I’ve very happy to be the next stop on Woolly Wormhead’s Bambeanie‘s blog tour.  Woolly Wormhead is probably synonymous in most peoples mind’s with hat design; and rightly so!   Her design style is so distinctive that you can usually spot when a design is her’s before you even look at the name.

I met Woolly several years ago when she just happened to be passing my house in west Cork.  Her mum was planning on buying a plot of land further west so they kindly dropped in.  Since then her mother has moved to Ireland and we’ve had the pleasure of having Woolly and her family over for dinner during the summer when they were in the area again.  It is so rare to get a chance to talk in person with fellow designers that we tend to get a bit carried away, I think we bored everyone (but ourselves) to tears talking about designing and publishing.

While we were talking I began asking her about her exclusive design of hats.  She described her love of the sculptural/3D quality of hats which means that designing them never loses interest for her.  When she picks up yarn she sees hats!

The book that she had just released is ‘Bambeanies’; available both as an ebook for £10 and a print book for $23 both options can be found here.  This book has 82 pages and 20 hat designs for kids.  Woolly is always good though about providing a wide range of sizing on her patterns.  This is very unusual in hat design where frequently 2 sizes would be the norm.  Looking through the book I can see that most designs have at lease 4 sizes (a single one, Rocketeer, has 3) but Tricable has 6 and Loops has 5!  Being able to grade a wide range of sizes is important to Woolly, she has been know to abandon a project if it’s not gradable.  For the knitter this means that you get to have a perfect fitting hat, and even though this book looks like it just has designs for kids, many of the sizes go up to adult sizes (do check though, some would be small adult head)!  The designs are not just standard bottom up construction, there are several that are knit from side to side, and one (Bimple) is knit from the top down.  Changing the direction that a hat is knit in can really help you look a hats in a whole new way.

I’ve just finished a blog tour for my own book Contemporary Irish Knits and I knew from personal experience how many interviews you end up writing.  So I decided to give Woolly a break and instead of an interview on my leg of the tour I’ll talk through my own experience of knitting one of her hats.  Now as a fellow designer I rarely get much time to knit designs by others but quick baby knits and unusual construction techniques drew me in!

I needed a quick baby knit for a new baby in Dublin and decided to give the pattern Moochie a go.  It was for a little girl and I had some bright pink Cascade Eco + sitting in my stash that would be perfect!

Woolly loves to turn design on it’s side, and that’s how this hat starts.  You begin working what looks like a straight strip…but it’s not!  Increases on one side and decreases on the other end creates a biased fabric so you end up with a parallelogram.  So when you’ve finished the length of knitting you undo your provisional cast on and graft the start and finish together.  As the ends are sloping you are grafting on a diagonal which gives you a tube you see below with the rows of eyelets twisting around the tube.

Once I had this tube, while it was pretty it still didn’t look like a hat!  So next step, once you’ve got your tube grafted is to seam the top together……starting to look like a hat!

Some of the designs (such as Tipper) finish here with a cute little square hat.  This design goes a step further…next you go and add some little I-cord ears to the sides, how cute is that!

Then finally, you tie the I-cord together and ta-da…a HAT!

So anyone out there who want some cute, fun and unusual takes on your humble hat go give this book a go (might even be able to squeeze my head into the largest size of Nupkin!)

The book is available directly from  Woolly Wormhead here and the next stop on her blog tour is on the 26th of October with Babylonglegs.

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A few months ago I sat looking at a lonely skein of Manos del Uruguay ‘Silk Blend’ on my shelf.  I loved the yarn and the color was one of my favorites but  for some reason it had been sitting there for quite a while.

I took it down and started swatching, I wanted to knit it at a nice tight gauge and experiment with cables.  I started out with a very elaborate cable sketch that morphed into a tulip at the top but it looked really silly when I went to knit it up!  Instead the combination of the single sideways cable that crossed over ribbing really captivated me.  I began working with just that and the zig zag cables began growing out from there. And so the Ambroso mittens were born, they’re available right now on the current Knitty Deep Fall 2o11 issue.

Working these mittens uses several different cable types, to make them very visually easy to pick out I would suggest color coding them so you can see at a glance where you are at, you can just use highlighter pens or markers of different colors for different cables:

I also got a  lovely surprise in this issue of Knitty, Contemporary Irish Knits made it to the top of ‘Cool Stuff’! I had no idea that Amy had such a soft spot for Ireland (she’s actually going to be teaching a class at This Is Knit in Dublin very shortly!)

My blog tour is now well underway, and you can find the latest review and interview with Shannon Okey (aka knitgrrl).  She had some fun interview questions so it should make for a good read!

The pace of life seems to have picked up in the last few days. Spent 24 hours in hospital with my youngest after a sever reaction to his final set of shots. Luckily he seems fully back to normal now!
Over on ravelry my Gilligan KAL (knit along) got started a few days ago. Several knitters seem to be speeding along, having finished the bottom edging and already moving along up to the waist shaping!  If you want any help along the way with the pattern just jump right in and ask.

Next week I head to Columbus, Ohio for my first TNNA.  As the time gets closer I’m finding myself very busy pulling a display folder together and packing my trunk show.  In the next few days I’ll have some more details to share with you about this so stay tuned.  One of the trunk shows I’ll be doing will be for my new book ‘Contemporary Irish Knits‘.  It will be the first public airing of the garments so I’m looking forward to it!  For anyone in Ireland, I’ll be heading up for This Is Knit’s 5 year anniversary on the 30th of June and I’ll have the full trunk show from the book with me, so come along for a look.

Next week I’ll have some news for you also about Knit Nation in London in July so stay tuned….

Wearable Lace $14.95

Over the last few months I have started to see certain trends in what I’m knitting.  Because of that it made sense to put several related patterns together in a booklet.  Some of these pattern have already been published but a couple of them are new.  All patterns can still be bought individually if you only want one of the patterns.  I’m afraid that I won’t be able to offer a discount if you have already bought one of the patterns individually, as you can see the booklet is already heavily discounted.  Buying the booklet you get a whopping discount of $14.70 on the 5 patterns.

In this booklet as well as having these 5 patterns I will have a brief introduction to lace, reading lace charts and working increases in lace.  There will be instructions on how to do several techniques uses in the patterns (provisional cast-on, grafting and short rows).

The full booklet will be released at the beginning of December.  You can however buy the booklet immediately and download the individual pdfs for the 3 patterns available now (Summer Affair, Laced Leaves and Centrique).  Fritillary and Midnight Shrug will both be released in November and you will be sent these patterns if you have bought the complete booklet.  If you buy the ebooket immediately you will automatically be sent the pdf upon release in December.

The 5 patterns available in the ebooklet are:

Summer Affair $5.95

Laced Leaves $5.95

Fritillary $5.95

Centrique $5.95

Midnight Shrug $5.95

Last Year I got a copy of Elisabeth Zimmerman’s Knitters’ Almanac and have been waiting until now to knit this up.  I had some lovely soft cotton from my aunt that was great for it – super soft.  Now I need to block, weave and darn ends in and we’ll be set.  It will have to sit and wait for the baby for a few months yet thought!
I hadn’t used the M1 method that she suggested in the book before (basically just twisting a loop around the needle) so i thought I’d give it a go. Not too happy with the effect it creates, it seems like too noticeable an increase. On the wrong side of the fabric it looks like a series of loops.  I don’t think I’ll be using it again.
Other that that I love the cardigan pattern- so simple and effective. If I were to do it again I think that I’d use a different increase method and perhaps decrease the sleeves a little (not sure about this in terms of the lace).

Thanks to the kind help of a fellow knitter on Ravelry I think that I may have figured out how to do those sleeves.  Now the fun part – I need to actually make them!

My problem had been that in order to get the armhole large enough on the body I needed a 18 inch opening.  I had assumed (always a bad idea) that I had to pick up the correct number of stitches for this opening so that I would be at the correct stitch gauge.  This would mean that I needed to pick up 90 stitches.

However – and this is where I started having issues – with the lovely short row shoulder shaping you end up at the bottom of your sleeve cap with the same number of stitches as you started (90) but at that point the width of the arm needed to be 14.5 inches (68 stitches).

What I have been told – and I think that it should work, is that you only pick up the number of stitches that you need for the sleeve width at the end of the cap.  So… it is 68 stitches not 90 stitches that need to be picked up.  A real Eureka moment!  Now my last concern is how picking up that many stitches will look, will the spaces between them be too obvious?  Will keep you posted on progress!

I have used Barbara Walker’s ‘Knitting from the Top’ for top down raglan shaped tops and cardigans before and it works beautifully.

I have been fascinated by the idea of knitting set-in cap sleeves from the top down with short row shaping and in theory it seems like a great idea. I’m working on a cardigan that is knitted from the bottom up and will have cap sleeves. I thought that I’d see if I could design myself some top down sleeves to make sure that the cap sleeve fits nicely.

However I’ve hit a stumbling block with the maths.. unless I misunderstand I can’t make the numbers work.

If I measure around the top of the shoulder to the underarm area I would need 90 stitches, which includes picking up the bound off stitches at the underarm. So far so good – now if I follow the Barbara Walker method you take 1/3 of the stitches centered at the sleeve top and work short row shaping back and forth picking up one stitch each side until you reach the picked up underarm stitches and magic you have your nicely fitted sleeve cap.

Sounds perfect doesn’t it?? Here is my problem … I don’t want 90 stitches at the top of the arm, I want 68. If I have 90 stitches the sleeve would fit a gorilla.

Maybe I need to work a combination of the methods – short row shaping but at the same time decreasing the stitches so that the upper arm diameter will be the size I want it to be by the time the short row shaping is finished and you reach the end of the sleeve cap.

After the last several weeks spent knitting for Christmas presents I’ve had a chance to get started on a project for myself this week. I got some Rowan Chunky print yarn in a lovely dark chocolate and have started on the Blackberry shrug from Knitty.

I am knitting it from the top though with a few more changes. Having recently gotten a copy of Barbara Walkers ‘Knitting From the Top’ I am finding as many excuses in my knitting to work from the top down. Especially when it is for yourself it means that you get a great fit. (Not so important if you don’t have the person around who will be wearing it …or if that person doesn’t want to try it on daily for fitting!)

I have put in a slightly different cable on the arm and left out the bobbles. Also I am tapering the arms a little more and increasing the length of the arms and body. I think I’ll probably do some short rows at the back of the next, I like cosy necks. Will post some photos as I start making a bit more progress.