Month: November 2010

Well, not really, but since appearing atop my article in Twist Collective, this hat has been the most-requested unpublished pattern. I was never really happy with the original pattern — the closure I used made it kind of pointy and I didn’t want to publish it that way. On top of that, the chart I based it on was lifted directly from Jessica Tromp’s amazing website. In light of that, I wasn’t at liberty to publish it anyway. I made some efforts to do my own chart that looked similar, but never came out with anything quite as elegant as Jessica’s. So, at Cat Bordhi’s recommendation, I emailed Jessica and to my surprise she was very happy to let me publish the pattern! Of course she’ll get credit for the original chart. So that left me with the responsibility to do better with the crown of the hat. Some fiddling around with decreases later, I had a few revisions of the chart and settled on this one, in which the decreases actually seem like they’re part of the design, and don’t interrupt the chart at all. I love this hat now — it’s one of my favorites. The other neat thing about it is that I knit it in the space of a week — the fastest hat I’ve ever done, and I could have done it even quicker if I decided I didn’t need the fold-up brim.

I gave the hat a new name (not that it had a name before), calling it “Struktur”. The German meaning of this word is particularly apt for any knitting project, but for one that looks like it’s made from skeletal building blocks assembled by M.C. Escher, it was perfect.

You can see more views of this hat here, here, here, here, and here. For those who are interested in the pattern, I am planning to wait until the book is published but it is possible I may release this pattern ahead of the book if demand is high enough.

The paucity of good tie patterns in knitting has irked me for some time. Most ties are overly-complex, constructed in the same way you’d sew one, or overly simple, looking somewhat tacky, or done on the bias, which makes the damn thing too stretchy. No offense meant to anyone who’s designed and published a tie. I’m sure there are some good ones out there. I figured out a while ago that double-knitting could be well applied to ties — the fabric doesn’t curl, it has no wrong side, and you can literally do any charted pattern on one without worrying about the non-existent wrong side. Hence, these two.

They’re both done in Crystal Palace Panda Silk (Thanks to Crystal Palace for the free yarn!). They’re entitled “Silk City” and “Silk Road”, respectively from top to bottom. Silk City was a snap — once I’d worked out the tie measurements and knitted gauge, it’s just a matter of planning out which rows to decrease on and keep working the pattern. The pattern itself has a ridiculous 70-row repeat, but it’s really all the same stuff, just shifted over a bit each time. Silk Road was no picnic; it was the one piece I dreaded designing most, not being sure I could work further decreases into the already increase/decrease-heavy fabric. Needless to say, I figured it out, but the limitation is that the decreases can only be put in every 16 rows if you want them to be invisible. So I decreased every 32 rows, which made the tie just a bit longer than its brother. They both tie just fine, however, without any awkward tail bit showing. I’m planning to include my tie blank in the book too, and will be interested to see what other patterns people put on it.