It’s knitting time again, and these ones are some rare birds: gift knits!
Before Christmas, I told my girls I would knit them both hats in a super bulky yarn color of their choice. They could also pick the pattern, but I had the option to veto anything I wouldn’t enjoy knitting. That sounded good to both of them, and so began the project planning!
After looking around at yarn options a bit, I settled on Malabrigo Rasta. It’s a hand-dyed, single ply, nicely squishy Merino wool, and has a decent amount of yardage (90 yards) compared to other super bulky yarns. For a hand-dyed yarn, it’s also on the less expensive side at $23 a skein. It’s not cheap, but a lot of hand-dyed super bulkies have less yardage and higher prices. Each girl picked her favorite: 687 Aquamarine, a tonal mix of light blues for one, and 177 Blueberry Cream, a pink and purple speckle with an ivory base for the other. We ordered them both from Wool & Co. in Illinois, which has free shipping and lots of beautiful options.
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After that, it was on to the patterns. I have made a couple of Big Wool Basic Hats by Sara Heckman in super bulky yarn over the years, so one of my daughters went for that. This is a fun and easy free pattern, and a good first hat pattern if you’re a beginner knitter.
It’s basically a tube with ribbing at the bottom that you gather in at the top. Easy! Now that I have a little more experience under my belt, I decided to knit it 6.5″ long, put in a lifeline, knit 2 together all the way around, knit a round, knit 2 together all the way around again, knit the next round, and then follow the finishing instructions. I could try it on my daughter as I went to make sure it was a good fit for her, adjusting if necessary since it doesn’t take long to reknit in super bulky. With my additions, the hat was a little more shaped to her head rather than only gathered at the top.
My other daughter chose The Looking Glass Hat pattern by Jill DeMarco/Yarn It All by Jill. You can make The Looking Glass Hat in a single color or using two colors, and although it looks complicated, once you get the hang of it, it’s not hard. In fact, it’s really fun.
The method she describes for making the textural pattern is interesting, and while you have some long bits of yarn, they don’t ever feel floppy or unsecured.
The Looking Glass Hat, detail
I went down one needle size on both patterns because I’m a loose knitter, and that worked well. I did not knit gauge swatches. I’ll do that for larger projects, but not for hats.
I made each girl a pom pom with their leftover yarn, and I also bought each of them two different coordinating McPorter Farms faux rabbit fur pom poms from Coveted Yarn in Gloucester, MA that they could change out whenever they wanted. Since I had giant snaps that were the same size as the ones on the faux fur pom poms, I sewed one onto each yarn pom pom so those could also snap on, rather than having to be tied on. I love the option to snap a pom pom on because it makes it easy to take off when you want to wash your hat.
Big Wool Basic Hat
The Looking Glass Hat
Thanks to the magic that is super bulky yarn, I finished these with time to spare and, while they weren’t a surprise, it was nice to know that both girls had hats they really liked, made by me…and I loved the process of making them.
Hi, everyone! My blogging has certainly slowed down a bit, but I’m back today with a whole bunch of knitted hats I made over the last year or two that have yet to make an appearance on the blog. So uncharacteristic! Luckily, this means I have a good-sized group to share, some of which were real successes, and some of which missed the mark. Since my knitting skills are not as advanced as my sewing skills, this is pretty much par for the course. I love knitting hats, though, because I like wearing hats, and they are a smaller project, so they don’t take as long to knit as a sweater or something larger might. If you’re a knitter, maybe you’ll discover a new pattern here. Let’s dive in! First up, successes.
Hats that Worked!
Pattern: High Cliff
Pattern source/designer: the book Plum Dandi Knits by Alicia Plummer and Melissa Schaschwary; this pattern is by Melissa Schaschwary
Yarn: bulky; I used a really beautiful hand-dyed 85% wool/15% mohair yarn that I got from Pindrop Shop on Etsy during last year’s Black Friday sale.
New technique: I tried cabling without a cable needle a few times, using Andrea Mowry’s video
Of all the hats here, this is my most successful and most recently made hat. I checked this book out from the library, and chose this pattern because I have been wanting to try cables again, and this just has one big one. It turned out to be really fun, interesting, and fast. I made this hat in three days of very occasional knitting. It probably helped that I made it an inch and a half shorter than the pattern calls for.
As for the yarn, it took me a long time to figure out what I wanted to use it for, but it was perfect for this hat. To my delight, the yarn sort of faded from one color to the other, reminding me of decorative corn where each kernel is a different color.
I still have to decide if it needs a pompom.
This hat fits great, and I have already worn it a lot. I love it!
Pattern: Ribbed Watchman’s Hat
Pattern source/designer: Channah Koppel
Yarn: worsted; Encore by Plymouth yarn, which is 75% acrylic/25% wool and is machine washable; I got this at Yarn on Front in Dowagiac, MI
This hat is actually a gift (shhh!), but I think I’m safe. I don’t think the intended recipient reads my blog. This was knit to said intended recipient’s requirements: a ribbed hat that is machine washable in yellow with a fold-up brim.
I’ve been really into the Twisted German Cast On lately, so I used that to cast on, and I knit to 11 inches before decreasing, rather than the 9.5 inches in the pattern, so that the brim could be turned up. This took me awhile, but not forever, and I think it turned out pretty well. Hopefully it’s well-received!
Pattern source/designer: Andrea Mowry of Drea Renee Knits
Yarn: fingering; Sock Yarn by Birch Dyeworks in colorway Pixie on a Bender, which is 80% superwash merino wool/20% nylon
Perennial by Kelbourne Woolens in Purple, which is 60% superwash merino wool/25% suri alpaca/15% nylon
Both yarns came from Pintuck & Purl; the Birch Dyeworks yarn was actually given to me by Maggie, the owner, for some socks we were going to knit together that we…uh…never really completed. I think we knit about half an inch before calling it quits. Haha.
New Technique: BRIOCHE KNITTING!
I am so proud of this hat. I had never successfully knit brioche before trying this hat, so I was barely hanging on through this whole pattern. There are a ton of mistakes in it, but due to my inexperience with brioche, I wasn’t sure how to fix them, and sometimes I’m sure I didn’t even notice them! Somehow, though, I made it through, and I love this hat. I think it is probably a little slouchier than it should be, but I don’t even care.
It’s really a testament to Andrea Mowry’s great patterns and YouTube video support that I even completed this. Someday I will have to try another brioche project to really get the technique down. One of my favorite things about this kind of knitting? It’s reversible!
As for the yarn, I love, love, love both of these yarns. Mary, the owner of Birch Dyeworks is a real artist who has an amazing eye for color, and is excellent in several crafting arenas. There are a lot of beautiful hand-dyed yarns out there, but Mary’s are some of my favorites. And the Perennial is soft and lovely. I have it in a few colors and definitely need to use it more. If I were to do this pattern again, I don’t know that I would use this exact color combination, but I would definitely look for colors that contrast like these do to really make the design stand out.
The Hat that Worked Some of the Time
Pattern: Eva
Pattern source/designer: Wild Honey Design on Etsy; no longer available
Yarn: the blue and light pink hats are made from Comfort DK by Berroco in colors 2705 (light pink) and 2753 (indigo blue); this yarn is 50% super fine nylon/50% super fine acrylic; I got this at Coveted Yarn in Gloucester, MA
the purple, gray, and white hat is in worsted weight 100% Shetland wool yarn from Yates Farm in Vermont many years ago
This wasn’t a well-written pattern, but the color chart was a lot of fun. The pattern says to use Alafosslopi yarn, which is a bulky weight, but I have tried it in various yarns with various needle sizes to adjust the sizing. It looks like I didn’t take as many notes as I should have, but my first try in DK yarn gave me about a toddler or teddy bear sized hat. I often (though not exclusively) like natural materials, and before buying this Berroco Comfort DK, I confess to being a little bit snobby in my heart about yarn, only wanting to use wool or alpaca or something. This yarn really changed my mind. It is a delight to knit with and washes and wears great!
For my second try, I used larger needles and came up with a larger child’s size.
After that, I tried some of my worsted Shetland yarn that, for me, with my looser knitting, typically knits up to a bulky gauge. It worked, but the brim let the wind blow through while the colorwork section was pretty warm.
If I were to do this again with the same Shetland yarn, I would double the length of the brim so I could fold it up, and go up one needle size for a better fit in the colorwork area. I absolutely loved the look of this purple and gray hat, but in the end, I gave it away because I could tell I wouldn’t wear it if the wind blew through the part over my ears, and I was too lazy to alter it! I don’t like to go back into old projects. I’m still coming around to the idea that I can unravel knitwear that didn’t work out the way I wanted.
Despite the sparse directions, I have made enough of my own notes that I would definitely make this again. I love knitting hats and I love stranded colorwork, so this is a good project for me.
Hats that Did Not Work
Before we get to these, I’ll admit that these failed due to user error. I’m definitely still learning!
Yarn: worsted weight 100% Shetland yarn from Yates Farm in Vermont; this pattern calls for chunky weight yarn and this yarn knits to a bulky weight, plus I am a loose knitter, so that probably adds up to chunky, right?
This pattern looks so cool, and I dove in with some of my worsted weight Shetland yarn (I seriously have so much), but somewhere around Round 15, I messed something up, and I could never figure out what I had done. The hat fit fine, but it bugged me. Whatever mistake I had made obscured the design, so I gave the hat away.
I would love to try this again at some point. It’s a really cool design.
Pattern source/designer: Rachel Illsley of Unwind Knitwear
Yarn: white mystery cone yarn given to me by Maggie of Pintuck & Purl; I did a bleach test and it is a natural fiber–I’m guessing wool, maybe superwash; it’s fingering weight
Perennial by Kelbourne Woolens in Neon Coral, which is 60% superwash merino wool/25% suri alpaca/15% nylon; fingering weight; this also came from Pindrop Shop on Etsy during last year’s Black Friday sale
hand dyed lace weight yarn in Lilac Dreams from YouKnitIDye on Etsy; this is 72% ultrafine mohair/28% mulberry silk
So…you’re supposed to use DK weight yarn and lace weight mohair in this pattern. I didn’t have DK that I wanted to use, but I was excited about the colors I had in fingering weight with the mohair, so I held my two fingering yarns double to equal DK. That should have worked, in theory, but the Neon Coral yarn is definitely thinner than the white yarn. Also, I’m a loose knitter who doesn’t do gauge swatches for hats.
My hat came out huge. HUGE! It sort of looked like a toadstool hat when I was done with it. I probably should have only doubled the coral and not the white or just used fingering with the mohair. Oh. And I shouldn’t have made the large slouchy version.
I did eventually (after putting the hat in a long time out) unravel this one. The yarns were a little too special to just get rid of a hat that maybe no one would even want to wear. It was a beast to unravel, though, since I was unravelling five strands of yarn at once. Ugh.
You know, I usually never like leopard print, but I do like it in this hat. The colorwork chart is very interesting. It’s possible that I will revisit it someday. It’s definitely a cool pattern, even if I didn’t make it very well.
Whew! Now I’m all caught up on blogging my knit hats! Hopefully you will find a hat or two you might want to knit, or maybe you can laugh at my mistakes.
On the sewing front, I was actually starting to lose my sewjo, which has never happened to me before. I could never understand how people just stopped wanting to sew, but it began to happen to me. You know what I think it was? My work space was buried under piles and I had a million ideas, but hadn’t committed to a single one.
My work table, filled with piles of projects, materials, and ideas!
So, I cleaned up my space, and chose and committed to my next few projects. Then I made a plan to work on them a little bit most days. Now I’m back up and running, so I hope to have some projects to share with you soon. 🙂
If you are reading this post, then it means I have actually succeeded! Last week, I had some family things to take care of that took the time I would normally be blogging, and this week our computer sort of…exploded? There were no pieces of metal or plastic flying through the air, but there was a loud bang and lots of sparks. Thanks to my in-laws, I have a laptop I can use to get everything sorted and out on the blog, although for awhile there, I couldn’t upload pictures or get WordPress to save my post. However, it seems I have finally prevailed (with help from my husband and the internet)! In the grand scheme of things, this is minor, but it feels like an accomplishment nonetheless. While I’m not bad at technology, it’s far from my first love. What I really love is fibers I can sew and knit. Today’s project is of the knitting variety–I made a Wool & Honey sweater!
My Wool and Honey sweater in Jamieson and Smith 2 ply Jumper Weight yarn
The Wool & Honey sweater is a pattern from Drea Renee Knits (Andrea Mowry). The first time I saw someone wearing this sweater, I thought it was really cool, but had a very strange shape. The shoulders and sleeves are fitted, while the body is wide and boxy. There’s a really cool honeycomb pattern that sits on top of the stitches at the neck, chest, and upper arms.
Wool and Honey sweater front view
Wool and Honey sweater back view
I initially wrote the design off as something with interesting details that wasn’t quite for me. But somehow, as often happens, the design got into my head. Then I accidentally made a sweater with a similar shape in the fall…and I liked it!
I bought the paper pattern at Pintuck & Purl and decided that I would join in their Winter Sweater Make-Along on Zoom.
After researching yarn, I decided to go with Jamieson & Smith 2 ply Jumper Weight, which was both less expensive, even after having it shipped from the UK, and less prone to breakage than the recommended yarn.
Once I got all my supplies, I knit up a few “swift swatches in the round” and realized that I was, as usual, knitting very loosely.
My swatch from the right side after blocking
Here is the back of my swatch after blocking–it looks messy, but it helps you swatch quickly in the round.
I recalculated my gauge so that I could knit at the gauge that I got, and found that I would need to make the smallest size, rather than the size I would normally fit into, which would have been the medium or large. I really had to make it work since I was already using very tiny US size 0 and 1 knitting needles. Here is where I have to give a huge shoutout to Meaghan over at the Drea Renee Knits (DRK) team. While I could knit the XS to get a bust size that would work for me, it looked like the arms would be too tight. I e-mailed the DRK pattern help address and explained my problem. Meaghan took time to talk through all the details with me, help me with my math, explain that Andrea Mowry drafted these sleeves so they would fit well with anywhere from -2″ up to +3″ of ease, AND she offered to check over all my math once I made my calcuations since her formula was slightly different than the one I had first used. She really went above and beyond, and I am so grateful. It made a huge difference in my confidence and in the finished sweater to have someone that knowledgeable to talk things over with. And as it turned out, the XS was going to be fine with the gauge I got, sleeves and all.
Knitting this pattern was fascinating. I had no idea how the honeycombs would be formed. They are really ingenious. I love that they look like they are randomly scattered over the surface of the sweater and that they grow in size as they go from the neck down toward the waist.
This is my second DRK pattern, and I am a convert. Any special techniques I might not understand are explained in the pattern or on Andrea’s YouTube channel. Knowing I could e-mail someone for pattern help is really the icing on the cake. This pattern was challenging, but not too hard thanks to the help provided, and it was interesting. The only part I didn’t love was how long it takes to knit a sweater with fingering weight yarn on tiny needles. Needless to say, the Winter Sweater Make-Along finished long before I was done with my own sweater, but it gave me the push I needed to get started, and it was fun to connect with other knitters over Zoom. Just as I really began to think I would never finish, I got going on my sleeves. Even making them a little bit longer, by the time I got to the sleeves, the end really was imminent (even if it didn’t always feel like it). I began this in mid-October and finished in early to mid-February.
I absolutely love this sweater. In the first two weeks after I finished it, I wore it almost every day. My family started to laugh at me, I wore it so much. It’s warmer than I expected for the weight of the yarn, but not bulky or too warm.
Here are my takeaways from this project:
I am a total fan of DRK patterns. They are interesting, fun, and there is great support to help you through the parts you don’t understand. I have since signed up for her newsletter, which I’m really enjoying. I even got my mom hooked as we’re knitting Andrea’s Sparks socks pattern together over Zoom.
I love this Jamieson & Smith 2 ply Jumper Weight yarn. It’s beautiful in color and texture and great to knit with. It blooms nicely with blocking and it has given me a whole new appreciation for the Shetland yarn I have in my stash from my first knitting phase years ago. This yarn comes from Shetland sheep which are an old and very cool breed. I love its rustic look. It’s softer than you would expect, and while it blooms when blocked, it doesn’t jump right to getting felted. I would definitely knit more projects with this yarn.
That being said, I don’t love how long it took to knit a sweater out of fingering weight yarn. I know four months isn’t forever, but it often felt like it took forever to complete even a single round of stitches. I absolutely love the lightness and drape of the sweater, so I understand why people love fingering weight sweaters. I won’t say I’ll never knit one again, but I definitely need a break.
And the boxy body plus close-fitting arm style? I love it! I don’t like how it looks with every pair of pants I own, but with closer-fitting bottoms, I do like it, and it’s a dream to wear. The stretchy sleeves and forgiving fit of the body are also great for weight fluctuations, making this a sweater that should last a long time.
I’m so glad I tried this. While sewing is my biggest love, I have done less of it than I would have expected over the last year, moving at a slow-but-steady pace, while I have done more knitting than I would have expected. Knitting is easy to pick up and put down, and I have two new knitting buddies in my mom, who has come back to knitting after a long absence, and one of my kids, who is really getting into it.
I love, love, love being able to make my own clothes. Knitting gives me one more tool in that box.
If I could add any other tool? Shoe-making! Maybe one day. 🙂
Pattern and Branch 