Finished Object: Frostfangs Hat in Knit Picks Chroma (Midwinter)

As my birthday gift to myself, I wrapped up the Frostfangs hat on Monday morning. The entire hat took me ~30 hours to knit total, which is, in my opinion, a rather long time for a hat. However, the Knit Picks Chroma remained a delight to work with and the Palette did it’s job as a phenomenal yarn for stranding (as advertised).

I did cut the pattern a bit short (though not much), as I thought the hat was getting a bit long. Turned out to be just the right length. Also, with the addition of my 40 extra rows of Palette to add an extra layer of warmth, I did *almost* run out of the contrast colour yarn (I made it though). I definitely have enough Chroma left over to make at least one, if not two, if not possibly three hats, so it’s a pretty good deal if you can buy 1 ball of $10 yarn and get 3 hats out of it.

The best part, I think, is that while the pattern wasn’t written with Chroma in mind, it might as well have been. It was the perfect length to go through exactly one cycle of the colour gradation in the Chroma yarn and I think it looks absolutely stunning. A bit like the northern lights.



I took it for a test drive the past few days here in the -10F (-23C) Minnesota windchill, and with the double layer of Palette plus the stranding across the back, it kept me pretty warm (at least in combination with my hood). I’m not sure I’d trust it at much colder temps than that, but there comes a point where pretty much no hat is going to help you out. If you live in less extreme conditions, this is probably a really great hat all winter long. My only gripe with my decision to use Palette as the foldover colour is that because it is 100% wool, it’s very itchy against my forehead. I have hope that with time and a little wool wash (I didn’t block it because I couldn’t wait to just get it on my head and out into the world) it may soften up and my itching will be minimized.

I leave you with a final shot of the hat in action as it accompanied me on my adventures:

Head Over Heels in LOVE with Knit Picks Chroma

WIP: Frostfangs Hat - Knitting Therapy (or, Tiny Yarn is Maddening)

After a bit of a saga involving the second Who scarf (which, again, I was already tired of dealing with) I got a bit of a break on the insane deadline of end of January, and I decided to make proper use of it by doing fun things.

Back in June, I saw a post on Tumblr about a super fantastic pseudo-Song of Ice and Fire inspired hat, the Frostfangs hat, and decided I must have it. I paid the very modest $3 fee to download the pattern…and I haven’t touched it since.


The problem is that the background variegated yarn used in the pattern is a hand-dyed Tri’Coterie Sock MCN in Glacial (gradient from white to dark blue) that I can’t get anymore. For many people this wouldn’t be a problem, but as I don’t make socks, I don’t work with fingering weight yarn, and I don’t work with anything self-striping, I didn’t really know where to go about finding alternatives. I did round up the required Knit Picks Palette yarn that I needed (it’s been sitting in my stash bin since sometime in July), but I didn’t have the main colour I needed for the hat, so I had sort of abandoned it.

Until the Knit Picks sale in November…

While browsing the sale yarns to see if anything caught my fancy (boy howdy, did it), I came across the Knit Picks Chroma fingering yarn in a colourway called Midwinter.



Midwinter! I thought to myself. Why, midwinter seems perfect for a North inspired ASOIF hat! And while you can see that it is not nearly as blue as the yarn used in the original, I do believe that the striping this is producing is going to be an absolute beauty.

So, I ordered it. Two skeins, in fact. Despite the fact that I won’t need more than half a skein for a hat. I figured, this deal is pretty good, and what if I want to put them on Etsy? So I bought two. (I have since bought a similar colourway (Wildwood) at yet another Knit Picks sale…bless those people.) And then it sat. Because I was busy making these 4th Doctor scarves and all that business.

While I was waiting for yarn to arrive as part of my great yarn saga of 2014 (which seems to have ended a bit more poorly than I hoped it would), I needed an interim project. I had cast on and done 2/3 of another Elvhen Triangle scarf, just to have one around since the other one I have belongs to me and I’m offering them for sale, so I should probably have a stash. The Lion Brand Homespun I’m using for them (what the pattern called for) is making me ANGRY though (knitting with that yarn is a wholly frustrating experience) so I might try to find an equivalent yarn that doesn’t make me want to throw it across the room. That’s a tangent though. Regardless, I had 2/3 of one done and I took a break to cast on for the second scarf before I finished it, so I put it on hiatus in the ottoman.

And then I didn’t have the red yarn for the Who scarf.

I knew that I needed to start something else while I was waiting because Minneapolis was embroiled in something called a “Polar Vortex” and I was basically housebound for five days without the yarn I needed. But, instead of doing the responsible thing and going back and finishing the ETS, I did the fun thing and looked at my stash and said, “Frostfangs!” So I pulled out the Chroma and I pulled out the Palette and I pulled out my circular needle kit and I set down to get to work.

…four hours later I had attempted knitting approximately 8 swatches, decided that I hated tiny needles, reinforced my hatred of this circular needle kit where the needles *unscrew* as you are knitting and then the yarn gets snagged on them (which is, I learned, 4000 times bigger of a problem with tiny yarn), went to the store to get proper circular needles because the damned kit needles made me actually have to cut the yarn off of them, finally cast on and knitted like 20 rows (which is an unsatisfying length of hat when you’re using fingering weight yarn!) realized it was moebiused, tried again, worked very hard not to moebius, moebiused anyway, took a break for the night, started over AGAIN the next day, and managed to make it through the 40 rows of stockinette grey for the lining and a bit of the way into the actual pattern (over the course of 12 hours of knitting…TINY YARNS) before my new red yarn arrived and I had to take a break.

But! Despite the setbacks and despite the fact that usually when I think “knit this hat” I’m figuring a one or two evening adventure at most, I couldn’t stop thinking about this project the whole time I was working on the scarf. I just really wanted to finish this thing.

Then, yesterday, when there was a lot of fallout and a bit of frustration, all of which ended in me saying I needed to not knit this scarf for a while, I made the decision to take a break on the scarf until I finish my Frostfangs hat. Three more hours of work yesterday and today, and it’s looking pretty fantastic. I just really can’t wait until I get it done. I’m in LOVE with this chroma yarn (it’s making me want to actually knit socks), and the Palette really is the greatest for stranding and fair isle work. The only problems I’ve got are that it sort of takes FOREVER to make a hat out of fingering weight yarn, I feel like I might run out of Palette (despite the fact that the pattern says I shouldn’t even need a whole skein)—that’s my fault, really. I did add quite a bit of extra at the beginning to the bits where you need to fold under to the inside though. I live in Minnesota. One layer of fingering weight wool/nylon between me and the outside world is a bit of a joke—and the NEAR CONSTANT ENTANGLEMENT of my yarn balls. If anyone has any good methods of working Fair Isle without constantly needing to stop and get your yarn balls out of their tangled up knots, please send them my way.

Best yet, though…this pattern has inspired me to draft some of my own patterns (alluded to previously). Also in the Knit Picks sales I picked up a bunch of different colorways of Imagination Hand Painted, and I can’t wait to start putting some logos on some hats/scarves/gloves. Problem is, I might need to use a yarn that’s NOT Palette as the base, since Palette takes FOREVER to knit up.

Anyway, here’s the WIP as of this morning. Can’t wait to share the finished product with you all!

WIP: The second 4th Doctor Scarf, mixed yarn, Cascade 220, and the great yarn saga of 2014

Since I ended last evening just a few rows over halfway done with the second of the two 4th Doctor scarf commissions I’ve got, I thought I’d give you a WIP update.

This is the scarf I committed to making BEFORE the first one, but then some stuff happened and I didn’t understand how custom ordering and Etsy work and a few other things and someone ended up ordering one before I could take the listing down. Which brings me to where I am today…making TWO 3.5+ metre long scarves between the beginning of December and the middle of January. It’s not a hard pattern, and it’s definitely not work I mind doing, since I can (and have!) literally knit these without looking at them, while watching TV, in the dark while riding in a car, and with my eyes closed as I try not to fall asleep, but I have to admit that I’m getting a bit tired of it. Mostly because I have all these new designs bouncing about in my head and I really want to get to them. But deadlines! And I honour my commitments!

So, this is also the first of these I’ve made in sport weight (though I argue that Cascade 220 Superwash is basically sport weight yarn) and the first one I’ve made with mixed yarn sources. In fact, it’s pretty much the first thing I’ve ever made with mixed yarn sources. I just don’t like the unknown terror of matching gauges across brands and the paralysing thought that one section of this is going to be way bigger than another and it’s going to look weird and be really obvious and… I’d continue, but I think you’re going with this. My OCPD tends to make me a bit of a brand loyalist.
Story behind the mixed media on this scarf goes as follows: I hadn’t advertised that I could do this in sport weight (mostly because knitting things in non-worsted weight yarn never occurs to me, okay?), but when the customer asked if it was possible, I immediately said yes. After all, Knit Picks makes the Wool of the Andes in sport weight too. NBD, right? Wrong. On top of the fact that this was all happening immediately after Knit Picks had their mega-huge sale and were basically out of everything, it turns out that they don’t have *all* the same colours in sport weight as they do in worsted. Whoops. Thankfully, this customer is super amazing and we worked out a deal where I would order the colours I could get from Knit Picks (green, yellow, red, purple) and the customer would hunt down the rest of the colours we’d found (thanks yet again to the awesome resource of doctorwhoscarf.com). I charged less for shipping because the customer had to pay to get yarn shipped from three different places and less overall because my yarn cost was smaller, and then everything was happily worked out.

Except, of course, that it wasn’t.

When it came time to do the Knit Picks order, they were out of the WotA Sport in Saffron. So…I had no red yarn. Being resourceful, and having just learned that Cascade 220 Superwash is the right color, and is basically sport weight yarn, and also happens to actually come in sport weight, I headed to the internet (same place I had ordered all the C220S for the previous scarf). By this time, I was nearly done with previous scarf and ready to ship. I knew that in order to keep my deadlines I’d have to cast on the next one as soon as I started blocking the first one, so I was a bit tight on time, but I was still waiting for the other three colours to arrive from the customer so I figured I was alright. So…instead of just ordering the C220S in worsted (yarn that I knew would work out) I thought to myself, but what if it’s not the right size? I should order sport weight! So I did. And I even used my coupon code for free shipping that I’d earned for spending $95 on my previous order. Very proud of myself, I awaited the yarn’s arrival.

Arrive it did. Except…and I realize this is my fault, really, but seriously the point of calling the yarn 220 is that there are 220 yards on a hank…the sport weight apparently comes in 136.5 yard hanks and not 220 yard hanks. I didn’t even check this because, seriously, 220. Considering I had used pretty much an entire hank of 220S on the last project (despite the pattern saying I would need 175…I blame Cascade. Knit Picks never does this to me.), I knew I didn’t have enough. I thought about re-ordering, but paying the shipping the second time around when I should have just ordered the right amount of yarn in the first place when I got free shipping would have angered me.
So I took to the streets. I searched all the LYS that said they carried Cascade. None of them had it. One store supposedly had 8 balls of it somewhere, but no one could find it. I mean, it’s not that burnt orange is a totally regular colour, but it’s not that weird. I wasn’t asking for the odd yellow colour. Still, not a one to be found.

Next step…Ravelry. No one had the right colour in C220S. No one had the right colour in C220S sport. No one had the right colour in C220 sport. Finally, the only ball I was able to track down in the allegedly right colourway (I’ll get to that later) was a Cascade 220 regular worsted weight in non-superwash. Which I had never used before, but I made yet another assumption that if the superwash was basically sport weight, then of course the regular was basically sport weight. It isn’t. TBH it isn’t even light worsted. I don’t know exactly what happens between the regular yarn and the addition of the superwash chemicals, but it sure as hell shrinks that yarn down something fierce. So, now here I am (a week behind schedule) with one obviously larger weight yarn amidst all my sport weights. It gets worse. Despite the fact that the “burnt orange” colourway in C220S is a delightful red with just a hint of orange in it, this C220 I was sent in “burnt orange” is basically just orange yarn.
Here is the end result of my yarn saga:



Now, as I’ve never seen another ball of C220 “burnt orange” in real life, I don’t know for certain whether the yarn I was sent was the wrong colour (the person I ordered it from had lost the tag) or Cascade just uses 4000% different dyes for two yarns with the same colourway name. Suffice to say…I will never use C220 (non-superwash) for this again, at least not until I can get it in my hand and see what colour it is.

But! I was behind schedule and it’s not the *most* wrong I’d ever seen someone get the red bits (despite the fact that people seem to be ordering these from me because I do a bang-up job of getting the colours proper right) and I just wanted to get going.

After I got a quarter of the way into the scarf, I turned to my husband and said…I think I want to rip this out. I hate this orange.

He talked me down. For better or worse. To my customer. I sincerely apologise for this HORRID yarn. I figured on-time shipping was better than another two weeks of setback for something that to people who aren’t me is probably close enough.

So I persevered worked a few 8 hour knitting days that every muscle in my upper back is still screaming at past-me about, and am mostly back on track.



As I feared, the gauges are slightly different so the edges aren’t stick straight (I’m counting on fixing this in blocking). The tan is too saturated for my liking and there’s that damnable orange yarn, but it’s coming along nicely. I’ve learned that I really, truly do love Knit Picks above all else. Whenever I reach a Knit Picks colour I just sort of coo at the delightful way it slides on the needles, the way it feels in my hands, and the perfect amount of tension in the knitting. The other new yarns are okay (Tan is Rowan Pure Wool DK - I would use a lighter colour next time. Plus it’s superwash so it has that weird feel that I’m starting to learn is just a feature of superwash yarn. Brown is Jamieson Shetland Double Knitting and it’s very scratchy wool and I sort of hate it. Grey is Dalegarn. Which I’ve oddly never used before. It’s wool. It’s fine. I don’t find it remarkable for any reason. It does knit up a bit bigger than the other sport weights, though. More often than not it’s the grey sections — more even than the orange bits — that are wider than the others.

I’ll give you another update when I get this done, but it’s going well and I’m making progress and I’ll hopefully not have to push myself so hard that I’m in physical pain for days on end and maybe I’ll learn to accept the orange (doubtful). For now…it is what it is.

Pattern Drafting OR I'M SO EXCITED FOR THIS NEXT PROJECT WHY CAN'T I JUST BE DONE WITH THOSE SCARVES?!?!

Since I needed to take a break from knitting today (because me trying to make up lost time on 4th Doctor Scarf #2 — more on that saga later— caused me to physically injure myself, and because I’ve pretty much had it up to here —insert your own hand marking graphic here— with these scarves right now), I took some time to get myself set up for my next exciting project.

As soon as I finish this scarf and then I finish the Frostfangs hat I started in interim, my next project  will be Game of Thrones related, and I needed to turn the house sigils into intarsia patterns. So today, while I was *not* knitting, I took an hour and a half, made a grid, and made three of the patterns I need. Now if only I could get these other projects to knit themselves so I could actually move on to these VERY EXCITING PROJECTS THAT I WANT TO MAKE SO VERY BADLY.

Cascade 220 Superwash and the Fourth Doctor

This is going to be a bit of a look-back post, as I’ve completed this project and shipped it out already, but I do want to document my thoughts regarding this new (to me) yarn.

Perhaps someday I will document the story of how I ended up promising to create two Doctor Who Season 12 4th Doctor scarves for two separate customers between the beginning of December and the end of January when I generally budget 4-6 weeks for each scarf, but I think that’s a post unto itself. Suffice to say, I’ve been knitting frantically at any available opportunity, and while I don’t mind making these scarves, as they are largely mindless work I can get done while watching telly or listening to podfic (or in the car, in the case of this superwash scarf), I don’t think I’ll be opening up the posting for a while. Sorry to those of you who may be waiting for one.

The second scarf I knit (back in August/September), I knit in Knit Picks Wool of the Andes in worsted weight and I absolutely fell in love with that yarn. It feels nice both pre- and post-blocking, it slides wonderfully on the needles, and it’s just generally a really fantastic wool to work with, especially for the price. So when it came time to list the scarves on my Etsy page, I thought I’d give people the option of having this knit in washable wool (planning on using Wool of the Andes superwash). Well, when an order came in for the scarf in superwash, I headed to the Knit Picks page and learned that Wool of the Andes superwash doesn’t come in all the colours I needed for the scarf, and I didn’t know the palettes well enough to figure out if I could get close enough. So, I had to ask the customer to pay a bit more for yarn (which I felt bad about, but he was very gracious) and I ordered the full color set in Cascade 220 Superwash (worsted weight).

The yarn came quickly, which is great because I was on a time crunch, and because I spent so much on yarn (the cost was $84), the shipping was free. Both positives, in my book. I was excited to work with the new yarn and see what it would knit up like and what the colour differences would be between the WotA scarf and the C220S (my new abbreviation system) scarf.



Here’s the new yarn. It’s a bit glossier than the WotA, at least on the skein. The green is very dark and the yellow and tan are often indistinguishable in certain lights. The biggest thing to note with this yarn is that while it is technically a worsted weight yarn, it’s a very light worsted weight, almost a DK. In fact, I have since ordered a skein of Cascade 220 superwash sport, and there is virtually no difference in yarn weight between the sport and the worsted, as far as I can tell.

As far as the yarn colorations go between the two brands, I do think the purple-red (marionberry in C220, currant in WotA) was far truer to the original show colors with the C220, but the green, yellow, and tan (Thyme, Turmeric, and Almond, respectively, in WotA) are definitely better in the Wool of the Andes colors.

As far as knitting up, I didn’t much like working with the C220S at first. It was very thin for worsted weight and it took me multiple swatches to get the gauge right (I usually knit very true to gauge). The superwash coating on the yarn makes it a bit slick so I found myself dropping stitches more easily than with the WotA. In addition, where the WotA seems to hold true to the yardages indicated in the pattern (using the pattern found on doctorwhoscarf.com), I either used far more yards than indicated on the pattern, or the balls are far fewer yards than they are supposed to be, as I actually ran out of green yarn before I reached the end of the pattern, and had to cut one of the sections short by a few rows. The pattern indicated that I would need 195 yards and the balls are supposed to be 220 yards. I also had just about enough yarn in grey, red, and purple (each with a 220 yard ball) when I was supposed to need 184, 177, and 137 yards, respectively. So either my gauge was completely off or something else went pretty wrong. I don’t think it would be worth ordering an extra ball of green in the future, as I was only off by 8 rows, but it is something that bothered me.

Blocking: This is my new nemesis when it comes to this yarn. It’s machine washable, so I debated just shoving it in a pillowcase and running it through a wash cycle, but I was worried about the yarn stretching oddly so I handwashed and pinned it instead. Turns out my first instinct would have yielded better results. The yarn opens up A LOT when blocked (it was significantly longer than the WotA scarf I made once it was blocked), which is fine, but my primary problem was that when I pinned my beautifully, consistently straight edges after handwashing the scarf, the rows shrunk up a bit horizontally as they dried and left the edges horribly uneven. I fixed it as best I could, but short of another re-blocking, this time with a run through the washer and a reshaping, nothing would fix the edges. So next time I either need to just let it shape itself and not pin the edges as it dries, or I need to pin it when it is less saturated with water and hope that makes the difference.

I’d definitely work with this yarn again, as it’s pretty much the best washable wool option in the correct colours that I can find, but if I have my choice I’d rather work with Wool of the Andes in worsted, as I think it produces a better product for less cost with less hassle.
Here is a photoset of the finished product in Cascade 220 Superwash. You can see the pulled edges from the blocking and hopefully this gives you a good idea of the colourations. I’m happy overall, except the blocking issue.