Birkenwasser knits

Combining two-colour brioche with two-colour garter stitch, finishing with one-colour brioche and garter stitch. Throw in some short rows and i-cords, and it's a poncho. Or a cape. Or a cardigan. Or whatever, but it looks good and feels nice. This P-Rex by Susanne Sommer was one of my Indie Design Gift-A-Long projects from last November-December, but I didn't manage to finish it then. After the deadline had passed, there was no hurry to finish - not until the Head-to-Toe-Challenge by Lankakauppa Kerä. Round 4 in the challenge was for sweaters, and as finishing a WIP was allowed, this gave me the push needed to wrap up this project.



The pattern calls for sport weight yarn, but as the options at my LYS were much better in fingering weight I decided to go with Hedgehog Fibres Sock. The fit of this garment is not really an issue, so I simply followed the instructions for the largest size and got a nice medium-large result. Although, I have to admit that before blocking I was slightly worried that it would be too small, but I'm happy with the size after blocking.


It's RUMS day again.

Smokey Zickzacks by Natalia Vasilieva have a very interesting construction. The socks are knitted flat in a chevron pattern and then grafted together to form a sock. This is a pattern that will keep you interested, and it's truly amazing how everything adds up in the end and all those different sized chevrons suddenly form toes, heel, and the whole sock.





The pattern is written for fingering weight yarn, but I had some aran weight sock yarn in my stash, so I simply knitted with the instructions for the smallest size and got a medium-size result.

I met the lovely Anna of AnnaSaskia designs last October at Kässäkerho Pom Pom Superviikonloppu. She told me about her plans and it's been great to see her start with her web page and Etsy shop since then. After the festival I checked out her designer page on Ravelry, and noticed that she's the designer of the popular Tamarugo hat. And then I remembered the camouflage-colored yarn that I had bought with Young Warrior in mind, so all that was left was to modify the pattern into kid size.



Last autumn, I made fingerless mitts for Young Warrior so he could play Pokemon. Later on, he explained that there should be half of the fingers in the gloves for better fit. Of course, that's obvious, and so is the reason why I didn't make them in the first place: too much effort and too many ends to weave in. But if the kid makes the effort to explain what kind of knitwear he needs, I feel that I need to make the effort to knit that and as there was plenty of yarn left, that was the next project.



I wanted to make matching gloves to go with the new hat, so I took the stitch pattern from Tamarugo hat. To avoid swatching and counting, I searched for a kids' glove pattern for the yarn. I skipped the stitch pattern from the instructions and used two repeats of the same stitch as in the hat. As the stitch is formed by one row of mostly slipped stitches, I was worried that the gloves would turn out uneven as the palm side would have one extra row in every four rows. Therefore, I slipped every other stitch on the palm side when knitting the slip stitch row, and then slipped every other stitch on the following row. Looks pretty even now. Only thing that I would modify is to make the fingers different length to match the length of the kid's fingers - working until the first knuckle, for example. There will be an opportunity to try that, as the next order is in. Troll Princess just realised how unfair it is that she doesn't have fingerless gloves...

Nancy Marchant is the queen of brioche, and I've been wanting to knit something designed by her for quite some time already. So when Lankakauppa Kerä announced the beginning of their year long From Head to Toe challenge and the second item to knit was a scarf, I knew that it was time to pick one of Nancy's designs. I chose Bart & Francis for the interesting brioche pattern. The instructions are great, and there are both written and charted instructions. The pattern has enough going on to keep you interested while knitting, and after a couple of repeats you don't need the instructions anymore as you can always look at the previous repeats. My only problem with the instructions was that there seemed to be a mix up of right and left slanting decreases, but looking at the pictures soon fixed the problem.




This was a nice pattern for learning a couple of new techniques: two-colour Italian cast-on and Italian bind-off. The cast-on technique is easy and creates a nice beginning for two-colour brioche patterns. The bind-off wasn't so easy and I managed to get it wrong in the beginning. It's also known as the kitchener bind-off, and it's done with a tapestry needle. Unlike grafting a seam, such as the toe of a sock, there's only one end to finish, and for me that made it more difficult to see which way the needle should go into the stitches. You can see how the beginning looks crooked and then the stitches start to look good. Of course, I should have started over when I noticed that it was going wrong, but I was lazy and decided that no-one is ever going to take such a close look at my scarf anyway.


I added one pattern repeat to make the scarf a little bit wider, and then simply went on for as long as there was yarn left. This actually produced about the same length as the instructions said. I took the scarf project with me for our winter holiday in Indonesia, but I didn't get much knitting done and I missed the deadline. Having eventually finished, I believe I'm still in for the 9 items KAL. Although, I did also miss the wrist warmers stage... Putting effort on the sweater stage now, while also trying to finish my gloves for stage three.

It's RUMS day.