Just a quick note to let you know I’m off on easter vacation! First we went to Brussels, which was lovely (the picture is from our B&B which had the best pastries for breakfast, as well as beeing appropriately stylish for being on vacation). Now we’ve landed in Italy, where my goals are few and good: eat, drink, and relax.
I’ll be back in a week or so with a finished sweater, some costumes, and a rested mind. Have a lovely easter everyone!
I recently checked in to my patternpage on ravelry, and saw my Reversible Biking Hat has passed 100 projects! Yey! I thought it could be nice to collect the questions I’ve gotten since releasing the pattern all in one place, so here we go – a little reversible biking hat Q&A. I’ll add to it as there are more questions, and hopefully it can be a resource! Follow this link for the actual Reversible Biking hat pattern.
What are the sizes?
They are Small, and Medium. The first hat was made to fit my boyfriends head and appearently it’s really small! I kept getting feedback from knitters about the hat ending up too small, so I added another larger size. Since the original wasn’t very big for men’s heads, I called the original size S, and the larger size M.
… and the stats?
The size S measures 16″ (41 cm) around, is 8″ (20 cm) tall, starts with 96 stitches, and counts 24 repeats.
The size M measures 18″ (46 cm) around, is 9″ (23 cm) tall, starts with 112 stitches, and counts 28 repeats.
Well, I’m making a hat for a *really* big head… how do I make a size L?
For the next step up, I’d reccomend casting on 128 sts. Here is why: The difference between the S and M sizes, are (112 sts – 96 sts =) 16 sts. The reason for adding 16 stitches between the sizes has to do with the decreasing pattern, so to keep that in check, add another 16 stitches on to the M size stitch count (112 sts + 16 sts), totaling 128 sts.
And, to get a little technical about the decreasing: This setup will give you 32 pattern repeats, which will decrease with 16 sts per decrease round until decrease row 6. Decrease row 6 has you halve the stitches, so at the end of row 6 you should have 32 stitches. For the final decrease row (decrease row 9) you’ll halve the stitches again, for a total of 16 stitches. You might want to do another round of decreasing half the stitches if you prefer ending with 8 stitches instead.
I’m going rouge and using a totally different gauge yarn than recommended. Any comments?
Yes! Do it! I love knitting based on what I have on hand, and I’ve never been very good at matching yarn and pattern perfectly. So, I’ve learned to adjust the pattern according to my yarn. It’s not that hard, I promise. I wrote about that in this post on alterations to the biking hat pattern, so be sure to read that too.
The general gist of it is this: you take the finished measurement of the project, multiply it with the gauge you get with the yarn you’re using, and that is the total number of stitches you need. Let’s do an example. The circumference of the Reversible Knitting Hat in size is 16″. My hypothetical gauge with my hypothetical yarn is 3,25 sts pr inch. 16 ” x 3,25 sts pr inch = 52 sts. So, I need to cast on 52 sts to achieve the goal of 16″ finished measurement.
In other words, goal # of inches x your stitches pr inch = amount to cast on.
Great. What about row gauge?
Yep, my example didn’t address row gauge. But for simple objects like hats, knitting until indicated length will be fine. However – if you use yarn that is way thicker, or way thinner than the original, you’ll probably have to adjust the number of rows to decrease over. Thinner yarn will need more rows to get enough height, and thicker yarn needs fewer rows. If you’ve knit until the decreasing starts, you can just measure your rows to see how many you get pr inch, and multiply by how many inches you’re doing the decreasing over – which for this particular hat is around 1 1/2″ – 2″.
And repeat patterns?
You also going to need to check that your new number works with any repeat pattern! The repeat pattern in the Reversible Biking Hat is 4 (k3, p1), which means any total number of stiches you get after doing our fancy math, should be divisible by 4. If it isn’t, round up or down to the nearest multiple of 4.
That was easy. To make it a little harder, let’s look at the decreasing again. This pattern is set up to work best with an even number of repeats. In the example above, I’m starting with 52 stitches, which is divisible by 4, producing 13 repeats. That’s not an even number. What is going to happen, is this: I start with 52 stitches, and decrease 1 sts pr repeat for half of the repeats, including the first and the last repeat, so 7 sts (now 45 sts total). Then I decrease 1 sts pr repeat for the other half of the repeats, 6 sts (39 sts total). I do that one more time, reducing first to 32 sts, then 26 sts. This number now gets halved at least once, to 13 sts, or alternatively another time if your stitch number at this point is above 15-ish, but this is depending on the thickness of your yarn.
Now, what has happened is that instead of each 4-stitch repeat section being combined neatly with its neighbour several times over for a wedge-like finish towards the crown in tidy pairs, you have one little section left over, and an odd number of stitches to pull the loop through. Most likely *nobody* will ever notice, but it doesn’t decrease as neatly as with an even number.
I want to make spirals like that picture up there.
Easy! I covered that in this post, so be sure to read that. Basically, you stagger the repeated section every yo-row by one stitch. So at the beginning of every yo-row, knit 1 stitch (or 2 if you’re into steeper diagonals!), *then* knit the rest of the section as normal. You’ve effectively just nudged the pattern over by one stitch, and when you keep nudging at the beginning of every repeat, you get diagonal lines!
Phew. I’m glad we’re done with all those numbers. Let’s look at some pictures.
image credit alois
image credit manosa
image credit kellys
Any recommendations for picking a good fiber? Something that won’t get too hot, but stay warm and keep its shape for cyclists biking in the cold.
I enlisted the help of my boyfriend – the handsome man in the pattern pictures – for an answer to these, since he’s the cyclist in our household. This is what I learned from him:
• The version I made in a wool/cotton mix (the dark grey hat in the pattern pictures) is his lightweight version. I’ve also noticed it’s not as good at keeping it’s shape, I suspect the cotton does that. He doesn’t really use that one below freezing.
• The sports wool version I made in brown, no pictures of that unfortunately (like a sock yarn with some poly I think) is what he uses when it’s cold.
• Neither are enough for bitter cold (from -5 celsius or around 20 degrees fahrenheit), and he has a lined fleece earflap hat he uses for that, as well as one of those microfiber things that almost totally covers his face.
• He says the eyelets means that neither of the biking hats never really get too warm, since they sort of self-ventilate!
And in conclusion, I admit to being very much partial to wool, just because I think cotton is more uncomfortable when it gets damp or wet. So my suggestion is a sports-weight wool (eg sock) yarn.
I like seeing this hat on men with beards.
I do too. Check out the ravelry project page for even more men with facial hairs wearing this hat.
image credit © lngom
I want to see this project mentioned elsewhere!
Aren’t you lucky? I’ve collected them right here!
• Allergic to wool’s post on Winter cycle chic (Meghan is also the co-editor of Pom Pom!)
• My own post on gauge, alterations, and potential design changes of the hat
• Ariane of Falling Stitches with her fabulous taste in knitting, featured the hat in a Ravelry round-up on her blog.
• And of course, on ravelry! The project page have some really fun hats on there, like one made for running, with a hole in the back for a ponytail (!), people’s first go at eyelets, or knitting in the round (with success!), a whole lot of men, and a whole lot of bearded men (I honestly didn’t expect this to be so popular with the male demographic, but I’m thrilled! I’m sure the bearded boyfriend model helped in that regards!), and my favorite… a husband who had added the hat to his lady knitter’s queue and added “Make this for hubban since I love him“. How adorable!
Any questions out there about the pattern? Let me know! Also, find the pattern for the Reversible Biking hat right here!
These past few weeks, I have been…
- soaking up sun… sun that we’ve actually had! Look, sun makes shadows!
- eating winter fruits and vegetables; lots of avocado, some fennel, parsley root and parsnip. Mostly avocado though, I can’t get enough!
- looking for signs of spring everywhere. You wouldn’t know it by the temperatures we’ve been having, and the snow (!) we woke up to the other day, but I *am* seeing crocuses and snowbells and pussywillow, and the fact that there is daylight both leaving for work and coming home is a dead giveaway. Spring *is* on its way.
- sorting out a more pulled-together wardrobe, piece by piece. I have a couple of new-to-me bags, some new jewellery, and plans for pieces to make to fill in the gaps.
- making costumes like a champion. Cutting out muslins of old bedsheets, pillow for my knees, and canned tomatoes as patternweights. I’m doing the costumes for a dance collaboration with a chess-game setting, so I’ve been dreaming up kings and queens and rooks and what-not, and it’s quite fun! It’s all black and white of course, but I’m using a range of fabrics to keep it interesting, from linen and bamboo, through boiled wool and cotton gauze, to fake and real leather. It’s really starting to come together now, and that is always the best part of a project. Soon on to finishing touches!
- reading a beautiful aussie magazine that John brought me back from his work travels. Every page is a treat, and I’m still not done reading it. Just looking at that cover makes me happy.
One of my favorite ways to build an outfit, is to pile on as many shades neutrals as possible at the same time, and lately I’ve been favoring a brown-toned, greeney grey sort of neutral. I don’t think I noticed I have so much in this hue until putting together this outfit! On a sunny winter’s day I felt like brightening things up with this fuchsia shirt-dress for a day of running errands, and taking my new-to-me bag out for a spin.
A new bag may not seem like a big deal, but I’m not very in to bags, which means I don’t have many. I usually just have one in constant rotation until it more or less fall apart, and for the past few months I’ve been lugging around a faded cotton tote bag that was getting more and more pitiful by the day. So it’s such a relief to have a bag that makes me feel put together instead of embarrassed!
I don’t know if this dress has ever made an appearance on this here blog, but I bought it some six or seven years ago during an impulse trip to Copenhagen with a friend. It was a good trip – my friend had some days off work, I did too, so we took an overnight bus down there and experienced odd people on that bus, and we saw old people dance to live music in the Tivoli, and went to the superb art museum Louisiana, and I bought the best smelling sunscreen ever, and after pinching our pennies all trip long, we ended up having to take a taxi from the bus station back to the apartment we’d been staying at to retrieve… ahem… a bus ticket, and then back to the waiting bus in the nick of time. Oh, and I fell in love with and bought this dress in a basement vintage shop on a cobbled side street after a decadent sandwhich lunch in the sun.
It’s always made me feel like a flight attendant for a cowboy airline. I think it’s the piping, and maybe the epaulettes? It goes wonderfully with turquoise necklaces, by the way, as you can see. And up until a couple of weeks ago, I was going to hem the thing – the vintage length isn’t necessarily too flattering on me, and I figured this was a perfect fix-it-friday thing that would take me all of 15 minutes, and then I’d actually start wearing the dress again.
I had chalk and a ruler out, and I put the dress on to have John help me measure how much to shorten it by, and it hit me. Even with a shorter length, I wouldn’t use it more. Even with fixing the bust which has really always been a little too roomy, I wouldn’t use it more. Even with all the memories of how I bought this, I wouldn’t use it more, and even knowing what it meant to me at the time to have chosen this dress in a style totally different from all of my friends, and the victory that the choice had felt like…. I wouldn’t use it more.
I absolutely love this dress. And for several years, it was the style I had chosen for myself. But the current me doesn’t feel comfortable and invigorated by it anymore, so the right fix for this one (and right up the alley for my 2013 goals of dealing with my fix-it-pile by any means necessary) is actually to let it go and be loved by someone else. So, dear dress – off to e-bay you go.
Oh, look at that. I made another tiny pocket tank!
Fabric: Remnant of silk charmeuse left over from this halterneck dress. I bought it on a school trip to China, it is a lovely weight and drape, and I think I have enough left for a pair of knickers. Used on the wrong side for a softer shine.
Pattern: Grainline Tiny Pocket Tank. Yep, round three. For this iteration I actually added the pocket. I thought it was about time.
Techniques: French seams on the side seams, bias binding on all edges, including hem. I could not stand the tought of pressing and hemming this slippery silk, so bias binding made more sense (more control!).
This was a sort of indulgent project for me. In the middle of other projects (costume gig! Minoru jacket!) I just wanted to finish something to wear straight away. (Hmm, I feel like I’ve written this blog post once before. Oh, look! That was in February too!). The tiny pocket tank is such a satisfying project, so with the Kennedy mini-series in the background – you know, the one where Katie Holmes has a hard time deciding what accent to speak – I stitched this up. I did an FBA on the front, but even with some serious curve to the dart-stitching, I think I might have overdone it a bit. There is some less than perfect bunching going on around the dart, since after my FBA it is a rather large (too large!) dart. I’ll keep tweaking, since there are bound to be more of these.
Man this shirt is bright! A little outside my comfort zone.. but I’ll give it a shot. It is such a nice fabric though, and it feels downright luxurious to have the smooth silk side on the inside.
And, now I feel compelled to comment on my pictures. I know I’m far from the only one to have problems taking photos in winter, since the weekends are pretty much the only time with daylight, assuming the weather is decent too. I’d like for all the photos I post here to be beautiful, interesting, fancy-camera-level quality pictures. Hopefully soon that’ll get easier, since I’m looking for a camera of my own, so I’m not dependent on John’s stuff (and the planning that comes with that!). In the meanwhile, with the choice between taking pictures with my cameraphone, in daylight, with sunshine, and to not have pictures at all since they wouldn’t be “good enough”… I went lo-fi. I write this perhaps most for myself, as a gentle reminder to not place an imaginary bar so high that lots of stuff I want to share, ends up unshared due to my vanity and expectations. B, lighten up!
These past few weeks, I have been…
- tidying piles, and hanging my patternmaking rulers, just in time for a bout of patternmaking (working on a costume project!)
- eating homemade bread with jam and sour cream, and some tea. I know, it’s rich, and if my mother reads this she will scoff and tell me I shouldn’t be eating this for breakfast pretty much every day. It’s one of the things I’m indulging in while John’s on work travel (the other things being chocolate-covered oatmeal cookies and obscene amounts of Gossip Girl. Don’t tell anyone).
- bemoaning the lack of light apparent in my grainy pictures. I wait not so patiently for spring, haha!
- reading about medieval stuffs. My first degree is in Medieval studies, and it always lingers in the background for me. My dad got me a couple of books on medieval cooking and social history for Christmas, and I’ve been fondling the pages and reading here and there and trying to understand (with surprising success!) the original old english recipes, and day-dreaming away. Also, some studies on medieval clothing for a couple of the costumes I’ll be making. Mmm, such fun!
- dressing for work-meetings with my Geithus lace top (yep, still working on the new sample), and a Hound blazer.
- flying through an alpaca sweater which is crazy soft and I just want to pet it. After a year-long hiatus I finished both sleeve in about a week, and now I’m just looking at miles of stockinette, and I’m thrilled.
- enjoying the signs of a lovely evening of visiting friends.