I decided that one of my projects while teleworking would be to do some spiral/helical knitting, and that the best way to practice it would be to make some hats out of stash yarn. I’m up to 13 hats (two didn’t make the group photo), and I’ve definitely made a dent in my stash of this yarn! All but one of the hats are made out of an overspun Knitpicks yarn I got years ago on sale.
Spiral/helical knitting is a method of doing multiple color knitting without a jog when switching from row to row. When we knit in the round we’re actually knitting on a spiral, like a slinky. This method basically takes multiple slinkys and interlaces them. I started with just two yarns, with the pink hat, and then increased the number of yarns. For the red and green hat with variable stripe widths I had 10 yarns going-I decided that was too much. In order to get a stripe that’s two rows tall, I use two balls of that color. You can see that to some extent at the boundary between the cuff and the main bit of the hat, where which color touches the brim changes around the hat.
After making 11 hats with the spiral knitting, I decided to try doing spiral mosaic knitting (red and green patterned hat). I do not recommend this, for several reasons. It turns out it is way more challenging to do mosaic when spiral knitting-there is so much more to keep track of in terms of where you are in the pattern, and I struggled a lot at first with that. The bigger issue though is that, for doing the type of all over pattern I was using for this hat, it is pointless.
I’ve got enough experience with mosaic knitting that I can generally make the beginning/end of row spot fairly seamless. I typically do this by starting my row in a slightly different spot (within 4 stitches from the true start of row) to hide the jog by putting it somewhere where there’s already a color change or something similar. So basically, there was no problem to fix, at least for this style of pattern. The effect of doing spiral knitting with mosaic ended up meaning that, while I didn’t have to fuss over a jog, the pattern didn’t line up properly. If you look closely, you can see some ‘8’s at the join for the spiral knitting, when the overall pattern didn’t have that. That’s because the mosaic pattern is designed for you to knit in rows, but when using spiral knitting you’re emphasizing the spiral nature of knitting in the round, and effectively shifting the pattern relative to itself at the join. To my eye, the spiral knitting mosaic just looks like I consistently made a mistake at that point in the pattern.
spiral mosaic knitting
regular mosaic knitting
Now that I’d started doing some mosaic though, I decided to try out two designs I made-one of birds and the other of boats. I wanted to make sure that they worked in mosaic knitting, and I’m pretty happy with how they turned out! I’m debating whether either need a pom-pom on top. I don’t have enough of the light brown to do anything with, other than as a bit of interest in a pom-pom, so it would help me to fully use up all of my light brown yarn.