green

We had a back yard visitor this morning:

At my January 2008 knitting guild meeting, I won one of our monthly raffle prizes: a book teaching basic Tunisian Crochet patterns and some hooks.

Armed with that and a tutorial on stitchdiva.com, I started making a scarf using the basic Tunisian Crochet stitch, alternating three different colored yarns (all of which were left over from a few other projects)

For those who aren’t familiar, Tunisian Crochet–also called Afghan Stitch–is like the fiber love child of knitting and crochet. You use a hook (like crochet) but you work rows of stitches (like knitting). You don’t turn your work, but rather create rows by picking up stitches right to left, then “casting off” left to right. It’s an interesting hybrid craft.

It produces a nice thick fabric, which almost looks woven. The wrong side looks like striped garter stitch.

I started using the three color yarns because I thought the combination looked pretty, but it had the side benefit of making it much easier to identify the vertical bars you pick up on your right-to-left passes–great for a newbie like myself. My tension is pretty uneven, but the stitch is very forgiving and still looks great.

This one’s a scarf for Ted, but I think it would make a fabulous pillow, tote bag or purse as well.

I started this as a travel project–something to do during our journey eastward to visit family over the holidays in 2007. I’d seen the pattern on Knitty and thought it I’d make a fun hat for my nephew, so I picked the black and army green as colors he might like.

This pattern is fun to knit. It’s simple enough that you can knit while distracted or in social situations, but keeps your attention with all the short-rows. And because it’s knitted in segments, you psychologically feel a little sense of closure after each one.

It’s a quick knit, too–great if you need a little something for a last-minute gift. Although my time for completion seems long, this is largely because there were big spans of time in-between my knitting sessions. I’m kind of a pokey knitter, but I think I could probably complete this in a few days.

The hat is a little pointy at the top, but it is less noticeable when being worn and I’m pleased with the way it turned out. I’ve now looked at other examples of the hat on Ravelry and find I like the more subtle color combinations (the original pattern on Knitty features a very high contrast combos).