Tag: Knitting

The wave of knitting for co-workers' kids continues this spring with a lovely lightweight hat for Alana, who is two and a half (or three quarters?) years old.  Alana's aunt Danielle picked out the pattern and the yarn for Alana's hat from a few options, and I think I owe her for picking both an awesome pattern and wonderful yarn.  I definitely plan on using this pattern again and again, and look forward to experimenting with different sizes, colors and yarn types!  Details on the project follow the picture of the finished, blocked hat.

 

Alana's Hat Details

Pattern:  Flower Hat, published by Rebecca Lennox and the Elmwood Yarn Shop.  I slightly altered the pattern by reducing the number of cast on stitches to 90 instead of 112

Yarn:  1 skein and only the slightest bit more of Schulana Sojabama, a 55% bamboo/45% soy blend (the "slightest bit more" probably equates to 2 – 3 yards) in 01 Natural.  Perfect yarn for spring/summer knitting.

Needle:  2 size 4 circular needles for main part of the hat, with 2 size 2 circulars for the bottom seed stitch border

Post-Blocking Measurements:  21 inches around at the widest point (the brim) by 7 inches tall.  The hat is approximately 18 inches wide at the middle of the hat.  Before blocking, the stockinette gauge was 22 stitches/4 inches for the gauge swatch I knit and steamed.  After blocking, it stretched to 18.5 stitches/4 inches, so a pretty considerable difference.  I knit 5 1/2 inches of the flat hat, followed by 2 inches of shaping.  The length didn't really expand that much from pre to post-blocking.

Update

What did Alana think of the hat, you may ask?  Let's ask her — Alana, what do you think of the hat?

 

 (Alana thinks about the question)

 

 Answer:  She likes it!

As regular readers probably know, my sister is a vegan which can make knitting for her a bit challenging.  As a vegan, she doesn't wear animal fibers — and given that I now mostly buy my yarn at sheep and wool festivals, you can see where this is an issue.  This situation has meant for the past several years that whenever I find a good vegan yarn (generally cotton), I go ahead and pick up a few balls or skeins for my stash.  I recently did just that a few months ago while on a quick visit to School Products in NYC to identify some mystery yarn in my stash that I bought there several years ago in the clearance bin.  I found some very soft cotton, reasonably-priced Karabella Windy, and bought two balls in the bright #2 blue color.  I quickly took a picture of the yarn with my IPhone on the street downstairs from the shop, and emailed it to my sister who confirmed that she thought it was a good color.  

After consulting with my sister further over the next few weeks, I decided to make her a new winter hat (the one I had made for her several years ago has apparently not been holding up well).  The pattern details follow this picture of the pre-blocked hat:

 

Mallika's Blue Cotton Hat

Yarn:  Approx. 1.3 balls of Karabella Windy in #2 color

Needles:  5 size 8 dpns

Stitches/Pattern:  I cast on 64 stitches, and worked the first 9 rows in a garter stitch (approx. 1.5 inches).  I then worked stockinette stitch rows until the hat measured 4 inches long, and then started the decreases at a k9, k2tog rate, alternating straight rows with the standard hat shaping decrease rows.  The shaping took 21 inches and added another 4 inches to the hat.

Post-Blocking Measurements:  22 inches at its widest point, and 8 inches from top to bottom.  There was a significant stretch from the pre-blocking measurement of 18 inches wide.

The hat only took a few hours to knit up and the yarn was smooth and easy to work with, so I look forward to making this simple, thick hat again!  

As I blogged about just a few hours ago, I went into Rhinebeck this year determined to buy only enough yarn for two holiday scarfs — one for Andy's niece and another for his nephew Logan.  For Logan, I bought two shades of yarn from the This and That Farm of Danby, VT.  The yarn was soft, two-ply como.  The larger ball was 212 yards (4 oz) and was a blueish-greenish shade, and the smaller ball was 96 yards (1 oz) in a marigold shade.  

Initially, I thought that I would make the scarf with the blue-green yarn and then anchor the scarf's plain pattern with a marigold/blue-green checkerboard motif at each end of the scarf.  As I got closer to making the scarf though, I decided to replace the checkerboard pattern with a moon and stars motif because Logan loves looking at, and talking about, the moon (he is 4).  Making that decision though meant I would embark upon a more difficult designing adventure though as I quickly realized I would have to probably design the moon and stars motif.  

I looked on Ravelry, and a few children's patterns books, and couldn't find any moon and stars patterns that I liked or would work for the scarf.  I did find though this moon and stars blanket pattern from Crystal Palace Yarns, and thought that the way the crescent moon worked with stars looked quite nice, so used it as inspiration to design my own set of moon and stars (the Crystal Palace pattern used much different dimensions than what I needed for the scarf and I didn't quite like the exact design of the stars as I wanted my stars to be a bit "lighter" so had to basically redraw and graph it, but the Crystal Palace pattern heavily influenced the overall design).  I ended up coming up with pattern below, which works over 19 stitches (I put it on a 22 stitch-long scarf).  I put the pattern on top of a seed stitch pattern, as I learned from Ravelry that that would be the best way to keep the scarf flat without rolling (even when I've done garter or slip stitch borders in the past, there has always been a bit of curling, which I wanted to avoid here because of the size of the scarf.  

The pattern, seed stitch, and yarn worked wonderfully together to create an AWESOME scarf!  I was incredibly happy with it, and look forward to doing future colorwork.  

 

 Here are the final details of the project:

Yarn:  This and That Farm Como Wool, approx. 2/3 of main color used and approx. 1/3 of contrast color, so maybe 180 – 200 yards used

Needles:  Size 6 Circular

Stitches:  22 stitches cast-on (21-stitch pattern graphic below excludes one plain row on the left side for some reason)

Post-Blocking Measurements:  5 inches wide by 40 1/2 inches long, with the pattern itself taking up approximately 7 inches of each side of the scarf and the pattern portion of the scarf being 4 3/4 inches wide (slightly tighter than the main part of the scarf).  

 

 

In Rhinebeck this year, I stuck to my "yarn diet" and only bought enough yarn for two children's holiday scarfs – one for Andy's niece Samantha and the other for his nephew Logan.  For Samantha's scarf, I purchased one 160 yard skein of Autumn House Farm's Sagamore yarn, which is a loose combination of silk, cotton and rayon yarn strands.  I bought the yarn in the Wood Rose colorway, which has off-white, light pink, light blue and green colors.**  I found the yarn to be somewhat slippery to work with, so instead of using Addi Turbos, I ended up using a somewhat coarser bamboo circular needle.  

The way the three strands of yarn knit up also made it hard to select a pattern, so I ended up experimenting with a few different patterns before settling on something that really worked.  I initially thought that a drop stitch pattern would work well to showcase the yarn, so tried this almost fish-like pattern.  Unfortunately though, I scaled the pattern down to only be about 4 – 5 inches wide because its for a 5 year old girl, and just three different repeats of the pattern just didn't look right with the yarn.  I next tried two different lacy patterns, including this Rivolo pattern, but both called for sport or DK weight yarns, so I should have known that they wouldn't quite work out but I tried anyways and found that the yarnovers and shaping wasn't as visible as I would have liked them to be (especially because like the drop-stitch pattern, I had to decrease the number of repeats so maybe there just weren't enough repeats to fully show the intricacy of the pattern).  

So finally, after a lot of frustration and hair-pulling, I came across this incredibly simple one row, modified rib pattern from Stephanie Pearl-McPhee.  I created a small test swatch, and found that it worked perfectly to make this somewhat thicker yarn look delicate and almost breezy.  

 

 Here are the details of the final project:

Yarn:  Autumn House Sagamore in Wood Rose, approximately 4/5 of the 160 yd. skein used

Needles:  Size 8 bamboo circular

Stitches:  I cast on 26 stitches

Post-Blocking Measurements:  4.5 inches wide by 45 inches long (and despite some concerns about blocking silk yarn, I wet-blocked the scarf and it turned out fine, though it may be because this was such a simple pattern so not a lot the blocking could mess up).

**While I did like the way the yarn worked for this project, I don't know if I'll buy this yarn again.  I didn't quite like the feel of the yarn while knitting it up (felt maybe a little too coarse, and didn't seem to wear well when I ripped out the first few rows multiple times after experimenting with the three or four different patterns).

Although I have been promising a knit vest for toddler Henry for over a year now, I ended up first knitting a hat for his younger sister Louisa, who also lives in D.C.  Don't worry though Henry — your overdue vest is in progress!

I used the same pattern for both of the Louisa hats (the Louisa series, if you will.  One hat though was completed over a year ago and not originally intended to be a part of the series).  Knitting these hats have reminded me of the significance of yarn selection because although I used the same pattern, the hats look and feel quite different because I used different types of yarns for each.  

Hat #1

 

Hat #2

 

As I note above, I did not knit these hats up at the same time — I actually completed Hat #1 a year ago, and have been waiting for a toddler to give it to.  I ended up picking the same pattern for Louisa's hat, Hat #2, because I liked the simplicity and elegance of the first hat, and I decided to avoid an animal-type ear hat because I couldn't quite find a pattern I liked.  Hat #2 is larger than Hat #1 as the measurements for Louisa indicated that she needed a larger hat, but I think that both will fit her well for the next few years which is a rarity in children's knitting (and clothes, generally).  As guidelines for the future, I think I will use the Hat #1 measurements for children up to age 3, and then Hat #2 for children over the age of the 3.  And this pattern I think will continue to be in heavy rotation in the future.  Here are the details for both hats:

Pattern:  Large version of the Baby Hat from One Skein 

Hat #1

Yarn:  Plymouth Baby Alpaca DK in a maroon shade, 1 skein

Needles:  Size 6 dpns

Post-Blocking Measurements:  8.5 inches wide at the widest point (= 17 inches wide around the hat), 6.5 inches tall with shaping taking up the last 2 inches

Hat #2

Yarn:  Karabella Aurora 8 in color 716, 1 entire skein (it was a close call at the end of the hat)

Needles:  Size 8 dpns

Post-Blocking Measurements:  9.5 inches at the widest point (= 19 inches wide around the hat), 7 inches tall with shaping taking up the last 2.5 inches

Look, look, Louisa loves her hat!

 

 

I recently heard about a family friend having her first baby, and decided that now seemed like the perfect time to make my first pair of baby booties.  Little did I know how much stress would be caused by this simple decision!  

 

First, I had to decide on a pattern, which as you may know from reading this blog, has been driving me crazy of late.  I think because I don't have enough time to knit, I try to make sure that every pattern I try is "perfect" in some way or another.  Clearly though, all that fixation does is make me go crazy and prevent me from starting any projects for days!  Any tips for getting over this would be appreciated…In any case though, after literally days of searching, I finally found this pattern on Ravelry, and from the finished object pictures of the pattern, I decided it was something to try out!

Second, after finally selecting the pattern, I decided to use some leftover yarn in my stash, some Dale of Norway Stork from Samantha's baby blanket a few years ago, and knit up a quick gauge swatch which seemed to do the trick (another stress reliever as choosing yarn can be as stressful as choosing a pattern!).  Then, I had to make a decision as to whether to follow the pattern as laid out (use straight needles) or substitute two circular needles or four dpns and knit the pattern in the round.  After some thinking, I decided to go with two size one circular needles, adjusted the pattern to reflect knitting continuously on the right side, and off I went!

Ok, so that progress ended up being rather short-lived, as after making 1/2 of the first bootie, I decided that the small newborn pattern was just TOO small for any child, even if it is a newborn.  I didn't really have a basis for making that decision, just that the bootie seemed way too small.  So I decided to undo the entire 1/2 bootie and start the larger size pattern for three – six mos. old babies.  And off I went again!

So that got me to another 1/2 bootie being completed before I decided it just seemed way too small again.  At this point, I decided to google baby feet size, and discovered I'm not the only one who is completely confused by the size of baby's feet!  From what I could gather, I should really be making a 3.5 to four inch long bootie, and so clearly what I was doing (around three inches) was not good enough!  As such, I decided to switch to size three needles, and just hope for the best.  Finally, when I was 1/2 done with that bootie, it seemed the foot would be able to stretch to a little over four inches, so it was a big relief.  

The final measurements of the booties, after blocking, were:

3.5 inch long foot

2 inches from top to bottom of foot

4 inches from top of leg to bottom of foot

2 1/4 inch wide leg

I will definitely make these again — they are incredibly simple, fast to knit up, and use up such a miniscule amount of yarn (maybe a seventh of the ball?), in addition to being super-adorable, so its a no-brainer for the future (finally!)!