More Weekend Knitting and a Baby Hat

 As mentioned in my last post, there have been two themes in my knitting recently: babies and Weekend Knitting. I have now made four patterns from Weekend Knitting; now, I think, I'm qualified to write a preliminary review.

I have an issue with cookbooks and knitting books. I love to read them, but I find I rarely use them to their full potential. I own several cookbooks, and have cooked through none of them.  (For The Joy of Cooking, I think I can be excused given the sheer volume of recipes, but my neglect of some of my other cookbooks is absolutely shameful.) I don't own as many knitting books, but I don't really use many of the ones I do own except my Knitter's Almanac by Elizabeth Zimmermann.

There are a couple of forces at play here. The first is that, while I cook myself dinner several times a week, I don't make myself a new knitting project that often. When I knit for myself, I already know what sort of socks I like and don't need a pattern, and when I knit for others, I'm not necessarily going to use a pattern I bought for myself. Besides, since I like to alter and play with things, I hardly ever use a pattern precisely as written, and it's easier to search Ravelry for patterns with traits I like (e.g. "Raglan baby cardigan") and then alter the pattern by, say, changing out a lace pattern or adding a cable than to look through my knitting books and scrape a commercially published pattern into the shape I need. The fact that I can look at other people's projects on Ravelry and read their notes also helps me avoid pitfalls.

With cooking, I've come to a partial solution for the problem: I don't buy new cookbooks (not until I've cooked enough of the recipes to be sure I'll use the book enough to justify the space). I take them out of the library and use only the recipes I like. I end up using Pinterest and Allrecipes for about 95% of my new recipes, and my cookbook shelf, which is mostly sentimental, does not grow beyond its bounds. 

This is coming to a point, which is that I recently bought a copy of Weekend Knitting and I want to make sure I use it enough to justify the space it takes up. I also want to challenge myself to use it; while the patterns are a bit dated, overall, I like a lot of them, and I want to see if I can make them into something I actually want to make.

My mum bought or was given a copy of this book about the time it came out, when I was pretty young. There were a few patterns (in particular the Reverse-Bloom Flower Washcloth and the Diamond Chair Cushions) that my young mind thought were absolutely fascinating. Last spring, as the lockdown blues were growing stronger, I kept thinking about the washcloth. I really wanted to try knitting it. When I looked up the book on Amazon, I found that it was for sale for only a few dollars used. So I bought it, bought some KnitPicks Dishie in Mint, and knitted it up over the course of two days. The flower washcloth is possibly the best-written pattern in the book; I had no major problems with it, and the finished project looks exactly like the photos. I started looking at the other projects in the book, and I actually like quite a few of them.

I'm toying with the idea of knitting through the entire book. The problem is that there are a few very basic patterns that I really don't feel the need to make; for example, I have already made a simple garter stitch scarf and feel that my life has enough of them at present. I don't really want a lap blanket, either, and if I did, I probably wouldn't want this one. So, if I do knit through the entire book, I'll probably give myself a few escape clauses: I'm allowed to tweak the patterns slightly, I'm certainly NOT using all the recommended yarns and colors, and I probably won't be making all of the mitten patterns (there are a lot). So far, in addition to the dishcloth and the previous post's Baby Sweater of Doom, I've also made the elf booties. Finally, as I had the baby sweater of doom in the corner cooling off, I made the Luggy Bonnet – the main topic of today's post.

I didn't like this pattern at first, but the more I looked at the photo, the more I grew to like it. While I can't see myself wearing it (even though there is an adult size included), babies already look silly enough that ear flaps add to, rather than subtract from, the total cuteness. Besides, the thing uses about forty different colors of yarn (and you could fit in more with some adjustments to the pattern), and I happened to have a plethora of scraps of wool worsted weight yarn in colors I wasn't intending to use any time soon.

I did break one cardinal rule of Knitting For Babies – I took out my Alice Starmore book. Gentle reader, I suffered for it, as I shall relate.

The hearts included in the pattern, as well as their alternative, a row of five-pointed stars, aren't much to my liking. For one thing, I'm not a huge fans of either of these motifs. For another, they aren't suited to stranded knitting – there are vast expanses of one color or the other, and the hat is knitted flat. If you think it's difficult to keep your tension even while doing stranded knitting in the round, let me tell you: it's so, so much worse knitting flat. The purling is an exercise in frustration.

So of course I decided to go for a more classic Fair Isle pattern. It isn't particularly like actual Fair Isle knitting, given the (duochromatic?) color scheme, but I think it looks nice. If only the hat had been knitted in the round, so that my tension would be better. . . 

 It does look pretty good, but I know I can do better, so. . . next time, I'm going to make some changes.

The pattern, as a whole, seems to embody how I feel about the book as a whole: cool ideas, but mediocre execution. The biggest issue, for me, is that the hat is worked flat: you make the earflaps first, then cast on, joining said flaps to – not a circle, but a row of knitting. Then you knit up to the top, working back and forth; at the end, you have six or so stitches. You run your yarn end through said stitches, and then sew up the back.

This is – weird. Generally, when you end a project this way, it's a tube of some sort: a hat, or a glove finger, or even a sock. If you end a flat piece of knitting this way, it's difficult to sew one side of it up without weird bubbles. 

Apart from the colorwork band and the very top of the hat, the whole thing is worked in two-row stripes: you knit one row in a color, purl back, and then switch colors. Since the pattern expects you to do a random permutation of seven or eight colors, this means you end up weaving in ends every other row. And since this is worked flat, all the ends get woven in on the same side of the hat, meaning you get some weird extra-thick patches in the fabric. I did my best to counteract this by weaving in a few ends after sewing up the back seam, but I think, again, it would have worked better in the round, since the ends would have been woven in in a sort of stripe up the back.

 

The strangest thing about this, though, is that I can't find any reason not to knit this hat in the round.  I think it would have been faster, since you don't have to worry about sewing up the back seam, and the cast-on part, when you're adding the ear flaps, could have gone much more smoothly. The run-the-yarn-through-remaining-stitches cast-off at the top would have looked more natural. And, perhaps most importantly, the finished hat wouldn't have a seam running up the back, perfectly placed to irritate any wearer who wants to lean backwards against something. The colorwork band would also be a little more versatile, since, as it stands, only an even-rowed pattern works without getting a single-row stripe in there somewhere (or adjusting the decreases or changing the yarn at the other end of each row). The only benefit I can see to knitting this thing flat is that some newer knitters have issues with working in the round. But the book as a whole is really not geared to new knitters, so. . . the pattern perplexes me.

There's one more thing: the crochet edging. The pattern calls for  two rows of double crochet (well, one of double and one of reverse double), but the pictures in the book look like single crochet to me. When I tried the double crochet edging, it looked grotesquely wide. I pulled it out and did a single crochet border, because I can do what I want with my knitting.

I think I'm going to make this hat again, but knit it in the round. I think, with a little bit of tweaking, it will be just as pleasant to knit as to see.

So, my thoughts on the book so far:

I really like the idea behind it. I like the idea of a whole book dedicated to fun projects: some useful, some simply cute or pretty or funny. I like the way the book talks about knitting; it's romantic, in the way that Nigella Lawson cookbooks are romantic about food. I like the whimsy – there's a pattern for little sweaters to keep soft-boiled eggs warm, for example.

The book doesn't deliver on clarity, though. The yarns are not listed by weight, but rather by manufacturer, and as it was published almost twenty years ago,  there's no guarantee that any given yarn is still being made. There is a gauge listed, which means it's possible to make a rough guess, but. . . this seems like carelessness to me. As mentioned in my previous post, some of the notes on finishing are sparse. I had to guess how to put on the last button of the Baby Sweater of Doom, and I'm still not sure I did it correctly. Some of the projects are rather dated, but that's only to be expected at this point in time, and most of that can be fixed with a little imagination as to color palettes. The patterns are written by an assortment of designers, and I don't know how much they were edited for consistency, so it may be that I've just managed to make some of the more obtuse patterns. Again, I didn't have any trouble with the flower washcloth.

All in all, I like it. But I wouldn't give this book to a beginner.

Maybe one of the future patterns will change my mind. I think I'm going to make the checkerboard next.