Posted on 15 Comments

Impunity

When I was a kid, I remember reading a short story called “Impunity Jane.” I don’t know why I always returned to that story; maybe it was because I was a typical girl who loved dolls, and Impunity Jane just happened to be a doll. But really, I think it was the word impunity that had me so fascinated. I just couldn’t infer its meaning from the story’s content. It was a word mystery, and I was hooked.

The mystery remained unsolved, and, eventually, forgotten, until my high school English class. There, in my vocabulary book, was the word impunity! And the definition? Freedom from punishment. The perfect word, waiting to be used in the perfect situation. I love those types of words.

As I was typing up the description for this hat pattern, I realized that the thing I like so much about it is its use of variegated and tonal yarns. I have a love/hate relationship with those yarns, which you may have read about here. They always look so pretty in the balls, and so horribly blotchy in stockinette. Unless.

Unless you can come up with some interesting stitch pattern. Then, they shine. Then, you can knit them up with impunity.

For example, in my new pattern, which I named… Impunity. Shocking, I know.

As you can see, these hats have vertical ribbing to break up the colour changes. And the shaping continues right up to the top of the hat. Lots of springy, stretchy rings and visual interest. This hat looks great knit in any colour, for anyone. I’ve been making them for the gezillions of babies being born to all my friends this summer, and I plan to make one for myself, too. And possibly for my husband. If he’s good. After all, what’s the use in being a knitter if you don’t have an over abundance of hats?

The pattern contains sizing for Preemies, Babies, Toddlers, and Children/Adults. Because of the larger-than-normal needle size and the vertical ribs, these hats are stretchy and will fit between sizes. If in doubt, knit a size up. For instance, Preemie is definitely too little for a newborn of average size, but the Baby size will fit a newborn for quite a while. The size shown in the pictures is Toddler, and it fits the pretty little 20-month-old (if I do say so myself) as well as her 5-year-old brothers. But if you’re knitting for an 8 year old or older, I’d go with a Child/Adult size. Clear as mud?

You’ll need a 50g ball of fingering-weight yarn and size 3 US (2.75mm) needles for working in the round. I used two circular needles, but dpn’s or magic loop would work, as well. The yarn I used, that’s shown here, is one of my new favourites: Shibui Sock. Oh, the springiness! Oh, the colours! My hands are happy when I knit with it. The colour shown here is called Roppongi, and it’s a pink/orange mix. Bliss!

[box type=”download”]download now for free![/box]

Posted on 8 Comments

Hand-Painted Preemie Hat

I love buying hand-painted yarn, but then I’m inevitably disappointed when I knit it up. The gorgeous, vibrant colours suddenly pool or stripe in weird ways that make the ugliest little hats. But when I use a textural stitch, like seed stitch, suddenly the yarn regains its charm and the hat becomes delightful!

You can see how the stitches break up the lines of colour and give it an almost tweedy effect.

Top view

I’ve worked out the top decreases in the seed stitch pattern to keep the effect going right up to the top. I’ve tried decreasing in seed stitch a couple different ways over the years, but this pattern uses my favourite. I hope you like it, too.

The pattern for these little hats includes sizes from micropreemie up to a full-term newborn. You’ll need size 2 US needles for working in the round. I prefer using two circs, but any technique will do.

You can grab the free download here:
download now

Posted on 1 Comment

Zimmermania: I finally get it!

Why is it that I sometimes need someone else’s permission to be confident?  There it is: the truth about me.  I constantly need to either  talk myself into being confident, or let someone else do it for me.  It doesn’t come naturally.  Thank God it can come by outside means!

I am currently reading Elizabeth Zimmermann’s Knitter’s Almanac, and now I know what all the fuss is about when it comes to EZ.  It seems like every knitting forum online eventually mentions EZ’s technique for this, or EZ’s pattern for that.  Well, this EZ book was the cheapest one on Knit Picks, and it contained the pattern for a sweater that I wanted to knit for the upcoming baby girl, so I bought it.  I splurged all of $7.50, and I think it’s the best knitting money I’ve ever spent.  (Well, except for maybe that grey merino that is now my favourite cardigan; but I guess that’s a fish, and the book is a fishing rod, to borrow from that old metaphor.  You get my point.  I hope.)

Said EZ sweater: February baby sweater on two needles (but I did the sleeves in the round because I hate seams.)

Listen to this:  “Don’t place unlimited credence in us knitting-instruction-writers, or believe everything in print to be infallible.  We do our best, but it may easily be that your best is better than ours.  Don’t hesitate to improve on us” (p.102).  Isn’t that wonderful?  Elizabeth Zimmermann herself, the guru of modern knitting, thinks I can do better.  Thinks you can do better.

I admit, this particular book isn’t for beginning knitters.  EZ assumes that the reader knows a lot about the basics of knitting, and if I had read it ten years ago, I would have been lost.  But, as a baby “unventor” trying to figure things out and make some of my own really great patterns, it’s the perfect book for me.

Here are, for your entertainment and encouragement, some things I have learned while designing:

There is nothing new under the knitting sun.  I might come up with some pretty new sweater, but it’s just a combination of basic sweater techniques and basic stitch patterns that already existed.  Every baby sweater I looked up on Ravelry for inspiration convinced me of that.

Anyone can design, if they really want to.  (If they have really poor taste, their designs might look terrible, but they’ll still be designs!)  It just takes a little extra knowledge about the basic workings of things.  Oh, and knowing some tips and tricks helps, too.  For instance: do you know how to do an edge stitch so your back-and-forth work looks neat and straight at the sides?  Simply slip the first stitch as if to purl, then knit the last stitch of every row.  That’s it.  And you’ll be rewarded with a neat little chain of stitches travelling up the side of your work.  That neat little chain, if employed on heel flaps, will also make it easier and neater to pick up your stitches for the instep, especially if you twist them to avoid holes.  Now that wasn’t hard, was it?

Math.  *sigh*  Math skills are quite useful, after all, especially when getting things to be the proper size and planning out pattern spacing.  Did you know that you could change any of my preemie patterns to fit an adult simply by re-calculating the gauge?  For instance, the Tulip Hat is basically a repeated pattern of ten stitches.  Knit out a tiny one, measure it, then measure your own head.  Figure out how many more repeats of ten you need to fit yourself, then add that many to the hat.  Knit in the pattern until you’re about 2 or 2 1/2 inches from the top of your head, then start decreasing.  Ta-da!  You’ve just modified a pattern.  You’re already part designer.

I was pretty scared of gauge when I first started knitting.  I ignored it if I could, to be honest, and frankly I’m lucky that some of my knitted sweaters actually fit their intended owners.  But now I know: in designing, gauge is a big deal.  It makes everything easier.  For instance, if I want a sweater with a 40-inch chest, and my gauge swatch tells me that my yarn knits up at 5 sts/inch, I simply multiply 5 by 40 to find out how many stitches I’ll need in that 40 inches:  200.  Now, wasn’t that easy?

EZ mentions in her book that a hat is usually about half the circumference of a sweater, so in my determination to design a sweater for the new baby girl, I decided to knit a test hat.  I had picked a couple patterns from a big pattern book I have, and I incorporated them into the hat.  Since I wanted to knit the sweater from the top down (because the lace pattern looks better upside down), I started the hat at the top, too.  I used that little hat to experiment with how to increase in seed stitch without ruining its effect.  I discovered a couple things I would not do on the sweater, and I kept going.  When I switched to the lace pattern to see how it would look with the seed stitch, I realized that the lace would pull in the seed stitch and make it pucker.  Since I don’t want the bottom of my sweater to be narrower than the top, I now know that I’ll have to increase right before switching from the seed stitch to the lace repeats.  All this from a tiny little hat! And not from a useless square of fabric!

Here's my test hat. Sweater to come!

(Amazingly, the hat turned out wearable and even cute.  I am even more encouraged to keep experimenting.  My sister even wants one in her size, since she “hates hats that hug her head too tightly and likes the bubbly look at the top of this one.”)

So, let me encourage you, as EZ has encouraged me:  go for it!  Change things, make things up, and unvent to your heart’s content.  It’s pretty awesome.

More of the hat. I'm just so pleased with my first real "unvention!"