MORE Seafarer Knitting

The deadline for the Seafarer contributions was farther in the future than I had thought, so I have continued to knit for them.  One could say that I got just a bit carried away, but it was fun and I hope the things I made will be useful.  It has been a nice project to distract me from my back and sciatic pain, and the items I made were simple enough that I could handle them in spite of the painkillers dulling my mind.

After I made the items I posted about before I was out of chunky weight yarn (#6), but I remembered reading that if you hold two strands of worsted (#4) together it comes out about the same as chunky.  I had a LOT of small balls of leftover worsted as well as several balls of cheap black & white worsted that I bought on sale a while ago thinking they'd eventually be useful -- and they were!

I made one additional scarf with some of the leftovers.  Here are my three completed scarves:

This new scarf was a nice simple project that helped me get used to knitting with two strands held together.  It's not very hard except that it means two balls of yarn at a time to keep track of instead of one, which is occasionally annoying.  But I liked the way the fabric turned out -- thick and cushy and warm just like the chunky yarn.

Even though the new one (the one in the middle) was narrower than the others, it took a lot of yarn to make a stripe and it used up my biggest balls of leftovers.  I decided that another scarf would have to have narrower stripes, which would mean a LOT of ends to weave in on the edges, so that was the last scarf.  Mittens are fussy enough without having to worry about stripes (as I learned with a previous project this fall!).  So I made lots of hats.

I started out with a hat that combined one strand each of two colors:

I was happy with the look of that -- almost like a variegated yarn.  And it was nice and plushy and warm just like the chunky weight hats had been.   It did mean having two balls of yarn bouncing around in my lap instead, but I had done that before with other kinds of projects.

After this hat, I didn't have enough yarn of any colors except black and white to knit even one strand of a whole hat.  (I have little kitchen scale that also is a big help for measuring yarn.  I had no leftover balls that weighed half as much as the hat I just finished, which answered that question easily.)  So I experimented with all sorts of stripes -- fat ones and skinny ones, sometimes in combination with two colors together.   Here are the results:


With stripes of double-stranded colors I was sometimes holding four  balls of yarn in my lap, which meant a significant amount of effort fighting tangles.

One nice benefit of all of these hats is that I became much more comfortable making jogless stripes.  (For non knitters: when you knit in a round you're actually working in a spiral, so when you switch colors you get a funny little "jog" unless you take special pains to avoid it.)  I found this page from the TECHknitting web site to be a real help.

With the bottom right hat I used a different technique -- helix stripes -- to make really skinny stripes.  (another page from TECHknitting).   That's a clever technique that I enjoy, but OMG I had SIX balls of yarn bouncing around at once and there was a lot of time devoted to un-tangling and tangle prevention!  I think from now on I'll reserve helix stripes for times when I'm not also double stranding!

That's the end of what I made for the Seafarers this year, but my donation will include yet another hat.  I made this hat two years ago when I was loom knitting with one hand after my surgery.  For some reason this hat got left out of that donation and I found it recently when I was organizing my yarn.  Here it is:

I enjoyed this hat marathon and I learned another interesting technique while I was doing it.  I ran through almost all of my worsted-weight scraps and wanted to make a few more hats.  I remembered from my reading that three strands of DK weight yarn is approximately the same weight as one strand of chunky. The idea of three skeins of each color going at once was kind of off-putting, but it turns out there's a really cool trick.  For some reason it's called "Navajo chaining" and it works like magic -- only one ball of yarn for each color in your lap and you get three strands at once.  I don't have a link to share for this technique because I had heard of it a while ago and had been meaning to try it, so I didn't have to look it up.  It was actually kind of fun to do.  I have a lot of DK scraps left and I will probably do a lot of Navajo chaining for some Seafarer projects next year!  I ended by making two hats using Navajo chaining.  I am writing this a couple of days after finishing all the hats and I honestly can't remember which hats were made with Navajo chaining and I can't actually tell from a quick look over the hats.  That is an interesting confirmation that knitting with two or three strands together really is equivalent to one strand of a fatter yarn!

Here is a group portrait of all this year's Seafarer projects:

It was a lot of fun to do and I hope these items help keep some people warm on the high seas this winter and beyond.

Now I will go back to much more delicate knitting.  I have been knitting for the baby of a family friend and she is growing like a weed and needs another hat and sweater.  I haven't been blogging about the baby knitting -- just posting on Ravelry -- but I'm enjoying writing about my knitting here so I'll try to start putting all my projects here from now on.