Happy Friday! It’s the last Extreme Double-knitting pattern highlight post — as usual, if you like what you see, consider preordering the book! I’m in between workshops at Stitches Midwest as I write this, so I’m going to keep it short!
Pattern #13: Footsies v2
When I first designed the Footsies (official tagline: the most adorable baby booties ever), I had never designed a truly sized garment of any type before — hats barely count. Even though baby feet are simple to enclose as compared to adult feet, I only had time when first designing these to execute a single version, which translated to a single size. If the size wasn’t good for your child, you’d need to adjust the needle size or yarn size.
This didn’t dampen the enthusiasm for these booties, but I’m sure it did reduce the number of people who made them. This time around, I decided it was time to properly grade this pattern. There are now 4 sizes, spanning newborn to 2 years old. The heel turning method is more elegant as well, and the instructions are clearer (of course now using my “marled knit” and “marled purl” terminology rather than the weird way I described the technique previously).
Pattern #14: Whorl’d Tree v2
This shoulder bag suffered from a number of weird design choices, not least the fact that it was done entirely in twisted stitches (see post #5 for more about why I did that for multi-color DK and why I don’t do it now). The major issue aside from that was that the background of the outer layer and the solid color of the inner layer were the same, which made it impossible to use the multi-color linked pair properly along the edges of the flat parts. To be fair, I hadn’t completely formulated the technique for the multi-color linked pair in the previous version of this book, but I have added it now. To make this pattern compliant, I made the inner layer a different color from the background of the outer one. There was only one choice — of the four colors used, only two are used in every row/round, and one of them was the background (white) color. So I used the other one — the blue, in the sample I made.
An unintended consequence of the reworking in untwisted stitches is that the stranding did not completely hold the fabric to the original dimensions — and the new bag (using essentially the same charts as the old pattern) is fully 50% wider than the original (twisted) version. To make sure that people still had the option of the smaller version, I designed a second small bag that is 2/3 the size — 4 repeats around instead of 6. So the Whorl’d Tree bag is now actually two complete patterns.
One bonus for knitters of this bag is that I am offering a service that is somewhat unprecedented. Most of the charts in this book have a uniform coloring scheme — two monochrome colors for the two-color pieces; the same two plus a red accent color for the three-color pieces. For this 4-color piece, I decided it was best to leave the original colors in place and offer to recolor the charts for anyone who wants them. This offer is good once per customer, and there’s a bunch of other fine print that you’ll need to see the book in order to read. I figure that the number of people who actually get to the point of being willing to commit to this pattern will not keep me too overly busy. Let’s hope I’m right (or honestly, let’s hope I’m wrong?)
What Else is New?
I’m at Stitches Midwest as I write this, and my plan had been to finish the edits before leaving, then doing a final once-over when I return home and then sending the manuscript to the printer. However, my tech editor is once again MIA after delivering me the first 4 chapters of edits and suggestions. I’m at her mercy here, so we may be pushing the print date back. I am hoping to have it ready by Rhinebeck at the latest.
This concludes my pattern highlights! I’ll be doing one more post next Friday that’s a kind of overview of what else is changing in the book. Hopefully by then I’ll have a better idea of the print date.
Thanks for your interest and please consider preordering!