...light golden beige, light golden brown and pale sand?Well a couple of DMC numbers on a counted cross stitch chart is the answer.
The kit I have started came with two hanks of silks unlabeled, and a handy cardboard guide to attach them too. It only took me an hour to work out the shade difference between 17 strands of blue to individual strands of light blue, light steel blue, steel blue, blue, sky blue, dark blue, light blue and navy.
You would think that I would hate that but no for some reason it appealed to my anal retentiveness, the biggest problem being the lack of sunlight to see by and trying to work out the nuances of colour by artifical light aggravated by the light being provided by low energy bulbs.
Anyhoo - started the picture with several strands of dark brown, as opposed to dark chestnut. Looking forward to getting on with that this afternoon.
Also started my knitting yesterday....
Very simple warm woolly hat pattern, one size fits all, ladies pattern
Using a thickish chunky wool and size 5mm needles, cast on 100 stitches.
The thicker the wool the bigger the needles and the less stitches you need to cast on, a rough guide is if you go up a needle size you lose 10 stitches, so with size 6 needles and a chunky wool, cast on 90 stitches instead.
- Row 1, knit to end, Row 2, purl to end, repeat until row 7. This first inch will curl naturally to create the brim.
- Row 8 (right side), knit 10, purl 10, repeat to end. Repeat this pattern stitch until body of the hat measures 6 inches not counting the curled brim.
- Start reducing at every 5th stitch following the pattern. So begin your pattern knit 10 stitches, but at stitch 5, knit two together, continue to your purl 10, and at the 5th stitch purl two together.
- Continue this reducing pattern on wrong and right sides, until you are left with 5 stitches, pull thread through and sew the hat edges together.
On a good day I can get this knitted to 2 episodes of House. Or a full episode of Midsomer Murders.
Unfortunately I did not get the chance to finish it yesterday so looking forward today to being able to finish a project again - although it does not really count as finished until I decide on the decoration that I am going to embelish it with.
3 comments:
I have recently taken up knitting again and I was looking for something easy to do, something not too complicated and this may be it. So far I have just knitted scarves. If you were making a hat for a man with a large head, how many stitches would you cast on and when would you start the decreasing
Thank you
Sue
For a man, cast on 120 stitches, but again this is dependent on the thickness of the wool, the thinner the wool the more stitches. If it is a wool that is for size 4 or below needles add 10 stitches for each size needle you go down.
Don't start decreasing until the body of the hat measures 8 inches. If you are using a stocking stitch brim instead of the curled brim then you should include that in the body of the hat, unless you want a brim that you fold up.
Have fun, watching the snow fall, knitting away happily on the sofa.
I've never been able to get into cross stitch (though I would very much like to have the finished projects magically appear in my hands!) but some of my fondest memories were sorting my mom's embroidery floss. I was also the kid that compulsively kept her crayons and such in chromatic order.
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