Adventures of a Desi Knitter

Wow, thank you all for the responses to my blog poll! The crimson won out with 66 % of the votes, out of a total of 38. I am looking longingly (one last time?) at the forest green, but also looking long and hard and very meaningfully at the crimson! I like Opal’s suggestion that I could overdye it later, but let’s see. Quill, you were right that the green was being made into the BPT cabled cardigan from Knitty, but I am so bored with that project! Plus my cables were getting all puckered up at the increases and I was generally dissatisfied with it. Even if I don’t end up Ogee-ing it, it is not going to be BPT-ed any longer, alas.

Recently I got a couple of photos in my inbox, representing afterlives of my knitting adventures here. One is from the lovely Mary, who is the first one to make my Rangoli Hat! I am so excited! Thank you so much Mary for braving the pattern, and for turning out this absolutely gorgeous hat:

She didn’t block it over a plate because she likes this billowy look to it, which doesn’t give her hat hair! Mary it looks great on you! I love the flat picture of it in the sun, too.

(Now, if only the recipient of the original green piece I made would take a picture for this blog….)

The second picture is of my dear friend Madhavi, who is unfortunately braving mountains of snow and bitter cold in the northeast after years of living in friendlier climes. Many years ago in hostel she once persuaded me to design a nose-warmer for her (she hates the cold more than I do, which is something). I think I had crocheted one, but I am sure she never wore it. I wonder why, it even had strings to go over the ears! But as a mark of my sympathy for her freezing bones I sent her my Turkish balaclava hat. Here she is, totally wrapped up and surrounded by snow, but warm and smiling! Medu, stay warm!

Tags: Rangoli patterns, Turkish Balaclava Cap, Caps, Hats, Etc. by desiknitter
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So I finally got round to writing up the pattern for the Cabled Rangoli Hat, and I also made another iteration of it. This time in Knitpicks Wool of the Andes, in Asparagus. I have written up the pattern and uploaded it to my sidebar on the left, where it is available free for download. You can also click here. Do let me know if you make it, I’d love to know your feedback and comments. Here’s what the latest iteration looks like:

As I had said last time, the cables definitely show up more clearly in the wool than in the alpaca. The hat also retains its shape better, I think. I love it! It looks a little more like the Queen’s headdress than I had thought, but in a nice way!

I made some changes to the pattern: I abandoned the separation of the two lines and went with a standard k2 cable line amidst the purl stitches simply because it’s more convenient when it comes to crossing cables. I also decided to have the lines dovetail into the ribbing to keep things neat. The bobbles too, are purl bobbles now and sit better, somehow.

I was a little worried that the hat might not be deep enough, but it just covers my ears without being too tight, which is exactly what I wanted with it; this is not a 20 degree fahrenheit hat, but an it-might-be-chilly-out-this-evening hat, I guess. There are more pictures with the pdf pattern. It’s about 7 inches deep and 22 inches in circumferences, perfect for my big head. 

Specs for this iteration:
Yarn: Knitpicks Wool of the Andes, Asparagus, 1.5 skeins (approx. 160 yards)

Needles: 5 Susan Bates circular and DPNs. I imagine anybody else in the world will need larger needles than that for this yarn, or slightly finer yarn for that gauge.

Gauge: 6 stitches per inch.

Took me about 2 days of sustained knitting after I’d got the pattern all worked out (which took a *lot* longer!)

Am feeling maha pleased that this is finally done. This evening I also finished writing a rather critical review of a book for a journal that I had been putting off for weeks, because I am not fond of writing reviews for one, and highly critical reviews, for another. But all in all, a weekend of accomplishment, if not of fulfilment (read earlier post about not getting any bhang for holi…)!

Tags: Rangoli Hat, Rangoli patterns by desiknitter
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I charted one of the Rangoli patterns and started knitting one of them over the weekend, while watching Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s Nizhalkkuthu (Shadow Kill) a fine Malayalam film by one of Kerala’s (and India’s) finest filmmakers. The film was good, excellent performances and an interesting look at (the lack of) choices available to people in traditional settings. The most interesting, and yet disappointing character was not the hangman protagonist with hang-ups (sorry) about his occupation (a wonderfully drawn character), but his Gandhian son who tries (somewhat unsuccessfully) to escape tradition by embracing Satyagraha. The film did well to show how nationalism creates these possibilities but often doesn’t deliver on them, but the son’s character was not complex enough to carry the theme through.
Anyway, I knitted up a small swatch of one rangoli pattern in Knitpicks’ Wool of the Andes, in the colour Asparagus. The pattern is only a quarter done, and the swatch will eventually be rectangular an long in shape. I’m happy with the way the yarn shows up the cables, but I need to work on my closed-cable increase/decrease method. So far I know two: one is Elsebeth Lavold’s method over four rows (used on the botton oval) and another improvised one on the other two, over two rows.

The rangolis, drawn by hand, are rarely perfectly symmetrical and I would ideally like my cabled ones also to have different shapes: some oval, some round and so on. I also need an increase/decrease method that will work for even-numbered increases. I used This increase method described by Jenna Wilson for her Rogue pullover, but that one was over an odd numbered cable of 5 stitches. Does anyone know of any other increase methods that will allow me to increase 4 stitches in the middle of the fabric, but without the stretched look that Lavold’s method gives? It’s really neat and tidy, but not as rounded as I’d like it to be.

The Wool of the Andes, incidentally, is supple and stretchy, great for cables. A tad rough on the hands, though.

Oh, and I knit about 20 more rows of the Russian stole. Pictures to follow soon!

Tags: Rangoli patterns, Cable work by desiknitter
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