Goya Shawl: Production Part 2

THE BUTTON BAND.

You should probably just bookmark this page and come back to it when you’re having tomorrow morning’s coffee. This is a very! long! post! sorry!

OK, Button band. I’m not afraid of you. (yes i am). I want you to be… STRIPED! and really wide and kind of loose and flowy. not quite like the body of the fabric. I want you to take on a sort of ruffly look. And the rib texture needs to be horizontal like the triangle stripes, also so that it expands and drapes the way I imagine it will. If I do the rib lengthwise, it’ll just look like tubes going up the edges of the shawl. Not what I’m going for. Plus how would you do length-wise rib stripes if you're knitting width-wise.

I experimented with a number of stripe options. Thick, thick, thick. (too collegiate) Thick, thin, thick (hmm not bad but not good either). Thick, thin, thick, thick (too busy). I know! Thick, thick, thick, THIN. (duck duck goose?) Ugh, none of these are working out right. The balance is off. It doesn’t look good with the triangles. It doesn’t look how I see it in my head. I even tried just solid navy.

Meanwhile, I was trying to figure out exactly how I would attach this button band to the body. And how long to make the button band. Considering that I wanted stripes that would run the length of the body, to sort of balance and counter the horizontal stripe-effect of the rows of triangles, I had to figure out how I’d get the button band to be long enough.

My knitting machine only has 200 needles, and the test swatch I did of a 3x3 rib, which is what I wanted because I wanted it to be kind of a loose knit whereas a 1x1 rib would have been too tight and just looked like a solid knit fabric on both sides, gave me only 20” of fabric. I would need a little over 60” total. So then would I knit 3 or 4 pieces of striped button band? and then I’d have to join them and create seams in weird places? I suppose I could place the seams strategically at the neckline.. but I don’t want seams there.

Also, still not sure how to connect the band to the main body. What if I hang the edge stitches from the main body onto the machine so the button band is connected with the first knit row? But then how do I do that and seam the different lengths of stripes. If I use this striped rib, and the rib is running horizontal, that means its stitches are perpendicular to the main body. So the little “v”s that are characteristic of knitting will be pointing left/right, whereas the “v”s of the main shawl piece will be pointing up/down. The issue is that knit stitches are not squares. They are wider than they are tall. So trying to piece together perpendicular pieces means that you have to calculate your rows differently. It’s not impossible, but it is tricky and nerve wracking. Also, would I have to include a seam allowance? How many extra stitches would that be? And account for the stretch of the rib? Ugh this is sounding like too much trouble.

Also also, the striped rib samples don’t look the same color as the main body, despite using the exact same yarn. I had a feeling this would happen, but I was hoping it wouldn’t be noticable. Grinthrough. When you use two colors and the back of the fabric is equally both colors, it effectively creates a new color of its own because you can see the back of the fabric through the front of the fabric. That’s grin through. The background colors are grinning at you through the spaces between the knit stitches on the face of the fabric. (ok thats not really where the term comes from but it might as well be :)

Frustrated, I posted a teaser image on instagram and took a walk. I meditated on the thought that sometimes things just don't work out no matter how much you want or expect them to, and noted to myself how this relates to so many things in life, and how I wanted to share this little life lesson example with my kids. Had they ever felt that way about something? Knitting makes me so insightful!

When I got back, there was a comment on instagram from my mom, “what more does it need??”

I was looking at the shawl body draped on the manequin and thinking of her comment when I realized… she was kind of right. The way the shawl was draped, it looked like there already was a band around the neck and at the front. The shawl was turned down at the neckline creating a sort of collar, which exposed the back side of the fabric. Eureka! I didn’t have to introduce a new (rib stripe) element to the design! I could repurpose what was already there! I could do a double sided birdseye jacquard! (a whosiwhatnow?) I could make the button band look like the back side of the shawl on both the front and the back. That WOULD create a sort of stripe motif from the birdseye, AND it would be the same weight and color of the main body because it would have the same grin through, AND I could knit it length-wise as many rows as I needed, equal in length and rows to the main shawl, and not need to make any seams. BRILLIANT.

Now all I have to do is figure out HOW to do a double sided birdseye, what type of buttons to use, how to make button holes (I remember it has something to do with holding stitches on one side and then switching, but how will that work with a double sided birdseye pattern on the ribber??), and where, exactly, will I put these button holes. and how big will they be? And I still have to decide how to attach the button band to the main shawl. Phew that’s a lot.

Step 1: double sided birdseye.

I was hoping this would be as easy as using the pre-punched card that came with my machine, Number 1s for any machine knitters following along, which is the “every other needle” selector punch card. This would create a birdseye pattern on a 2 color knit fabric if you only used the knitting machine and not the ribber ie 2 yarns per row. (it is useful for other patterns and textures also, fyi.) Basically, this punch card tells the knitting machine to select every other needle, the same way the ribber’s carriage can be set to select every other needle. What I didn’t intuitively know was whether or not this simple punch card would be effective with a multi-color jacquard. Meaning: the pattern has to be converted from 2 colors per row to 1 color per row, so would it still accurately select every other needle? Or would it end up knitting the same needle twice for two passes?

I went through the exercise of making my own multi-color rib punchcard, following the directions in the color changer manual (not the ribber manual), and was happy to discover that, yes, even with the multi-color rib pattern, the punchcard is the same for multi-color knitting. I stopped working on the punchcard as soon as I confirmed I could use the one provided, which saved me about 30 minutes of hole punching time. You can see the successful result of my first double sided birdseye jacquard in this picture. Phew!

Step 2: button sourcing

At first, I wanted to use the beads from the leis we got on one of our last trips to Hawaii (#RHOSV). I realized without even trying to sew one onto a sample swatch that a bead IS NOT a button, and would not quite work the way I had intended (because in order to attach it to the garment, the yarn comes out of either end of the bead rather than from the center, so the bead would slip in and out of the buttonhole rather than fasten it closed).

So I scrapped that idea and went to Joanns where they have a pretty good selection of buttons. I saw that they had buttons made out of coconut shells. I thought that would be perfect for this hawaii-inspired design! Of course, they didn’t have as many as I needed in the color I liked best. So I bought a bunch of other buttons that I hoped would work - some brown, some wood, some navy. I brought the pile of buttons back to minartment and just didn’t really love any of them.

I happened to be downtown a few days later so I went to Britex, SF's premiere fabric store. I had been wanting an excuse to visit their new location. It’s just as big and daunting as it was before! They have SO. MANY. BUTTONS. And even with all those options, I really only was interested in the one style of coconut button they had. Luckily, they had a lot of them, so I bought 10 smaller ones, and 2 bigger ones. I expected I would use 8 small and 1 large, but I always like to buy extra, just in case. And it’s a good thing I did, because I totally forgot that I wanted big buttons on BOTH sides of the shawl, and the actual spacing of the smaller buttons required 5 per side, not the 4 per side I had originally estimated.

Step 3: buttonholes.

Now that the punchcard pattern is figured out and buttons bought, I need to understand how to do the button holes. I know the basic concept:

- Knit the stitches on the left side of where you want the button hole, knit as many rows as needed to the height of the finished button hole.

- Stop knitting those stitches and knit the stitches on the right side of the button hole an equal number of rows

- Final row knit straight across the top, closes the hole.

There is then a space created between the left-hand stitches and the right-hand stitches, because when you knit them separately, the yarn isn’t going across the space between the center needles. That space is the button hole. make sense? (Do you understand? #insidejoke)

Ok, so, I did a test swatch of this technique, using the birdseye punchcard. I didn’t pay too much attention to how many needles I selected for the test swatch. Probably 20 or so. What I learned, by being a tiny bit lazy with this swatch, is that the needle selection IS important, even if doing a small swatch. Why? Because of the birdseye pattern. This is where the button hole process begins to twist my brain around.

Here are front and back pictures of my first button hole test swatch. You see how those stitches are SO long on the back of the fabric? And there is some kind of rouching happening on the front of the fabric? I had to sit with this swatch for a while before I figured out what went wrong. I re-read the part of the manual that explains how to set up the machine and carriage for multi-color rib knitting, and that’s where I found my answer. This has to do with needle selection.

I didn’t pay close attention to how many needles I used for my test swatch, I probably went with 20 on the main knitting machine which means 19 on the ribber. You always have a main knitting machine needle start and finish a row, and the ribber needles work in the spaces between the knitting machine needles. So you always have one less needle in work on the ribber. To understand this better, you could picture a number line that goes from 1-20, count the spaces between the numbers. (now let me explain to you a taco. #insidejoke)

I probably chose 20 so that I could knit 10 stitches on either side of the button hole, easy to remember. But it threw off the birdseye pattern so that I was knitting the same color in the same needles for 2 rows while not knitting the alternate needles at all for 8 rows on the BACK side of the fabric, rather than alternating needles every row like it was doing on the FRONT of the fabric. How did this happen?

Well, remember that the birdseye pattern is created by knitting a color on every other needle, then going back across to knit the second color on every other needle that hadn't been knit yet to complete one row of alternating-color stitches. And that I’m trying to do this on both the ribber and the knitter. What I was reminded of when reading the manual is that when you’re doing birdseye with the ribber, the ribber carriage automatically selects the SECOND needle from the end, no matter which direction you’re knitting.

So pretend you’re knitting with 10 needles,

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Starting with the carriage to the left, Knitting from —-> left to right, the ribber would select:

2 4 6 8 10

It starts with 2 because that’s the second needle from the carriage at the beginning of the row

On the way back, with the carriage starting on the right, knitting right to left <—— , it would select (read this right to left, the direction the carriage is going):

1 3 5 7 9

It starts with 9 because that’s the second needle from the carriage at the beginning of that row.

This creates the perfect alternating stitch pattern.

But what happens if you have 11 needles selected?

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Knitting from left to right, the ribber would select

2 4 6 8 10

Knitting from right to left, the ribber would select (read from right to left)

2 4 6 8 10

That's right, it is using THE SAME NEEDLES BOTH WAYS. Because now needle 10 is the second needle from the carriage at the beginning of the return row.

That means you’re only knitting even stitches!

It’s a bit less tricky with regard to the main knitting bed. That side of the fabric is using the punchcard to determine the pattern, so while using this particular punch card, it’ll always alternate needle selection no matter if there are even or odd numbers of stitches. Needle selection for the ribber, on the other hand, is done by a gear on the bottom of the carriage that, when turned on, selects every other needle as described above. There is no punch card needle selection for the ribber.

This means, in order to maintain the birdseye pattern for the button holes, I will need to have an even number of stitches selected on the ribber (back side of fabric) on either side of the button hole. If I have an even number of stitches on the ribber, I need to have an ODD number of stitches on the main knitting machine. But if I have an odd number of stitches on the main knitting machine, that means my button hole can’t be centered in the button band. I would have, for example, 10 stitches on one side of the button hole, and 11 stitches on the other (for an odd total of 21 stitches on the knitting machine and an even 20 on the ribber). And you can’t have a rib needle be the first/last needle of the row, so if I had 10 active needles on the main knitting machine while knitting the left side of the button hole, I’d have 9 on the ribber on the left hand side of the button hole, and 9 on the ribber on the right hand side of the button hole, but that makes 18 and I have 19 active needles, so what do I do with the center needle?

(Can you tell that I’m writing this in as confusing a way as possible on purpose so you feel as mixed up as I felt while doing this? You can? ok good :)

For the final button band, what I ended up doing was selecting a total of 19 needles for the main knitting bed, and 18 needles on the ribber. When it came time to create a button hole centered in the button band, to maintain an odd number on the main knitting and an even number of needles on the ribber, I transfered one center stitch from the knitting needles onto an adjacent needle, and transfered 2 center stitches from the ribber to an adjacent needle. That meant, on the left side of the button holes, I was working with 9 stitches on the knitter, 8 on the ribber. Then I would switch and knit the same number of stitches on the right side.

I used different balls of yarn to knit the right side of the button hole. Remember that once the left side of the button hole is knit, the yarn is now 10 rows above where it needs to be in order to knit the right side of the button hole. The process of adding in the new strands of yarn took a bit of practice. First, I had to make sure I was starting with the right color. Keeping track of which every-other stitch is navy and which is tan was tricky. It is essential to pay attention to how many rows you’ve knit, and turn the row counter back when you start the right hand side of the button hole. Both sides of the buttonhole should start with the same color of yarn.

I spent a long time trying to figure out how to start the right side of the button hole with the carriage on the right side of the machine. It's tricky to start knitting in the middle of a row from the left side when you have to pass over a bunch of needles without knitting them, that's why I wanted to work from the right side.

But working from the right really threw off the birdseye pattern. I was seeing stripes on the back instead of alternating stitches (see swatch). It took me hours to figure out why: The last knit row on the right-hand-side of the button hole was knit from right to left. So when I would start the right-hand-side of the button hole from the right side of the machine, I’d effectively be knitting the same stitches that were last worked rather than alternating stitches (despite my careful even/odd needle selection!!) So it would create a stripe instead of birdseye on that row. (clear as mud? coo coo cool.)

I ditched the effort to start from the right. My brain couldn’t figure out how to make that work. Then, starting the right-hand-side of the button hole from the left-hand-side of the knitting machine caused the knitting to fall off. ARGHHHHH. WHAT THE HECK?!!?!?

What was happening was that I forgot to wrap the new yarn around the first working needle, so it wasn’t catching or knitting, and that side of the button hole would fall off. It took me a few failures before I figured out the best way to re-thread the machine each time I had to knit the right side of a button hole. The yarn had to go through the tension mast, behind the other colors, down into the carriage, up and over the non-active needles, then around the first active needle. I was nervous every time I had to bring that carriage across the first right-hand-side button hole row. Once I figured all this out, I was able to make a proper buttonhole. TA-DAAAA dang gurl why you don't darn in your ends for your blog posts damn.

Step 4: button and button hole placement

FINALLY, after all this trial and error, I felt confident in my button hole making skills. I still had to figure out exactly where to place the holes, and buttons.

Once I threw the shawl up on the manequin and pinned the spots where I thought it would look nice to have buttons, I noticed that the placement was lining up with the stripe motif created by the triangle patterns. Perfect! Of course it does. I worried about all that for nothing. I did have to figure out exactly how big to make the button holes, though. I did a few different samples with 8 rows, 10 rows, 12 rows.

Button hole size is tricky because you don’t want it to be too small, then the button won’t go through, nor too big, then the button won’t stay fastened. I found what felt like a happy medium for the smaller buttons, 8 rows, and 10 rows for the bigger button. Then I calculated which rows to start the button holes in order to center them with the adjacent row of triangles. Then I calculated where to put the buttons so they would perfectly align within the center of the buttonholes, and decided I would mark that placement while knitting to make it easier to attach them later. All those notes are in these images.

Step 5: knit it!

Confident in my button hole making ability and with placement confirmed, I set out to knit the button bands. I estimated about 1-2 hours per band. It took me 6. SIX. S-I-X. HOUUUURS. PER. BAND. That is longer, per button band, than the entire main body by itself!!

Part of the slow down was that I was marking both sides of the band on every 48 rows. I wanted to be sure that a) the buttons and button holes would be properly aligned once I attached the button band to the main body, and b) that I was sewing the bands evenly onto the main body. I did this by tieing a small red thread to each edge of the fabric. It was really tricky to get the thread to behave! I spent a lot of time struggling to grab the thread from beneath the machine and pull it out of the way of the working needles. I also marked where I wanted to attach the buttons in a similar way of tieing a red thread around the center stitch on a specific row. Near the end of knitting the second button band, I realized that I will ALSO have to spend time REMOVING these tiny tags. ohhhhhhh. I vowed to come up with a much less time consuming, annoying, and ultimately useless process for the next time around.

Oh and one time, when I was knitting a button hole, I forgot to put the carriage on "hold" when I started to knit the right side of the button hole. Putting the carriage on "hold" tells the machine not to knit the needles that are pulled all the way out (on the left side of the button hole that I had just finished knitting). So it knit the stitches on the left side of the button hole when I didn't want it to. And I had to undo that row. After that, I just left the carriage's "hold" button on the entire time I was knitting the button bands.

I also struggled with making sure the needles around the button holes were knitting when they were supposed to on those first rows after holding the stitches. I thought I could just pull the needles forward and they would knit without problem. Nope. I had to actually transfer the stitches back onto their needles so they were snugly on the needle safe underneath the latch. Having to transfer these stitches every start and end of a buttonhole added to the time it took to make the bands.

And then, then! I discovered, halfway through knitting the second button band, that I was short one needle. How could this be? How could the birdseye pattern look fine if I was short a needle? How did I figure it out?

Well, I had run into some kind of trouble with the knitting. Some stitches had fallen off. I was working on repairing the dropped stitches. I took the whole band off the machine and threaded a contrast nylon cord through the stitches a few rows from the working edge so I could easily (ha, "easily", it is never easy) re-hang both the knit and rib stitches. I kept on re-trying to hang it on the correct number of needles and being one stitch short. I was frogging rows and rows to see where the missing dropped stitch was. I counted and re-counted the stitches on the band. Finally, I determined that I had re-hung all the stitches properly, and that I had been knitting with an even number of needles on the main knitting machine. How??

The reason I hadn’t noticed before is that the birdseye pattern continues to knit like normal no matter how many needles are in work on the main knitting machine. It only gets messed up on the rib side if there are an odd number of needles in work. In this case, I was using the correct, even, number of needles on the ribber, and was short one on the knitter. (What about the rule that you can't start/end with a rib needle?! NFI, guys. nfi.)

I thought about starting over because I am a perfectionist and this is a big mistake. Then I realized... it is just one stitch. No one will notice. WABI-SABI! So at the exact halfway mark, center back neck, I just put the end needle into work on the knitter and carried on.

These are my notes to myself on button hole shaping:

(as seen in the notebook pic above)

row 20: start buttonhole: transfer center stitches, both ribber stitches onto same needle so they knit onto same row. hold right side. knit 8 rows

row 28: hold left side, transfer right stitches back on to 3 5 7 9, push right side into work and rehang stitches on ribber, thread other navy yarn, wrap over-under needle 2 and over held needles. reset counter to 20

row 22: right side: thread other tan yarn behind other yarns, wrap over around needle 2 and over held needles, check that no yarns are in the way/twisted.

row 28: w carriage on left, put all needles into work, xfer stitches onto 8 6 4 2 0 3 5 7 9, and rehang needles on ribber, cut right side yarns.

Another tricky detail was how to close up the button hole in a way that looked nice, putting those 3 transferred stitches back into work. Each button hole has a slightly different method. Pick up a stitch next to and below the out of work needle, pick up and twist the float that runs across from the previous row, share the adjacent stitch, grab a knit stitch to put on the ribber, etc. I used the blanket stitch outline on the buttonholes post-knitting to hide all these discrepancies. I never did get it right.

Step 6: Attach it.

I took a break for a couple days to think about how I’d attach the button bands. I wanted a really flat/no seam so that the shawl could be reversible. Would I have to stitch it on by hand? Is there a way I could use the linker?

I did a couple samples using the Hague linker, and, with the traditional method of attaching two pieces of knit fabric, the seam was just too thick. I didn’t like it. I researched various ways of joining pieces, by hand or machine, though I already knew most of the techniques I read about.

I liked the idea of having a crochet-like chain running the length of the button band joining seam. It would be like a solid stripe and give it a clean finished edge. But I wasn’t exactly sure how to do that. I found a great video on youtube that explained exactly what I was thinking of (though I can't find it now to share with you, sorry), crocheting the seam together by hand. But when I tried to do it on this actual garment, I found the stitches were much too small and it was taking way too long just to join the first few rows. I even bought a whole new set of crochet hooks so I could have the really tiny ones to make the process easier, but nope.

(Though I'm still happy with the crochet hook set. look, surprise hot pink cover!! I love it when my accessories match minartment!)

Maybe they aren’t good crochet hooks, I had trouble grabbing the yarn with them, or maybe I was using the wrong size. I dunno. Either way, I realized the only thing I could do was to use the linker.

I came up with a technique for the linker that created basically the same look as the crochet joining technique I was trying to do by hand, and it created a pretty flat seam. Because the two fabrics I’m trying to join are double jacquards, they are very thick. Normally, I think you’d hang the fabric on the linker so that the right side of the main fabric faces you and then layer the button band with wrong side facing you directly on top of that, hanging the entire edge of both fabrics on the linker. This would create a fairly thick seam on the inside of the shawl. Instead, I hung the fabric on just one stitch on one side of the main body fabric, and one stitch on the button band. This way, the thickness of the fabric is butted up against itself rather than folded on top of itself. Maybe these pictures can help explain? I probably should have taken better notes on exactly how I did this. Anyway, I was pretty happy with the result!

It was a bit tricky to get started, though, because I either had a few missed stitches at the beginning of the main body fabric, or I steamed it so much it shrank. The main shawl, which had exactly the same number of rows as the button band, was much shorter at one end. I ended up hand stitching this part together to kind of force it to match up. I realized after the fact that I could have done a similar technique with the linker where I sew together two stitches to one instead of one to one… but by the end I was too tired to take the time to go back and fix it. Another opportunity for wabi-sabi. I pretend like years from now, I’ll be famous, and this piece will be worth something, and the way it’ll be identified is by these tiny imperfections.

After the button bands were attached, I had to figure out how to make the button holes look nice. There were all these loose threads from adding in the additional strands of yarn to make the button holes, and the look of the transferred stitches wasn’t great. I ended up doing a sort of blanket stitch around the edges of the button hole with the blue yarn. It looks alright, but does make the buttonhole less stretchy. I had to re-do a couple that got too small and tight.

Then, when all that was done, both button bands attached, (most) stitch markers removed, and all the ends darned in, I laid the whole thing out on the steaming table and saw that the button bands were really wavy! I must have used too many weights and stretched the stitches out while I was knitting! Agh! Thankfully, most of the excess disappeared after a thorough steaming. Phew. That was nearly a disaster.

(pictured: before and after steaming)

This whole process to attach the button bands also took a really long time. I had to rehang every single stitch. This thing is 1440 rows. I hung 1440 stitches 4 times, because I had 2 button bands that were both 1440 rows long attached to two sides of the shawl that were 1440 rows long. Ugh it took forever. Another multi-day project. Total work time just to attach the two button bands was another 13 (THIRTEEN) hours!! And then a couple hours for final steaming and darning in ends.

Total active work time: 30 hours

(for a project that should have been more like 2 or 3 hours start to finish! agh!) (this does NOT include inspiration or design development time, this is JUST knitting&finishing time)

It’ll be interesting to see how long it’ll take to make a second one, now that I’ve made it through all the trials and errors! And what should I charge? If I paid myself $20/hr, that'd be $600 not including design development. Plus the cost of yarn which was around $250... $1,000 feels like a fair price, no? (insert laughing emoji)

Here’s the final finished piece!! You can wear it 6 different ways!

Go and order yourself one here!

I hope to develop a few other color patterns and color combination options soon.

Please comment below if you’d like additional details or images related to any portion of this dissertation :)

Thanks for reading!

Please join me again soon for a review of Knitting Graph Paper Books! And work on my next three projects: BAMA scarf, lightning scarf and telephone hat.

-nina

P.S. To the head-of-school's wife: I truly hope you find comfort and joy in your shawl. Thank you for being the inspiration for this project and giving my work purpose.