Double cabled version of the basic slouch hat recipe

 

 

CO 96 to smaller circ (4 or 5mm)
1x1 rib moving onto one size larger circ in first row for 12 rows (k1, p1 all rows)
Row 1 k1, kfb to end (144 stitches)
Rows 2 &3 rows k8, p18,k4 to end
Row 4 cable row: purl all purl stitches. On k8 sets C4F, C4B. On K4 sets C4F.
Rows 5-10 rows k8, p18,k4 to end
Row 11 cable row as above.
Row 12,13,14 k8, p18,k4 to end
Row 15 cable row - cable only 4 stitch cables, so K8, P18, C4F to end
Row 16, 17,18, k8, p18,k4 to end
Row 19 cable row as for row 4
Row 20 start to decrease, purling two together each side of 4 stitch cables - so in this row K8, P14, P2tog twice, K4, P2tog twice, P14 (repeat to end)
Rows 21, & 22 continue to decrease
Row 23 cable row and decrease row - cable only 4 stitch cables, so K8, P to 4 before next set of knit stiches P2 tog twice, C4F, P2 tog twice, purl on to next knit stitches
Row 24, 25,26 continued decreaing as per row 20
Row 27 - cable row and crecrease row with both cables cabled
Row 28, stepped up the decrease purling all purl stitches 2 together. On the 8 stitch knit cable section K2tog, K4, SSK, on four stitch K2tog, SSK
Row 29 again step up the decrease. Purl at purl stitches 2tog, On larger cable section K2tog twice, SSK, on smaller cable K2tog.
Cut long tail, thread onto tapestry needle, thread through all remaining stitches, pull off needle and cinch tight.
Weave in ends

The easy cabled slouch hat

A recipe for a cabled slouch hat        

Side view of the double cabled version of the hat

Rather than presciptive patterns I believe in recipes that help understand how projects are constructed and help you make them your own.

Yarn: Sirdar bonus Aran
Needle: 5mm circular (and also a 4/4.5 mm if you'd like a tighter fit).
Notions and skills: working in the round, increasing and decreasing, cablingHat brim
Cast on 96 stitches. Use your smaller needle if you want a tighter fit or for a small size. I have a very little head and find a hat knitted with a 5mm blows off in a breeze! I always circular knit and usually need magic loop this bit until I do the increases, but it will depend on the length of your cable. Place marker on the start of the row.

Next 12 rows work 1x1 rib i.e. K1, P1 to end. Switch to the larger needle on the last row (if using) by simply knitting from one to the other.
Make it your own
Try on you hat at this point - it will probably feel a bit loose but should sit relaxed on your head. Too big? You might need to start again and reduce the stitches by ten. Too small? do the opposite. All you need to do with the pattern is add or take away stitches from the purled area - one from each repeat will give you ten more or less overall. So when the pattern reads purl 11 all you have to do is purl 10 (if you want ten less) or 12 (if you want 10 more).

The starfish version of the hat

Make it your ownThe pattern as written is divided by 10 starfish "legs" or cable sections - 10 repeats of knit 4 purl 11. You can easily change the pattern by doing some simple maths. Just decide on a cable pattern - how many stitches does it have and how many times do you want to repeat it? In another version of the hat I did 6 cables; 3 each of 4 and 8 stitches (36 stitches). If I had used the same basic increase (I did in fact do it slightly differently) it would have left me with 96 purl (reverse stockinette) stitches to distibute between the knit (stockinette) stich sections - so 19 stitches for each of the 6 sections.. The number of rows here is also up to you - add a few more for a deeper, more bag-like slouch, or keep it short for a slouchy beret shape. The pictures as shown and pattern as written are the shorter version. Simply add another repeat (or more than one) of rows 1-6. Keep trying the hat on though to make sure it looks how you want it. You can also throw in more cable rows - every 3 or 4 rows instead of every 6 - if you want a more of a rope effect and less of a starfish leg.

This version has six cables 3 each of a simple 4 stitch cable and 3 of a double cable. I used decreases on either side on the four stitch cables rather than just to one side and did more repeats on the cable rows.

         

Hat body
Increase row. *K1, KFB (knit stitch forward and back), *repeat 6 times. Then K2 and then KFB all the way round for one round (you should end up with 150 stitches). This then filled my medium sized circular needle and I switched from magic looping to knitting round and round here which prevents any ladders.

Count your stitches when you have completed your increase. If you are anything like me you won't have exactly the number you should have. If it is just one or two over or under just correct by knitting or purling 2 together or increasing by KFB in the next row. It is unlikely to show. If you are a perfectionist you'll have to tink back to your mistake and try again... If you are out by a larger factor, rip it back and start again or simply recalculate the pattern to distribute the stitches you do have evenly (e.g. add or take away another stitch to each - or every other - purl section As long as you take a note of what you have decided you should be fine.Row 1 -5 . Purl 11 knit 4* purl 11 *(repeat to end).
Cable Row Row 6. On the next row I purled 11, *cabled 4 forward (slip 2 onto cable needle, knit two, knit two from cable needle) purl 11 *(repeat to end).

Rows 6-12. Purl 11 knit 4* purl 11 *(repeat to end).
Cable Row Row 13 Purl 11*cable4 forward (slip 2 onto cable needle, knit two, knit two from cable needle) purl 11 *(repeat to end).

DecreasingPart 1
Purl 2 together purl remaining 9 knit 4* , purl 2 together purl 9 *(repeat to end). On the folIowing rows purl 2 together on either side of your cable (the 4 knit stitches, continuing to work until you have only 2 stitches of purl on either side of the knit stitches (at some point during this process you may need to switch back to magic loop if using a longer circular needle). Part 2
Row 1 Purl 2, knit 1, ssk , knit 1 purl 2 *(repeat to end).
Row 2 Purl 2, k1, ssk, purl 2.
Row 3 Purl , ssk, purl 2

Finishing
You should have just a few stitches (10 or fewer should do it) left on each needle at this point and the hole in the crown should be small. If you have been improvising and it's not quite like this yet, keep decreasing until it is. Cut the yarn with a long tail, threaded onto tapestry needle, run it through the stitches, pull them off the needle, cinch the hole shut and weave in the ends

If you used a wool yarn you can use the magic of blocking to stretch or shrink your work at this point if you need to!

The learn to knit Afghan AKA "The dog's dinner"

The learn to knit afghan/blanket AKA "The Dog's Dinner"        

I have knitted on and off - badly - and in a very limited way since I was a child. The time came, when after knitting a million garter stitch scarves I thought I would learn to do more. So I decided to do SOMETHING ELSE. But I couldn't concieve of knitting a hat, let alone a jumper - what did all those abbreviations in the patterns mean anyway? So I got a few books from the library and started to knit a few flat swatches of different stitches, learning what the abbreviations meant as I went as a new stitch called for a new technique.

I started off with just the combinations of knit and purl stitches with just a couple of different rows to the pattern. As I gained confidence I then moved onto then more complicated gansey patterns and then on to try every technique from cabling, slip-stitching, fair-isle to intarsia. After just a few bits I was hooked and realised I couldn't throw all my beautiful samples away. I had to do something with them. This was the birth of the dog's dinner - a recipe that is ideal for any beginner knitter to work their way through some new techniques in a painless way.

Here's the recipe for your own dog's dinner

Needles :

what have you got? I used 9mm straight needles for the super chunky yarns, 5/6mm needles for the aran yarns and 4mm needles for the DK/sport yarns. Oh yes there is also a really dodgy bit of crochet on a 5mm hook 'cos I thought "what the hell" and I had a go at that too.
Yarns:

Same story here. You can use any scraps you can cadge and I started off with a few really small squares of DK and even lighter weight yarns that I had from making chilrens scarves. A big light went on when I realised that CHUNKY YARNS MAKE FABRIC REALLY FAST!!!! And so I moved on to super chunky for most of the blanket, which makes it absolutely the softest and most cuddly thing on earth. It also meant I could make a new section a night easily even when I was still really slow at working out how to create a new stitch pattern. Most satisying. So essentially you can use any amount of any colour and any weight.

Resources:

a good stitch library website or a book. I mostly used Knit Stitches a visual Encyclopedia and the online stitch library on Knitting Pattern Central.

Method:

At first I was completely random in how much I knitted and of what. But I soon realised that if I ever wanted to sew this together into something approaching a regular rectangle, I probably needed to end up with roughly even-sized panels. So I took one panel of super chunky and made this my template.

Every panel thereafter was made to match this reference piece for size as closely as possible. Another Eureuka moment was when I realised thatmany knitting stitches only work on repeats on certain number of stitches (yes really, I didn't know this). As it happens this was a 17 stitch wide panel so I looked for stitch patterns that could fit into this - or one stitch either side (i.e. 16 or 18 wide). I soon realised that cable patterns pull in a lot width ways so for these I added a few extra stitches and held the first couple of rows against my reference piece to see if I had guessed correctly. I never counted the number of rows - I just held a new piece up against my reference panel to see if it seemed long enough, allowing a row for the cast-off. I took all the smaller bits I had made and blanket sewed them together to make panels the same size - making the odd bit especially to make up gaps. Every panel featured a different stitch pattern.

List of some of the stitch patterns used (I'm still adding to this so it's not exhaustive yet):

Knit and purl combinations:

Garter stitch stripes

Chevrons

Basketweave

Gansey anchor pattern

also:

• moss stitch
• stockinette stitch
• seed stitch
• wide rib
• 2x2 rib
• bell rib (this could also be classified as a lace stitch as it involves additional skills)

Bobble and texture  patterns:

• basic bobble stitch
• bobble stitch star panel
• rosette stitch
• tweed stitch
• star stitch

Cable patterns:

• 3 x 4 stitch cables
• 1 x 6 stitch cable
• braided cable
• 1 x 12 stitch cable
• basic open cable (based on the bobble cable in the knitting stitches encyclopedia just omitting the bobbles)
• Nautical cable
• long and short cable

Intarsia and stranded colourwork (from the  knitting stitches encyclopedia)

• star pattern
• heart pattern
• rectangles stranded colour pattern 10
• flower stranded colour pattern 18

Lace patterns

• drop stitch garter
• bedjacket stitch

Sizing:

My reference panel was about 20 cm wide by 25 long so I decided to make my blanket six of these panels by four so I made up 24 in total, although some of these were in turn made up of smaller swatches . This was enough to wrap around one adult comfortably. You can make your reference panel any size and make the blanket up of any number of panels to make anything from the dog's blanket to a bedspread. Leave nice long ends of yarns each panel to sew them together with.

Colour and design: Why should the dog care? But if you do.....I went with a basic two colour design of blue and cream but in pretty much any shade of blue I liked from pale to darkest blue although all soft toned blues. I added just a couple of highlights of jade green and a couple of bits of multicoloured yarn, which had a blue running through it to tie it in. Other options that should work harmoniously
* One colour in every shade of that colour
* Multi-coloured but using the same depth of tone (so pastels or clashing rainbow brights)
* Monochromes - black, white and all shades of grey
*Any single colour with white/cream or black/grey

Constructing:

One thing I was thinking about of during the project was that your "normal" pattern doesn't really use wools of different weights in the same piece. I was concerned that the weight of the chunky panels would pull on the finer fabrics and distort them. Also I didn't want the edges to feel thin. So I decided to make sure that the patchwork panels of smaller stuff were in the middle surrounded by chunky panels, and separated by them as much as I could. I added chunky bits to the edges of some of the panels so that where two thinner panels were adjacent they had some thicker bits to hold them together. This seems to be holding up OK. Obviously if you use all the same weight of wool you won't have this problem.

Also I tried, whilst deciding where to place each panel, to put those that had come out thinner next to those that had come out fatter to even out the sizing. It worked well enough for me, but then you may have noticed I'm not the perfectionist type.

Making up: I simply sewed every panel together with blanket stitch using the end yarns where I had left them long enough and wove in the ends . There is a technique to weaving in - have a look at some you-tube tutorials. This had the effect of blocking some of the lace stitch bits and tighter patterns because they were stretched to fit the adjacent panels. It can also be good to do this a bit at a time as you go because it is a long old job if you are doing a big peice. I didn't block the end piece but I daresay it would look better if I did....

Below is a plan of how I put the pieces together (by weight of wool)