Magic loop: yes, it is!

After my success with two-colour brioche for the It's New To Me KAL back in October, I decided to keep up my upskilling momentum and try another new technique that I've been vaguely meaning to try for years: magic loop!

If you're not familiar with it, magic loop is a method of knitting a small circumference in the round; an alternative to using double-pointed needles (which I'm prone to dropping). My favourite thing about it is that the 'ladders' which can appear between needles are a little easier to control - at least for me! And I also like switching needles twice per round instead of three or four times, which keeps things flowing nicely. Another benefit is that you can use the same interchangeable needle tips when switching between standard knitting in the round and magic loop - reducing the danger of a tension mismatch. I have a jersey with visibly different tension in the sleeves where I switched from metal circular tips to wooden dpns...

Candide designed by Noriko Ho, my first magic loop project

I picked a simple hat for my first attempt, thinking it would be easiest to focus on one tricky thing at a time. I got the hang of it pretty quickly, with the help of this photo tutorial on the Tin Can Knits blog: Magic Loop Technique. If you'd like to see magic loop in action, I've included a video below. :)

For good measure, I followed up with another simple hat, this time in reverse stockinette, and then jumped in the deep end with a pair of stranded mitts.

obsidian designed by ash alberg, knit in Malabrigo Rios

Underwing Mitts designed by Erica Heusser

If you followed the saga on Instagram, you'll know the second mitt went missing for a couple of nail-biting days before it was discovered stowing away in some clean laundry! Talk about relief...

It was this pair of mitts that really hooked me with magic loop. This kind of design, with a clear front and back, just makes sense to knit on two needles rather than dividing it up further.

My current magic loop project is a pair of scrappy socks, using some pretty leftovers from a couple of different projects. Because I was knitting at a tight gauge, I found I needed to upgrade my needles to a pair with smoother joins between the cable and the needle tips. I settled on a pair of HiyaHiya Sharps from my LYS Maker Maker, which, true to their name need to be handled with a bit more care than I'm used to.

Simple Socks designed by Emily Bolduan

The gist of the technique is this: you'll begin with half of your stitches on one needle tip and half on the other, with the cable looped between them. Then arrange your needles so that you have one free-floating needle tip in your right hand, and knit across the stitches on your left-hand needle tip. When you run out of stitches, rearrange the cable and start again.

If you'd like to try magic loop for the first time, my top tip is to do what I did, and knit a hat on circular needles, switching to magic loop for the crown decreases - this way you won't need to get to grips with a new technique while you're trying to cast on.

New pattern: Anagram

I'm so happy to finally be able to share this pair of projects with you! The Anagram Hat & Wrap are part of the new amirisu Winter 2018 issue, along with seven other patterns celebrating texture in knitting.

Photo by amirisu

The Anagram Hat is a cosy beanie with crisp texture, and its sibling the Anagram Wrap is a large dramatic rectangle with an all-over lace pattern. The stitch patterns combine modern geometric lace with garter stitch for texture and squish factor.

Geometric stitch patterns have become a real signature of mine - I find them very satisfying, both in the designing stage and the knitting. Because of the small repeating elements in their stitch patterns, the Hat & Wrap are very rhythmic and meditative to knit. I rearranged the little 'blocks' of pattern, with diagonal lines travelling across the garter stitch background, just like rearranging the letters in a word - so I think of these two stitch patterns as 'anagrams' of each other.

Photo by amirisu

The Anagram Hat & Wrap are both knit in Brooklyn Tweed Arbor in the delicate wintery shade 'Thaw'. Arbor's beautifully crisp stitch definition really lets their texture shine. You will need 7 skeins for the wrap and 2 for the hat (including a pompom if you wish).

Photo by amirisu

Hat Features:

• a cosy textured beanie in modern geometric lace
• can be topped with a pompom if you wish
• knit in the round from the bottom up
• techniques include the long tail cast on, and lace knitting including the occasional double increase and decrease
• suitable for solid or semi-solid-dyed DK-weight yarn
• one size, easy to alter by changing the number of repeats around
• pattern includes full written instructions as well as charts.

Wrap Features:

• a long cosy rectangular wrap in modern geometric lace
• knit flat from end to end
• techniques include the long tail cast on, lace knitting, and a stretchy bind off
• suitable for solid or semi-solid-dyed DK-weight yarn
• one size, easy to alter by changing the number of repeats across or lengthwise
• pattern includes full written instructions as well as charts. 

Photo by amirisu

The patterns are available as part of amirisu Winter 2018, Issue 15. You can purchase a print copy from their website or your favourite yarn shop, or a digital copy from amirisu's website or Ravelry.

Brioche beginnings

I'm learning to knit brioche, and I'm absolutely loving it! It's just so thick and squishy, and it makes colour combinations really sing...

I've been wanting to learn to knit brioche stitch for a long time. I even have one of Nancy Marchant's books on brioche, but sometimes my design knitting deadlines don't leave much space for playing with new techniques and knitting other designer's patterns. I finally got the push I needed when I heard about Karen of Wool Gathering Australia's It's New To Me KAL. There are a few of us knitting our first two-colour brioche projects for the KAL this month, and sharing tips and encouragement.

If you're not familiar with brioche stitch, here are some examples of designs from my Ravelry favourites which I think really show off its strengths and possibilities:

• Really bold stripes and zigzags in two or more colours - Stephen West's Askews Me Shawl and Briochevron Wrap (which I plan to make one day as a sock yarn stash-buster)
• More subtle two-colour brioche, with garter stitch as a contrasting texture - Andrea Mowry's What the Fade!? shawl, Bristol Ivy's Jemison cowl from her forthcoming book Knitting Outside the Box, and Lesley Anne Robinson's Unda shawl (which has a very subtle colour pairing)
• Classic, cosy texture in a single colour - Jared Flood's Oshima sweater, and Olga Buraya-Kefelian's Gren mitts
• More complex texture in a single colour - Bristol Ivy's Lisse shawl and Burke cardigan, and Norah Gaughan's modular Counterpane sweater.

The pattern I've chosen to knit for the KAL is Katrin Schubert's beezee hat. I chose a hat because it's a manageable-sized project (I was tempted to try for a large shawl or wrap, but I have other projects to finish!), and I chose this design because I liked the boldness of the stitch pattern. It's my current weekend project, which I've been chipping away at when I'm hanging out on the couch.

I dug through the DK yarn in my stash and chose a speckled main colour, 'Koi' on Walk Collection Cozy Vintage, and a calm grey background colour, 'Eastern Reef Egret' on Circus Tonic Handmade DK:

I'm knitting the biggest size, and I can tell it's going to be a long, slouchy kind of hat. I've just reached the start of the crown decreases, so there's not much more to go.

If you're keen to try knitting some brioche, I recommend just diving in! Here are a couple of resources I used when I got stuck (for example, the first time I had to work a decrease):

• Nancy Marchant's Knitting Fresh Brioche: Creating Two-Color Twists & Turns - a comprehensive book including photos of the basic moves (which helped me a lot), a stitch dictionary with charts, and several scarf and shawl patterns
• Susanne Sommer's YouTube videos, which I found really clear, especially her Knitting tutorial: basics of two-colour brioche. 

Pooling on purpose

As promised, here is the tale of how I got the colours to pool so nicely in my smaller Rainbow Cake hat. The pastel rainbow colours of the yarn (Madelinetosh's Pure Merino Worsted in 'Pocket Rainbow') practically demanded that I have a go at controlled colour-pooling, and I couldn't be happier with the way it worked out. :)

The first step, of course, was swatching. I cast on about 40 stitches, knit in seed stitch until I reached the start of a pink section of yarn, and then counted my stitches until I reached the same point in the colour cycle. I repeated this a few times to make sure my count was consistent (to within a stitch or two).

I discovered I was getting 70 stitches per colour repeat, in seed stitch on 4mm needles. The smaller size in my Rainbow Cake pattern-in-progress had a 72-stitch cast on, which I decided was close enough for the pooling to work.

The first time I cast on for the hat, I used smaller needles to get a nice tight, tidy ribbing section. This change of needle size caused the colours to line up in little rainbows instead of pooling, which looked really cool! But unfortunately the stitch pattern was obscured a little too much, and I decided to start over.

The second time, I used the same needle size throughout in order to get consistent 'stacked' colour pooling right from the cast on through to the crown decreases. This time the stitch pattern was clear, and the yarn complemented the design rather than muddying it.

While knitting the hat, I found I often needed to tink/un-knit part of a round to get the colour repeats to line up nicely. My tension definitely changes depending on how fast I'm knitting and how much attention I'm paying to it, and I found myself zooming through the cream sections to get to the next 'rainbow', only to discover I had far too much cream yarn leftover. At least I'm pretty good at tinking these days!

I was happy to see the colours begin to swirl when I started the crown decreases, making a little whirlpool around the pompom. :)

If you'd like to try deliberate colour pooling, my advice is to swatch carefully, stick to one needle size, and be prepared to do a lot of tinking/un-knitting if your tension is a little wonky like mine.

This Twist Collective article by Karla Stuebing goes really in-depth into how pooling works: The Art and Science of Planned Pooling.

And here are a couple of shawl designs that make great use of planned pooling: Pool & Conquer by Martina Behm, and Pool Party by Ursa Major Knits.

You can read all about my Rainbow Cake design in my previous post, and the pattern is available on Ravelry.

New pattern: Rainbow Cake

It's been a while since I released a new hat design, but here we go! Rainbow Cake is a cosy textured beanie designed to complement speckled or gently-variegated yarn. I really enjoyed knitting the two samples for this design, they went so fast compared to my usual diet of shawls (much as I adore them).

The arcs of ribbing remind me of rainbows, and the seed stitch texture looks like sprinkles when you combine it with a speckled yarn. I used two special skeins of madelinetosh yarn for these hats: one skein of Pure Merino Worsted in 'Pocket Rainbow' for the small sample, and one of 80/10/10 Worsted in 'Holi Grunge' for the large one. I really love the colour-pooling in the smaller hat, which I managed to achieve after a false start or two - but I'll tell you more about that in another post.

Because you only need one skein of yarn for either size (including the pompom and gauge swatch), a Rainbow Cake hat might be just the thing for one of the single skeins in your stash...

The two sizes are intended to fit kids with a head circumference between 16-19” / 40.5-48.5cm (Small size), and adults with a head circumference between 20-23” / 51-58.5cm (Large size).

Features:

• texture made up of arcs of ribbing and seed-stitch panels
• topped with an an optional pompom
• a quick one-skein project, perfect for gift knitting
• two sizes, for children and adults
• requires one skein of worsted-weight yarn
• suitable for speckled, semi-solid, or variegated yarn
• pattern includes full written instructions as well as charts.

You can see all the details and download the Rainbow Cake pattern on Ravelry.

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If you're curious which recipe I used for my delicious photo props, it's the classic vanilla cupcake recipe from the Edmonds Cookbook, with my favourite lemon icing. Serious 80s birthday party nostalgia!

Insulate 1,000!

My INSULATE! Hat has reached 1,000 projects on Ravelry - that's a huge milestone for me, and I'm thrilled that so many people liked my hat enough to knit their own! You can see a few of these fabulous projects (in an amazing array of colour combos) on the pattern's Ravelry page.

The INSULATE! Hat was one of my early-ish knit designs from mid-2012, and I offered it as a free pattern to other knitters who share my geeky love of Daleks. Its stranded colourwork design is nice and simple, and every now and then I receive a lovely comment from someone who used this hat as their gateway to knitting colourwork, which really warms my designer heart!

If you'd like to make one of your own, you can download the free pattern here.

A post-Gift-A-Long post

I can't believe we've come to the end! It's been a whirlwind few weeks helping behind the scenes in the Gift-A-Long, keeping up with the threads, and handing out prizes. While being a moderator has kept me extra busy, it's also been incredibly fun and exciting and I'm looking forward to doing it all again next year. :)

My fellow Hand & Arm Things host Becca worked out the final stats for our category:

Final tally is 238 finished projects (!!) (64% of those declared), but more importantly…

• nearly 300 people participated in this thread alone,

• sharing more than 450 GAL-designer-related projects (some not for hands but that’s totally cool),

• calling out more than 250 GAL-eligible patterns for us to appreciate.

The ongoing parade of WIPs and FOs provided an incredible source of inspiration from the great colour choices, skilful stitching, beautiful yarn (including handspun), and lovely patterns people chose. I found out about new-to-me methods of construction, such as starting a pair of mitts with the thumb and it growing from there (Lee Meredith's Either/Or mitts), and cool-looking techniques like slip-stitch crochet (Yuliya Tkacheva's Snegurochka Mitts), and some just really beautiful cable designs I hadn't seen before (Olga Beckmann's Morosko mittens, and Kelly G.'s Cèilidh Fingerless Gloves).

Another big source of excitement was seeing my own designs pop up! My Beeswax Hat was actually the tenth-equal most popular pattern, with 11 finished projects during the GAL. In total there were 22 finished projects from my patterns, which is pretty amazing! Here are a few of my favourite photos from the 22, including two Beeswax Hats, an Ascent hat, and a Silverwing shawl:

knittingvortex's Beeswax

UkeeKnits' Ascent

rebekafish's Darkwing Duck!

theaburras' Beeswax Hat

For participating designers, a traditional part of the Gift-A-Long is sharing other designers' work. An obvious way of doing this is using their patterns for our own projects, which I did with my GAL socks, and we've also been sharing our favourite patterns on our blogs and other social media. I've been posting collages of great knit designs on my Instagram account. These are a few of my favourites from the past few weeks:

Star Anise by Svetlana Volkova (top left),
Singing Beach by Bonnie Sennott (top right),
Crisp Apple Strudel by Katy H. Carroll (bottom right),
and Same Wavelength by Kristina Vilimaite (bottom left).

Stornoway Throw by Anita Grahn (top left),
Icterine by Hunter Hammersen (top right),
Tree Rings by Andrea Rangel (bottom right),
and Badlands Mitts by Kathryn Folkerth (bottom left).

Hudson by Shannon Cook (top left),
Ballydesmond by Irishgirlieknits (top right),
Dancing with Bears by Carol Sunday (bottom right),
and Grellow Love by Clare Devine (bottom left).

Another cool way to share each other's work while getting to know each other better is to interview fellow participating designers on our blogs and podcasts. I've been lucky enough to have been interviewed three times during this GAL! Once by Stephannie Tallent for her Sunset Cat Designs blog (Interview: Amy van de Laar), once by Vikki Bird for her blog (GAL 2016: Meet Amy van de Laar), and Carolyn Macpherson also featured me in an episode of her podcast The Next Beautiful Thing:

Thanks for the ride, everyone! Hope to see you all again next year. 💛

Heartpops Revisited

Sometimes I get the urge to re-knit an older pattern and tweak a few things - the colour, the length, various aspects that don't fit my current preference. And sometimes I just really want to add a pompom! My Heartpops hat was released back in February, and I was (and am) super proud of the stitch pattern I invented of 3D hearts in a delicate cabled lattice:

What I didn't love so much, especially when it came time to photograph the hat, was the extremely bright, almost fluorescent colour I'd chosen. It's a fun colour, but it was seriously hard to photograph, especially in sunlight. I also wanted to showcase the hat's other blocking option, which is beanie-style rather than beret-style (blocked over a balloon instead of a dinner plate).

It's the same pattern, but the effect is so different:

First version (Feb 2016)

Second version (Nov 2016)

This second version is much softer and calmer looking, thanks to the change of yarn. This time I used Scout, a lofty DK-weight organic merino from Wool Days, in the colour 'Winter's Day'. The cool neutral grey shows off texture and cables beautifully! Two balls was enough for both hat and pompom.

Another tweak I made was reducing the height of the ribbing a little, because if I'm adding a pompom I want the hat to fit snugly on my head without extra room at the crown - I don't want the pompom to flop around up there. But aside from the yarn change and shortening the ribbing, the pattern is exactly the same as before.

Happily, I still had some of the heart-shaped lollipops left over from the previous photoshoot! If that's not proof of my lack of sweet tooth, I don't know what is. ;)

The updated Heartpops pattern is available on Ravelry.

New pattern: Heartpops

New pattern day! Heartpops is a cute textured tam or beret, with embossed hearts popping out from a lattice of cables.

I took advantage of the Valentine's Day display at the lolly shop for my photo props. ;) My sweet tooth is pretty much non-existent, so my flatmates will have to take on the task of eating the lollies now I'm done photographing them... I'm sure they won't complain too much!

This is what the bright blue yarn from my Wellington trip became - it's Madelinetosh Tosh DK in 'Button Jar Blue'. Tosh DK has great stitch definition and, best of all for someone who tends to do a lot of un-knitting in order to get a project just so, it's tough enough to stand up several rounds of frogging without getting damaged. And the colour is just unreal...

Features:

• textured pattern with embossed hearts and cable lattice
• 1/1 cables that can be knit without a cable needle
• the lattice flows out of the ribbing and into a star-shaped crown
• can be blocked into a tam/beret shape or a beanie shape
• a one-skein project for 100g of DK-weight yarn
• suitable for solid or semi-solid colourways
• four sizes (Child Small to Adult Large)
• both charted and written instructions.

Here's a link to my favourite tutorial on knitting small cables without a cable needle: Twisted Stitches.

There are a couple of special increases and decreases in this pattern, which are explained in the stitch glossary. They only occur a few times - mostly you'll be working plain old m1, k2tog, and ssk. This pattern would be suitable for an intermediate or advanced level knitter.

The Heartpops pattern is available to download as a pdf from Ravelry, Loveknitting, Craftsy, or Etsy.

New patterns: Rose Jam

Some of you may have gathered I have a bit of a thing for roses. I like to look at them, smell them, and for good measure, eat them! Rosewater and rose jam are lovely in desserts and baking, and fun to experiment with. My favourite combos are quince jam made with rosewater (recipe here), and rose jam on scones with whipped cream. :)

It was only a matter of time before I came up with a rosy knitting pattern, and in fact I've made two: the Rose Jam Hat and matching Rose Jam Mitts.

The stitch pattern is inspired by rose petals, which sometimes have a very sweet heart-shape in some old-fashioned and wild varieties. Like so:

Rosa moyesii, at Melbourne's Royal Botanic Gardens

Hat features:

• all-over mini-cable texture inspired by rose petals
• the petals flow smoothly out of the ribbing and up to the crown 
• a one-skein project (128-160 yards of worsted-weight yarn)
• suitable for solid or semi-solid colourways
• two adult sizes, photos show larger size  
• both charted and written instructions. 

 Mitts features:

• all-over mini-cable texture inspired by rose petals
• the thumb gusset emerges naturally from the stitch pattern
• a one-skein project (140 yards of worsted-weight yarn)
• suitable for solid or semi-solid colourways 
• one size, to fit 7-8" palm circumference
• both charted and written instructions. 

The 2-stitch cables in the hat and mitts can easily be knit without a cable needle, making these quite straightforward projects for an intermediate-level knitter. I've included a guide in each pattern based on this excellent method.

The yarn I used for my hat and mitts is the famously-squishable Malabrigo Rios, in the semi-solid colour 'Ravelry Red'.

The Rose Jam Hat and Mitts are available as separate patterns, or together.

Ravelry links: Rose Jam Hat and Rose Jam Mitts, and the ebook Rose Jam.
Loveknitting links: Rose Jam Hat and Rose Jam Mitts.

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The little white flowers in some of the photos above are from Mum and Dad's Viburnum opulus, known to us as the 'Snowball Tree'. After our Rose Jam photoshoot, Dad took photos of me messing about and making the tree 'snow'. And then he made an animated gif. ;)