Prairie Knitter

It’s knit in the round for double thickness and it is a whopping 8 x 68 inches! Otherwise known as the BIG ASS SCARF. But I’m digressing from the hat…

I’m doing the garter stitch hat from The Yarn Girls Guide to Simple Knits because….I needed a garter stitch hat to match the garter stitch scarf. Man, I haven’t knit this much garter stitch since I don’t know when. It feels kind of like I’m regressing as a knitter to be knitting so much freakin’ garter stitch.

The only exciting thing about this hat was that I was going to modify the pattern to accommodate the yarn I wanted to use. See, the pattern calls for two strands of yarn held together to create a gauge of 4 stitches per inch. Since I knew that I’d get more than 4 stitches per inch with ONE strand of Cascade, I thought I’d get to use the handy dandy guide to pattern modifications found in Stitch ‘N Bitch Nation. You know, take your row gauge x your stitch gauge divided by your height in centimeters and added to the national deficit minus 10% of….

Sorry. Got confused. Anyway, I was really, seriously going to follow SnBN’s guidelines except…..Dammit! I made gauge with one strand of Cascade. That’s right. One strand of Cascade does equal 4 stitches per inch in garter stitch since garter stitch is wider than stockinette! Duh! This is the only time in the history of my hobby that I’ve been unhappy about making gauge on the first try.

So the only interesting part of knitting this hat is gone. Consequently, I have accomplished only this much in one week: Does it look like a hat to you? Me neither.

Since I don’t have a stunning finished hat to show off, I thought I’d display some other garter stitch projects from my past. First is the very first thing I ever knitted, the oh-so-creatively titled Go-Go Garter Stitch Scarf from SnB the Original:
I didn’t have access to Blue Sky Alpaca so I substituted with Rowan Polar. Nice and warm. Love to touch it. Notice the fuck-up on my first ever color change that I didn’t go back to fix because I had worked on this thing for hours and couldn’t bear to unravel it.
Second example of garter stitch: The Frida Poncho from MagKnits, knit in red Cascade 220 (noticing a trend here?) last November. I loved knitting this poncho, not because of the garter stitch, but because of the little leaf pattern. I think it’s such a creative motif, and I guess a lot of other people do too, because I’ve been seeing it on a lot of bloggers’ scarves since this issue of MagKnits came out.

Extreme close-up of motif:

# posted by katie @ 11:39 AM