Baby Socks for my Niece

My mum-in-law just finished knitting a baby jumper for one of my nieces and she had left-over yarn, so she asked me to make some socks. Over at Knitting Daily, I found: Better-Than-Booties-Baby-Socks. You have to sign up to get the free pattern, but if you don't want to give up your email address and get spammed just for the sake of downloading the free pattern, utilize the services of the folks over at Mailexpire.com.

The socks in Ann Budd's pattern use Priscilla Gibson-Roberts (PGR) short-row heel and toe, but don't let that scare you because Ann has kind of simplified it. So anyway, usually when I knit stuff in the round where you have to join the work, I just hold the tail yarn with the feeder yarn and knit 3 stitches in pattern to make the join. I always hated the jog that results. But a while back when I was browsing Techknitter's brilliant, awesome, wonderful, helpful blog, I came across her method for joining knitting in the round, which really minimises (almost eliminates) the jog. I wish I had tried it sooner because it isn't really complicated, and it makes a big difference to the look of the top of your socks. So the first part of this vlog today covers using Techknitter's circular join for Ann Budd's cute little Ruffle Rib Socks.





In the image below I have circled the jogs on the inside of the ruffle edge, but I think if I hadn't done it, the jogs would probably not be noticable at all! I really love this circular join.

OK, now the other part of this post today is about the heel/toe construction of the socks. Ann Budd's instructions are pretty easy to follow, but I noticed they miss a bit about stitch mount correction, so I thought I would make a video about this. Unfortuantely my camera was a bit wonky and I didn't really notice! Oops. I also keep calling PGR "Patricia", lol. Excuse my brain-deadness.

I will upload my video anyway in case it helps someone. I plan to knit another pair of socks for my niece because I still have yarn left over, so perhaps I can try to make a better video. In the meantime, here is the heel video in 2 parts:

Part 1: Short-row heel decreasing


Part 2(i): Short-row heel increasing


Part 2(ii): Short-row heel increasing


And finally, here's what my baby socks ended up looking like:

Cute!!!

Mittens

Quick short post as I haven't posted or knitted in a while. Last night I was experimenting with knitting a top-down mitten with my left-over yarn, but it's a disaster. *cry* Not much else to say. I need to think about this some more.

Starting the simple top-down double-knit hat after the i-cord cast-on is complete

In yesterday's vlog post, I had set up my DPNs and was ready to start a circular piece, in this case my simple hat. Today I post the remainder of my vlog about starting the hat.

Row 1 of the hat:

It's kind of hard to see by essentially what is happening is that the red (outside) hat is knit in one round (round 1 a), and then the light blue (inside) hat is purled (round 1b). The purl stitch is just the back side of a knit stitch, so when you look at the blue stitches on the other side of the hat, you see a knit fabric.

As you knit the circle outwards, every odd round will be a simple knit round for the side facing you, and then a simple purl round for the side on the inside.

Row 2 of the hat: increasing # of stitches

Every even round of the hat will consist of increases while you knit the circular piece outwards.

I-cord Circular Cast On in Two Colours

Part One: A Two-colour cast-on


Erratum: At 2:11 I say something ridiculous about a "blue loop". I actually meant a red loop/stitch on the needle. :P

Part Two: Knitting a Two-colour I-cord


Part Three: Lifeline and I-cord increase


Part Four: Setting up the stitches on DPNs

Errors in part four: I kept blathering about "4 colours" when obviously there are only 2 colours. I probably meant to say "4 stitches on each needle".

Simple top-down double-knit hat is finished!

My simple top-down double-knit hat experiment is done.

It took me ages knitting this with my 2mm circulars. Lessons learned in the course of faffing about:

1) Use larger needles. Maybe 4mm or 5mm circulars (and an appropriate yarn for that)

would have made the project faster.
2) If I ever make a hat like this again, I will use an i-cord circular cast on for this project and not a modified Emily Ocker cast-on.
3) This hat was not allowed to be "girly" because it was for DH, but I think ribbing would have been a better move than of stockinette.

The inside of the hat turned out to be a disaster. I blame this on the cast-on, needles-size and tension that resulted. Looks like this will be a non-reversible hat, but at least it will still be warm!

First post! Yay!

Over the last couple of weeks I have been faffing about with knitting a hat for my dh. I wanted to make a double-knit hat, and was inspired by Alison's double-knit cap.

I just wanted to knit it from the top down, so I asked Google to find me a nice free pattern, but alas I couldn't find exactly what I wanted. Google did lead me to some lovely top-down hat patterns though! My favourites were these:

• http://ma2ut.blogspot.com/2005_11_01_ma2ut_archive.html
• http://www.smallknits.com/freepatterns/karlchen.pdf

So now I munged these patterns and started a top-down hat which is slowly developing. Because I am using 2mm circulars though, it's taking a while.




Off-topic: the blogger video upload feature sounded good, but omg did it take forever for this skinny little slice of video to upload!