{"id":1817,"date":"2021-11-19T14:03:58","date_gmt":"2021-11-19T19:03:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fallingblog.double-knitting.com\/?p=1817"},"modified":"2021-11-19T15:03:47","modified_gmt":"2021-11-19T20:03:47","slug":"introducing-the-fifth-element-bocote","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fallingblog.double-knitting.com\/?p=1817","title":{"rendered":"Introducing the fifth Element: Bocote"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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The Wuxing: 5 Elements collection<\/a> has been a long time coming — I released Agni Deus in March of 2020, just as the pandemic was beginning. I had finished one more pattern from the collection when my home burned down a few months later. This slowed my creative process (to say the least) but finally, about a year and a half later, all five hats in the Wuxing collection are complete!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bocote has been a journey, and not always a smooth one. The hat is very complex, so I decided it needed test-knitting before the pattern was released (3 of the 5 hats in the collection fell into that category). I released the pattern to them in chunks while I was designing it, expecting to complete the crown decrease planning well before any of my testers got to the decreases. With their feedback, I made a number of changes to the pattern, and all three of them finished their respective hats before I’d even cast on for the final version of mine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My own hat was slow in coming because I made some math errors along the way — a couple of glaring ones right in the pattern that none of my testers caught meant that their hats ended up quite a bit larger than expected — as did my own. Once I fixed the errors, I had to rip out and start fresh, which was disheartening and I had trouble restarting with as much enthusiasm (this was also during the hottest part of the summer, which made it harder to spend a lot of time knitting). Finally I hit my stride and made some true progress — but as I reached the decreases, it became clear that I had made still further measurement errors in both directions. The hat that I was expecting to be a 21.5″ circumference ended up closer to 23″ around. The height of the hat was also considerably taller than I expected, despite the round gauge matching my original calculations — another case of sloppy designing (now rectified in the final pattern). I did do some livestreams of me working on the pattern for my supporters on Patreon<\/a>, so if you’d like to see the recordings of those (and now that I’ve got a good setup for doing livestreams of me working on knitted pieces, probably more in the future), join my Patreon<\/a>!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But those two mis-measurements went together to make a hat that’s still quite wearable for me, because the need to roll it up twice means that it now hugs my head a bit better (and even fits my wife pretty well). So even though it wasn’t exactly what I had intended, and if I had figured all this out earlier I could have saved quite a bit of time, I’m happy with the final result (especially the crown). I opted to model it myself for simplicity’s sake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The yarn I chose for this is 3 natural colors of Bare Naked Wools Stone Soup Fingering<\/a>. I was able to do the largest size with the equivalent of three 2-oz skeins!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thank you for your patience through this journey — if you’ve already bought a copy of the collection, thank you! If not, and you’ve been waiting to see all five patterns before biting the bullet, it’s available to purchase now<\/a>!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the coming months, I plan to put all of the patterns together into a single eBook rather than five individual patterns, and I might even consider printing it (similar to the Parallax collection). If I do that, I’ll make a discount code available for anyone who purchased the digital version.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In other news<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I have some workshops coming up in December, both my own and a couple for VKL. Especially if you’re interested in the techniques around the Wuxing collection, I recommend taking the Off-the-Grid workshop on Dec 4th. All times are in Eastern Time:<\/p>\n\n\n\n