Knitting.
I had a customer ask if there was anything I could do to make his hat look more rustic. I explained that at this point, my fingers just kind of do what they do, and it’s very difficult for me to make my stitches uneven. I told him there was no guarantee that his hat would look any different than the one in the photo on the site, but that I would do my best.
So here’s what we have! It is indeed more rustic, although the detail doesn’t show up well in the photo. I periodically pulled my stitches extremely tight to make for a more uneven fabric. I used a longtail cast on instead of a cable cast on. But there was one thing I did that I think made a subtle but significant difference.
A while back, I was trying to get some local folks to knit this hat for me in hopes of farming out some work. (Note: if you are reading this and have knit a hat for me, I am not referring to you.) It didn’t quite pan out. It just wasn’t quite the way I did it, and I really wanted to have a level of control over what went out that I couldn’t get from hiring a contractor, as it were. However, I did keep a couple of these, even though I didn’t feel I could send them out. So for this guy’s hat, instead of yarn nice and new from the cone or skein, I unravelled an existing hat and re-knit the new hat with the old, kinky yarn. It gave it different textural quality, particularly along the cast on edge and on the ribbing at the base.
Obviously, this isn’t something I can do for every hat, since I don’t have a supply of spares to unravel just lying around. If I were to do this again for someone, I’d charge significantly more, because MAN did it slow me down to have to consciously think about my stitches. I can knit a Jayne hat in my sleep. Literally. I’ve half-nodded off and woken up a minute later to realize that I’ve knitted another row. But it required more thought to make my stitches look amateurish. Oddly, knitting this Jayne hat was an interesting break from Jayne hats.
Another nice knitting break is this. Sure enough, the Firestarter socks were unpleasant with all the knitting through the back loop, so I switched to another pattern I’d been eyeing. These are Susanne Kitzmann’s Rainbow Socks, from the Oct ’07 MagKnits. The pattern uses show row shaping along the foot and leg to make zig-zagging triangles. This is a great use for self-striping yarn. I’m knitting these toe-up, which may be a little tricky since if your foot length is different than a repeat length, you can’t really cut out in the middle of a short row. I may have to do a little math and rejigger the repeats if the length doesn’t work quite right.
I wasn’t paying very close attention to the pattern for the first short row section, and as a result, the foot actually runs diagonal to the toe at about a five to ten degree angle. Fortunately, yarn stretches, so it’s not really noticeable when it’s on. Once you’ve done one section, it’s easy to remember what to do, so this is a good pattern for keeping a certain amount of your attention without having to refer to a chart. It’s going quickly and I’m really enjoying it.