Category: pattern

knitting · pattern · wool · yarn

February Hat ’22.

mousearmy

What have I been doing all February? Well, I’ve been knitting a hat. One hat. It literally took me ten days to knit a hat that should’ve maybe taken four or five

I’m never knitting another one, but…you can, if you want.

(Yeah, this is effective marketing copy.)

(Really though, while it is a long hat, if you’re not ripping back the crown decreases to make them more coherent throughout the sizing options, and then pay attention to the changes you’ve made, it won’t be onerous. I hated this hat a little bit so you can enjoy it, basically, and that’s what a significant fraction of this kind of design work is sometimes.)

(And I guess I also knit about 40% of a cardigan, but nevermind that.)

It’s got a liner option. The liner is not the same hat knit again. I couldn’t handle that.

This hat is almost three feet long from hem to tip in the adult medium size, which fits 21-22.5” head circumferences. The sizing is broad, but the pure length on these makes me wonder if a baby size is appropriate: it might be cute for closely-observed babies, as in those fancy baby photosets you do to commemorate a person being a baby, etc., but it’s not ideal for general baby-use unless your baby is old enough to sit up, walk, run, escape traps, make its own sandwiches, and solve simple logic puzzles. You just don’t want the long hat style to give a baby trouble.

And finally, here’s the link to the Ravelry .PDF. There’s a limited-time promo going on now, though that assumes you’re reading this the weekend of March 4th, 2022, and it probably won’t be the case a week or two in the future. Anyway, hat! It’s a good hat. I’m still not sure I want to knit another one, though.

knitting · pattern · photo posts · wool

Yes! New Cardigan & Hat.

mousearmy

This is Caddis Cardigan. It’s knit in sportweight yarn—most of the samples are Malabrigo Arroyo, which is kind of a favorite of mine. (It’s soft, with a nice tonal quality to the dyeways. I think they’ve moved from having dyelots to not, which is probably fair and for the best since there’s a limit to how consistent skeins dyed this way will be even if they’re all from the same batch, but I still want to make a basic pullover for myself from it someday.)

This is a very versatile sweater/vest sort of thing. If you close the front using a shawl pin or similar (it has no attached buttons), it looks very tailored and smart. If you leave it free, it’s very flowing. The shapes are geometric and the cardigan vest overall is slightly asymmetrical, but the eyelets line up.

The shaping is unique! Knitting is easy for the first part, and then requires a little more focus at the end. But once it’s done—and it’s mostly done when you finish knitting; there are no true seams— there are so many options for wearing the finished piece: thick collar, slim collar, no collar, long, or (flipped) cropped with a broad square collar.

Oh, and there’s also a new hat design .PDF up! It’s an okay hat-hat, but a pretty cute baby hat.

So that’s it for October, so far. Pumice Hat and Caddis Cardigan/Vest/Thing.

knitting · pattern

Anning.

mousearmy

New Hat!

First person who comments with the correct namesake for this hat gets a free mouse army Ravelry .PDF of their choosing. (You have to be able to receive Ravelry gifts, so this may be limited to registered users, but I’m not sure. I may be able to work around that, actually. But I am not going to be unreasonable; no carrier pigeons, no morse code.)

knitting · pattern · The Summer Kitchen. · tutorial

The Summer Kitchen Continues With Projects 5 & 6.

mousearmy

Project 5: Simple Garter Dishcloth

Project 6: Kitchen Towel

These are both extremely simple, but they have a nice cottagecore aesthetic if you work them up in rustic cotton (or weaving threads held together).

The towel pattern includes a quick (2018-ish vintage?) tutorial .PDF to help you make a button to hold it in place. You may not even need the tutorial—it’s basically two large buttons sewn together with some wrapping around the shank—but just in case, it’s there.

knitting · pattern · photo posts · The Summer Kitchen.

Planispiral Shawl & the Summer Kitchen Project.

mousearmy

I feel like I’ve been getting nothing done lately, but wait! Behold!

The thing on the left is done. It’s off the needles. It’s even been finished, completely—in this case, felted/fulled.* I’m pretty excited about the result. As I come back to this post in drafts, not only is the first sample finished—but there’s also a second sample done, and the pattern is available.

There’s also a new shawl pattern out! It’s a circle, and it ended up being pretty interesting. The stitches are simple, and showcase yarns with long color transitions. Good as a fairly big shawl; I think it would also work as a baby blanket. (I may end up sending off my latest shawl and blanket samples to babies in the extended family; I am not sure.)

PLANISPIRAL SHAWL.

knitting · pattern · photo posts · yarn

The Super-Secret Larger Project I’ve Been Working on All Month(?).

mousearmy

It’s Octagon Time! It’s a blanket/basic shawl. Really, what it is depends on what you want to make, and what yarn you use.

I went a bit wild and self-indulgent on this one; it is probably the most hedonistic use of an expensive yarn I’ve ever committed. The soft blue gradient yarn making up most of the project is Cascade 220 Superwash Wave in Deep Sea; the bold near-neon-green stripe is Dream in Color City in Pickleball.

(The smaller stripes are Malabrigo Yarn Rios in Apple Green, and the subtle, thicker bands are Malabrigo Washted in Aguas and Cirrus Gray. It was meant as a scrap-friendly project, and technically it is that, but I kind of like the Cascade background and the contrasting stripes. The .PDF is written as a formula, and doesn’t really include instructions for stripes. If you’d like to knit something with a similar color pattern, I had about 16-18 garter ridges separating all the bright green bands, and stayed pretty consistent with that all through the blanket. The middle might be the smallest band of main color; it’s about 14 ridges.)

Weirdly, despite the hedonism and all my feelings about it, I really like the result, and want to keep it, and not allow the dog to steal it; something about the murky blue-greens and the shocking contrast stripes really appeals. (I will probably keep it. It’s a small throw and not really adult-sized, so something that’s a dog or a kid will probably end up with it eventually. Maybe not the dog though. She got the Garter Square blanket sample. Makes her tacky dog bed look slightly better.)

knitting · pattern · photo posts

Salt Post.

mousearmy

I never actually made a Table Salt post, so here goes:

Table Salt is a cowl that uses a similar textured motif to the large one in the Salt Cowl & Hat. It takes the same idea, but makes it smaller, more fine-grained, for a different textured effect.

The pattern is meant to be done in light sockweight yarn, but I’ve also worked it up in sport/dk, partly to check my math and partly to see what happens. It’s all right at a bigger gauge, but this experiment did take every functional bit of an entire skein of Malabrigo Yarn Arroyo, and I haven’t blocked it yet, so I’m not sure if it’s just a roomier cowl or if it might be mini-cape material. It should open up at least a little bit, and it’s already considerably larger than the original.

knitting · pattern · photo posts · Uncategorized
mousearmy

By the end of the month, if all goes to plan, I’ll have published 10 indie patterns this year, so far—

but 6 of the 9 so far are hats;

two are shawls,

and two of the planned ten are cowls.

(One’s a connected triangle cowl. It could use some new photography. But that aside, it looks like I still classed it as a cowl, rather than as a bandanna or a headband. One is a balaclava, but you can wear a balaclava as a hat, so I counted it in the hat category.)

This seems unbalanced, with a considerable lean towards hats, and that bothers me a little—but it looks like I am/may still be in a hat phase for a little while. I’ve been playing with some structural ideas, which seem fairly compelling to me, and I guess on the up side, small projects like hats and socks are decent for spring and summer knitting—but I still feel a sort of low-level anxious desire to Get Ahead with those in a way that would free up some time to experiment with some spring and summer tops and light sweaters.

In other news, Igneous/Igneoramous is available now (link here or above), SALT cowl is coming soon (sneak preview in first photo—it’s really simple but still extremely satisfying), and everything that comes after that is too far out or too early in planning for me to talk about it without jinxing it.