First things first

It’s never a bad time of year to knit hats. If it’s summer now where you live, you can start planning for ways to keep your head warm when the mercury drops in a few months. And if you’re in a cold spot right now, well, take comfort in the knowledge that hats knit up pretty fast and you can be sporting new headgear in no time at all.

Like a retro look? Not afraid to toss your wool knitting into a washing machine full of hot water? This felted cloche may be just the ticket for you.

If you eschew head-hugging hats and yearn for something long enough to trip over, then give this stocking cap a try. The pattern is available for both kids and adults. They’re both based on the hat worn by Schwartz in one of my favorite holiday movies, A Christmas Story.

And here’s a whole page of free hat patterns, if you’re looking for more options. One thing I love about this page is the use of thumbnails and not just design names. So when looking at the list it’s easy to tell at a glance if something appeals to you rather than have to navigate to another page to see the images.

When I first started knitting, I did what pretty much everyone else does: I made garter-stitch scarves. After three of ‘em, I decided to branch out. So I made a garter-stitch blanket for Sylvia.

And then I got the brilliant (ahem) idea of knitting a ruana for my mother-in-law. I had recently acquired Sally Melville’s very excellent The Knit Stitch and was feeling inspired to do something that wasn’t a scarf. But I was still a bit intimidated by increases and decreases and any sort of shaping. So I chose the one-size-fits-all Three-Scarf Ruana, figuring it would make an excellent Christmas gift for my mother-in-law. When I started it, I completely failed to realize that it is basically a scarf. A freakin’ huge scarf.

Melville annotates this pattern with “Lots of knitting”—and boy, she’s not kidding. It’s a lot of garter stitch. As I neared the end (after two Christmases had passed), I wasn’t really happy with how this thing looked. But because I was near the end, I doggedly continued. Some part of my brain thought, “If I can just finish this thing, then some miracle will happen, and it will actually look good.”

No such luck. I finished everything but weaving in the ends, then put the ruana in a basket on top of my armoire. It sat there for three years, a failed knitting project in every sense of the word. Finally, I decided to frog it and use the yarn for something else. But the thought of wrestling with a big tangle of yarn (and I knew I would be unable to frog this and get it into balls or skeins without creating some ginormous mess) made me pause.

Then I learned about the niddy noddy, a tool used to wind yarn into skeins. Then I found an excellent online tutorial for making my own—out of inexpensive PVC pipe. After a quick trip to the hardware store, I set up a little workshop on the front porch.
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Look! I HAS MAD SKILZ! See how a few deft cuts with a hacksaw (followed by a bit of sanding on the edges—don’t want to snag the yarn!)…
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…yields a niddy noddy that becomes flat for storage and cost about $2 to make!
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I was so pleased with myself (and had plenty of leftover PVC, since the store sold it only in ten-foot lengths) that I made another one for a friend. (There was even three feet of PVC left after this. It has been turned into a pole for Sylvia’s pirate flag.)

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The ruana is now frogged and all the yarn tidily wound into very curly skeins that make me think of poodles whenever I look at them. But all I need to do now is soak the yarn to get it all wet then hang it up to dry (with a can of soup acting as a weight at the bottom to stretch out the kinks). And then I’ll have ten skeins of Nature Spun worsted (in the Grape Harvest color) at my disposal. Now I just have to figure out what I want to do with it…

Well, maybe not rich, but the prize money could buy a lot of yarn.

The people responsible for Knitter’s magazine, XRX books, and the Stitches events are having a sock-design contest called Think Outside the Sox. The grand prize is $6,000, and the contest runs until 1 January 2009.

I wonder if knitting an oversized washcloth, folding it around my foot, then stapling it into place would qualify as a sock design. That’s pretty much all I could manage in the sock department, I think…

I received a lot of wonderful comments to my post about which sock yarn to knit up first. (Thanks, everyone!) The suggestions were great, and I agreed with them all—even when they didn’t agree with each other!

I decided to start with the Trampoline yarn. This was given to me as a gift, and it definitely falls into the “these are so not my colors” category. But Sylvia really liked the yarn, so I set out to knit a pair of socks for her.

I followed the Ann Norling pattern for baby and kids socks. This pattern is written for three different gauges and is clear enough that even a sock n00b like me had no trouble following it (until I got to the Kitchener stitch instructions at the end, which made no sense to me, so I looked them up elsewhere).

These socks knit up pretty quickly, and I really enjoyed working on them! The best part? Sylvia is excited to wear them—as soon as her feet grow a little more and the weather cools. I think they’ll be just right for her this winter.

And now…on to the next pair of socks!

The Thrifty Knitter (and author of Naughty Needles has posted a free pattern for her Spring Forward Fall Back Raglan, perfect for the warm/cool days of spring and autumn.

Do you find yourself saving the “disposable” wooden chopsticks you get a restaurants, not wanting to add them to the local landfill but not sure what else to do with them? Try making your own knitting needles! (Tutorial here.)

The Worsted Witch points us toward a tutorial from Lion Brand Yarn on using edible items to dye yarn. I’ve heard before of using turmeric and onion skins and other things for this purpose, but it’s nice to have the information–with recipes!–in one place.

St. John Ambulance in London (UK) is asking knitters to help with its fundraising by knitting 5,000 (yes, five thousand) tea cozies (which will be sold throughout the UK) by the end of November. There’s a funky free pattern here, and knitters are invited to create their own patterns, too. (Via Crafty Crafty.)

Looking to participate in a knitting competition? Round two of the Walking Stick Cosy Competition is underway; submissions are due 1 May 2008.

Why throw down big bucks for a row counter bracelet when you can make your own?

Easter is just around the corner, and those of you who celebrate it with decorated eggs and the Easter Bunny may be interested in these patterns: Honey Bunny (a knit-and-stuffed bunny reminiscent in shape of a bowling pin—albeit a very cute one), a tiny stuffed bunny made from a four-inch square (at last—a use for all those gauge swatches!), bunny-shaped egg cozies, and little knitted Easter eggs.

If bunnies—or Easter—aren’t your thing, try one of these other knitted animals: Kate the cat, a lobster, and a felted squid.

Let’s start with something positive, shall we? Remember that disaster I mentioned a few weeks ago? The vest that was supposed to have 160 cast-on stitches but somehow had 194—a fact I did not discover until I’d knit ten inches of it and was all set to divide the fronts and back? Well, I frogged the whole thing (which didn’t stress me out too much, honestly, because this knitting is not only quick but enjoyable) and—in a “get back on the horse that threw me” frame of mind—cast on again right away.

I placed markers every twenty stitches, then counted the stitches between the markers six times, then counted the markers five times, then counted all the stitches on the whole thing another few times, just to be sure. Yup—160 stitches. Houston, we have liftoff! As you can see, the knitting is going well! With luck, I’ll have a finished object to show you all (and to wear!) very soon!

And here’s the bad news: I regret to inform you that one project has bit the dust. Way back in August, I swatched for a wrap cardigan called Damson Wine. The pattern is from The Family Book of Knitting* (which is more like an extra-long special issue of a magazine), published by the folks who do the Simply Knitting magazine in the UK. I bought the book mostly for the knitted gnome pattern it contained, but also really liked this cardigan—so much so that I actually bought the yarn the pattern called for, Rowan Kid Classic.

So I swatched succesfully (hooray!) and a couple of weeks ago finally got around to starting to knit the sweater. You know how some patterns have those “do this pattern until you have X stitches left, then K X stitches” lines? Every time I got to one of those points with this pattern, I had X stitches. Wow! I was feeling pretty good about this!

And then I got to where you start the raglan decreases. And I got stuck. I simply could not make it work. I kept ending up with the wrong number of stitches.

I looked online for help and found nothing. Not a single person on Ravelry has knit this pattern (at least, not a single person on Ravelry will admit to knitting this pattern). Simple googling yielded nothing but sites where the pattern is for sale (usually listed in the contents of the book) and my own original post about it.

So I turned to my local knitting group for help. There are some very accomplished knitters in this group, and I knew that some of them would enjoy the challenge of figuring out why the decreases just didn’t work. Much math was done. Papers were scribbled upon. Heads conferred. And then came the verdict:

“This pattern is written like crap.”

(Well, maybe they didn’t actually say “crap.” I think they said, “This pattern is very poorly written.” But my subconscious heard “This pattern is written like crap”—partly because it’s a more efficient way to say the same thing, and partly because I think “crap” is one of the most useful, versatile, expressive words in the English language.)

My friends said that it would be possible to figure out the math of each line of the pattern, but that would be a headache. And they were pretty sure I’d be all set to tear out my hair when it came time to put the thing together, because the pattern yielding some pretty lousy seaming points.

So I’ve decided to bag it. For me, knitting is supposed to fun, and thinking ahead to the amount of cursing all that math and seaming up will inevitably produce, this cardigan doesn’t seem like a fun project. I’m going to frog this sucker and move on.

This was my first time knitting with Rowan Kid Classic, and I really enjoyed working with it. So now I’m trying to think about what to do with seven balls of this stuff. Should I try the Hourglass Sweater? Something else? I’m open to suggestions!

*This book is called The Bumper Book of Knitting in the UK. That title is way cooler than the one on the book I bought. Why is it that American prints of UK works always get the lame titles? Argh.

Via Craft, I recently rediscovered a pattern I’d first encountered last winter via my SP8 downstream pal’s blog. It’s for a double-sided star scarf that looks awfully fun to knit. I’m thinking about giving this a try with a different motif or maybe even a set of motifs.

And here’s another scarf pattern—this one a foulard—from Topstitchgirl. She writes her blog entries in both English and French, so here’s a fun chance to try knitting from a pattern in another language (with as-needed peeks at the other), if you’re interested.

I couldn’t stop laughing when I first saw this O RLY scarf. If you want to know what’s so funny, check this out. Yes, I wear my geek badge proudly!

Here’s a lovely pattern for a scarflet that fastens with buttons. Me, I’m more of a long-scarf person—something that be wrapped around your neck a couple of times—but I do think this is a nice design and could work very nicely (perhaps in a luxury yarn?) for something a bit more formal.

For Christmas last year, my friends Gina and Todd gave me some yarn and a pattern book from Green Mountain Spinnery. After much thought, I decided to make the Artisan Vest in that book, using the Double Twist yarn called for.

The smallest size in the book is for a 36″ chest. That’s a bit larger than what I wanted, so I did some math and modified the pattern to make it fit me better. So instead of casting on 180 stitches, I cast on 160. And I counted them three times before starting to knit.

Or so I thought. After a week and a half of merrily knitting along (this vest is worked in one piece from the bottom up), Saturday afternoon I found that I’d reached 10″ and was ready to divide the piece. I knit the right front and put those stitches on a holder. I bound off for the right armhole. I knit across the back. I put the left front stitches on a holder. Then I bound off for the left armhole. And then I thought, “Gosh, there’s an awful lot of stitches left on my needles for the back.”

So I counted them. And I counted them again. And I undid all of the bound-off stitches and worked back to right before I started to divide the piece…and I counted again.

Somehow, instead of 160 stitches, I had 194. How this happened, I have no idea. Like I said, I triple-checked the number of my cast-on stitches. The number 194 doesn’t appear anywhere in the pattern, so it’s not like I accidentally followed the wrong line. And I haven’t added stitches anywhere—my rows are beautifully tidy all the way up.

The only solution, I’m afraid, is to rip out the whole thing and start over. Yes, it’s a fair amount of knitting on size 6 needles. But it’s “mindless” knitting—the kind I can easily do while chatting with friends or watching a movie. So I’m sure I’ll be back to this point in no time—and this time around, I’ll have the correct number of cast-on stitches. I plan to quadruple check them this time. And I’ll make Jan count ‘em for me, too.

It took some thinking, but I finally found a good project for one of the skeins of yarn Sylvia gave me for Christmas: I made a hat for her. It’s more like a bonnet, actually (and that’s what we’ve been calling it), and it’s similar to one wore by the character Lyra in the recent film The Golden Compass.

I haven’t seen that movie yet (I’ll probably wait until the DVD is out for that one), but I’ve long loved Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Lyra is a fabulous personality—so full of fire and determination and cleverness. Sometimes Sylvia reminds me of her a bit. And of Arya Stark. Especially in the willfulness department. (Has anyone else realized that two-year-olds are master tautologists? “I don’t want to do X because I don’t want to!”)

Sylvia wore her new hat Friday morning to our weekly playgroup meeting, and when I was asked where I found the pattern, I honestly couldn’t remember anything beyond “online somewhere.” (Isn’t that where we find pretty much everything these days?) But I’ve now tracked it down. The pattern is available at Froggie Meanie, at Marmalade, and on the Lion Brand website. All of those patterns are free, and they include both child and adult sizing. I am thinking about making one for myself, too. After all, I’ve got another skein of thick yarn that Sylvia gave me…and what else am I going to do with size 19 needles, anyway?