Cables are sneaky
Cables? Cables are gorgeous but sneaky! They will shrink your fabric. There's a video version of this over here, should you wish to watch me flop them around and point to things and listen to me talk. Now, admittedly this is a particularly dramatic example! (The cabled panel and the ribbed panel are the same number of stitches, but the ribbed one is nearly twice as wide.) But all cables will shrink your fabric at least a little. The bigger the cables and the more densely they're packed, the more they'll shrink your fabric. So a four by four cable [...]
Minimize the disruption
Remember how I said I set aside a little ball of yarn to do the thumbs with when I'm using a gradient yarn? That's because it minimizes the disruption in the color progression. Now, the truth is the progression on this one is gradual enough I could probably have gotten away with not doing it. But it's easy enough to do so why not! There's a longer post with more details about what I do and how it works back a few weeks, should you wish to know more.
The Opposite of Suspense
Remember how I said I used yesterday's yarn math all the dam time? Yeah, it's how I knew I totally had enough yarn on hand to do a second version of this hat. And yeah, spoiler alert, if you look at yesterday's picture you can see I totally did and said hat is indeed already finished. But wow was it nice to work on it knowing, deep in my truest heart, that I would not be running out of yarn half an inch from the end of the hat. Because I'm sorry. Life in 2023 is stressful enough. I do [...]
Yarn Math
I know math isn't everyone's favorite thing, but there's one Very Tiny Math Nugget that comes in super handy pretty much every time I knit something, so I want to make sure you have it in your bag of tricks. There's a point in pretty much every project where I find myself wanting to know 'how much yarn is that?' Sometimes I want to know 'how much yarn did I use in this hat?' Sometimes I want to know 'how much yarn is left in this ball?' Sometimes I want to know 'how much yarn do I need to make [...]
Cursed Victorian Lampshade
Cursed Victorian Lampshade 101, aka how to block a cowl! So, the new cowl is lacy, which means you want to block it under tension. And a lot of times that would mean pinning your fabric out on a blocking mat. But a cowl is a tube, so if you pin it out, you'll end up with creases along the sides where the fabric is folded. But there's a better way! If you run a wire through the top and bottom of the cowl, use those wires to push the fabric out in a nice big circle, then make a [...]
Mind the Gap
I warned you I was going to indulge myself and talk about the nerdy bits of these mitts, so let's just do that. Let's talk about how to handle that little gap you can sometimes get between the hand part of the mitt and the thumb part of the mitt. When you make a mitt, you (generally) set some stitches aside for the thumb, finish off the hand, then come back and make a tube for your thumb using the stitches you set aside. BUT, if you just start making a tube with your set aside thumb stitches and nothing [...]
Discontinuity
Let's talk about thumbs on gradient mitts. First, this is a very long gradient with subtle shifts. The color change over the course of the mitt is slight, so you could get away without doing this! But it's a neat trick, so it's worth talking about. Usually when I knit a mitt, I knit a tube for the wrist, make the tube wider to make room for a thumb, knit the wider tube until I get to the webbing between my thumb and hand, set stitches aside for the thumb, then go back to knitting the original size tube for [...]
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