hats

FO: Oxidation

- Caitlyn

With the leftovers from Justin’s cabled hat and my own, I had exactly enough yarn to create a third hat. I’d hoped for as much when I bought the yarns—just ask Rebecca at Warm ‘n Fuzzy—but it was a huge relief when my little yarn scale confirmed it.

Rather than knit more stripes, because I’ve had enough of stripes for a while, I decided that there was no better time than now to try my hand at stranded knitting. Since I knew my yarn was limited, I didn’t bother trying to find a pattern, and instead improvised based on my most recent hat and some guidance from Ann Budd’s The Knitter’s Handy Book of Patterns.

I’ll admit I felt a bit of trepidation, which is silly, because I didn’t feel a single flutter of anxiety when I first tried cables. Maybe it’s because my very first knitting project was cabled, and I didn’t know enough to have the slightest idea what to worry about. Now that I’ve knit a while, I know what to fret about: Tension. Color dominance. Insufficient contrast.

There was nothing I could do about the combination of colors, since I was already committed to using up the yarn, and tension would only be solved with  practice and patience, so the only thing left was color dominance, which I was aware of and could easily look up online. Ysolda has a great introduction to the theory of color dominance on her blog, but the one thing she neglects to mention is the more practical question of how to carry the yarns so that the dominant and subordinate colors aren’t switched accidentally. Enter Dianna of Paper Tiger, who helpfully explains which yarn is dominant when knitting with one color held in each hand, both colors held in one hand, and with one color at a time. Thanks Dianna!

I knit continental, and I was tempted to hold both yarns in my left hand to keep things familiar. But I’ve heard that, once you get used to it, holding one yarn in each hand is quite speedy and prevents the yarn from getting twisted or tangled, so it seemed like it would be worth the effort to learn to do it that way.

It was pretty awkward. As expected, I struggled to keep the tension even. My tight-knitting tendencies are so strong that the blue stitches, which should be dominant/larger, are in several places dwarfed by the background copper stitches. Every time I started to get into the rhythm of alternating hands, I’d notice that things were moving a little more smoothly and promptly lose focus and knit the wrong color or drop the yarn.

But wouldn’t you know, it flew off the needles anyway. Anyone who’s ever said that there’s an addictive quality to knitting colorwork was definitely on to something. Before I knew it, I’d run out of blue yarn and it was time to decrease the crown and cinch it up.

If you’re curious about the knitting specifics, you can check out the notes on my project in Ravelry. The only thing of note is the crown, which has eight sections instead of the typical six. This was purely down to the number of stitches I’d cast on at the beginning. It does work, but I think there’s a good reason that six sections is the norm: this crown doesn’t lie down as smoothly, and it has a tendency to make the whole hat ride up a smidge, which you can see in the close-up above and the two pictures below.

The scarf I’m wearing is also me-made. It’s a lovely, drapey 100% rayon in a pattern and colors that I love that I snagged from Jo-Ann several months ago. Sadly, I should have purchased a longer piece than I did, because the woman at the counter did a poor job cutting it, so I lost a fair amount straightening up the edges. Once the corners were squared, though, it was a simple matter of rolled hemming the long edges, zig-zag stitching the short edges, and then removing weft threads to create a fringe on the ends.

There are several suggestions online for sewing a rolled hem. Grainline Studio recommends sewing a line of stitching to use as a guide for pressing, stitching, and trimming before pressing and stitching a second time. Craftsy suggests using a teeny tiny strip of interfacing to encourage the first several inches of the fabric to roll properly. I chose to take Megan Nielsen’s advice, which is to sew a few stitches without feeding it through the rolled hem foot, pull the fabric free without cutting the threads, and then use the thread to guide the fabric into the foot and sew.

I can confidently say that, after sewing the edges of this scarf, I am about two iotas better at using the rolled hem foot. Megan’s advice certainly helped to get things started, but keeping the hem even as you go along seems to come down to firm and steady tension applied to the fabric and a keen eye to keep it from veering too far into or out of the foot. So, practice.

Luckily, I got a to try my hand at it again on my next make, coming up next week. Today, I’ll leave you with my favorite photo from this shoot:

FO: Andraste

- Caitlyn

When I started knitting this, hot on the heels of Justin’s hat, I was certain the yarn was destined to become a Dragonflies Hat by Joji Locatelli. So certain, in fact, that when I made it to the crown decreases and realized the whole thing was turning out much too short, I immediately ripped everything out and started again on a larger needle. When I made it to the crown decreases a second time and it was still—inexplicably, disappointingly—too short, I spent a solid evening mulling over ways that I could fix it. A smarter knitter than I might be able to devise a way to repeat the pattern a third time, but I couldn’t tease out a solution, and I also couldn’t convince myself that adding another inch or two of ribbing wouldn’t disrupt the balance of the design.

After setting the pattern aside (with a promise to myself that one day I’ll knit the sweater version instead), I cast about my Ravelry favorites and decided on Droste Effect by Amy van de Laar, a free pattern from Knitty’s Deep Fall 2015 issue. Besides going up a needle size for both the ribbing and the body, I knit it exactly as written. I had a minor hiccup with the Decrease 5 to 1 instructions, but found helpful notes on another user’s project that had me speeding through in no time. While I love to lose an hour scrolling through all the loveliness in the pattern database, I think I’m most gratified when I can find—and give!—that little hint or nugget of knitting wisdom that turns an imminent failure into a success. In fact, my proudest knitting achievement to date is creating a project with notes that have helped 10 people.

What’s your proudest knitting (or crocheting, or sewing, or crafting) achievement?

FO: A Hat of His Own

- Caitlyn

When Justin and I were dating, I bought him a pair of red mittens for Christmas. After we’d gotten married but before I’d started knitting, I crocheted him a hat to match. It was made from Caron Simply Soft, it was solid red, and it was subtly textured, alternating two rounds of single crochet with a round of double (or was it half-double?) crochet. He wore it for a winter or two before he lost it, and it was another winter or two before I plucked up the enthusiasm to make a replacement.

By that time I’d started knitting, but only just, and I wasn’t confident in my ability to knit in the round. I didn’t want lack of muscle memory to slow me down or uneven tension to spoil the result, so I stuck to the crochet I was familiar with. I also went back to the same yarn and pattern. But because I made the replacement during an interstate drive and didn’t have Justin’s head handy for reference, I ended up increasing a few too many times, and the finished hat was too big around and much too long, even for his larger-than-average 24″ head. He wears it anyway, but with a sizable cuff at the bottom to keep it in place and out of his eyes.

Now, with more than a few successful knit hats in my collection, I felt the time had come to make Justin the better-fitting—and warmer!—hat he needed and deserved. Needed, because the red hat obviously no longer passes muster in this more experienced maker’s opinion, and the 3″ difference in our head sizes means we can’t share hats even if wanted to. Deserved, because he’s a reservoir of patience and support when it comes to my hobbies and a gracious recipient of anything I make—including less-than-stellar dinners and off-beat jokes—and therefore knitworthy (the lost hat notwithstanding).

So, hot on the heels of Jonah the D&D dice bag, here’s a wonderfully woolly, cabled hat for Justin. He picked out the (free) pattern, Brigid Hat and Mitts from Willow Yarns, and the yarn, madelinetosh Tosh DK in Chicory from Warm ‘n Fuzzy.

The hat is designed to fit a 21″ head circumference, which is pretty typical for adult hats and thus too small for Justin. To compensate, I added a repeat of the cable pattern but went down a needle size from the recommendation, finding the sweet spot that yielded a hat exactly 24″ around. For more technical details, check out my project page on Ravelry.

Like all hats, I found this one satisfying to knit because it practically flew off my needles—even after casting on, knitting through the first few rounds of the body, and then frogging and re-starting to get the right size, it only took me two weeks from start to finish. The cables were a little different than ones I’d knit before, because there are places where one crosses under another and then vanishes instead of continuing to travel away, but this kept things interesting for me. And because every cross was two-over-two, they were easy to accomplish without a cable needle and easy to fix if I made a mistake.

Justin’s been wearing the hat practically every day since it was finished, and he gets compliments on it any time we go out. He loves to tell people that I made it, and I love him for that. Knitworthy, indeed.

FO: Cary Depot

- Caitlyn

While I’m continuing to make slow progress on the striped sweater I started on New Year’s Eve, the fingering weight yarn and the frequent pauses to change colors mean that even if I knit for an hour or two at a time it doesn’t feel like I’m gaining much ground. I’m trying to keep pace with Amy Herzog’s Deep Winter Knit-A-Long (note to self: actually join the KAL thread on Ravelry instead of just lurking), which means that I have until the end of March to finish up. In the meantime, I desperately needed a little quick gratification so as not to completely stall out, so I turned to my Ravelry favorites and my little pile of leftover yarn. And wouldn’t you know, I managed a hat out of it!

2016-02-29_01_Cary-Depot

The pattern, Glenna C’s Union Station Beret, has been in my favorites for ages, along with both of her Urban Collection bundles and a handful of standalone patterns. Glenna’s penchant for cables comes through in many of her designs, and when you’re looking to increase your cache of warm winter hats you can’t go wrong with squooshy wool cables. The yarn I used is the remnant from my Courant sweater. I can’t decide if I’ll wear the two together or not—as much as I like matching, that seems like it would be a bit much.

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My version ended up a beanie rather than a beret by accident: I cast on with the correct size needle, but when I went up two needle sizes, I referred to the US size rather than the metric size. The 0.5 mm difference combined with a lighter-than-called-for yarn and a firm gauge resulted in a hat with no extra room for slouch.

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I was a bit bummed at first, and I considered re-knitting it since I still had yarn left. But I ultimately decided that I wanted a hat more than I wanted a beret specifically, and ripping out the entire thing sort of defeated the purpose of an easy, motivation-boosting project anyway. Wearing it out proved that I made the right choice, and I’m glad to have another hat in rotation for the remaining cold days of winter.

In the spirit of playing around with pattern names, I’ve dubbed this Cary Depot after the train station in our town. We can hear the trains trundling along and sounding their horns from our house. I know some people dislike the idea of living anywhere they can hear traffic noise, but I’ve always lived near transportation hubs—a commercial airport for my childhood home, and train tracks for both my college and first post-college apartments—so I find it comfortingly familiar.

Plus, who can resist an opportunity to play around with a bronze conductor statue?

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Project: Cary Depot
Pattern: Union Station Beret
Yarn: Tanis Fiber Arts Yellow Label DK in Velvet