FO: Handspun Urchin Beret

Back to showing off a bit of knitting here. Here's another handspun hat that I whipped up in an afternoon.

It started out as a 4oz braid of Creatively Dyed roving. It's a 50/50 wool and bamboo blend.



I got this at MDSW a couple years ago. I just remember that it was hot out, and touching wool was a really big effort for me. Maryland has a great wool festival, but it's timed rather awkwardly. It's at the exact part of the year where you are liable to get your first really muggy days, which make you panic about there never be the need for woolly things ever again.



I spun this up as a chunky 2-ply, with plenty of thick and thin spots. The bamboo was a little squeaky to spin- it wanted to clump and not be a homogeneous blend with the wool. I went with it, and let it be what it wanted to.



I got slightly over 60 yards in the end. A hat-amount.



A simple beret was whipped up in record time. I used size 15 needles. Once again, it's the Urchin Beret by Wenlan Chia. It's a good pattern for a small amount of chunky or bulky weight yarn. I put in some extra rows just so I wouldn't have any leftovers. The bamboo really wants to drape, so it gives it a nice slouchy appearance. You can't really put this on your head, you have to pour yourself into it and let it flop around artfully and lopsided.



The bamboo didn't pick up the dye, so the white really muted the bright colors. It looks more heathered than anything.



Voila! It's a cute, fun little topper.

FO: Chutes and Ladders Hat

A couple weeks ago it was sofrigginhot out and it felt as though winter has never existed anywhere ever. How could these waves of oven-like heat come from the same planetary weather system that did this to my car just a few months ago?



I spent the heat-wave week working from home in my little office with no air conditioning. That's how dire my work life has gotten- I would rather spend 8 hours in an airless sauna then make my way into the city with a crush of humanity to sit in a chilly icebox for the day. It actually ended up bring quite entertaining- just when I couldn't bear the heat another second, I would run into the kitchen and cook a big dinner. Corn on the cob, wonton soup, stewed chicken thighs over fresh pasta. Basically, standing in front of the oven and cooking made it so much easier to bear the oppressive heat and humidity because as soon as I stepped away, it magically felt 10 degrees colder. Also, because I couldn't drink water fast enough to stay hydrated, when I drank something with alcohol in it, i was tipsy and having a riotous good time right away. The fact that I spent several occasions over the winter dishing out huge amounts of cash to sit in a sauna or steam room, I had to embrace the heatwave as a way to cleanse my pores. My skin...it's fabulous.

It got so hot in the kitchen, a bottle of homemade beer exploded and shattered into a million pieces. I was kind of proud of the fact that I was tougher than the beer, but cleaning up all those sticky shards was not how I wanted to spend my morning.

The other thing I thought would make me feel nice and cool was to whip up some handspun hats. Oodles of them. As many as I could find odd balls of handspun in my stash. I've been spinning for, oh, 6 or 7 years now, which equates to a whole lot of 2-4oz skeins of oddballs of yarn. I'm on a lot of conference calls and webexes all day, and I find if I don't knit to keep my hands busy, I'll just start click-clicking away on the internet or tap-tapping away on the keyboard, answering emails and stressing about all the tasks that I could be doing. So I knit, and try to pay attention to the call. It's nice.

Here's the first one I spun up:



It started as a 2oz bump of Merino/Silk fiber from Capistrano Fiber Arts in the "Etoille" colorway. It was as soft as anything and the 20% silk content made this just a little shiny. I had acquired this at the Yarn Tree in Brooklyn ages ago...I actually bought two bumps and made a scarf out of the first one I spun up. I love the color on this so much- the combination of the moody dark purples and blues with yellow really made my heart pitter-pat.

I spun this up on my Kromski Minstrel into a big, bulky thick-and thin single.





I tried to keep it as lofty as possible. I had some thin spots where a whole lot of twist accumulated, but for the most part, I was happy with my non-lace spinning. It was fun, and making a bulky yarn takes a fraction of the time than cobweb lace. I got about 70 yards.

I found a hat pattern that I wanted to try.



It's called the Chutes and Ladders hat from the "Handspun Handknit" book. It's a perfect fun little hat to eat up a skein of handspun. It's just a ribbed brim, cables with double yarn overs that you drop on the next row. Or, at least that's how I did mine. The pattern had some ambiguous instructions, so I chose to ignore them and just knit on. It was probably just the heat messing with my head. I don't see any scary killer clown faces in this, so I think I'm okay.





It's not the most tidy hat, but I had a lot of fun making this. Also- it took maybe an hour and a half, and that was even with a good chunk of multi-tasking thrown in. I keep meaning to pick up some round balloons at the dollar store. I've been blocking hats over a mixing bowl for years and they all kind of have a flatter top that what I'd like.

Size 11 needles.

FO: Uni Beret makes me say "oui!"

I have such mixed feelings about berets. On one hand, they can be very stylish and chic. On the other hand, they can look foppish and, as my friend Knithound found out, "like a feedbag". (Whatever. She looks regal in it when she's not trying to rob banks.) I approach beret-making with much trepidation. They take up twice the amount of yarn as a regular beanie hat, and they usually take about twice the time. Beret= neigh.

The solution:



Yarn that is thick and roving-like. You lose a bit of the drape, but it only took me a hair over an hour to finish a hat. If it looked like I was about to run away and join the French Circus, it would't be a huge time loss.

Also, I really needed a quick pick-me-up since all I've been plugging away at have been eye-straining chart-reading cable and lace projects. Big projects. They have ceased to be fun, and I usually put them down and forget my place on a weekly basis. I should break this cycle, but I am way too committed to it at this point. I want to making no visible progress on my cable sweater FOREVER. I prefer it that way.

Here it is, the Urchin beret:



Except I prefer to call it "Uni", since that's what it's called in sushi form.



It's a bit heavy and warm for the summer. Quite a bit. Also, it pissed me off to no end that it took almost a week to dry after blocking since it wouldn't stop raining. I couldn't get anything to dry at all, and at the end of the two-week rainstorm we had that is called "Springtime" everything smelled like musty grossness of doom and gloom. I sprayed down everything with tea tree oil once I could get a dry day. I was seriously worried that a mushroom forest would have popped up in the bathroom if I didn't spray something.



A floppy fun head-covering in an hour.

The specs:

I used less than 1 skeins of Classic Elite Soft Chunky Yarn. It's only 83 yards to a skein, so it's a good use of most of one. The pattern is called the "Urchin Beret" from "Twinkle's Weekend Knits". I used size 15 needles. Bigger is really better when Instant Gratification is needed.

FO- Lion Neck Cardigan

I forget how much city there is around me after a long snowy winter. As the weather turns suddenly, getting outside becomes a priority. I spent the past few days revisiting New York places that I abandon during the winter. Central Park, the Bronx Zoo, Prospect Park. All of these places are much nicer when you aren't sliding around on ice.

I had finished this rather dramatic cardigan a few weeks ago. Thankfully, the nights are still cool enough to need a cozy layer and I have gotten quite a bit of use out of it already. I was always a little leery of sweater coats. They looked frumpy and too bath-robey for me. I was fond of one that I had a few years ago that had a collar trimmed in ostrich feathers. One of my co-workers got drunk and told me I looked like a Mexican wrestler. ¡Dios mío! That comment tainted my Bette Davis fabulousness I felt when I was flouncing around the office donning my elegant sweatercoat.



It's just fabulous enough. The ruffle makes it Bette Davis chic, but not so overboard that it would be considered Bette Davis drag queen impersonator chic meets Nacho Libre. Meow.







The specs:

I used 9 skeins (about 1000 yards) of Rowan Scottish Tweed Chunky in Burgundy (funny, I just noticed that it's not a tweed yarn at all.) It's a fuzzy woolen spun 2-ply yarn. It does have a bit of an itch factor to it, but not so bad that it's uncomfortable on my bare arms.

The pattern is a top-down raglan from Wendy Bernard's "Custom Knits". It's a simple and fast knit, with enough shaping to make it elegant and slimming. I made the large size- in the sample, she has a tie that stretches across the front to hold the two cardigan halves together. I would rather have them meet in the middle and button in the front, so I went up a size from what I normally would make based on measurements. I crocheted an loop and salvaged an oblong wooden button from my button bucket. Unsurprisingly, the ruffle took a ton of yarn- at least 240 yards. After blocking, I ripped the sleeves back and re-worked the ribbing since they grew quite a bit.

*****
I have two woolie sweaters that are almost finished, and then it's on to more seasonal knits for me. I approach this time of year with mixed knitterly feelings- wool is my absolute favorite material to work with, but it's hard to sit on the beach in 80% humidity with an ever-growing wool sack resting on my lap.

FO- Belle Cardigan

This might have been the fastest thing I've ever knit. I cast on sometime on a Friday morning and I was wearing it Saturday afternoon.



It's the Belle Cardigan from Interweave Knits Fall 2007. While not the most wearable garment, I'm happy with how it came out with some modifications.



Most Wenlan Chia patterns are notorious for their lack of pattern editing, mistakes and miserably vague instructions- they just don't seem like a real knitter sat down and worked things out. This one made much more sense...I'm thinking that the editors at Interweave went to work on it. The instructions were clear and concise.

I made the 29.5 inch size. That seems impossibly tiny, but this does stretch quite a bit and the two halves don't meet in the middle. It's meant to be a bit curve-hugging.

Some mods: The entire thing is written in reverse stockinette stitch (purl-side showing). I think that adds bulk, and I don't personally need that, so I reversed the whole garment. I also left the patch pockets out...I don't need more super-bulk yarn at the point of my waist where I need less bulk. Besides, I loathe useless pockets. The sleeves are supposed to be big and blousey. I just went down to the instructions for the small size to make them more fitted- yarn this chunky doesn't flow and drape, so the blousey looks more like arm-fat underhang. The only other thing I wish I would have done is to knit the sleeves in the round. The seams are grand-canyon big.



It fits kind of weird in the end...I keep trying to push my boobs down so they are covered by the edge of the cardi. It seems a bit odd to have something on that isn't covering you boobs. It will be a nice cover-up for a dress or a plain tight-fighting top. Since it's merino, there's no itch so it's comfortable on bare arms. I did have a rather epic struggle trying to put a coat over this- the sleeves ended up riding all the way up to my armpits and with the overcoat on, it looked like I was about to go out and play football.

The specs: I used all of 4 skeins (348 yards) of Rowan Big Wool in charcoal, which is too bad because I was trying to use up the 5 skeins that I owned. The body was knit on size US 17 needles, and the ribbing was done on US 15.