Herald's tabard

Recipient: Moi
Designer: Moi
Pattern: As yet unnamed
Completed: April 9, 2006
Colours: Mostly green, with red sleeves and yellow and white motifs
Yarn: 100% NZ yarn, worsted weight
Completed status: To re-felt...again, or knit a neckline to felt
Notes: First felting project

2006-Jun-15

At the beginning of next month, two friends of mine are getting a very spiffy SCA honour (membership in the Order of the Laurel), and this week they asked me if I could be the herald for their induction ceremony. Well, duh, yeah, I'd love to. :) Obviously, I will want to wear this tabard to look as spiffy as possible, and obviously again, I will not want it slipping off my shoulders. So I am going to try to finish it to my liking by the event.

2006-May-29

This got broken in over the weekend - we went to an event on Saturday, I brought it, and got a chance to wear it while doing some field heralding. It got many, many compliments, which was fantastic. However, the neckline really is way too huge. The thing just does not stay on my shoulders. I was joking with people that I was going for 'the eighties Flashdance look'. (1380s, maybe.) I'm nervous about doing Yet Another Felting Runthrough because a) I'm not convinced it would make a difference, and b) lengthwise, I think it's about as short as I want it to be - I would hate to pull the thing out of the machine and find that the neckline was perfect but the whole tabard became a crop-top! So I think what I'm going to do instead is knit a wide garter stitch neckband, which I will then felt by itself and then sew to the neckline of the tabard to keep the whole thing from slipping off.

2006-Apr-21

I want to thank rachel very much for her heartening comments and advice. She is right, felted stuff can be cut and sewn willy-nilly to ensure the correct fit. I need these kinds of reassurances because I felted the tabard again last night and it is still too big, even though it did shrink some more and the front is not horribly oversized anymore. I think I'm going to run it through the felting process one more time, and then call it quits.

If the neckline is still slipping off my shoulders after that, I'll do some kind of fix. Either I'll knit up a garter stitch neckband, felt it and sew it to the tabard, or I'll run some cotton thread around the neckline on the wrong side and try and 'tighten up' the neck that way. Something will work. Something has to work. I've come too far not to get a usable tabard out of this mess. Because dammit, Tanya, you're right, it is a cool project. :) If only I could get it to work right...

2006-Apr-12

Thank you VERY much, rachel and Mel, for your spot felting tips. That's really good to know. I'm not sure yet whether I'll have to used those tips, though, because...well... I tried the tabard on.

Disaster.

It is way too big. For most tabards, it doesn't matter so much that it's way too big, because the folds of the material drape around me and it still manages to fit properly. But because this is a thick, felted material, it doesn't fold, it just sticks out awkwardly. And the neckline is frickin' HUGE. It'll slide off me the second I start to move. And the less-felted-than-the-rest-of-the-tabard front left corner is really, really obvious.



And to add insult to injury, the bathroom mirror is filthy, hence all the white spots on the photo. Sorry.

This is so going for another felting trip through the machine. I'm so nervous.

2006-Apr-9

I finally ran the stocking-stitch-only swatch through the machine to see whether the edges stopped rolling when fulled. And...they do!


This meant I could felt the actual tabard as it was. However, despite two successful swatch fullings, I was pretty nervous about that part of the process, but this afternoon I sucked it up and just did it. I put the tabard in a zippered pillow case and put it in the washing machine along with two of DD's rubber balls (roughly 10-12cm in diameter), an old pair of jean shorts and a pair of DH's pants which he has identified for the garbage.

Prior to the passes through the machine, I'd identified some sections of the motif which were 10cm wide and 10cm high so that I could measure them post-fulling to see whether I had correct shrinkage. After the first run-through (with soap), it wasn't quite there, so I ran it again (without soap). After that the shrinkage seemed to be pretty much perfect, so I took it upstairs and started to block it.

Everything started out really well. Everything was blocking to my intended measurements. The back looked great. The sleeves looked great. And then...I hit the bottom of the front.

Wherever this part of the tabard was in the pillowcase, it was somehow 'protected' from the agitation that the rest of the tabard got hit with, because it had hardly shrunk at all. Aieee.

In desperation I wet the bottom and tried some spot hand-fulling. I scrubbed it against itself. I rubbed it between my hands. I wrapped a fancy hair elastic around my hand (it has lots of beads with jagged edges, good for agitation, I figured) and rubbed the tabard with it like crazy. I took the strap off my fancy camera, which has an anti-friction section at the top with rubber spikes all over it, and rubbed that against the tabard like crazy. I did all this a lot, and with serious enthusiasm (a.k.a. 'panic').

I think all this made a little bit of a difference...but it's still pretty obvious that the bottom of the front is bigger than the back. The front is about 4cm longer and about 10cm wider. Oh, and also, the green faded quite a bit, and it now looks kind of grey.



Ouch.

Mind you, I might be able to do some more spot hand-fulling to the bottom of the front, and it's entirely possible that the tabard still looks green and that its current grey appearance is only due to the contrast with the disgustingly green towels it's blocking on. So there may still be hope. But right now I'm feeling a bit discouraged.

Anyone have tips on spot hand-fulling?

2006-Mar-28

Duplicate stitch? Check. Weaving in of ends? Check.

detritus leftover from weaving in all the ends (hand included for scale to show the true horror)


tabard, pre-felting (aka 'wearing my mummy's tabard'), plus one of DD's bouncy balls for added interest

Test swatch knitted in stocking stitch so I can see whether fulling will cure the curling? Check. Test swatch fulled? Um...no, not yet.

But I'm SO CLOSE.

2006-Mar-27

The lovely Aven reassured me with the wealth of her own felting experience that the currently-madly-curling edges of my tabard will cease to curl once felted. She then added, "you could always reassure yourself with a test swatch." How very true. And how well she apparently knows me. Because the more I thought about those words, the more I realised that I would not rest easy until I had convinced myself with real swatch experimentation that a plain stocking stitch edge wouldn't curl. So, sigh, I guess I will be knitting and fulling a swatch.

In the meantime, however, work proceeds very well indeed on the tabard itself. Today I stayed home sick from work and spent a huge chunk of the day sleeping off whatever nastiness kept me up most of last night with weird sinus happenings and a bad tickle in my throat. However, when not resting (or catching up on laundry), I managed to finish off the second sleeve, do most of the duplicate stitch on the trillium flower motifs, and weave in a lot of ends:

(tabard here pictured with our absurdly long living room sheers and one of DD's toy cars)

I am pleased.

Here is a close-up of the sleeve which has all the duplicate stitch completed:


Next up: more weaving in of ends, more duplicate stitch, and a test swatch to see if I need to do a garter stitch edge.

2006-Mar-24

I have finished the first sleeve and have picked up all the stitches for the second. This means that for the moment, I am not doing any intarsia motifs, which means that I am much, much more relaxed. (I find that my knitting stress is directly proportional to the number of strands I am intarsia-ing with at any given moment.) Also relaxing is the thought that I only have one more of these motifs to do.


(the shot is fuzzy because the only way I could get the whole thing in the shot was by lifting the camcorder high over my head - whilst, I might add, already adding to my height by standing on my sofa, what can I say, the tabard is big and I'm short - and so the focus kind of blows)

However, I'm thinking ahead, and I'm concerned. Obviously, since this is one big stocking stitch monster, it is curling at all the edges like nobody's business. I think this might go away during the fulling and blocking process, but since my fulled swatch had garter stitch borders, I have no actual proof in my hands that this is so.

I have tried to find some before and after photos of fulled projects via Google, but I haven't been entirely reassured. In many projects, it isn't clear whether the edges curl before felting and uncurl bee-yew-tifully during the felting process, OR whether the pre-felted edges are not curling at all but are actually done up in garter stitch.

Does anyone know? Do I need to run a few rows of garter stitch around all my edges before I felt this thing? I have two obvious options, of course. The first is to knit and full an all-stocking stitch swatch and see what happens with the edges. And the second is to do a garter stitch edging all around the tabard just in case. But if I don't hafta do either of these things (especially since I might have to do both), I really don't wanna. Someone take mercy on me and give me a definitive answer? Please?

2006-Mar-21

Over the weekend I finished the back of the tabard and joined the shoulders together. I used the three-needle bind-off for that, which I lovelovelove the clean look of:


Yesterday I really got going on the sleeve. By the time I got off the subway to go to my parents after work, I had finished quite a few rows of the intarsia motif for sleeve #1 and was feeling pretty damn cocky. Until the moment when I started folding up the work and putting it back into my bag. I suddenly realised that, since I was knitting the sleeve from the shoulder down and had been working the motif from the bottom up, that the damn thing was upside-freakin'-down.

There are no words.

So, after I put DD to sleep at my parents, I brought out my knitting, heaved a sigh, and pulled the needle out of the sleeve stitches in preparation for some frogging. My mom's eyes just about bugged out of her head...and that was even before I pulled out the first stitch. :) "What did you just do?!?" she exclaimed. Sympathies were extended once I explained my plight.

Now, however, I am knitting the motif with the correct orientation and everything's going very well once again. I'm past the halfway point of the sleeve:


If I keep this up, I might be finished this week's goal of finishing the sleeves by mid-week. That'd be nice.

2006-Mar-18

The back is really coming along nicely. Here's what it looked like on Friday morning:

(shown here on top of the front for comparison)

Happily, it is even further along now - I'm only about two rows away from completing the heraldic motif. After that, it's just a few inches of stocking stitch, some neck shaping, and the back will be done!

2006-Mar-12

Back has begun. Not much to shout about, though, I've only worked one decrease so far:


The good news, though, is that I recreated the instructions for the sleeves (and realised that yesterday I wrote about figuring out sleeve decreases when I should have said increases...whoops).

Still behind on The Schedule, but at least now I'm forging ahead.

2006-Mar-11

A call last week? the week before? to the TTC Lost and Found department sadly yielded the result I was expecting - no one had turned in my pattern. However, on the bright side, my dear, darling husband went through reams of our recycling and found me the rough notes I had tossed. These, combined with my memory, were enough information to help me recreate the pattern. I still have to recreate the decrease instructions for the sleeves, but that can come later. I haven't saved the recreated pattern anywhere yet, but at least I do have two copies of it, which are not going to be in the same place until I save the damn instructions to my computer.

Yesterday morning I got back into the project and just finished the front:

(sorry about the weirdness at the bottom of the shot - I wasn't paying attention and got some of my shirt and the camera strap)

This is good, since I was supposed to finish the front last Sunday. I'm behind on The Schedule, so I need to start hustling.

2006-Feb-23

DH called me up very shortly after I got into work this morning. The dear, wonderful, lovely man had gone through our recycling and had found my rough notes for the tabard, which include my original diagram, with MEASUREMENTS. He is so getting lucky.

2006-Feb-22

The intarsia on the front is done. It turned out great:


Although it recently occurred to me that the proportions are going to change a bit once it's fulled. It's going to get a little squatter, since the swatch shrank more vertically than horizontally. Hm. Hopefully it will still look great, though.

My next step, before going much further, is to recreate the neck shaping instructions. But I'm still pretty close to finishing the front.

2006-Feb-18

Despite the setback of losing all my pattern notes, I have been able to forge ahead because I could reprint the intarsia charts. I'm now done most of the motif on the front. No pictures yet, and all the entangling of the skeins is really getting to me, but it is looking good and I like it.

2006-Feb-15

Nervousness about running out of yarn continues. However, the first cone is holding out long enough to keep raging panic at bay. I've hit the intarsia section and it's still a decent way away from running out on me.


(And Aven, you are so totally right about felting being fun. I love it, and all I've done is one swatch. I do find that if I look closely, I can see the stitches, and the garter stitch at the top and bottom of the swatch made it obvious anyway, as you suspected.)

2006-Feb-13

Felting is so cool.


It took four trips through the washer to achieve this (and my tree-hugging little heart quailed each time I realised it needed another trip, lemme tell ya) but here it is - a bee-yew-tifully felted swatch. 80% of its original width and 70% of its original height. Thick and felty. Very, very nice. I could really get into this!

Saturday I sat down and designed the pattern and then cast on. I'm about 65 rows into it...

...and already I'm nervous about running out of wool. Sigh. Yesterday's stash roundup revealed more of the green wool than I thought I had, which was very heartening, but I'm still nervous because damn, this thing is big.

2006-Feb-10

Last night I swatched! I have myself a more-or-less 22cm square swatch, and have knotted in four scraps of acrylic yarn, 10cm apart from each other, in a square (18 stitches and 24 rows apart):


It's all ready for felting. Once felted, I will measure how big the 'square' of knots is, and that will give me my shrinkage factor. (I picked this brilliant technique up from Aven's blog.) Once I have my shrinkage factor, I will know how much bigger I will need to knit the tabard in order to shrink it down to the size I want. Then I can design the motifs. And then, finally, I can start the actual knitting.

I've never felted before. Cross your fingers for me.

2005-Aug-28

No progress, but I have taken a picture of the three yellows:

I definitely will not be using the one on the left. I'm currently trying to decide between the two right-most yellows.

2005-Aug-25

I finally took the three balls of yellow wool down to the basement and found the electronic scale. The news is good - each ball is around 55g. At approximately 900 yards per pound, that gives me over 100 yards per shade of yellow. This might well be enough. It should at least be enough for one of the yellow motifs, so worst-case scenario, I can always do the motif on the front out of one of the yellows, and the motif on the back out of another yellow, and you won't be able to tell that anything is off unless you walk all around me looking for inconsistencies.

2005-Aug-22

I forgot to mention in my previous post that the yellow wool arrived in the mail late last week. The vendor actually sent three different yellows, which was fantastic of him. Now I have to get myself a money order so I can pay him back.

I am a little nervous that he didn't send enough of each colour. I told him I didn't need more than 100g of the yellow and I think he misunderstood and sent me 100g in total. This means I'll have about 33g of each colour, which may not cut it. I haven't been able to tell for sure, though, because DD accidentally knocked over my postage scale last week and now it doesn't work properly. DH has an electronic postage scale, but it's in the basement and I haven't bothered to take the wool down there yet (besides, the scale never seems to be in the same place twice). But we'll see. Worst case scenario, I can always ask the vendor for more.

2005-Aug-9

Well, I contacted the seller of the NZ wool to ask if he would be willing to sell me about 100g of yellow worsted-weight yarn, and he was extremely accommodating. Not only was he very willing to wind up what I needed, he offered me a choice between two different kinds of yellow, and all he's asking for is the cost of postage...after it arrives on my doorstep. Unbelievable. What a guy. Needless to say, unless the postage cost turns out to be some horrifyingly high amount, I will probably pay him double or the guilt will haunt me forever. (Incidentally, in order to prevent hordes of people bugging him for the same kind of deal, I should probably point out that I previously bought twenty-six pounds of yarn from this man in one shot, so I suspect you would probably have to be the same sort of customer for him to be so ridiculously generous with you.) So...soon I shall have all the yarn I need for this project, at which point I will probably burst some vessels in my brain with the effort of resisting the urge to start knitting it.

2005-Jul-29

The NZ wool seller on eBay now has an auction up for worsted-weight wool in pretty much the perfect yellow colour. Problem? There are over three pounds of it. Yeesh! I don't need three pounds for this project! I need, like, fifty grams, one hundred max! And trust me - this is not a colour that I would be able to find a use for once I'm done with the tabard project. This is a strong yellow that I personally would not be caught dead in, nor would I dress any of my loved ones in it if you paid me. I think I should just email the seller and ask if he would mind doing a private sale of a smaller quantity of yellow wool. Hopefully he'll go for that.

2005-Jul-26

I've mentioned before that I'm in the SCA. One of the things I like to do there is court heraldry. In our Kingdom, I'm warranted (or at least I hope I am, because I sent in my report for the last quarter) as a Herald-at-large. And one of the requirements of being a Herald-at-large is that I have some kind of heraldic regalia of my own that I can put on when 'on duty' so others know I'm a herald. I do have a baldric (...somewhere in my house...) but a tabard would be ever so much better. I could of course sew one, but it occurred to me...what if I knit one? Heck, what if I made a felted tabard? The more I thought about it, the more I figured this was really an inspired idea, since a) I have become increasingly intrigued with felting over the past few months, and b) I am one of those people who is perpetually cold (and it doesn't help that I lost my cloak about a year ago, and haven't been able to find my nice woollen hood for a long time, so there's a real lack of warm medieval garb in my wardrobe).

So yesterday I figured out how I wanted the tabard to look. The body will be green, with the herald symbol on the front and the back. The sleeves will be red, with the red Trillium Herald's seal (reserved for senior staff members of the Ealdormere College of Heralds, which I believe I am, assuming my last report has brought me back as a member of the College in good standing).

The yarn should not be too hard to acquire - I already have some worsted-weight 100% New Zealand wool in green, red and off-white. So all I need now is some yellow - which I'm sure the eBay vendor I bought the wool from will carry one of these days. (There's no rush, because this is slated as a 2006 project.)

Next steps: a) start looking for auctions for yellow wool, and b) knit and felt a test swatch to determine shrinkage. Then I'll be able to design the pattern.