Oliver's Christmas Spider Hat: a free pattern

I had decided to knit hats and mittens from the luscious Malabrigo Worsted I picked up for 20% off at my local yarn shop during their annual birthday sale. I had finished my daughter's and planned to embroider little flowers on her hat, but couldn't come up with a good (easy/beginner) embellishment for a boy's hat. Friends gave me ideas like stars and rocket ships, sailboats, etc... but I wasn't exactly sure how I'd do that, and I wasn't sure that Oliver would be into it.

Then the concept of bugs came up, and it reminded me that I had seen patterns for bobble spiders out there. I ran across this pattern for Spider Socks using that lovely spider. I realized that considering the hat I was making was on size 9 needles the gauge alone probably won't allow me to put the big spider pattern on a toddler hat, but her teeny spiders were perfect! Sadly, they were written for knitting from the top-down, but my hat was going from the bottom up. So I came up with a slightly different pattern for the spider and spread it over the course of the hat.




Soooo... here's my version of the spider, worked on reverse stockinette:

Worked in multiples of 9 stitches, in the round.

Round 1 & 2: Purl
Round 3, 5, 7, and 9: P1, slip 7 with yarn in front (be careful to leave it loose enough that you can attach it to your spider which will be on round 10, these will form the legs) P1.
Round 4 & 6: Purl
Round 8: P4, K1, P4
Round 10: P4, work bobble [knit in front of loop, knit in back of loop, knit in front of loop, knit in back of loop, knit in front of loop so that there are now 5 stitches in the bobble. Turn project around and purl across the 5 bobble stitches. Turn work and knit the 5 bobble stitches together through back of loop.] take the 4 slipped sections from rounds 3, 5, 7, and 9 and put them BEHIND the bobble, so that the bobble looks like the spider's body and the legs appear to come from it. P across.

Round 11 and as far above as you like: P4, K1, P4

I decided to do my spiders at various heights, to make it more interesting.

Oliver's Easter Vest

My not-quite-two year old son needs a vest for Easter. Little boys look so sweet in vests. I was looking around and eventually settled on this pattern from Lion Brand. I planned to use some of the TLC Cotton Plus that I had sitting around. So, I start knitting with size 8 needles and the cotton plus. I'm also doing this project as my first done using the continental version of knitting - yarn held in my left hand - where previously I have always knit English style.

Personally, I think this yarn looks better on smaller needles, generally, so I'm sort of nervous of upsizing to get the appropriate gauge. I knit my swatch and where I should have 17 stitches per 4 inchs, I have more like 20. So, using that I've decided to adjust the pattern to that gauge. I'm doing the 2 year size. Twenty stitches in 4 inches would be 5 stitches per inch. I want the vest measurements to be 11 inches wide, so I multiplied 5 (stitches per inch) times 11 (inches across) and came out with 55. However, to make it a nice even number I'm going with 56.

After the rib bottom edge, there's a portion where they increase 8 stitches across. So, subtracting that from the number that we determined above gives us a 48 stitch cast on. I'm doing the 1x1 rib for an inch then increasing 8 as follows: K3 M1, [K6, M1] to last 3 stitches, K3. It makes me crazy when they just say "increase evenly across" but make you figure out "evenly" for yourself.

Revisiting the Sweet Baby Cap

My son has a ginormous head. He's 19 months old, but is wearing 2T-3T hats. Huge. I just measured him and he has a 19 inch head, but the standard head size for a "child" is 18 inches. I love that sweet baby cap and I want to do it again, but in the appropriate size for him. I'm calling it 3T, but it could be considered "child" size, I think. So, doing the math, I came up with 139 for the cast on. That's also adjusted for having all the sections be even length... because I'm a dork like that.

So, here's my final pattern (I think) mostly taken from the original but just with the tweaking described above:

Gauge: 24 stitches = 4 inches

Needles: Size 2 & 3 circular needles

Yarn: JoAnn Sensations Kashmira

Sizes: 3T / Child

CO 139 stitches with size 2 circular needle, join then knit 7 rounds in garter stitch (purl one round, then knit one round) then change to 3 mm needles and knit the rest in stockinette stitch, changing colors as you see fit.

At the same time:

On the next round, increase and decrease as follows:
k1, M1, k21, slip 1 - knit 2 tog tbl - ­ psso, k 21, M1, k1, M1
k 21, slip 1 - knit 2 tog tbl - psso, k 21, M1, k1, M1, k 21, slip 1 - knit 2 tog tbl - psso, k 21, M1, k1

Repeat these increases and decreases every other round for 11, or 12 or 13 (depends on the size you want - an older kid will need more length in the hat) more rounds. Then do only the decreases every other round until there are 10 stitches left. Then k2tog until only one stitch is left, break yarn and thread through remaining stitches.

I like to attach twisted cord to the ear flaps. You can do i-cord or crocheted cord, too, if you prefer.

Trying my hand at fair isle

I finally got around to doing some interesting color work. I found this pattern in Cool Knits For Kids. I couldn't find any errata for the pattern, and the pattern isn't even imputed on ravelry yet, but the pattern seems to be missing a chart, so I did my fair isle stuff mostly from the picture. It worked out, though - looks pretty good, if I do say so myself. I also picked an alternate color scheme (the one in the book is pink) and took out the heart intarsia on the ear flaps and replaced it with a random fair isle pattern. I'm really happy with the result! Now, if I could only get my toddler to wear it!

Fibonacci Hat

Well, since the other hat didn't fit my son's ginormous head, I ended up giving it away and trying again. This time, I used JoAnn Sensations Kashmira yarn (which is DK weight, in case you're wondering, but for some reason it's not labeled). I really like the JoAnn Sensations yarn. I didn't think I was going to like it this much but, for cheap wool, it's REALLY smooth. Not soft, really, so much as soft like cotton might be sorta soft. It doesn't feel scratchy at all like normal wool feels. I tried to felt it before though, since the label says "100% wool Felt-able" but the felting was terrible.

The colors I had I wasn't too sure about, so I had read on some blog someplace that if you use the Fibonacci sequence for the stripes it is more appealing to the eye than just straight stripes w/colors that don't necessarily go well together. I had about the same gauge (as far as I can tell) as with the patons classic marino, so I went with it, but I believe I cast on 113 this time to make up some circumference and also did 9 iterations of the increase part of the pattern. I love how it turned out. I'll see if I can get him to hold still enough to get a pic of him with it on.

Baby Hat take 2

Ok, so since they didn't give a gauge (or dimensions), I think the hat I made turned out closer to 0-6 month size. At least, it's tight on my 6 month old, but maybe he has a giant head. here's the pic, though. I guess I'll try a bigger number cast on :)

Baby Hat

One of my friends did her own rendition of this hat pattern, which I got to see when we were at a playdate. OH SO CUTE!! So of course, I set out to try out my own rendition (she didn't give me the website, I had to search it out). The pattern is translated from a Norwegian pattern, and I don't know about you, but I've never even *seen* a 2.5mm circular needle (I believe that's a 1 1/2 size, US). And of course, I wanted to knit it right away instead of waiting until I got a chance to go to a yarn shop, so I had to go with what I had. I *do* have a size 3 circular needle, which I figured I could use and get a fairly small gauge, and the Patons Classic Wool Merino comfortably knits to a pretty small gauge, so I decided to go with that from my stash. The gauge in the pattern is 28 stitches to 10 cm (about 4 inches), so instead I wound up with 24 stitches per 4 inches with the combo I used. I wanted to make a 12 month size hat, so I calculated out how many inches it would be using their gauge and then used that to decide to cast on109 stitches. That puts the in between straight stockingette sections at 16 stitches instead of 18 or 19.

Ok, I'm off to knit. I'll let you know how it goes!