Wool of the Andes hats... part 1

I say part 1, because I’m only halfway through this yarn… I bought enough for a super big cozy sweater, but when it arrived I decided it wasn’t quite what I wanted for the sweater I had in mind, so I started knitting hats out of it. We’re six hats and 500 grams in-exactly halfway. I’ve been enjoying making a series of hats that use the same number of stitches and the same yarn, and just seeing what different patterns I can come up with. Turns out that I can come up with ideas to try way faster than I can actually knit up the hats…

leftover hats

The one thing that these two hats have in common is that they used up some stash yarn. I noticed the blue yarn sitting on my desk one day-I have no recollection of selecting it from my stash, but there it was, sitting on my desk. I had used the rest of it for a cropped top lace sweater, and apparently had 50g left over. It’s Outlaw yarn’s bohemian sport: 45% Polwarth, 45% Alpaca, 10% Possum. It wasn’t the best choice for a sweater, as it felted like mad in the armpits, but it should be lovely for this hat. For the sake of variety I grabbed the white yarn to mix in-the white is some blue sky alpaca, and is a completely different weight. I’m actually fairly pleased with the result, particularly since I was making it up as I went, and I had no idea how far I’d get before I ran out of the blue…

This second hat is also from stash yarns, and used up the last of the sparkly pink yarn I used in a shawl about a year and a half ago. I’d used some of this pink for something before, but still had leftovers, so when I found a mohair silk laceweight in my stash that was a complementary color, I decided to use them together. While with the blue hat I started from the top and went until I ran out of yarn, I started this pink hat from the bottom, and actually ran out of yarn at the top, which is why it’s a slightly different color. I’ve decided it’s a design feature.

Cloudy with a chance of rainbows

I love that this colorway is called ‘cloudy with a chance of rainbows’. When you directly compare this color with the previous rainbow hats, these ones look a bit sad and dull, but on their own they are a lovely subdued rainbow. Both these rainbow hats and the previous bright ones are both from Knitpicks Felici.

I used this colorway to play with the zig-zag pattern I’d worked out with the previous rainbow yarn. Though the three adult sized hats may look the same, they vary in terms of the width of each stripe of color (done by using one, two or three skeins at once), and what type of increases I used. I had enough left over from the three adult hats to make two baby hats and finish off the leftovers.

These pictures were taken by putting the hats on my teapot! I am very pleased with my own ingenuity in figuring out that I could use my teapot as a head form, because I have been really struggling with taking hat pictures. For socks I have a foot model, and sweaters at least will lay flat on the ground, but hats…. They don’t lay flat unless I fold them, but then they look all long and impossibly narrow. If I lay them down and don’t try to force them flat, then I get all sorts of wrinkles and weird shadows. In theory I should be able to model them myself, and get pictures, but that requires availability of my photographer during daylight hours on a day that wants to cooperate (i.e. nice weather). Also, then they have to be able to fit my head. And my photographer is still learning the art of knitted object photography, so it typically takes 2-3 times longer than I feel like it should. (I don’t think he realized at the time that he was signing up to become my personal knitting photographer, so I can’t really complain, and I do try to take as many of my own pictures as possible…) So, if I am to continue with all of this hat knitting, I think I must go in search of a head model to join my foot model on the mantel.

Year of the Hats

I’m a sock knitter-it’s in the name of this blog, ‘Amy Knits Socks’, my instagram name ‘amyknitssocks’, and my ravelry name ‘amythesock’. I knit socks pretty much all the time. Except for this year. This year, apparently, is the year of the hats. So many hats. I think it’s because they’re super fast. I can use up my stash and whip out a new hat so quickly! I can try out patterns on them, and by the time I’m tired of the pattern, the hat is done! So prepare yourselves, my friends, for tons of hats. Lots of them. Currently I’m churning out hats at a rate of a few per week…

This post, we will look at the batch of hats I made from Knitpicks worsted Felci yarn in the colorway Rainbow. I love this color-it is super bright, cheery and loud. So loud. I love knitting things for other people, because I can use colors like these that I would never wear (i.e. any color other than blue). I find knitting with such happy colors makes me happy too. I purchased 400g (4 skeins) of this yarn just this past November, because it looked too fun not to play with. These are the result:

I started with a basic ribbed hat, to get a feel for the color repeat and such, before branching out into all sorts of other nonsense. I purchased this yarn because of it’s bright, cheerful rainbow colors, but I didn’t just want to knit plain ribbed hats, so I thought I’d try some patterns. My first try was the hat with floats, trying to see if I could add a bit of visual interest. I feel like the hat is still dominated by the stripes, though not as much as the cabled hat that I knit next. I think the cables get pretty lost in the colorful stripes, so I then tried to figure out what pattern would work with the colors, rather than against it. The lace diagonals was my first attempt. I really like how the top of it turned out-one of the things I strive for with hats is to make the top visually appealing, and I really like the star that shows up on the top of the lace hat, as well as the entrelac hat that I knit next. The last pattern I tried was the zig-zag hat, and I’m really pleased with how the colors make the pattern. The zig zags and the entrelac hats are my favorite, because the colorway works so well with those patterns.

o Tannenbaum hat

I put my mitten pattern up on yarnpond to look for test knitters, and I was overwhelmed by the response. Within 2 days I’d had 16 knitters offer to test knit, not including my mom. She’s currently finished four pairs of the mittens, each slightly different. It was while she was wearing her new mittens that she decided there should be a hat pattern to go with them. When Mommy tells me I need to write a hat pattern, I sit down and do it!

View fullsize

Conceptual design for the hat

I started by jotting down instructions on a piece of paper, complete with this picture that I am inordinately proud of. Mum had sport weight yarn in the appropriate colors, while I had worsted. I decided to write the pattern up for both. With worsted weight I can keep the same 8 stitch pattern decrease that I used on the full mittens, while a sport weight adult hat requires slower decreases. By the time we both cast on our respective samples, the pattern was already all typed up, with this drawing and a picture of my fingerless mittens as placeholders.

I made the large child size, which I think may be a bit small for me, even though I do have a smaller head. It was a quick knit, and I’m really pleased with how it turned out-particularly how the decreases look from above. I’m still working on training up my photographer, so I don’t have the best pictures ever, and we will need to iterate a bit more to get the pattern pictures… I tried showing him exactly the style of picture we were aiming for, that my mum took of me in a different hat, and while that helped get a good angle of the hat, we apparently weren’t super picky about making sure the background looked good. I’m really considering getting a head model, to put on the mantelpiece next to my foot model.

My plan is to look for test knitters for this one as soon as mom finishes (and photographs) her second hat, which she’s making to be her size. Then I’ll have a matching set of sock, mitten and hat patterns!

baby sweater

With two friends due in March (on the 13th and 31st, coincidentally), I decided it was time for some baby knitting. My mom’s favorite baby sweater pattern is the shawl collared aran sweater pattern by Debbie Bliss in her 1988 book ‘Baby Knits’. Since it’s mum’s favorite pattern, I figured I’d give it a try. As we already knew, I’m not all that good at knitting a pattern straight, so there were significant changes, starting with knitting it in the round. Also, no bobbles. I do not like knitting bobbles. At all. So the front cable was modified accordingly. And some of the other cables were modified, by mistake more than intention… Also, I went with a seed stitch ground for under the arms and the sides.

Other than those modifications (and the detail of not knitting a gauge swatch, so I’m not quite sure if the sweater is the appropriate width), I more or less followed the pattern. I did follow the number of stitches, which was one of the key reasons for referring to a pattern in the first place. I was told I should knit a hat to go with, since I had plenty of extra yarn. I wanted something fairly simple, since I was knitting this while doing other things, so I decided not to use all of the cables from the sweater, but just do some basic 4 stitch cables.

The yarn is a sport weight in a colorway called ‘coral reef’ from Rocking the wool-from the yarnbox page on this yarn: “Megan from Rocking the Wool is an artisan hand dyer out of the Chicago area. Using 100% Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTs) certified organic merino wool, each skein is dyed using low impact dyes that are heavy metal-free acid and environmentally friendly. What’s so special about the GOTs certification? It means that, from start to finish, you have a yarn that is environmentally conscious. This is the best organic textile standard that you’ll find in the world. This link will bring you to a great break down of all the environmental criteria a yarn must adhere to receive a GOTs certification.” Given that the care instructions are to hand wash cool, it might have not been the best choice for a baby sweater, but I thought the color was perfect. I really struggled with getting the right color in these pictures. It’s pink, but not a super in-your-face pink like the first picture implies, and not orange as so many of the pictures I took while it was in progress turned out. It was really frustrating. I tried in all sorts of lighting, and I did try messing with filters to make it better, but I failed. So you’ll just have to imagine it in a nice soft pink color.

copper socks

My mum was struck by this yarn, because it is sock yarn with copper in it. She bought a cone of it, wound it into hanks, dyed it, and gave me 100 grams. I really love the dye job she did on this yarn-it’s a really nice blend of blues and greens. The yarn was a little odd looking in the skein, as the plies stretched differently, so it had a bit of an untwisted look, but it knit up perfectly normally. I wasn’t sure how much of a pattern I could get to show with these, so I went ahead and did a standard pair of socks with no patterning. It is nice to occasionally have some mindless knitting, particularly when I’m working!

There was just enough of this skein left over to make little baby socks, which I gave to my newest cousin, along with two hats-an apple and a cabled one. She needed some hats since she’d grown out of all of her brother’s castoff hats…

Jaggerspun Jupiter socks

My mum’s been longing to visit Jaggerspun mill for years. She really loves their sock yarn, though it was their alpaca silk blend we met first, as a weaving yarn. I finally made the trek to their store (though mom wasn’t able to come along). I ended up walking out with two large boxes of fiber, most in plain white for her to dye, but also some fun colors for me to play with. These bright colors called me first-it’s their Kokadjo, a 4-ply fingering weight yarn thats a blend of 90% superwash treated wool and 10% silk. I picked out the variegated and dark purple for my first pair, not paying much attention to how much yarn was on each spool. Turns out that there wasn’t quite enough of the variegated yarn, so for the last bit of the sock before the toe I supplemented with the purple, doing helical knitting to alternate a row of the variegated and a row of the purple. I think I got away with it! I actually really like the effect of the combined variegated and purple section, but I wouldn’t have had enough of the purple to do the whole sock that way. As it is the second cone of purple is running low!

In retrospect maybe I should have weighed the amount of yarn on each cone first, and come up with a more comprehensive plan, but it was kind of fun trying to decide what to do on the fly. I’m hoping to get two more pairs of socks from this yarn, with some supplemental black as contrasting yarn.

In the background of the sock pictures, you can see my new spinning wheel! I’ve been using it mostly for decoration, but every once in a while I’ll go spin a bit on it. It’s a great wheel, or walking wheel, made by Lyle Wheeler. My wheel is the one he shows on his website! As for my other wheels… I have a double drive ashford traditional (currently living with my parents) that we bought new for me, as my very first spinning wheel. My second wheel is also an Ashford traditional (single drive), at least we think it is, bought on Ebay for cheap because it was missing the flyer assembly. This allowed us to instal the super-duper high speed ashford flyer kit, which has a ridiculously high ratio. Because of that ratio, this is my go to wheel for most of my spinning. I’ve had both of my ashfords for a long time, and they went to college and grad school with me. The next additions were a small electric EEW wheel from Dreaming Robots and a Country Craftsman, that is my go to plying wheel, in part because it has lovely large bobbins. This great wheel is my most recent acquisition, and I think it rounds out the family nicely.

o Tannenbaum fingerless mittens

Since my Christmas present pair of socks was a year late, I determined that I needed to make matching fingerless mittens to go along with! I debated a fair amount how to go about the thumb, mainly if I should try to do it in pattern, with trees, or if I should do green and white stripes. I ended up carefully charting increases so that I could maintain some level of trees along the thumb, though the thumb trees are slightly smaller than the trees on the rest of the mitten. I think they turned out pretty cute!

I am really pleased with how these mitts turned out, though I had to block the thumbs a bit so that they weren’t way too small! I ended up sticking a large lip balm and a chopstick in each thumb while they were drying. After that, they seem to fit me pretty well, but I don’t know how big my hands are compared to others… One difference in these mitts is that there’s one extra pattern (tree) repeat in the palm as compared to the wrist. I measured my hand, and it’s about an inch smaller before the thumb as compared to after the thumb, so I’m reflecting that in the actual pattern. Thus, some of the increases for the thumb actually turn into body stitches, and stick around for the rest of the mitten. I’m really happy with how they fit me, and interested to see how they fit others.

I’ve decided to write up this mitten pattern, and I’m calling the size I knit ‘extra small’, though I don’t think I quite stuck to the gauge I’m writing up, so it isn’t quite clear exactly what size they are. These ones only have 18 stitches around on the thumb, but I’ve also figured out charts for 24 stitch and 30 stitch thumbs. I got my mum to test knit the ‘medium’ size, and she made full mittens (as compared to fingerless).

View fullsize

With the full mittens I had to figure out how to end the pattern. Normally I wouldn’t decrease as quickly, but I was limited in how I could get the decreases to fit with the tree motif, so the top of the mittens (and thumb) dive in pretty fast. I originally thought I’d go with a more standard stranded colorwork mitten top, but then I realized that some of the sizes have odd numbers of trees, which wouldn’t frame as nicely in those triangles that the standard mitten top has, since I didn’t really want half a tree. I’m quite pleased with how these decreases turned out on my mum’s sample, so I feel that I made the right choice.

o Tannenbaum socks

I first cast these on over a year ago, with the idea that they would be a Christmas gift for a friend. I got as far as the ribbing on the cuff, and then the yarn languished in a box for a year. This is my second time knitting this pattern, and I really love this color for it-it’s called ‘Central Park’ by Forbidden Fiber Co. It is a lovely deep green, and it was nice to work with. For the white I used some Opal sock yarn. The pattern is one I designed and published! I’m really happy with how the pattern has turned out, and it’s been fun seeing the socks people have made with it. I think its my most popular pattern.