I'm on a hat binge. A brioche stitch-a-thon.

In the works we have two-color brioche rib in the round, a take-off from one of the scarves in The Elegant Knitter. This sample is one of my current traveling companions. Sitting atop its bag, it looks a little like an onion dome in the making but not for much longer. A little number-crunching will make this stitch work in a cloche, I think, after the current configuration takes a trip through the frog pond and goes back to being two balls of yarn temporarily.

My fingers have been itching to experiment a little with two-color brioche stitch (especially since I discovered Nancy Marchant's  marvelous site. She is truly the queen of brioche stitch.) I warmed up with the cap in a brioche stitch look-alike - fisherman's rib. While I've been away from blogland I wrote up the instructions for the cap, as well as a companion tutorial on tubular cast-on in the round. The one seemed incomplete without the other. 
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It is a week for super-chunky wool on big fat needles, all the better to keep us warm. Here's a case in point, a new hat worn by my friend Chris in Rowan Big Wool from the stash, deceptively simple in design. It features a flawless tubular or "invisible" cast-on, in the round, thank you, and a deep and lofty oversized rib that is the hallmark of brioche stitch. But is it brioche?  

This sample happens to be fisherman's rib, which takes a different route to the same effect. In brioche rib, you go along setting up a yarnover that straddles every other stitch. In fisherman's rib, you knit or purl into the row below. Once you make this stitch in the row below, you release the stitch above it, so that it looks and behaves just like the yarnover of the of the brioche rib. More on the brioche rib in another post.

The challenge in this seemingly effortless hat was getting the decreases to meld just so. I borrowed some ideas from Nancy Marchant, the queen of brioche stitch, but I still must have worked the top of the hat about 15 times before I was satisfied. 

Solving this puzzle became such an obsession that  I took the hat on the needles with me everywhere I went, even  into a courtroom where I was acting in my role as  trained observer and scribe. Everyone who has hung around court anywhere knows there's a lot of hurry-up-and wait. I've clicked away in the halls before, but never in the courtroom itself. I thought the guards were going to come and haul me out any minute.

On this particular day, however, the action was either at the bench, in sotto voce conversations between the judge and the lawyers, or in the judge's chambers. People waited half the morning in the courtroom for the judge to return, and I was able to get my interviewing done and to clean up the mess I'd previously made of the fisherman's rib hat. Oh, the courtroom case was continued... 

Here's a closer look at the top of the hat. 

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Here is M, wearing his new Christmas hat, which is my favorite among the earflaps - and his too. A simple detail, like combining a neutral with a few stripes of bold and changing colors, can make all the difference.

Note that M is actually out the door on time on a Monday morning on his way to work. Makes my day.

I'm on a riff with headgear - and bulky yarn. Some of the yarn balls in this type of yarn call for size 15 or 17 needles, but I went down to size 13 to make a denser, warmer covering. Comfort for the winter blues and blahs.

    The black in M's earflap helmet is Burley Spun, and variegated blues are Jumbo Merino. The two earflaps are knitted separately and then joined to the body of the hat during the cast-on row for the brim. This knitting pattern is based on the earflap in Start to Knit, but there are some changes, including a built-in garter border up the sides of the earflaps, which are done in stockinette, like the rest of the hat.

    

      The garter border eliminates the need for a finish row of slip stitch crochet, seen in the original, but it does call for some short rows to compensate for the difference in row gauge between garter and stockinette.

Yesterday, I didn't move very far, but did get to block the big-needle version of the lacy scarf from The Elegant Knitter. The blocking job came out better than the photography, but you get the idea. I gently swished the scarf in water and laid it out, folding it in half so that the tapered ends lay one on top of the other. To prevent a crease in the middle, I folded the scarf over a couple empty toilet paper rolls. Under the towel is a length of homosote, a fiber board available at your local big-box home improvement store. Homosote is sometimes used for bulletin boards. I keep two big slabs of it standing upright in the basement. They take up virtually no space at all.

    

     Water stains don't matter on homosote and it takes pins well, although I didn't want to pin the wavy borders of this little number. Laid out flat, the waves seemed to behave all on their own, but I piled on quarters from the spare change bowl just to make sure. It was ready this morning. It's boxed up and ready to go.  

 Most of yesterday we rested from a very long round trip to that big island of tall buildings where the Hudson and the East River merge. I learned on the return drive that I need new windshield wipers. For about three and a half hours I thought about the virtues of timely auto maintenance as I kept trying to find that one place in the windshield where the blades met the glass at just the right angle.

We saw family we haven't seen for more than a few months, including Ms. G, who inspired a redesign of the headband I gave her last year. (She said the original was just fine!) She needs a chic city cap, though. Something warm and bulky in a fisherman's rib? It's on the needles already.

 

We discoved that kitty had somehow disengaged the Christmas tree lights from the extension cord tucked into the tree, so that when the wall end of the cord was plugged into the socket, nothing happened. Nada. Until we took down the decorations, we thought the lights themselves had been damaged. Then the DH reached in and came up with the other end of the cord - attached to nothing. We tested all the lights before putting them away, and they worked. There's always next year. At least we won't have to buy all new lights. We are down a few glass ornaments, though , , , .

I used a grey and rainy New Year's Day to make gains on the lacy scarf  from The Elegant Knitter for the upcoming workshop in February at the Knitting Corner and Beadery in Middletown. A long block of time, uninterrupted, is the ultimate luxury in my view. And knitting lace benefits from momentum, as I picked up speed the longer I stayed with it. The flow of the pattern, with its undulating borders and tapered ends, freed me from everything else weighing me down.

The scarf is done now, except for the blocking  Time for a little dance!
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