Was that a whole lot of work and bother for a very simple result? I mean possibly? But really, you can say that about pretty much any thing you knit by hand. And honestly, that was literally the first time I'd done a turned hem, it took me about thirty minutes more than a plain cast on would have (a big chunk of that because I stopped to take pictures), it is satisfyingly tidy, and I'm completely delighted to have done it. So yeah, I'm calling it a win, because my brain could very much use a bit of soothing [...]

Ok, so here's the actual joining bit. Look at the wooden needle. See how it's got rather a lot of stitches on it? And how they're jammed up awfully close to each other? Yup, well that's the sets of stitches we picked up in the earlier post. One from the live stitches, one from the cast on edge, one from the live stitches, one from the cast on edge, all the way around. So now you go along and work one new knit stitch into each pair. So you make one new stitch, and that new stitch joins together one [...]

This is two views of the same thing. I'm taking the stitches freed up by my provisional cast on (on a metal needle) and the live stitches already on my needles (on a metal needle) and interspersing them (on the wooden needle). I've got two different kinds of needles just to more easily see what's going on, you for sure don't have to do it that way. It's just one from the live stitches, one from the cast on, one from the live stitches, one from the cast on, back and forth around the whole hat. And you don't even [...]

First things first. Forthwith is out today, and it's 10% off on ravelry and payhip with the code PROMPTLY. ⁠ ⁠This project wins the prize for 'longest time from cast on to pattern release.' Which is frankly a shame, because it's an absolute delight.⁠ So much of a delight that I somehow managed to knit it twice. Don't ask. The last few years have been challenging on a variety of fronts, and I simply cannot bring myself to feel bad about having knit a lovely hat twice.⁠ It does leave us with a grave difficulty though. I am completely incapable [...]

See, I told you, appropriately confident. I did a provisional cast on, knit until I had about double the depth of fabric I wanted for the turned hem, then freed up the end of my provisional cast on and yoinked it. As I did, it slipped out of my work, one beautiful, perfect stitch at a time, and I caught those newly freed stitches on a spare needle. And now...now I'll do a weird foldy upy bit where I get the live stitches mashed up next to each other with the wrong sides of my fabric together and the right [...]

So remember how I wasn't loving the ribbing on the orange and gray hat ('the' orange and gray hat I say, as if I didn't have, um, several things that could reasonably be called orange and gray hats within a few dozen feet of me at this very moment). Right, well, so I decided what that hat really truly wanted was a turned hem. Which means a provisional cast on, then join it in the round, then whang on in stockinette for a bit, then join everything up, and if you did it all right, you get a damn near [...]

Pssst, the first of these two patterns is scheduled to come out Tuesday (you know, assuming the world doesn't do one of those things where the news or a more personal catastrophe makes it just too fundamentally awful to even think about bringing out something as inconsequential as a knitting pattern that day, which sure does seem to happen a lot these days).⁠ Each piece (so the hat or the pair of mitts) uses most of a 100 gram skein of yarn. So if you want to have a matching set, you'll probably need two skeins (you might possibly be [...]

See, this is the sort of stuff I love to play with. The hat with the embroidery on it from a few days ago (scroll back a bit if you didn't see it, it's rather smashing)? Yeah, each one of the columns of embroidery in that uses two strands of yarn. Meaning you can use two colors (or two strands of the same color if that's more your jam. But...well...I couldn't think of any functional reason you couldn't do that with four colors (cough, or any even number of colors when you come right down to it, she said, in [...]

Folks I'm going to be honest with you. I do not know how to Do A Capitalism under these circumstances. Everyone I know enough to like & give a crap about is walking around exhausted & shell shocked & just completely out of reserves. And yet, we still need to get groceries & cook dinner & do the dishes. We're watching our national hatred of women get cast into laws that will ruin lives & get people killed. (And yes, it's not only women who can get pregnant or need abortions. I use that language because I promise you, the [...]