Twenty, twenty, twentyfour hours to gooooo

As is my penchant I gave this new pattern a ridiculous name.

I Can’t Control My Fingers

Often it is a song that comes on when I am knitting a pattern that clicks for some reason and becomes the name. You can probably count on this happening often for the foreseeable future. Hey, it is as good as using road names or cocktails, eh?

Some kind of Wonder Twins thing going on here I guess?

I get to say some things about this new pattern that you don’t often hear around these parts. The deeply textured pattern that I developed for these mitts is a fairly simple combination of knits and purls. It repeats over 16 rows and is easy to work. You could bust these mitts out quickly over a few days. Heck, you can knit these while watching TV.

To be completely honest, except for the thumb instructions I knit the second pair without even looking at the pattern. The red ones were the second pair. I had to do the red ones because a) I kept coming up with other ways that the mitt would be awesome and b) I needed a gift for my son’s 1st grade teacher. Yay for multi-tasking.

You can really see the thumb gusset here.

The way the mitts are constructed makes them easily amenable to modification. Want them snugger? Take out stitches in increments of 4. Want them shorter? Leave off some repeats.  Want them longer? Add repeats. Want them stripy or color-block? Add some yarn. These even work well with variegated yarn (but not crazy variegated). You can make them yours and then make another pair that is totally someone else (or your alter ego).

Let me talk a moment about the yarn I chose for these mitts. The orange mitts specifically. The Pumpkin mitts. Swans Island Organic Washable. It is a DK weight yarn that was made using an ecologically friendly method of super-wash to create an organic super-wash. This yarn guys? It is luscious. In addition to being a friendly super-wash process on organic wool, Swans Island also chooses to use only natural dyes. I might have a bit of a crush on this company. And I want to be straight, I bought this yarn, Swans Island doesn’t know I exist but I am glad they make their yarn.

And the reveal of the teaser

To be honest, the yarn for the red pair came out of my stash. It was a beautiful skein of Squoosh Fiber Arts Ultra DK in Blood Orange. Luckily this serves to illustrate that you can easily substitute yarn for this pattern. If you want a smaller mitt go with some sport weight (I had a tester use Bugga! with excellent results). The Squoosh resulted in a wonderfully squooshy mitt (quell surprise).

All in all I think this is a fun little pattern, check it out on Ravelry or Craftsy. As you can see I also had some fun with the pictures. Hey man, I have chickens and I am not afraid to use them.

Quick, Easy and Fun Knitted Hat/Cowl Set

Complexity, it is something that I have a tendency towards. I don’t know why, but for some reason I feel the need to do fiddly little bits. This makes it a challenge for me to cook up something that is simple. Which is kinda the opposite of what one would assume. It is actually a little bit harder for me to develop a pattern using only basic techniques.

I will come to a point in a pattern where something needs to happen and for me the most logical thing is to put in a quadruple centered decrease and volia! problem is solved. But when I am trying to make something simple I frequently have to look back several steps and figure out how to rejigger the pattern so that I don’t get to the point where I need a quadruple centered decrease.

Easy is hard.

Counter-intuitive, I know. But there it is.

Esopus Creek Hat & Cowl Set

This pattern set is pretty darn easy. The cowl is made up of knits & purls. That is it. The hat is not much more complicated, you have the obvious need for decreasing in the crown to make it – you know – hat like, but other than that it is knits and purls.

See, crown decreases for optimal hat like properties

And a little bit of fancy because I cannot resist a wee fancy. It uses the same technique as the Rollercoaster cowl in that the texture is created by alternately knitting the piece inside out. And really, once you understand that I actually want you to do something that you are always told not to do … that is a piece of cake too.

I didn’t want the set to be too matchy/matchy so I chose complementary colors of madelinetosh tosh DK. The hat is in Nutmeg and the cowl is in Earl Grey I am very pleased how they play off of each other. And I think that the cowl shows you how the texture plays with a variegated yarn. As I discussed in a previous post, if you want to substitute yarn you need to look at the actual properties of this yarn as opposed to simply looking at the fact that it is DK. I think that this would work fine in any of your heavier DKs and lighter Worsteds.

The inside-out technique means that both pieces are reversible and it doesn’t need to be blocked! The lack of blocking is apparently a plus for some people.

For the name I went with a place name. I designed the cowl while I was at Rhinebeck, so it is great airplane knitting. The texture pattern gives a wavy/cable-y feeling and it just so happened that a major creek was running right by our hotel so I asked of my roommates “What is the name of that creek?”. A few googles later – we have a name. (did you know that google was a unit of time measurement?)

Neither piece takes an entire skein, but you need more than a skein to make the cowl – so you need two skeins. If you had a larger put-up you might be able to get both out of a different kind of yarn. As always, I cannot wait to see what spins other people put on the pattern. I never cease to be amazed how creative knitters are (as a whole).

So, are you doing any last minuted gift giving knitting? Need quick and easy? What are you working on?