $6. It was tangled and messy but it contained every color in the crayon box and a great many more. I spent days sorting it out and making it neat. I wish that I had photos of it.

But here's an image of another lot I bought on eBay.

I can't tell you how much I paid, but I always try to keep my bid well below $10 a pound. 

Some of these needlepoint yarns are in 40-yard skeins, and that's always great to knit with, but most are cut lengths that needlepointers use. A few are almost 2 yards long, but most are 28 inches long, and shorter. These lengths are almost perfect for the multicolored Kaffe Fassett coats knitted in intarsia. Kaffe's patterns often specify the yarn needed thusly:  7 pounds of yarn, one-third light tones, one-third medium tones and one-third dark tones. You get the picture. I can knit a coat like the Kaffe's Jug Coat for $50. (Well, it would have been $50, but I decided to add three 25-gram skeins of super expensive silky yarn at $20/skein.)

The Long Leaf Coat is coming in at quite a bit more. I started it just as the Rowan Scottish Tweed yarns were being discontinued, and I found many (but not all) of the yarns specified in the Sticka med Kaffe book at half price. You know how I love a bargain.

Nonetheless, I'm using this bag of LOLOL yarn, too, on the LLC.

So Kaffe's Long Leaf Coat won't be $50, but it's not going to break the bank, either.

Your Kaffe Romeo & Juliet Coat is quiet a different affair. I can see why you paid so much for your seven pounds of heritage yarns. Not only have those original yarns been off the market for twenty or more years, your coat is continuous, coordinated stripes of color, and mixing bits of this and that would give it another look altogether -- not what you would want if you really liked that 30-year-old red, red coat pattern. Plus, long stripes do not call for 28-inch pieces of yarn! Not at all!

So there's a time for LOLOL yarn, and there's a time to splurge. 

It's the first day of winter

Buffy, Christmas knitting is finished at my house. All the gifts are made and wrapped. Time to get back on track and move Kaffe's Long Leaf Coat to the front burner. I'm making it a priority in the list of New Year's knitting resolutions!

Now that you have  your Kaffe Romeo & Juliet Coat to the try-on stage, I feel like such a slacker.  I know you have many miles to go: Reknitting that very, very large sleeve into a very large sleeve will take some time. How did the frogging go?

I've just added a heart count to our Ravelry links list on the right-hand side of this blog, because I want our readers to know that as of this day, 113 Ravelry readers have favored your Romeo & Juliet Coat with a red heart! My LLC, not so many, so I'd better get busy!

Knit small, knit large

Buffy, you've answered the question.

But I've got to say that the big sleeve had a certain something!

I know you've positioned it "just right" for the photos, but in my mind's eye, I see it flowing and blowing and waving about. I just go back to the traditional Chinese holiday costumes, so huge and undulating with movement. But then those were used in ritualized dancing so there was motion most of the time

Smaller sleeves are more practical. I've heard you must reach the great age of eighty before you can begin to be impractical.  We're not there yet.