Turkish Balaclava
This is just to confuse further those who thought this was baclava the last time… still talking knitting.
I chose a Turkish pattern for the stockinette portion of the balaclava cap. I cast off for the face opening, slipped the stitches to a larger needle and tugged the tube over my head. Nice and long. So then I decided that it would be nice to have the thickness of two-colour patterned fabric over the ears rather than stripes or plain bands of colour. What I am going to do once I run out of this Andean Silk red I don’t know; will figure something out. But for now, am excited about this beautiful pattern. I got it from a Turkish motif cap in Hats On by Charlene Schurch, which is a great book (I’ve made four caps from it so far). The other, darker red is Elann’s Pure Alpaca, which is a wee bit thinner than the Andean Silk, but not significant enough to warrant a needle change. It makes the stockinette fabric a little more snug, which is exactly what I want.
The only foreseeable problem is doing the two-colour stranding on the purl side. This is the first time I’m doing fair-isle work on back-and-forth knitting. Naturally, it occurred to me after I started. But it’s not that big a deal, and it’s only a couple of inches before I join and start in the round again for the forehead.
This is turning out to be a lot of fun indeed.