Monday, January 5, 2009

The Third Knit of Christmas

Well, Christmas is long past now and so I need to get busy and show you the rest of the knitting I did. This project was requested many months ago and in fact I originally intended to give it to Peter for his birthday last fall. That didn’t happen and so it moved to urgent Christmas knitting since a winter ski hat needs to be used for the ski season! Peter chose the colors and the pattern and so he knew about the project but didn’t see the finished result until Christmas – that was why I didn’t want to blog about it. I knew that Peter reads this blog.

This was my first successful project with stranded knitting. The St. Moritz Hat made with Brown Sheep Nature Spun sport weight yarn. The hat is made from a Dale of Norway pattern and let’s just say that there are not a lot of words to explain what to do (it is in English though). I think that the main reason that I procrastinated so much was that I was intimidated by the idea of doing colorwork. I shouldn’t have been. I had a lot of fun knitting this hat and learning the new technique of two handed color work knitting. I used the video at Philosopher’s wool to learn the technique and the gracious help of Mary (knittingchemist on ravelry). I did catch the floats every other stitch on most rows – exept for the pesky 3 color row – so that there aren’t many long floats to catch on things. Once I got the method down I had lots of fun – but I noticed that my tension is a little wonky in places. I got better as I went and the wonky tension did even out with blocking. I hope you don’t mind Peter that you basically got a beginner project with this hat! My sister reports that he is enjoying wearing it on their ski vacation.

I’m looking forward to making more projects that involve stranded knitting. Maybe not a sweater quite yet but mittens are looking good.

1 comment:

Miss T said...

The hat is beautiful! Bravo!