Experimental Knititng

 I recently learned a whole new knitting stitch! I can purl!

Yes, this does mean I have only been knitting with one stitch for the last ten years.

For anyone reading this who actually knits, I will wait for you to stop laughing.

....


Anyway, I started experimenting with ribbing for hats.

I had some red yarn, but not enough to do a big project, so I thought I'd do a hat.

Part way through, I realized I probably didn't have enough to finish the hat, so I started doing stripes.

And then I was having fun with stripes, so I didn't want to stop...

Choclo loved his crazy hat!


So then Oob wanted one!

 But he wanted three colors!

So that was pretty fun, and actually very quick - it probably takes me two evenings to make a crazy hat.

I'm working on one for Leena now!

But I learned I could do more with purling: I did a scarf alternating two knits and two purls, and it had a lovely "popcorn" texture (the number of stitches was not divisible by four or it would have come out "ribbed").

What else could I do?

The colors are really much darker than this

Was it possible to do vertical stripes? Alternating knits and purls gives you "ribs" that are like vertical stripes.

Could I do them in different colors?

Wow!  It came out plaid!

I showed it to my FIL and my friend Bill and they thought I had knitted a Black Watch Tartan scarf!








So that's been fun, although I did the scarf very long and wide, so it took about a month.

I was trying to use up some of my donated yarn stash.  It's mostly normal weight yarn, and I like to knit with chunkier yarns, so I usually use three or four strands when I use it.

With this scarf, each color was three strands, so I was knitting off of six skeins.  That  got a bit unwieldy.  I had planned to knit to the end of the skeins, but, near the end, the I was getting everything tangled and the scarf was getting both long and a little heavy, so I stopped!

A successful experiment!