This is week 8 of the pattern highlights from my upcoming book. If you like what you’re reading about, please join my preorder mailing list. To read more about why I’m doing this (and why you should join the list), you can visit the Month 5 blog post.
Eureka is worked in A Hundred Ravens Aesir, an 8-ply sport/DK superwash merino yarn.
To put a cap (pun intended) on the textured double-knitting in this book, I decided to cram all the techniques I still wanted to teach into one pattern. As is typical for me, I loaded all the techniques into a very small space and designed a hat with them. I love hats — they’re a great way to try out and learn a technique (or techniques) without resigning yourself to a massive project. You don’t need to knit a sweater in order to learn RDK decreases or quilted DK. Sure, both techniques could come in handy in a sweater, but why not just do a hat? The sweater can come later. This hat is made up of triangles; all of the inverted triangles are done in purls. However, you may remember from elementary double-knitting that the fabric may only be held together by color changes within a row. When two large triangle bases meet horizontally, as happens frequently in this hat, what you really get is a big hollow diamond. In order to stabilize the fabric, I had to use a horizontal linking method. Lucy Neatby and I independently developed our own methods of doing this technique, so we talked and decided to be consistent with the name: quilted double-knitting.
I first encountered A Hundred Ravens at a local sheep & wool show; a good friend and sample knitter of mine was staffing the booth and lured me in with soft yarn and vibrant colorways (as you probably understand). While I have lately been trying to avoid superwash merino, the base is so ubiquitous that it’s hard to avoid it completely. And sometimes it’s worth it. AHR is another local yarn company, like Dirty Water Dyeworks back in the first post, that I’ve had the pleasure of watching grow from a local to a regional and perhaps even national brand. They’re still small, but they’ve got great colorways and are well worth checking out. The yarn I chose for this hat, Aesir, may be a superwash merino, but it’s an 8-ply sport/DK which has an unusual look and great stitch definition.
The original name for this hat was going to be “Achtung” but when I showed it to my local guild (while Kate from AHR was presenting, no less!), someone noticed the exclamation point on the front and called it a “thinking cap” — so the name “Eureka” was born. There is a second version called “Eureka?” that has question marks instead of exclamation points (worked in two-pattern DK, of course) for those who are less confident about their discoveries.
This pattern will be available in my upcoming book “Double Or Nothing”. To be informed when the preorder period begins, please join my preorder mailing list. Thanks!