Penchant Expansion Pack
There are two things you should know. First, exploring variations on a theme is my happy place. I love to find something fun, then tweak it and tweak it and tweak it, just to see what happens. Second, duplicate stitch is magic. It’s easy (you don’t have to make any judgement calls, you’re just tracing over the existing stitches in the underlying fabric), it’s useful (it’s my very favorite way to mend thin spots in well worn knits or to handle my ends on new projects), and it can be absolutely lovely.
So it seems only fitting to combine these hats (which started with a sweet little rib and then accidentally turned into two different hats because I felt like playing around with different variations) with a duplicate stitch (which gives you nearly endless possibilities for adorning your knits). And when you put them together, you end up with something rather special!
We’ll start with the patterns for both versions of the hat. Then comes a rather extensive primer on duplicate stitch to teach you the basics and walk you through several variations. Then to get you started playing with experiments of your own, we’ll end with six different ways to duplicate stitch on the hats.
So whether you make the hats and leave them plain, make the hats and dress them up, or decide to stitch all over an entirely different project, you’ll find something to experiment with. Because it’s good to have options, and I’m always looking for an excuse to try just one more version of whatever I’m up to!
Delineated
This started because I wanted to draw lines on my knitting. And there are actually a bunch of ways to do that! But one of my very favorite is to hold a floofy yarn alongside a regular yarn and then occasionally set the regular yarn aside and work with just the floofy yarn. When you do that, the stitches made with just the floofy yarn end up being a different color. And if you stack them up, you get a line. And once you’ve got the hang of that, well, there’s no end to what you can do.
Here I went with drawing wibbly wobbly swoopy lines. They’re pretty and easy to memorize, and they make the fabric just the tiniest bit wavy, and I swear I couldn’t love them more if I tried. Combine that with a turned hem, which I maintain is the tidiest way to start a hat, and an adorable little welt, and you end up with something that is astonishingly warm and the perfect mix of tidy and swoopy and really just generally delightful all around.
Plus you get to draw lines on your knitting. Which is apparently enough to keep me amused for hours at a time. And possibly I shouldn’t admit that in public? But I suspect some of you might just share this particular fascination, so maybe if we all pretend that’s perfectly normal we can get away with it!
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