Heather asked for a Space Invaders hat that was rude inside and reversible.  At first I couldn’t wrap my head around doing these together, because I was stuck on the idea of the phalanx of space invaders one sees in the game. I thought I would have to split it into two hats for her, one with space invaders and one that was rude inside, so I figured out the pixelation that would fit on a hat and went with that.  I was unhappy with the middle set of invaders, they looked ok in my drawing but didn’t knit up well.  I thought the bottom and top ones looked close enough to the real thing for anyone who had played the game, but not the middle ones.  Back to the drawing board (or graph paper notepad in this case) I went and came up with better (more detailed) pixelations.

There are two distinct phalanxes, because each of the guys waves their arms and switches between two modes, so on the second hat I did each of the guys in each of their modes, plus the bonus spaceship.  You can see six of the seven invaders in the above two shots.  Below see Heather sporting her new hat…and her new tattoo peeking out from her shirt.

….and I made it rude inside as per her request… as my friend Jen said when she saw it in progress…it is totally NSFW on the inside.

Oh yeah…and for the Barbara Walker project,  I used Diagonal Wave, pg 275, above the fold, because it is the same on both sides.

This one went from concept to completion with only minor glitches.  I had to rip back a couple of rows a time or two in one section or another. I was at my brother’s birthday party with about 35 people while I was knitting this so once in a while I forgot if I was on a resting row or not and had to go back a bit.  All the stitches I used except one had a resting row in them. 

I have found over time that if you want to rip back blocks of stitches for several rows, the best approach is to re-knit them row by row, instead of stitch by stitch.  You have to put them all back on the left needle each time you do a row.  Place the loose loop corresponding to that row over the index finger of your left hand and grab the stitches to knit European style (i.e. holding the loose yarn in your left hand–look it up if you don’t already know how to do it). You  can usually grab the stitches except the last stitch, at which point things are too tight to knit that last stitch, but it is easy to fudge things on just one stitch.

When you do this you have to be careful to line up the right loop with the row you are supposed to work.  If you go back several rows, this becomes more important.

I cast on 102 stitches and did the ribbing (Zigzag Knotted Rib, pg 43) on two needles.  I changed to a round needle for the pattern stitches which were (from left) Spiral Columns, pg 121, Aran Honeycomb, pg 273, Twist Zigzag, pg 119, Bavarian Check Pattern, pg 117, Elongated Aran Honeycomb, pg 273 and Shadow Cable, pg 273—see top picture for these last two stitches.  I did each pattern twice so there were 12 vertical strips in the hat.

Oh, and how do you like them apples Nancy…7 stitches in one hat…now THAT is pattern loading… I could have done 13 stitches if I had not repeated around the hat.  But that may be overkill.  Another time, maybe.  If I get desperate.

I love the graphic impact of black and white.  This is a pretty simple hat which uses two stitches. For the ribbing, I cast on 104 stitches and used Twist-Four Mock Cable, page 116.  This is a nice cable and doesn’t take a lot of time because you don’t use a cable needle.  It only works one way though.  If you want the cables to twist the other way, I am pretty sure you would have to bite it and use the cable needle.  The body of the hat is Woven Stripe Pattern, pg 61.  To do the decreases, I knit 6, k2tog around in one of the plain wide stripes.  I did k 5, k2tog in the next, then k4, k2tog…etc.

I finished work last week (yeah! so far) and hope to be more rigorous about knitting and posting. I am only going to do one item per post and I am aiming for posting on Tuesdays and Fridays. We’ll see.

This hat bears absolutely no relation to the hat I thought I was going to make when I cast on. As I was making this hat, I kept screwing up and making bad decisions, digging myself into design holes that threatened to be graves and cause me to say RIP!  My design style these days basically involves picking the next stitch in THE BOOK (A Treasury of Knitting Patterns by Barbara Walker), deciding how many stitches around the hundred mark I should cast on to do the repeats, then wing it from there.  I am still pretty much only working with Patons Classic Wool, worsted weight.  When deciding how much to cast on, I take into consideration how much it looks like the stitch will draw in.  I go up a repeat or two if it looks like it will pull in a little or a lot, and down one if it looks like it will be a loose stitch. Knit-togethers and lots of colour work tend to draw in, at least the way I knit.

I cast on thinking I was going to be doing the Broken Plaid Pattern (pg 62) which is a repeat of 8, so I cast on 104 stitches.  I had a concept in mind, which I will probably make soonish.  As I was trying to set this up, I knitted the first row when I really should have purled and that got the bottom looking funny for what I had in mind, so I decided to put a patterny stitch below the colour work.  To the Fancy Texture Pattern chapter I went and found the next stitch to be Trinity, Cluster or Bramble Stitch on page 129 (luckily a repeat of four, so that would work).  Up I went for  awhile…time to switch to colour…may look funny…maybe put in a roll before…ok…do a garter stitch roll…I probably should have decided to ditch “the concept” and go up from here because I thought it looked ok and I could have finished it up and had a decent hat, but no, I was still stuck on the colour thing, so roll it I did and then realized that I should be doing Bricks (also page 62), not the plaid anyway…still a repeat of 4 so phew…OK…do some colour work and ended up with… a big hot mess that had taken quite a bit of effort to get to….

a hot mess…

The roll was too big and saggy, swamping the trinity stitch and it didn’t look good with the bricks.  When Heather was in high school, we spent a lot of (quality?) time together watching Project Runway.  Tim Gunn used to regularly come in to the design studio and find someone with a hot mess on their mannequin.  He always said the same thing…”make it work”.  He is one of my (sometimes annoying) design heroes because of this phrase, and I often hear him saying it to me in my head.  The thing about knitting is it takes a long time so he says it A LOT and I occasionally want to kick him as I knit toward what I hope will be a solution.  I actually had another row of bricks knitted before I realized this was NOT going to fly.  Before I took this picture there was a small rip back so the bricks would be the same height as the trinity stitch when I rejoined to the cast-on row, which makes the hat reversible.  I didn’t want to lose trinity stitch in my stitch count and have to redo it in another project.

I decided once I got things joined back together that it would look funny on the trinity stitch side if I had a line through the pattern for no reason, so I looked and the design gods were smiling on me because the next fancy texture stitch was Allover Cross Stitch, pg 130, and it both had a four stitch repeat and would look good on the back…yeah!…I did this up to the decrease section, then realized that the only way to reduce this pattern well at the top would be in sets of 4 stitches.  I had 104 stitches which doesn’t lend itself to division AT ALL.  I decided to put a garter stitch top on with a 10 point decrease (I knit 2 together on the knit rows, getting rid of 4 stitches first then 10 per time until I was done).   Finally.

…and silly me, I just realized I could have done it if I had got rid of one set of four, then done a 5 point decrease…oh, well, the garter stitch at the top echoes that at the bottom, so fine by me…I might also put another couple of rows of garter stitch before the cross stitch, but better done than perfect.  Maybe.

Blue and green aren’t fit to be seen except on a midsummer nights colleen…at least that is what my Aunty Corinne used to tell me when I was little.  I think times may have changed, I know they have for me and I quite like green and blue together.  This hat uses Slip Stitch Ribbing Variation, pg 44 and Twisted Check Pattern, pg 117.  I cast on 100 stitches, did 15 rows of ribbing then reconnected to the cast on row, changed to green and did 12 rows of garter stitch, reconnected again with blue and did 2 repeats of the twisted check, switched back to green for 12 garter stitch rows, connected it back on itself again with blue and increased 5 stitches to 105.

For the top, I used Twist-Three Cables, pg 116,  I did one full repeat, then got rid of every third cable, did another repeat and got rid of every other cable, did another repeat and got rid of the rest of the cables and then just decreased to nothing.

Something she may not have had time for in the sixties.  I sometimes try to think of how she managed to accomplish amassing the collection of pattern stitches.  It must have been hugely hard work and discipline.  In the sixties and especially the seventies, there were two very distinct types of craft books.  One type, like Barbara Walker and others like her, actually advanced craftsmanship.  The other type was done by and for the hippies and contained a very low level of instruction or workmanship.  I had a bookshelf full of both but have only retained the first kind.  Anyway….the latest entries in the Barbara Walker Project:

This hat uses sitches Striped Check Pattern, pg 59

This one uses Four Color Fancy Pattern, pg 59

This hat uses Slip Stitch Ribbing, page 44 and Long Slip Textured Pattern, page 93.  For this one, I added bands to break up the pattern and also see what happens when you use two colours.  For this pattern stitch, you do a base row, then slip every other stitch in that base row three times.  You then do another base row and slip the stitches you didn’t slip before.  For the light purple, I used the same colour for all eight rows.  In the bands I used one colour for the base row and a different one for the slip rows.  I used white for the base row in the lower band with three row of dark purple.  In the upper band I reversed things and did dark purple for the base row and white for the three slip rows.

The colour in this photo is off, but I am using the same dark and light purple as the other hats.  It uses Triangle Check, pg 60 for the cuff and Harris Tweed Pattern, pg 22 for the body of the mitts.