Color is tough, because it’s as much personal preference as anything else. For Harriet’s Hat, Harriet picked out the colors of the Gilbert Bain Hospital and interlaced them through this beautiful design, adding pops of color here and subtlety there.  Here’s what the finished project looks like, courtesy of MRI Markers.  Notice the snowflakes are […]

Now that you’re familiar with how to read a knitting chart, you may want to make some changes to the ones you run across.  In this case, I’m knitting Harriet’s Headband and I want to use 2 colors instead of 6. As you can see, it comes out quite lovely!  It’s just a question of […]

Knitting charts look much like something spit out by a spreadsheet program.  They are a section of a pattern depicted graphically rather than in words, and can be very useful when you are showing color changes (like in fair isle) or texture changes (like the one pictured here). Following the number sequence, you’ll notice that […]

This is written to accompany the Harriet Hat Knitalong, but it will work any time you need to swatch for a project you’re knitting in the round! 1) Cast on 50 stitches* and join to work in the round – but make sure you leave a 4-5” gap in the yarn between the two edges. […]

I think, on some level, we’re all afraid of swatching because we don’t want to get bad news – namely, that the fabric we’ve just knit isn’t going to give us the results we want for our project. I think also, personalities like mine just want to charge ahead and get started, and we’ll adjust […]