Bandit is the third asymmetrical hat that I have designed in the past three years.

The first hat hasn’t made it online yet, though one version (in Malabrigo Worsted) has seen a season of snowboarding under my helmet, and another version (in Green Mountain Spinnery’s Alpaca Elegance) went home with Zoe of Three Bags Full because she loved its flattering fit.

The second hat has turned out to be popular: Piper, published online in the Fall 2009 issue of Twist Collective.

And this, the third? Well… I have high hopes that it will do as well as, or even surpass, Piper.

Piper IS pretty cool (okay, I’m secretly THRILLED at how many people like Piper…) but it is also a fairly girly, dress-up-ish hat, with a strong vintage flavour. Bandit is also cool, but in a more daily-wearable way: the saucy styling will go well with a sporty outfit when knit in something tweedy (as shown) or you could choose a smoother yarn in a glam colour and knit a sleek hat for dressier occasions!

Bandit is also flexible in the way it can be worn, and I wish I had thought to take a picture when Francesca of Three Bags Full popped it on her head with the narrow part forward. Again with the comparison: if you did this with Piper, the turban effect would be pretty powerful. With Bandit, it is a much subtler flavour: is it a turban reference? Or does it suggest the bandanna of Rosie The Riveter? Or something rockabilly?

I’m looking forward to seeing the photos that will be appearing on Ravelry soon, from all of my test knitters. This round of pattern production saw two hats and a hooded scarf all ready to go in early September, and I made use of Ravelry’s Testing Pool, Hats Hats Hats, and Just A Scarf groups to find testers. 24hours after I posted a request for testers, I had 20+ responses! A couple of testers haven’t returned my emails since the initial pattern sendout, but the rest have come through with questions, comments, suggestions, red and blue and green ink, and a glorious amount of support for my designwork.

I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the work these people have done on my behalf, and just for the love of knitting (and as many of my patterns as they’d like…), the challenge of working through a possibly-glitchy pattern, and the desire to mark up other people’s writing with red ink all over the place! Bandit in particular was suffering from some small holes near the top of the band, where I had failed to write down the correct type of short-row wrap, and both hats had issues related to lazy cut-and-pasting - when I start writing up a new pattern, I’ll often begin with an older pattern of mine and just replace the instructions - in these cases, some uncorrected issues included confusiong statements about which size of needles to use (even though the hats only use one size) and how to use the cast-on tail to do something that it really really can’t.

I feel like my brain is overflowing with design ideas.. and I’m glad to have brought this one to life! I hope you enjoy

Visit Bandit’s pattern page for more details on the project, and for the link to purchase and download through Ravelry.

Several months ago, a shipment of Koigu arrived at Three Bags Full. Luckily I was working that day, so I got to spend most of my five-hour shift unpacking the boxes and rearranging the new colours up on our Wall of Glory (which is what I call the Koigu section in my head)!

We have a Charlotte’s Web shawl in the shop, so I began playing with combinations of colour, in groups of five skeins each. I started adding extra skeins (since that shawl is a bit undersized for me), and wound up with a group of nine that I really loved. Turning to Francesca, I asked if I could design something using the nine, in a beginner-friendly pattern. She gave me the go-ahead, and off I went! About a week later, the wrap was complete and blocked, and it was AMAZING!

Did I mention that the project is all-knit, all-the-time? Yes, NO PURLING!

The double-stranded Koigu blocks out to have a lovely drape, but still springy and stretchy and cozy and full of OOOOHness! (technical term there, “oooohness”) Since the sample wrap has been living in the shop, many of our customers have put together their own colour choices, and getting to see each new wrap has been a lot of fun!

Some hints for choosing nine colours: pick a skein you love, pick another one that you think will look good next to your skin, and pick a third that will be a darker anchor at the hem of the shawl. Now, fill in the gaps: find colours that bridge the gap from one to the next, sharing a few colours in common with the skeins on each side. Don’t be afraid if one colour seems to jump out a bit - this adds a visual sparkle to your wrap!

This is a free download, available through Ravelry (though you don’t need to be a member). If you ARE a Ravelry member, it would be great to see your completed project photos! If you aren’t on Ravelry, what’s keeping you?!

Click here for Free Download of ColourFlow Wrap pattern.

Go here to see the Colourflow Wrap project page on Ravelry. Hopefully others will post their projects quickly so we can all ooh and aah over the glorious colours!

Many thanks to Megan McPeak for allowing me to take photos during the final stage of her project!

Now, the tutorial! Please note that this does not include enough information to create the wrap, you will need to download the PDF and read through the pattern to get started. This WILL help you out when it comes to the final stages of cutting and fringing. Enjoy!

After you unravel the final 10 stitches, the 11th loop should be at the top of the column of twisted stitches.

The tail end of yarn has been threaded through the last live stitch, so all cast-off stitches are now secured and will not unravel. Live stitches on the left will be unravelled after cutting, to become the fringe!

The white arrows indicate the columns of wrapped stitches. The cut line is 10 stitches away from each of these columns.

The pink line shows the column of knit stitches that you can follow as you cut. Untie any knots as you come to them, and trim these after the fringe has been knotted.

Starting at the end with live stitches, pull out one row of stitches at a time until you have reached the cast-on edge (which gets pulled out, too!)

Whee! Isn't it nice to have this happen on purpose, instead of by accident?

Make the first layer of knots close to the knitted fabric, using 8 strands for each knot. Fudge the number of strands as you get close to the end if needed (your row count may differ from mine). You can see how the first bundle in the second row of knots is thicker than the rest - this will be true of the first and last bundle, as they will have all the strands of the edge bundle plus half of its neighbour. You can choose to knot all of the first row before beginning the second row, it won't affect the final outcome.

PS - wondering about the spelling? You say Colorflow, I say Colourflow - ’cause I’m Canadian, eh?

When the Spring 2008 issue of Knitty with Laminaria appeared, I fell in love with the lace edging of this shawl. I tried swatching it, using some fingering weight hemp. It didn’t go well. (I’m sure you are surprised.)

I did have other yarn possibilities in my stash, of course, but nothing that was the same teal-green as the hemp… and the whole seaweed-like look of the shawl was what I found so appealing. So, this project didn’t really get off the ground.

Last night I was browsing Ravelry, looking at patterns for tank tops and camisoles (and having a good laugh at the other projects in the ‘Naughty’ catagory). A few caught my eye, but I realized that I would probably have to strike out on my own path to make the lacy summer top I was searching for: large, graphic motifs with an interesting border. Hm. Sound like a shawl we know?

Today wound up being a vacation day for me: no work, no commitments (”no, honey, you go buy seeds for the garden.. I’m going to stay in bed and read until I feel like getting up!”), just doing whatever amount of puttering through chores I felt like (which means the studio is much closer to done, but not done, and the living room hasn’t fully recovered from the Triple C craft night on Thursday), and making stuff for ME! (okay, I admit that the spinning has had more photos of it taken than usual, while I ponder whether I want to write something for Knittyspin, and I swapped a few emails about pool work back and forth with my supervisor, but that was it)

The result? I’ve got a generous swatch of the blossom and border charts knit up on 4mm needles in SeaSilk (in a off-white, cream and pale gold mix, possibly destined for overdyeing) and now blocking overnight. The last few rows seemed to take forever, but the pattern looks awesome, and I’m looking forward to plotting my summer top.

Veronique? Well, she got a few more inches done during the Triple C, but I’m a bit fed up with having to pay attention while I knit. Knitting, all knit stitches, I can usually do without looking. The lovely boucle yarn is unfortunately too easy to snag, so I would catch a loop instead of a stitch if I dared look away, so… it may become a second-string project for a while. Then again, watching knit stitches is still easier than reading a chart line-by-line, so it may not be fully doomed after all.

I guess we’ll see! Oh, PS: new episode of the ChristaKnits podcast is out - check iTunes (it has been so long, I wouldn’t blame you if you had unsubscribed) or visit the Podcast page for the link!

C woke me up this morning, because I was apparently making unhappy moaning sounds. He asked if I was having a bad dream, and once I sorted out in my brain that that was the first sentence in our real conversation, I was able to figure out that I had just been dreaming that I was showing him my latest pattern. My latest pattern that had been FORMATTED INCORRECTLY! Oh, the horror.

This is the sort of thing that I think about, as I try to build my work as a self-published designer: are my patterns easy to read? Are they nice to look at? Are they consistent, so I don’t have to continually decide what goes where each time I sit down to write one up?

One of the decisions I’m faced with right now is whether I want to go back and rework all of my old patterns to fit into my current formatting, or just make them available as-is. On the one hand, it would feel good to have a library of work that I’m totally happy with. On the other side, it will be a chunk of work time that could be spent elsewhere, on new designs or finishing this website or working up another submission for a magaine.

Comments are welcome, what do you think?