M-Space: The Blog

Ar y Gweill #2

Going by my usual blogging rate, you may have been expecting the "tune in next time" at the end of yesterday's post to entail quite a long wait before getting to hear about my current knitting projects. Not so, however...

At the moment I have two projects on the go, which is probably quite a good number - it gives you a chance to switch between things for a bit of variation, or to suit the mood, but doesn't mean that there's too much danger of any project getting neglected for too long. I think 3 or 4 projects, if sufficiently different, may be reasonable, but for the amount of knitting time I get any more than that would probably be a bit too much.

Anyway, enough digressing on the number of projects. The two I'm currently doing are an alpaca hat and a pair of slipper socks. Both are being knitted in the round and incorporate some twisted stitches (a new technique for me) but they are otherwise quite different projects.

I mentioned previously that I had planned to knit a hat using alpaca yarn but abandoned it before I started actually knitting it because I had concerns about the amount of yarn I had and the modifications I'd need to make to get a decent gauge and still make the hat fit my head. At the time I didn't have a definite idea what to use the yarn for instead, but I've now started to make it into a hat using a different pattern. This one is a fairly straightforward ribbed watch cap with the twist that many of the knit stitches are worked by knitting two together, keeping the old stitches on the needle, then knitting the first one again and dropping both stitches. This produces a spiral effect, and is essentially a version of cabling that doesn't require the use of a cable needle. With the yarn I'm using, which is quite hairy, the spiral effect doesn't stand out very clearly but it makes for an interestingly thick texture and you can see it if you look closely enough. Here's a picture of how it's looking so far:

In fact, I've knitted a few more rows (a couple of centimetres more length) since I took that photo a couple of days ago. The main body of the hat is in the twisted rib that I described (it's 4 knit stitches, including twists, and 2 purls per pattern unit) but it starts with 3 or 4 cm of 1x1 rib to give it a nice grip to the head - and because in the first test piece I tried to test out the pattern and assess the gauge it turned out to be quite difficult to get the twists going straight from the cast-on row. I'd guess I'm now about two thirds of the way through this one. At the top the pattern is set to decrease pretty quickly. Actually the pattern I'm using (with some modification - mainly the addition of the 1x1 rib) is a Spiral Rib Qiviut Cap by Caryll McConnell, although I'm using alpaca rather than qiviut yarn (and I'm not calling it a spiral rib hat as I use the term "spiral rib" to refer to a different stitch pattern). I'm knitting this on a 4mm x 40cm circular needle, although I may need to switch to dpns for the decreases).

My other current project is a pair of slipper socks. Essentially I'm making these just like an ordinary pair of socks but using fairly thick yarn (Aran weight, in a 25%/75% wool/acrylic blend) and restricting the leg part to about 2cm of ribbing at the ankle. Also, because they are designed to be worn as outerwear and not under shoes, I can afford to use a fairly heavily textured pattern. In fact, I've designed a pattern for the instep (i.e. the top surface) that incorporates a 3-strand braid, a couple of twisted columns (one using the K2tog technique I mentioned above and the other knitting into the back of the second stitch and the front of the first stitch to make a twist in the other direction) as well as some moss stitch panels (by which I mean a stitch which alternates knit and purl stitches in both directions). The sole is in stocking stitch. I've used a heel design called a "common heel" (in Nancy Bush's book Folk Socks), which involves knitting a longer-than-usual heel flap and then grafting together the stitches at the bottom rather than turning the heel. Here's what it looked like a couple of days ago:

Since then I've finished the heel and knitted about 16 rows (twice through the complete instep pattern) of the body of the sock, but I haven't yet taken any further pictures. These socks are being knitted on 4.5mm dpns.

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