Blocks
I've figured out the plan for these! We've been talking all week about how the thing my brain REALLY loves to do is come up with pretty stitches, and then come up with ways to work with them, to slide in an out of them, to shape fabric around them. How that's a lot of what makes my designs look like my patterns. We also talked recently about how this month marks the fifteen year anniversary of Popped, my very first pattern. And quite a few of you playing along at home have noticed that the socks you saw [...]
Soon
Some, time very soon, I will show you the tops of these two hats, side by side. At that moment, our brains will, in glorious unison, go 'oooooooh, tiiiidy' and release One Precious Pellet of the good brain chemicals. This day is not that day. But that day is coming soon!
Options
So we've been talking about building blocks. How you can stack all the various parts of projects (ribbing, transitions, stitch patterns) up like building blocks to make different things (hats, socks, cowls, shawls). And, just like like building blocks, you sometimes have different shapes you can stack on top of each other. Like here, how I used a different transition out of the main stitch pattern and so the next little bit of this hat will do something different than the last one. Because if you have all the little pieces, you have lots of options. And who doesn't like [...]
They grew
Turns out, if you keep making stitches at even a slightly faster rate than you rip them out, your project will eventually grow. Even if you're tired. Even if it's been raining for two weeks straight. Even if you have a crew full of marvelous folks doing necessary but noisy (oh so noisy) repair work at your house. And if your knitting grows for long enough, you get to make a thumb. And if your brain works the way mine does, two things happen. First, you absolutely adore the thumb. Second, you think it looks just the tiniest bit like [...]
Show off
I have this little voice in the back of my head that says I should attempt to maintain some sort of semblance of self effacing modesty. That I should not let on about how tickled pink I am about this whole thing. But you know what? That little voice is absolutely drowned out by the ever so much louder voice saying "Holy crap look what I made. Isn't it fabulous? Don't you just love it to bits?!?" And today? Well today the louder voice is winning. Because this really is rather delightful. It's off with testers now (some day we're [...]
Pretty much like that
So after that 'let's go straight for a nice long time...no...longer than you think' part, then comes the 'aaaaaaand three rows and you're done' bit. At least that's how my hats tend to work. I'm a tremendous fan of a quick decrease on hats. It actually means you're knitting a bit more fabric (because you have to make the straight part a bit taller before you start the decreases), but I feel like it fits better and it doesn't give me hat hair. Plus it lets you do all sorts of delightfully dramatic stuff on the top. This one is [...]
Remiss
Yeah, so somehow I've been distracted and not shown you as much of this as I should have. Which is a shame, as it's lovely. But it does pretty much do that thing all hats do in the middle where you can just sort of assume 'and then it got taller for a while with no particularly notable changes.' Because well...that's how hats work. At least with this one you can distract yourself by wondering if the color is changing yet (hint, yes, yes it totally is). Yarns are Malabrigo Rios in Natural and Friea Handpaint Sport in Flare. If [...]
And now we start actually knitting
So, after all those swatches, it's time to actually knit the thing! I'm doing a rolled brim (in part because I like how it looks and fits, but also in part because I want to get to the color change bit as quickly as I can, and plowing through a solid brim in the colorful yarn lets me get there quick). And I generally cast on over two needles (not to make the cast on stretchier, it doesn't do that, but it does make the loops of my first row of stitches a better match for the rest of my [...]
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