You have heard of UFO, the flying kind. The knitting world has grabbed its own version of UFO to mean an unfinished object. Logically, an FO would become a finished object. I have finished the R2D2 beanie hat for a certain family member. I am debating whether to place pictures up here or let the recipient see it first, then post pictures. I even hesitated to post about finishing it, since technically, I have not even told the requestor of the hat that it is finished. I did taunt the person a bit with an email along the lines of, you are going to have to come and visit me to see what I have for you. I have now let the proverbial cat out of the bag or maybe robot out of the knitting bag?
I must admit to being a rather monogamous, but slow knitter of late. I have a pair of slipper socks finished, a beanie hat, two reusable cotton grocery/shopping bags and a handful of dishcloths. In my defense, I had to make up the slipper socks as I went along, using a worn-out slipper as a guide. The beanie was a blast to knit, but I had never done intarsia colorwork until this project. The general idea of intarsia is to thread bobbins for each color change. (As opposed to stranded knitting where you carry the colors behind the work, simple but can cause puckering and often become too tight of a finished object.)
An example of an intarsia color change would be as follows: let’s say I want to make 5 blue blocks 15 stitches wide with a gray column between each one that will be 3 stitches wide. Starting with a gray bobbin, I would knit 3 stitches, then add a blue bobbin knitting for 15 stitches, add a second gray bobbin for 3 more stitches, add another blue for 15, another gray for 3, blue for 15, gray for 3, blue for 15, gray for 3, add one last blue for 15 and a gray to round out the evenness of it all. That is a total of 10 bobbins hanging around. At each color change, I bring the new color under the old color so that the new color has wrapped around the old, this prevents holes in between the color changes.
Let’s add another complication. Did I mention this was my first intarsia project? Most intarsia is knit flat because of the bobbins, if I tried to knit in a circle, I would get back to the beginning and find my bobbin to be on the far side of the color block where I left it, instead of the beginning. I did some reading and discovered that if I knit one row, I can twist the yarn at the end and purl back to the beginning and then twist the yarn and knit forward again, rinse, lather, repeat until desired length is completed. I don’t like seaming, so I knit the hat in the round with intarsia.
I will admit to ripping out the hat not less than 3 times but not more than 7 or 8. The first time I tried stranded knitting, it was too tight. The second time I knit it, I knit it flat with bobbins but the hat didn’t seem large enough. I then checked Ravelry, I can look at this project to see what others had to say about it when they made it. So glad that Ravelry exists for this pattern. The pattern as written was a child sized hat, so small it didn’t fit my head. Before I ripped it out, I took measurements as to my gauge, how many stitches per inch I was getting So I ripped it out again and waited until I saw the intended recipient in person again. I took some measurements and did some math. I had to add 40 stitches to the width, which meant I needed to redo the color work. I printed off knitter’s graph paper (the width of a stitch is wider than the height), got some scratch paper and increased all the blocks proportionally. If the old pattern called for 1 I drew 2, if the old called for 8 I drew 12, and so on. It seemed to work well for me. I used about 30 bobbins which meant over 30 ends to weave in when I was finished. Some of the bobbins were used multiple times, hence the over 30.
I wrote down my directions word for word, step-by-step, kept the charts and am filing it away for the day I am asked to make another rather large adult sized hat.
