Monday, December 15, 2008

It Started out Great



I had this vision of a double knit hat made up for Mr. E as a tribute to his favorite anime character. If you click on the link it will show you the cloak he wore for Halloween and I figured if I could make a hat with this same odd red cloud then he might actual wear it.

The main image is a red cloud with white outline on a black background. I sketched out the image and after calculating the stitches per inch I made a grid for the pattern, which turned out to look like this:



The hat would be first constructed in red from the top down, increases for the crown then continue around until deep enough. One row of purls creates the turned edge and thus begin the black background and pattern. Once the pattern was complete I do everything in reverse as to the red. The red part gets inverted inside the black and attached at the crown once the decreases come to an end.

It was great, Now It's Arse. Perhaps worse then that. Fucked up and ugly = Fugly.



I don't know if it's the dpn's that are messing with my tension or if I'm just doing it all wrong. Perhaps I put the project up on a circular needle and see what happens. sigh.

5 comments:

Knitterary said...

Yikes. Tension problems. Different needles might help. Have you thought about double knitting it, instead of knitting a mirror-image facing?

Rebecca F said...

I think I found your problem. Knit stitches are taller than they are wide, but your chart has perfect squares. You need to use "knitting graph paper".

You can google it and find it, that uses the right proportions.

I had the same problem when I did Jason's "Star of David" yarmulka.

A :-) said...

Perhaps you could just knit the red and black parts, and then overstitch with the white yarn to make the outline (I know there's a real name for that, but it's escaping me at the moment).

Anonymous said...

yay for the naruto series! i follow the manga releases from japan that are translated into english.

=) good luck with the hat!

Anonymous said...

btw i agree with A ... i remember reading that if you're going to be carrying colors that they really should be done over small spaces (fewer stitches).

eunny's blog mentions taht if your'e carrying yarn across the back, stretch the stitches as far as they will go and then knit to keep a consistent and loose (but still stretchy tension)...

again, i think you might be best with just embroidering the white...or maybe magic looping it?