The Peripatetic Knitter

I made a hat like this for our grandson when he was here over Christmas,
but I didn't have time to document it. So I'm making another and writing down what I'm doing. This is going to be a work in progress and more of a recipe than a pattern.

Materials, gauge, etc.
For Dima's hat I used one skein of Berocco Hip-Hop - very big and bulky so it took no time at all to knit up. This time I'm using some of my own worsted weight handspun. My gauge was 14 stitches = 4".
You can use anything you like. Gauge doesn't matter - you're going to knit this thing to fit.

You'll be knitting in the round, so you'll need a set of double-pointed needles, two circular needles, or a single circular needle in a size that suits the yarn you're using. I'm using a 40"  5 mm circular needle because I prefer Magic Loop.

Measurements
You're going to need to know two things: the circumference of the wearer's head, and the distance from the top of the head to the middle of the ears. Instead of taking the second measurement, you can just try the hat on.
My head is 22.5" around and 6.5" from top to mid-ear.

Instructions
Top
For Dima's hat I cast on 6 stitches and knit 1" in I-cord. For mine, I just cast on 6 stitches and joined them in a round.
Row 1: Increase 6 times.
Row 2: Knit around.
Row 3: Knit around, increasing 6 times evenly spaced.
Repeat these last two rows, increasing 6 stitches every second row, until you've got a circle of the right circumference. You can determine that using a bit of math. Remember your elementary school geometry? The circumference of a circle, C, is 2πr. You should knit until the length from the start (which is r) equals C - the circumference of your head - divided by 2π or roughly 6.25. My head is 22.5" around, so I increased until I did 3.6" (or 3.5" or something close). I had 78 stitches at that point.

Sides
Knit around and around until the hat comes to the middle of the ears.

Border and earflap tops
We're going to use a k2p2 border around the front and back and a garter stitch border around the edges of the earflaps.
Round 1: Work

• ~35% of the stitches in k2p2 ribbing for the front (30stitches in my case)
• ~20% in plain knitting for the first earflap (15 stitches)
• ~25% in k2p2 ribbing for the back (18 stitches)
• ~20% in plain knitting (15 stitches)

Round 2: Keeping the ribbing as established, purl 4 stitches at the beginning and end of the earflap sections, setting up the garter stitch borders.
Continue like this until the ribbing is about 1" deep.
Cast off the front and back sections.

Earflaps
You will be at the beginning of the left earflap at this point. Continue working it back and forth for another inch or so, keeping the garter stitch border. Then decrease a stitch at each end of the needle once or twice (depending on your gauge). After that decrease one stitch at each end of the needle every row until you have 3 (or 5, for finer yarn) stitches left. Work I-cord on these stitches for 15" or so.

Join the yarn to the remaining stitches and work the right earflap and i-cord the same way.

My mother carefully saved a set of four Lux knitting books through all the twists and travels of her life. I'm finally getting around to dealing with them. There are some treasures there. My first project was scanning and OCR-ing the 1939 War Supplement to the Lux Knitting Book. It was obviously produced in a big hurry - the pagination just doesn't work. But once you figure it out, it's got some quite fashionable stuff in it. Here are pictures of the scans.









I have uploaded the scans and the converted patterns to Dropbox. You can get the files by clicking on these links:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2640258/Wartime%20booklet/WarBooklet.pdf
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2640258/Wartime%20booklet/WarBookletPaged.pdf
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2640258/Wartime%20booklet/WarBookletScan1.JPG
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2640258/Wartime%20booklet/WarBookletScan2.JPG
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2640258/Wartime%20booklet/WarBookletScan3.JPG
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2640258/Wartime%20booklet/WarBookletScan4.JPG

I've done some spinning before. I even had a very nice spinning wheel for awhile, although I gave it to a good home when we moved to Turkey. I kept my drop spindle, though, and thought I might get around to using it again.

Last month at Woolfest I took a refresher course on drop spindle spinning and was hooked. I now have 5 drop spindles including two I've made in the last two days. Here are 3 of them:

The big one in the middle is my old bottom-whorl spindle. It's a fine tool, well-balanced and nice to use, but I've discovered that I prefer top-whorl spindles - it's quicker to wind the spun yarn on. The one on the left is my absolute favourite, a souvenir of Woolfest. It's light, balanced and made of beautiful New Zealand wood. And the one on the right is one I made today, along with some of the buffalo fibre I'm spinning on it.

That spindle was incredibly easy to make. I got a 1 foot long (30 cm) length of 3/8" (.8 cm) dowel from the local building supply store (actually I had to buy 4 ft but I had them cut it into 1 ft lengths). I also got some cuphooks and a set of sliders - 2 1/2" disks that go under table legs. These sliders have holes in their centres. Put the screw end of a cuphook through this hole and screw the cuphook into the end of the dowel. Et voilá - a spindle. It's not beautiful and certainly not well balanced, but it works and it cost about $2.00.

There's a video showing how to use it here.

I made this scarf the other day from some yarn I'd had lying around for awhile. I have no idea what the yarn is or what fibre it's made from. It's just a collection of various bits of sparkly or fuzzy or shiny strings tied together. And this is what I made from it:

Get yourself a medium-long circular needle with tip diameters a little on the big side. Using the cable cast on method, cast on "enough stitches to make it good" - just fill the cable without packing it too tight. Leave a  tail at the beginning that's sort of fringe length - 4-5 inches (10 cm) or so. Break the yarn, leaving a fringe-length tail, and join on again, once more leaving a fringe-length tail. Knit a row and break off. Join on and knit another row. And so on and on. Keep going until you've done enough or have only one row's worth of yarn left. Bind off. Tidy up the fringe and secure it by tying knots up against the knitting.

Four hours' work is what it took. Very cost-effective.

Another really easy knitting pattern. I wanted to try out the Mountain Colors Homespun, and this seemed to show of its bumps and colours well.

The stitch is usually called a "mistake rib", but I don't think there's any mistake about it. The rib shifts over one stitch from row to row, so I'm calling it "shifting rib". Actually I called it Shifting Sands at first, but discovered that Grumperina had a much nicer scarf of the same name on her blog!

I used larger needles than the yarn band calls for because I learned in my hand spinning days that you have to use the right needles for the largest bumps - otherwise you get a cardboard effect. If that`s what you want, stick with their advice.

Materials Mountain Colors Homespun
9 mm (US size 13) knitting needles

Gauge 11 stitches = 4 inches in pattern stitch.

Pattern stitch (multiple of 4 stitches + 1)
All rows: knit 2, purl 2 until 1 stitch remains. Knit 1

Instructions
Cast on 17. Knit in pattern stitch until you run out of yarn or patience. Bind off. Sew in loose ends.

This makes a fairly narrow scarf, but it's fast knitting.

Here's another pattern moved from http://momles.blogspot.com:

Part of my crusade against plastic bags.
Crocheted bags don't get any easier than this. The only stitches you need to know are single crochet and chain.


Materials
A sturdy, non-stretchy yarn or string. I used Elsebeth Lavold's Hempathy. You'll need maybe 100 meters - or less.
A large-eyed needle to sew the loose ends in.

Instructions

Foundation loop
          Chain 6. Join with a slip stitch in the end of the chain.
Round 1
Round 2
Round 3
Round 4
Rounds 5 - 16
Rounds 17 - 18

Here's the first pattern I've ever designed and published: the Ocean Waves scarf. I've moved it from my other blog.

A note about the stitch. It's not the standard Ocean Waves stitch you might find in some books. It's kinda like it, but it's made for lazy people like me. Instead of wrapping the yarn around the needle between stitches, you wrap it within the stitch. So you stick the needle into a stitch you're going to knit and wrap the yarn around twice (or three or four times) before pulling it through to make the new stitch. And on the next row you drop the extra loops. Nothing to it!

You have my permission to sell scarves made from this pattern.

So here it is:

These mittens are very closely based on Patti Pierce's Basic Top Down mittens, with just a couple of different ideas thrown in. She has some wonderful patterns that have given me lots to think about and work with.

The best reason for doing mittens and hats top-down (and socks toe-up) is the increased flexibility you have. If you don't feel like doing a swatch, or (like me) tend to knit very differently when it's the real thing, this is the way to go. The idea is to cast on a few stitches and increase until the object is big enough in circumference, knit until it's long enough, and quit.

So here's what I did for the mitts:

Cast on 12 stitches using the Magic Cast On technique (an essential thing to learn.

Round 1: 
  Needles 1 & 3 - kfb (increase 1), k2
  Needles 2 & 4 - k1, kfb (increase 1) k1 (16 sts on 4 needles)
Round 2: knit
Round 3:
  Needles 1 & 3 - kfb, k3
  Needles 2 & 4 - k2, kfb, k1 (20 sts on needles)

Continue increasing like this until the mitt is big enough around.
Knit plain until the mitt reaches down to the thumb.

Patti uses the Elizabeth Zimmerman afterthought thumb technique. I'm going to try something different on the next pair and may edit this if it works.
This is (I think) the way the afterthought thumb works:
- Decide how many stitches you need to go around your thumb. That number will be N. S is the number of stitches on one needle.
- Left thumb: knit across the first needle. Knit S-N-1 stitches. Knit the next N stitches using a piece of scrap yarn, then slip these N stitches back on the left needle. Knit them again with the working yarn. Knit the remaining stitch on this needle, Proxy-Connection: keep-alive Cache-Control: max-age

I've been blogging for a while on Blogspot (http://momles.blogspot.com), throwing in the occasional knitting pattern or other knitting thought from time to time. This kinda upsets my regular readers there who are looking for news of our travels & things. So this blog is going to be the home of my patterns and tales of needlework adventures.