Colllar-ed Greens (and Yellows)

Despite my fears that the recently cut ends of my steek would fray, unwind, unravel and otherwise disassemble themselves overnight, they stayed put. I spent a good chunk of the morning picking up stitches around the v-neck collar of the Vaila Slipover.

Ann Feitelson makes a point in her chapter on Fair Isle techniques that Shetlanders draw the yarn up from behind the fabric when picking up stitches. They find it distorts the pattern stitches less than pulling up bars and pulling the yarn from the front of the fabric. This made sense to me, so I did it. This meant a lot of yarn manipulation in the vicinity of my unreinforced steek cuts, but it didn’t seem to cause any problems, despite starting over several times. Whew. Clicking on the picture above takes you to the photo at Flickr with notes for more details.

Once I got them picked up (on a size 1 needle), the rest was a piece of cake.Just nine rounds of k2p2 alternating colors and switching the purl color every few rows. There’s a tidy little 3-stitch decrease at the bottom of the V, and that’s it. I had to agree that the join between these two fabric types works well and I have to chalk it up to drawing yarn up from behind. It’s a little weird at first, and I somehow managed to get all the oyster heather-colored stitches on backwards, but the overall effect is nice. I should do this all the time.

As you might be able to see, there is a bit of curliness to the bound-off edge of the collar ribbing. One of the finishing instructions suggests running a basting thread through the ends of the ribbing and drawing it in during the blocking process to take care of this. I’ll definitely try it.

So far so good. All that’s left to do is cut the armhole steeks and do the ribbing for them. And then some blocking and finishing. But the end is in sight! I’m really pleased with the retro look this is taking on. Seeing the collar ribbing does improve the overall look.