Knitting -- brioche pullover

OK who started a brioche pullover using the stitch counts from my original pullover, bottom up?

If you didn't, don't, first think about how brioche works. If you work bottom up, after you cast or cable on your stitches that fit your hips, and do say a round of seed stitch, the next thing you do is your brioche setup round. And you increase the size because this is a bulky, springy technique. 

But if you work top-down, you have a chance to customize the width of the body with a new technique I haven't shown you yet. 

Cable on for the neck, work however many rows of K1/P1 rib. Work one knit round for stabilization.

Now do your setup round. 

Now work brioche top down, doing increases so you have room for your chest and also to attach the sleeves. Meaning that this is a raglan piece. And then if you want, you can work decreases in the body below the armpits.

So I cabled on 104 stitches for the neck and worked 10 rounds in K1/P1, etc. The advantage of K1/P1 is that, in spite of the added stitches, every rib of a one-color brioche connects to a knit stitch in the neck. The added stitches are YOs, remember, and they get worked into the first purl row while new ones are added for use in the knit row. If you're working non-brioche raglan, you may have to finagle to get the increases to match up with the K2 of a K2/P2 neck rib.

At the end of my brioche setup round, I had 156 stitches. Divide in 4 and you have 39 stitches in each sleeve, the front and the back.

Normally with raglan you would work one round and then start increasing. Now let's think about working brioche. You work a brioche increase by knitting, adding a YO and then a knit into the same stitch, so you add two stitches not one.

In a raglan, you work 8 sets of increases, on each side of the sleeves and on each side of the body. In brioche, you increase by 16 stitches instead of 8 each time you increase. In brioche, work increases every other KNIT round, or the FOURTH round since the last increase.

So the sleeves will increase from 39 to 43--47--51--55--59--63--67--71--75--79. Stop increasing in the sleeves but increase one more time in the front and back for 83 stitches.

This comes to about 39 rounds and your last increase was, of course, in a knit round. Start that last purl round, and cast on 10 stitches (total 93 stitches in front and back, which is divisible by 3) at each armpit for the body while moving the 79 sleeve stitches onto holders. On the next knit round, do setup stitches at the underarms and then breeze brioche down to the hem. (But see decreases below.)

Now go back to your sleeves. Cast on 8 stitches and work that last purl round. On the following knit round, work the brioche setup on the cast-ons and then work four rounds (two brioche SETS). The last round you work will be a knit round. Stop SIX stitches before the end of the round or at the 3rd stitch with a wrap. Don't work this stitch. You'll need it as part of the decrease.

Work the first decrease at the end of the round you are on. Then you'll do 7 rounds ending with a purl round, and for the next knit round, work the first stitch and then do a decrease at the start of the round. Alternate between starting the 4th knit round with a decrease, and ending it with a decrease.

Let's go to the video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWiw_m_98Zs

Notice that this is a FOUR STITCH decrease. YES, you can work a decrease at the start of a round and another at the end of the same round. This is going to create an obvious stair-step as you go down the sleeve. I didn't like the thought of that so I alternated every 4th knit round as I said above.

Also notice that line running between the decreases. That's the first or last stitch of the round, before or after you decrease.

You need to take out 40 stitches and the cuff will wind up as 47 stitches; work a total of 10 decreases. In worsted, my sleeve is normally 132 rounds before the cuff. With brioche, make sure the sleeve measures the right length rather than having the right number of rounds.

I admit it, the first time I tried to do this decrease I ended up out of step in my brioche. So I unraveled back to the last knit round and reworked it. It's called "learning".

Also I made enough mistakes in other places that I had to unravel some but not all of the rows, and I learned to pick up a row. I found that picking up at a knit row was easier for me. You have to make sure to pick up the YOs with the stitch that they go with. In a knit row, these are in front and then you dip the needle to the back to pick up the singleton. But I have managed to pick up purl rows to avoid too much unraveling. Just work slowly when you pick up, and be obsessive about picking up the YOs.

If you work a brioche pullover for a guy with big shoulders and snake hips, you might want to work decreases on the body under the armpits. Make sure you change from knit to purl rounds and vice versa in the middle of the back. Then work symmetrical decreases directly under the cast-ons at the armpits. 

Do one set of decreases, then work a number of rows. Now let your boyfriend try it on. Decreasing below the armpits might make the hem too narrow to go over those broad shoulders. If that's so, unravel beyond the decrease, pick up the knit or purl row before it, and finish the body without decreases.

With a sock, binding off every stitch (with a YO if necessary) made the edge too tight. With this pullover, neither the hem nor the cuffs are too tight. And I can probably put like five layers under it, making this one of the warmest pieces I've ever worked.

I used Brown Sheep Lamb's Pride wool, in Victorian Pink. This yarn gave off a lot of fluff, unlike the Orange You Glad color in the same yarn. I had enough leftovers to work a pair of socks, which were not so fluffy. So it's the brioche stitch itself which preserves the fluff.  Your guy won't want something fluffy so use some other worsted or a bulky yarn. And remember, if it took 16 skeins to make the last sweater for him, you'll want 24 to work brioche, even with decreases in the body.

And of course you could work a brioche sweater with buttons down the front, but I have other fish to fry so that is not on my bucket list.

Next time, another mariner's jumper that got adapted into high fashion.

21st Century Classical Greek -- conditional 2

So OK once again I'm posting Monday night instead of Tuesday morning. I'll be skipping next week.

Thucydides Book I section 10 starts with a conditional.

καὶ ὅτι μὲν Μυκῆναι μικρὸν ἦν,

ἢ εἴ τι τῶν τότε πόλισμα νῦν μὴ ἀξιόχρεων δοκεῖ εἶναι,

οὐκ ἀκριβεῖ ἄν τις σημείῳ

χρώμενος ἀπιστοίη μὴ γενέσθαι τὸν στόλον τοσοῦτον ὅσον οἵ τε ποιηταὶ εἰρήκασι καὶ ὁ λόγος κατέχει.

The fact that Mukinai was small

[is] that if it seems not now considerable among the towns of this time,

[nevertheless] it is not precise that whatever indications [we have],

proclaim that we might doubt that the expedition was not as great as the poets say or assertions extend to.

Dokei einai is an idiom for “seem”. It is a progressive conceptual, in line with the habit or condition of seeming not to be large compared to other towns of Thucydides’ time. In fact, Mukenae was razed during the Persian war. It revived slightly and had a theatre for a while, but by Roman times it was nothing but a tourist stop to see the sad fate of Agamemnon’s city.

This structure isn’t in Goodwin’s classification. It’s a present general supposition, that Mukenae seems small to everybody, but it uses neither ean nor the oblique. By having ei, it ought to be a particular supposition that implies nothing as to its fulfillment. However, anybody could go to Mukenae and see that it’s not as big as other cities, or they may have gone there in the past, or they may have seen it being razed. This is what Thucydides knows, as opposed to speaking directly to some specific person in his audience about the size of Mukenae. So once again, we have a fuzzy category that gives us no help.

In the non-an apodosis, Thucydides uses an epistemic since he is not signing up that we should doubt the poets’ estimate of the size of Agamemnon’s fleet. So he has the fact that Mukenae is small, but he is arguing against mistrusting the poets. He can’t force his conclusion on his listeners, he is saying things change over time. People in his audience may be old enough to remember Mukenae before it was razed. Goodwin points to this kind of structure starting on page 303, section 1421, but he’s only talking about the forms used and does not relate what he says to his original categories. So even if the categories were useful, Goodwin does not apply them to every conditional construction, and that’s a terrible oversight. It’s kind of like not relating the rare earths to their electron configurations.

If you have read the Catalog of Ships in Book II of the Iliad, you know that 29 leaders contributed ships to the total of 1,186.

Scholars who don’t understand oral traditions cast doubt on this total. From the time that the Peleshet/Ahiyyawa destroyed Wilusa, about 1190 BCE, until the accredited time of Homer’s work, as late as 600 BCE, the Peleshet/Pelasgians, who had been part of the Palace Culture in the Peloponnese, were joined by the Denyen (also listed on Ramses III’s Medinet Habu inscription listing the Sea Peoples), the Aeolians and Boeotians, and the Dorians as founding ethnic groups of the Greeks. The last in particular were known as the Herakleidae and possibly represent the spread of the Hellenic language, replacing the Pelasgian dialect for which Linear B was the script.

It is perfectly reasonable that as new populations entered the Peloponnese, whether from the north or from Egypt, as they came to consider themselves one people they all began adopting the oral narrative that was the basis for the Iliad. They added themselves to the Catalog of Ships. This has its analog in the fact that Deukalion and Pyrrha, who survived the flood, are said to have landed on four distinct peaks in Greece: Mount Parnassus, Mount Athos in Chalkidiki 40 miles NW of Parnassus, Mount Othrys in Thessaly barely 20 miles north of Parnassus, or Mount Etna in Sicily, over 60 miles from Parnassus.

Mount Parnassus was sacred to Dionysus, a fitting legend for the landing place of the ancestor of the man who brought wine grapes to Greece. It has its own flood story in which howling wolves save the citizens from the flood. It overhangs Delphi, the oracle sacred to Apollo. (This is the landing spot in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a product of the Roman Empire that nevertheless seems to have drawn on oral narratives.)

Chalkidiki was part of Macedonia, which was supposed to have been founded by Argives.

Thessaly was the homeland of the Hellene Achilleos and the Herakleides or Dorians who brought Hellenic Greek to the Peloponnese.  

The Sea Peoples who settled Sicily adopted the flood narrative and notice that Sicily was part of the Greek oekumene long before “Homer”. But Homer is a convenient name to attach to the consolidated Troy narrative, even if he was a live person.

Notice once again the perfective conceptual eirikasi referring to what the poets wrote as done with, a persistent result.

21st Century Classical Greek -- negated conditional

And the reverse of last week.

[4] φαίνεται γὰρ ναυσί τε πλείσταις αὐτὸς ἀφικόμενος καὶ Ἀρκάσι προσπαρασχών, ὡς Ὅμηρος τοῦτο δεδήλωκεν, εἴ τῳ ἱκανὸς τεκμηριῶσαι. καὶ ἐν τοῦ σκήπτρου ἅμα τῇ παραδόσει εἴρηκεν αὐτὸν “πολλῇσι νήσοισι καὶ Ἄργεϊ παντὶ ἀνάσσειν:” (Hom. Il. 2.108) οὐκ ἂν οὖν νήσων ἔξω τῶν περιοικίδων (αὗται δὲ οὐκ ἂν πολλαὶ εἶεν) ἠπειρώτης ὢν ἐκράτει, εἰ μή τι καὶ ναυτικὸν εἶχεν. εἰκάζειν δὲ χρὴ καὶ ταύτῃ τῇ στρατείᾳ οἷα ἦν τὰ πρὸ αὐτῆς.

In the rest of subsection 4, it looks as if we have two apodoses because an shows up twice.

Actually the first one is ouk an plus what Thucydides is denying: that outside of neighboring islands, Agamemnon did not rule any islands. There’s more to it than that but first I have another an to address.

Which is inside the parentheses with a progressive epistemic. First, remember we are talking about a past situation. We need to call the verb progressive aspect, a situation, to avoid the cognitive dissonance of calling the verb present tense.

Second, we need to call it an epistemic, not an optative, because Thucydides is not signing up to any certainty that there were a lot of islands. Which kind of island? Neighboring islands. Agamemnon was king of Crete, but the Kyklades, for example, are some 60 air miles from Crete. Odysseos’ Ithaka is even farther away and on the opposite side of the Peloponnese.

And now the rest of the idea about the neighboring islands. The actual thought is this:

οὐκ ἂν οὖν νήσων ἔξω τῶν περιοικίδων ἠπειρώτης ὢν ἐκράτει… εἰ μή τι καὶ ναυτικὸν εἶχεν,

it’s not, then, the being islands outside those neighboring the mainland which he ruled, If [Agamemnon] had possessed not some ships,

So where does this conditional fall in Goodwin’s categories? See page 296, section 1387, Roman numeral II. Homer states that Agamemnon did have ships, at least at the time of the Trojan War, so this is a protasis contrary to fact. As a known thing, it is indicative modality, as well as being completely definite and certain.

Notice how clumsily it reads in English, when you put the negations with the words they refer to.

The protasis has “not” next to “some ships”, not “have”. And it is mi, the partitive, which goes perfectly with “some”. It’s not negating the condition.

On the other hand, the apodosis is negated with ouk, the categorical, and it does refer to the conditional particle, not to the islands.

If you “translate while running”, trying to produce somethng comfortable in English,

a)         you’re going to put the negations in the wrong places and end up, as Jowett did, with “Grenglish”.

b)         You’re probably also going to reverse the protasis and apodosis from where Thucydides has them, because in English we always think of “if…then”.

c)         And you’re probably also going to bury the fact that this is an ei…an conditional as Jowett did.

So slow down, pay attention to the word sequence, and don’t call something a negated condition unless the negative particle actually refers to the conditional particle instead of to the subject of the protasis or apodosis.

21st Century Classical Greek -- conditionals

 I'm posting tonight cos on New Year's I wouldn't post.

Now we can start getting into conditionals. And what we are going to do is eliminate what, class? That’s right, the useless categories, especially the nasty confusing “future more/less vivid”. We’re going to show that modality and not aspect drives what a conditional means, and we’re going to eliminate a lot of Goodwin’s notes. I’m going to move to section 9 subsection 4 for now.

[4] φαίνεται γὰρ ναυσί τε πλείσταις αὐτὸς ἀφικόμενος καὶ Ἀρκάσι προσπαρασχών, ὡς Ὅμηρος τοῦτο δεδήλωκεν, εἴ τῳ ἱκανὸς τεκμηριῶσαι. καὶ ἐν τοῦ σκήπτρου ἅμα τῇ παραδόσει εἴρηκεν αὐτὸν “πολλῇσι νήσοισι καὶ Ἄργεϊ παντὶ ἀνάσσειν:” (Hom. Il. 2.108) οὐκ ἂν οὖν νήσων ἔξω τῶν περιοικίδων (αὗται δὲ οὐκ ἂν πολλαὶ εἶεν) ἠπειρώτης ὢν ἐκράτει, εἰ μή τι καὶ ναυτικὸν εἶχεν. εἰκάζειν δὲ χρὴ καὶ ταύτῃ τῇ στρατείᾳ οἷα ἦν τὰ πρὸ αὐτῆς.

The bolded phrase may look like it uses an impersonal gerundive with that -sai ending, but the word tool will show you that the same spelling can be labeled epistemic. There’s no provision for using “infinitives” in a protasis that Goodwin lists. He says “indicative” but the “infinitive” is not thought of as being indicative. See the distinction used in this article.

https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2008/2008.02.24/

The old label for tekmiriosai was not only optative, it was aorist optative. Aorist was a past tense. This creates a cognitive dissonance with the old category “future less vivid” which is what Goodwin calls it when the protasis has an “optative”. The label is adopted from Latin. If you also know Latin, here's your chance to examine whether such conditionals always refer to future events.

Is Thucydides talking only about people in past times trusting what Homer said? This is where aspect works better than tense. As an imperfective eventive, tekmiriosai does not have to refer to a past event. It can refer to an event occurring in multiple places at multiple times involving multiple people, with no requirement that any of the people experienced the event at the same time or in the same place. We will see later that it didn’t have to occur in the past either.

If this is a conditional then a) the protasis and apodosis are reversed and b) the apodosis does not have an at the start. In fact the apodosis is only sort of hinted at, the audience that doesn’t trust Homer’s evidence won’t believe what Thucydides is saying.

We can see why we have an epistemic – not even an oblique – in the protasis. Everybody in the audience knows that Homer was a poet, not a historian. They also know that Homer was not alive when Agamemnon ruled, and had his information at tenth hand or something like that. Thucydides knows it too, and he is not signing up to the “witnesses” knowing what they were talking about.

Now look at Goodwin page 297, section 1393 bullet 2 at the bottom. Goodwin proposes a past tense in the apodosis but not only do we have no past tense in the apodosis, we don’t have a stated apodosis. There’s no evidence here for what Goodwin says.  In 1395 on page 298, he says you can have basically any mood [except infinitive] in the protasis for a general supposition. IOW having a non-indicative modality in the protasis does not mean you have a “future more/less vivid”. So his claims are too fuzzy to be useful. No wonder kids in British public schools had so much trouble learning Greek.

By changing to an aspectual verb description with strict definitions, we get rid of cognitive dissonances.

By changing to modality with objective definition, we show why a protasis would have an indicative (most certainty), oblique, or epistemic (least certainty) in the protasis. And most of Goodwin’s ten pages on conditionals go away.

Knitting -- customization

So I already talked about using math to make sure your knit tops fit YOU, no matter what weight of yarn you use or what your interest pattern is -- Fair Isle, argyle, etc.

This week's post is about two patterns by Hayfield, both of which are available for purchase on etsy. Pattern #9219 shows boatneck and vee neck jumpers for adults and a child's sort of polo jumper. I don't have a pattern number for the other, a set of adults' and children's cardigans, Sirdar also carries them; here's a link to the cardigans.

https://sirdar.com/en/products/cardigans-in-hayfield-bonus-aran-tweed

The point is that 9219 has what people call a Celtic braid motif but no button-front sweater, and the button-front sweaters have no Celtic braid. What if I want a button-front sweater with a Celtic braid?

I count stitches.

The Celtic braid is 36 stitches wide and 16 rows long. The two front panels of a cardigan that fits me, have 50 stitches each. I could do moss stitch on the underside of the sleeve and the part of the body it falls against -- but I decided that would be boring. There's a panel of Xs and Os that run vertically; I did that on both sides of the braid, for an additional 16 stitches -- 52 stitches wide aside from the button and buttonhole plackets. It's always good to use extra stitches with an Aran pattern because the cables make it contract. I worked moss stitch on the sleeves and back beside the braid.

I worked the sleeves first as far as the armpits and stopped where I was about to go back to row 1 of the pattern. I worked the body the same way, only one pattern set shorter. Then I put everything onto a 40 inch circular needle. Boy, was it heavy! And then I started decreasing at the moss stitch on the back and arms.

About 2/3 of the way between the armpits and the neck, I ran out of moss stitch. So I started decreasing at the Xs and Os of the sleeves, letting that part of both front and back dominate. Finally at the top I still had too many stitches so I did a knit round to fix the cabling, and
regular decreases on the next purl row and the following knit row. And finally did k2/p2 rib on the collar just like on the hem and cuffs.

This is Brown Sheep Lamb's Pride worsted in Orange You Glad. If it's not bright for you, well, they have another color called Wild Orange. I'll use this yarn in another color in another post.

If you are now in love with Celtic braids, here is an even more complicated one from Lucy Hague, who grew up in the Orkneys, for free. I plan to use this with a petal pink DK yarn. I'll flank it with motifs from Grace  Thompson's book on traditional fishermen's sweaters.

https://www.lucyhague.co.uk/blog/2015/09/30/nennir-written-instructions/

Again, this pattern is fitted to a cowl. If you want it for a jumper or sweater, you will have to redesign it in your spreadsheet and count stitches to make sure it fits you.