I marvel over the abundance of knitting patterns online. Whether free or not knitters are strutting their creativity. Today you give a knitter a pattern and they more often then not tinker with it, individualizing it with yarn choices, colors, sizing or embellishments, adding even more to the creative pool. Sometimes this tinkering is necessary as when a better fit is needed - the case with my recently finished Elusive Blue Rose Hat.
I found Jana Pihota’s free pattern for the hat while searching Ravelry for knitters’ projects using Louisa Harding’s Kashmir Aran. From its picture I thought it was an attractive, slightly unusual hat. What really convinced me to knit it was the designer’s statement that the rose was an integral part of the hat, not a separate piece tacked on at the end. Reading the pattern alone didn’t fully answer the question of how, only knitting it would.
The first thing I tinkered with was the size of the recommended needle. The pattern called for a US 5 (3.75mm) circular needle, a size really too small for Kashmir Aran. I got my gauge on a US 8 (5mm). I was concerned about the snugness of the hat’s ribbed band so I used a US 7 (4.5mm) for it, knitting off the US 7 onto to the US 8 when the rib was complete.
Right away I saw how the rose worked. I was to knit a portion of my cast on stitches in rib and a portion in stockinette. I was not to knit in the round but back and forth in rows until this band was complete. When I was instructed to rapidly decrease the stockinette portion by knitting stitches together over two rows I noticed the stockinette portion begin to spiral, hinting at the rose it was to become. On the final row of the band I bound off the remaining stockinette stitches, leaving the rib stitches live. I knit these stitches onto my 16˝ circular US 8 and joined these stitches to work the rest of the hat in the round. The gap between the rib and now spiraling stockinette band would be seamed.
The rose’s stem was a simple matter of working yarnovers on every round, moving the yarnover one stitch to the left and finishing up at the start of the crown shaping. Here I tinkered again knitting to a depth of 6.25˝ from the bottom edge. I anticipated that the instructions as written would give me a hat so deep that it would slip down to the top of my eyes. And again I compensated for the depth by working only knit rounds between the first three crown decreases, not between all decrease rounds.
The two leaves were knit separately and sewn on. As suggested by the designer I used the tail of each leaf and running stitch to simulate leaf veins to sew them on. The “rose” coiled easily and I used its tail to tack it into place at the lower end of the stem.
I went back to Ravelry to view the results of other knitters. One knitter had tinkered with the pattern and knit the rose in color different than the hat. Now knowing how to knit rose and hat as one this tinkering was deceptively easy and yet so imaginative. |
