Thursday 29 April 2010

Peaches

I am desperate to embark on some serious garment knitting/designing at the moment but, stubborn as I am, I will not break my personal oath to use up a good portion of my stash before I begin anything new. Alas, I cannot use my existing yarns to make garments because, as we all have at some point, I have foolishly purchased a ridiculous collection of single skeins! Unless I plan on the knitting the world's most stripey jumper (which I don't!) then I must find another outlet for all those little 100 gram bundles of beauty! After hours (literally hours - I am so indecisive!) of searching through my hundreds of pattern books, I eventually alighted on this beauuuuuuty of a book!


Kim Hargreaves is a magnificent knitwear designer and if I happen to be introducing any of you to her for the first time then I must urge you to go and buy one of her (multiple) books. I own 3, I believe. Everything she designs has a timeless elegance, so you can be certain that her pattern books will be as relevant in 20 years as they are now. If I'd thought ahead, I might have taken some pictures of the other designs in this book as the one that I am about to discuss is, by no means, characteristic of her style.

I decided to use up a skein of blue DK cotton (denim style!) to make the hat on the left in the image below. I apologise for the pictures - the focus is a bit off!



'Peaches' is a crocheted slouchy beret with these great 'tr5tog' stitches that form big, bouncy clusters. It's a fun design and one that I'd probably do again! I have a thing for hats anyway, so I expect everybody I know will be getting one of these for Christmas now!





I did have to rip this back by about 50% at one point. Apparently, I cannot count! Very frustrating to think that, had I taken my time, I would be all finished up by now! Oh well -not too much to do!


I hope you all enjoy seeing these brief, one weekend projects because I expect to be posting many more of them! I will not rest until my stash is halved! Each project that I make will be another step in the right direction and the small amounts of leftover yarn that I am bound to have will be used up in my crocheted hexagon blanket! Now that's organisation!

Do you have any favourite stash-busting patterns?

More soon

Mother's Ruin xxx

1 comment:

  1. I made two of these last year. They are gorgeous but be carful on the bobbles I was off knitting a crochet for several weeks after giving myself tendonitis- very painful. There are a couple of very cute hat patterns in kim's new book. one(cheer) only takes a ball of calmer. I see a few of those in my future.

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