Tag Archives: bulky yarn

I know what a LOT of people are getting for Christmas this year…

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I am trying my best to show a little restraint when it comes to this hat pattern a friend gave me. But, oh sweet knitting gods, it is hard.

This hat is so cute and knits up insanely fast because you knit flat and then sew it into shape. What’s not to love?

Oh, that’s right, here is what is not love:

Way down at the bottom of the pattern, looking innocent, is the instruction to “mattress” stitch the ends together. I’m not sure why it’s called mattress stitching, though my current theory is because it makes you want to go lie down after you try it. Good thing this first hat (because oh yes there will be more, bed-related stitching or not) is for my daughter, who is not yet discerning enough to care about what a complete hash her mother has made of the mattress stitching on her new hat.

Of course, it doesn’t help that this first attempt is on a diagonal (the tutorials only show horizontal and vertical… how dare they not envision every possible orientation?). I’m making my son one next… it will give me another chance to see if I can work out how to join these things together.

Quick side-scarf

knitting, ,

I have so much love for thick yarns. I had a sudden, birthday-related need for a scarf. Fast forward roughly 4 knitting-hours, and I’ve got a warm, wooly scarf.

The color on this picture is way, way off. It has a lot more red in it than is shown here, but otherwise I think this nicely shows off the seed stitch that I used. I just sort of winged this scarf, and decided on the fly to do something a little more fancy that a garter stitch.

Even though this was an easy project, I still learned something (2 things, in fact – how embarrassing!):

(1) This scarf is 21 stitches across, size 13 needles with “super bulky” yarn. I should never, ever make a scarf this wide again. I ended up having to run out and buy another skein because it would’ve been way too stubby with just the one I had. If I had had the time, I would’ve started over with maybe 15 stitches.

(2) In my head, here is the pattern I decided to make:

CO 21
Rows 1-4: K21
Rows 5-??: K3, [k1, p1]* repeat until three stitches left, k3
Knit last 4 rows then BO

Okay, so in my head, this would give me a 3-stitch garter border. In reality, this gave me a 4-stitch border because, duh, K3 then k1… yes, that is K4. Plus, because I correctly figured out that I needed an odd number of stitches, the seed [k1, p1] actually ends with just a k1, so… yep: K4 at the end of the row. To be fair, I got what I really wanted, which is being able to knit the same exact pattern every row and still get a seed stitch with a border. The border is just a little bigger than I planned.

A lovely side-effect of this project (because I can’t learn three things from a silly scarf that took a few hours) – I can know really tell the difference between how a single knit stitch and a single purl stitch looks. I am ridiculously proud of this.