devlog

February 12, 2005

Knitting: Scarves, Pouches, and Hats
log, yarn

Just before Thanksgiving or so, I started knitting along with a number of my fellow crewbies for the purpose of creating fundraising scarves - my contribution to the effort being happily sold afore the scarf-selling was through. Becoming hooked upon the craft, I then went on to buy a surplus of needles (tip: you don't need to buy 3 sets of needles to knit one pair of socks.) and forge ahead, needles poised. A modicum of yarn later, the clack of needles can be heard as I do battle with a 21 inch long rectangle, also known as a hat.

Prior to starting the hat, I also knitted a nifty little pouch, albeit with a good number of modifications – I ended up with a much smaller flap, and a nifty little button loop instead of a hole.

The hat, based on this pattern, is knit on straights, "around" one's head. I would've knitted it from the brim to the crown, but I wanted vertical stripes. I took out the increases/decreases from the pattern to eliminate the spiral, and switched to 4-row wide stripes. I'm using black and neon orange acrylic yarn, selected based on color. At first, the acrylic felt a bit oily after using Wool Ease, but that feeling soon disappeared.

At first I was cutting the yarn at each color change, but that would have resulted in 84 ends to be woven in. Looking into the nifty-nifty Vogue Knitting book, I found the simple twisting method of carrying the yarn, after trying the weaving method also found in the book. Twisting seems to work quite well, although I suppose it makes the edge a bit messy, but it's a lot better than either of the other options I've tried, and is quite easy too. I'm currently twisting the two colors at the beginning of every knit row – I'm using stockinette stitch – which seems to work alright.

I'm a bit worried about my gauge, since it seems to have varied a bit since I started. Moreover, my tension when purling is much looser than when knitting, which is a bit wonky. I'm hoping that it won't matter and so I'm just continuing on, making efforts to equalize my knitting and purling tension as I go.

At any rate, I'm about 3.5 inches from the end of this thing - I'd best hurry up and finish it before the cold disappears. After finishing the knitting I get to sew it up, add a pompom, figure out how I'm going to do the black brim I also want it to have, and start some yummilicious socks! Tube socks, that is – I don't think I'm quite ready for the complication of real socks.

Posted by Trevor Savage at 4:11 PM | Comments (0)