It is one thing to see the little knitted black and white photo of a stitch in The Book, and it is another thing entirely to expect myself to instantly imagine a hat that works for the stitch.  It does happen sometimes, like the tam using the triangular stitch last week.  I just had to keep faith in the vision and carry it through.  I must say I was pretty chuffed with the final project, although several people have laughed when I modelled it for them.  A few others, however, share my taste.

For this particular hat,  knew I was doing the Dots and Dashes from page 81 all along, but the hat changed several times before it finished.  I cast on 100 stitches and did the garter stitch rainbow,  I increased to 110 stitches because of the anticipated draw-in of the colour work and thought I would do the dots and dashes in black for a while, then do a rainbow somewhere in the same stitch and go back to black, like the last hat where I subbed the rainbow in for one repeat, and resulted in a hat I was OK with.  As soon as I started the pattern, I realized that plan was not going to fly.  I had thought that the garter stitch dots and dashes rainbow would echo that in the border and things would be OK, but I realized it just wasn’t going to work somehow.  I then thought I would just go with black dots and dashes to the top and put a topper to echo the base.  I kept going, but after a couple of inches, my vision was fading again.  Too busy, with not enough strength in the pattern to carry a whole hat.  It was definitely proving to be a “smaller doses” pattern stitch.  

I decided to go to black for the bulk of the hat, which would tone it down and hopefully show off the dots and dashes a bit.   I looked at the next stitch in each of the chapters that dealt with single colours.  Giant Diamond Pattern, pg 32 was the winner.  I had to decrease to 105 stitches to get to  7 repeats of the pattern.  It is just a simple knit/purl pattern so there is no draw in at all and has a 15 stitch repeat, 90 would be too few for an adult hat, 105 is on the large side, but so be it.  I used 7 points of decrease and stacked the sl 1, k2tog, psso’s on top of each other above the big purled diamonds of the last row of the pattern.  I decreased every other row to 21 stitches.  i then did knit 1, k2tog knit 2, knit 2 together around and ended up with 15 stitches and did a garter stitch rainbow again, then went back to the base and filled in with black.  It has a bit of a Mulan vibe, but I am binge watching Once Upon a Time at the moment.  They have a lot of knitting I wish I had done.

Right now, I have two obsessions.  Knitting the stitches from A Treasury of Knitting Patterns and Candy Crush Saga.  I know, I know, back in the summer I claimed to have beaten it, but apparently it is not that simple.  Number one, I didn’t admit it at the time but I had not conquered all the dream-world levels.  The parallel universe with the owl Odus.  I managed that a few weeks ago.  In the meantime, They have released new levels every week or so, so I have to keep beating them too, right?

Bite me Odus

Last night when my insomnia was in full swing and I was working away at yet another new set of levels, I was struck by the fact that the rainbows I am knitting are almost exactly the same hues as the candies in candy crush.   And I have a whole ball of each colour and I have only used a fraction on the three hats I have done so far.  It may be a while.

I am trying to decide what knitting I should take with me on my upcoming trip.  Six weeks of knitting on planes, trains and auto-mobiles, not to mention in hotel rooms, coffee shops, etc…  I think I will have to crack into the lace chapter.  There is a lot of knitting with not much supplies in lace…lace weight wool is pretty thin.  Too bad The Book hasn’t fallen apart much around that chapter yet.  It is quite a heavy section still.  I think I mentioned last trip that I only take one carry-on backpack and a fanny pack.  I have to take my apnea machine and clothes.  I will probably take my Ipad. The laptop is way too heavy and bulky.  Luckily, even though we are going to a myriad of countries, I only have to take one (1″) Lonely Planet.  It actually has all but Greece of the 12 countries my brother Charles has on his list.  Eastern Europe doesn’t have that much on offer I guess.  I never actually start planning the trip until I am on the plane, so I haven’t looked at it yet.  I am not even sure why I do it that way.  Travel never really seems real to me unless I am actually doing it.  I don’t think about it much when I am not there yet.  Anyway, I am not leaving for almost two weeks and I tend to pack in about 10 minutes, so I don’t have to worry yet, except of course to make sure I have enough to knit.  After all, one can only take this failure to plan thing so far.

Barbara stuff: cast on 105 stitches, Dutch Pyramids, pg 30 for the hat band.  Increase to 108, then Chickenwire Check, pg 80 for 5 repeats, with a rainbow in the third repeat.  Decrease one stitch per 6 stitch  repeat 2nd and seventh row of the 6th-8 row repeat, then on the 3rd row of the next 8 row repeat and the 2nd row of the next 8 row repeat.  Slip one, knit one around for 4 rows with white, then k2tog around do two rows with black, k2tog around again and finish.

I don’t usually do tension squares.  I figure add about 15-20% more stitches for lots of stranded colours and 10-15 % for heavy cabling.  You can often look at the pictures of the cabling patterns and tell what is being drawn in.   I had no idea on this stitch, Triangular Stitch or Mock Kilting, pg 28.  Barbara just said it had a tendency to roll up into false pleats.  This sounded like it would work for a tam type hat.  I made a tension square on 49 stitches and did about 4 inches so I could get a good sense of how much take in the pleating caused.  I then measured over the middle 35 stitches to determine that 35 stitches drew into about 4 inches.  I multiplied this by 5 to get to the ballpark of 20″ (the nice thing about knitted hats is that they will stretch a bit).  I cast on 175 stitches.  To get the rainbow, I had to carry 7 balls of yarn back and forth.  I used a similar method to one I developed for myself about 30 years ago when I made this sweater for my sister in law:I decided then to use a small ball for each of the colour stripes I carried up the front of this mohair sweater,  This meant I had 25 strands of yarn working in total.  I used to refer to this kind of stuff as my masochistic knitting.  I showed some tartan pillows a while back that fell in the same category.  I remember I had two slotted pieces of plastic and I put one strand in each slot, then put the other piece of plastic on top so the strands were basically running through one hole each.  With care, I could trade the places of two strands of yarn and make sure on the purl side they went back into their old places.  If you left this many strands to their own devices, you would spend as much time untangling as knitting.  This time I cut the slots from a shoe box, put the balls inside and closed the lid.  It worked really well and I only had to stop once to get my strands back in order when I lost concentration.

I am not sure what anyone else thinks about this hat, but I was happy that it actually turned out exactly as I had planned.  When I had the main part of the hat knit, I picked up 4 stitches from each 7 stitch repeat so I had 100 stitches.  I then did garter stitch on the top, 4 rows per colour.  I used  8 points of decrease.  The first decrease needed to get rid of more stitches so I knit 10, knit 2 together, then knit 10, knit 3 together around.  Next time I knit 9, knit 2 together around then knit 8, knit 2 together etc.At this point I had what looked like a giant coffee filter with a rainbow on it.I picked up 100 stitches from the opposite edge and did two rows of garter stitch per colour to finish the hat band.

Spare me from myself, sometimes.  This time, I had a concept.  I was trying to get the feeling of one of those walls of art you see in galleries.  I was thinking of one at the AGO in particular, but I could not find an image of it online.  It took almost as long to plan this hat as to knit it.

I had to figure out the stitches to use, how I was going to fill the spaces with at least one repeat of each stitch.  I had to center the knitting within the block, adding stuff that made sense.  I decided I wanted all the “paintings” to line up top and bottom.   I also needed the same amount of background between the individual “paintings”.  I also made an attempt at framing them by surrounding them with garter stitch, but I wouldn’t call that particular aspect a success on the aran coloured hat.
The bottom, background and top were done in Diagonal Stitch, pg 120.  I cast on 120 stitches and worked 8 rows.  I then did two rows of garter stitch where I was going to place a “painting”, and continued with the Diagonal Stitch in between.  This hat also used Twist-Stitch Diamond Pattern, pg 120, Variation Smocking, pg 134, Little Knot Stitch, pg 132, Peppercorn Stitch, pg 133, King Charles Brocade, pg 31,  Pyramid Pattern, pg 29 and Twist-Stitch Waves, pg 124…8 stitches total.Once I had done 32 pattern rows and put the garter stitch on top of the “paintings”, I only had room for an aggressive decrease.  I used 10 points of decrease and decreased every other row.

I went to movies last Tuesday (Oscar contenders, yeah!) while I was in the planning stages of the first hat and Christine, who was with me, said I shouldn’t do it in white, I should do different colours for the “paintings”.  I knew I was going to do the aran coloured hat because I love the texture you see with the off-white wool.  I told Alan when he got home and he said I had to do both.  This one was done on two needles and you can see the seam to the left of the orange/purple blocks.  Seams have always been a nemesis of mine.  I will have to ask for help sometime.  ANYHOW.  I had the rainbow of balls from the hats last week and thought, what the heck. 

Back to the planning notebook I went and worked out another layout, this time using Italian Chain Ribbing, pg 47 as the background and 114 stitches.  This meant I had to leave 6 stitches in between, but unlike the Diagonal Stitch which had a two stitch repeat, I had to line the “paintings” up so that a full pattern repeat went up between them, and I had to fudge the patterns sideways as well as height-wise so they fit properly.  The knitting was infinitely more complicated on this one, what with all that Intarsia going on and the balls getting tangled (themselves)  and untangled (painstakingly by me).  I outlined the paintings with a round of crocheted chain stitch to simulate frames before I finished the top.

I reduced in the last row to 108 so I had 18 of the 6 stitch repeats left.  I decreased every 12th stitch, then every 11th stitch, etc maintaining the pattern as much as possible as I went.  (9 points of decrease, decreasing one stitch every other row).  This hat also used Pennant Stitch, pg.  29, Diamond Brocade and Double Diamond Brocade from pg. 30, English Diamond Block Pattern, pg 31, Inverness Diamonds, pg 32 and Diamond Stripe, pg. 33…7 stitches in all.  Two hats, 15 stitches…not bad, eh Barbara!