knitting kitchen

I’ve been on a quest to make a perfect tam. By ‘perfect’ I mean that it is my own design in which I demonstrate a complete understanding and unbelievable expertise in knitting, charted design, and color selection. Why I think this is fun after working a full day in complete mayhem, I have no idea. Maybe it’s a control thing.

Back in February, 2009, I subjected myself to knitting a tam out of Jojoland Melody.

The yarn is a ’superwash’ meaning that you can’t shrink it. While that can often be a nice feature, if you have an overly floppy tam, there isn’t much you can do. I would rip this tam out if I could be bothered. Right now it’s in a box with other knitted misfits in my office.

Next, I tried to knit a tam using my stash of sport weight yarn and the instructions in an article written by Alice Starmore.

First of all, the yarn was too thick to get the gauge I was going to need. Secondly, I realized that getting the colors correct was much more of a challenge than I thought.

I put the entire pursuit into the rubbermaid container of forgotten projects until I stumbled across Jared Flood’s pattern for Beaumont.  I liked the idea of a tam in two colors so off I went. Naturally, I didn’t use the yarns suggested and in my decision to make a substitution, the very slight change in gauge (and the choice of alpaca) made for a very floppy tam. It  is not Mr. Flood’s design. I want to be clear about this. Although the photos in his book do show a tam which is much drapier than the tam in my mind, what wasn’t right about the tam I knitted was all my fault.

Here is the Beaumont tam in alpaca and noro silk garden sock. Very pretty but too floppy.  So, I felted it slightly

Now it fits fine as a hat, but the very pretty knitted pattern is a bit fuzzy.

I thought it might be a good idea to get the basic tam knitted by following the directions as written, checking the gauge, doing the math, but not worrying too much about the challenges posed by color choices. I got out my mechanical pencil, graph paper, and calculator, and left the color issue to Noro.

Naturespun sport and Noro Silk Garden Sock

In case I wasn’t sure before (and I was, I just chose to ignore it), a slight variation in gauge can translate into disaster. This tam came out pretty well because I did the math like I meant it.

Feeling pretty emboldened, I piled up my stash of Spindrift and tried to make sense of the color issue. By this time, Mary Rowe’s Knitted Tams had found it’s way into my home and I was certain that the wisdom contained therein would solve all of my unanswered questions about tams. Through no fault of Ms. Rowe’s, I felt more overwhelmed every day and decided to use a lesson I learned while studying painting. When you want to understand how a composition is composed, eliminate the color and do a value study.

This idea lead to the black & white tam.

Traditionally, tams have XO designs on the sides above the ribbing. I saw a design in Sheila MacGregor’s Fair Isle knitting book that struck my fancy however. I tried to take some risks by changing the background and foreground colors, but giving my limited palette of spindrift (there’s nowhere near here that sells it and I am not a truly patient woman), I ended up using a black background for the sides, reversing it for the top of the tam. (Notice that my experiment with a grey ground and white contrasting color is not in the finished tam).

Every night after dinner, I would knit several rows of the tam. In the morning I would find myself dissatisfied with my efforts and rip it back. At the rate I was ripping, I am very surprised that it was ever finished.
(skip this if you don’t want the technical details of combination knitting)
One of the interesting things that I struggled with was making my double decreases look like the pretty raised lines in Mary Rowe’s book. All knitting books are written for either English/American knitters or Continental knitters. I knit combination which leaves my stitches in the opposite direction on the left needle. It’s taken me a lifetime of knitting to realize that the reason I can’t ever understand the technique instructions in a knitting book (save anything written by Annie Modesitt) is because of this one fact. It’s forced me to really think through what the technique is trying to achieve and then reinvent the way to get there. In order for me to knit a raised double decrease, I insert the point of the right needle into two stitches on the left needle, moving from left to right. This is a very awkward thing to do and it leave the two stitches on the right needle twisted as if they are a small cable. Then I knit the third stitch and pass the two twisted stitches over the third stitch. Now there are pretty raised double decreases in my black & white tam that were not in the aubergine and silk sock tam.

On Friday night, I stayed up until midnight so I could finish the top. When I woke up on Saturday, I realized that using US 3 needle made the top just a hair too big so I ripped it all out and put it on US 2 double pointed needles before heading out to work.

After work on Saturday, I was greeted by a package from Overstock.com which contained the Alice Starmore Fair Isle Knitting book. Woot! M and I had an errand to do (a trip to the home brewing store) so I took the book with me and tried to read and reknit the tam’s top. It’s at this point that I gave up trying to design the star pattern myself. I used one Ms. Starmore provided in her book. I moved the black from foreground to the role of contrasting color and just kept knitting.  I stayed awake until the knitting was finally done. All the ends are woven in and the hat has been blocked.

Lest you think, all I ever do is knit and work, I’m here to say that’s not entirely true. Last Sunday, I sewed Olivia a dress

and this morning, I bundled up more sage from my herb garden for drying.

Notice that nowhere in this post do I mention washing the floor or doing the laundry.