The Age of Brioche

On abandoned Works In Progress (WIPs):  On this blog I've talked about a few projects that have been completely shoved aside.  Either to make room for a new project, or simply abandoned and forgotten about without remorse.

The Alice in Wonderland double knit scarf is one.  I haven't touched it since we moved here a year ago, and I don't  plan on finishing it either.  Honestly, the technique is hard on my hands, the scarf was going to end up at least a foot too short as written, and designing extra sections to lengthen it was too difficult for me.  I was not feeling it and life is about a foot too short for me to think about wasting it on a project I'm hating.  The moral of the story is Double knitting is a fun technique for sure, it's the basis for my favorite float catching technique, but entire projects of double knitting are not for me.  That's cool.  Moving on.

I started some socks last fall for my mother-in-law that I wasn't really happy with.  Something about the yarn was off, and it was not enjoyable to knit.  Plus, while she was staying with us, I gifted her all of Zac's old socks.  She likes a slightly larger sock and Zac hadn't worn any of his socks for years.  So, finishing another pair for her next seemed indulgent.  I don't even think I frogged the partially finished sock and rewound the yarn, I just shoved it in my stash after pulling the needles out of it.

More recently, I've frogged the Morvarch shawl. The cabled one that I introduced last time.  I was growing increasingly dissatisfied with it. The cabling was looking kind of sloppy, as were the short rows I was doing, and I'm sure it wasn't my technique.  Also, the shawl was going to be too small as written.  I don't need a new shawl, so to do all that work and end up with something I wasn't feeling that wouldn't even work for me seemed a waste.

It was weird, because the urge to frog it came over me all at once.  I was eating dinner, preparing myself to get back to knitting it while Zac took his usual after-dinner nap, when all of the sudden I realized I didn't want to finish it.  I didn't want to work on it at all.  So I frogged it.

I also abandoned Zac's Christmas sweater.  I have the yarn, 10 skeins of DK yarn in a lovely chocolate brown, all wound up and nowhere to go.  But, that leads me to the point of the post! I started a new sweater project with this yarn!

And then I immediately frogged it and went with a different sweater pattern.

 

 

And currently I'm a ways past this point, but you can still see what's going on here.  It's brioche and cables! Brioche, oh, brioche. How I love brioche.  The age of brioche is upon me.  It's upon all of us.

Brioche is a knitting technique that's kind of difficult to explain if you don't knit, so bear with me.  You alternately slip stitches and yarn over them, then in the following row, knit or purl the slip stitches together with the yarn overs.  This causes the stitches to plump all the way up.  It makes a squishy, warm, and delightful fabric.  You can either leave it as a fancy knit one purl one rib, which is lovely and squishy and what I'm doing here in this sweater.  Or, you can play with increases and decreases and make patterns.

Which, spoilers, is what I'm doing on the hat I started just the other day:

In this hat pattern, the brioche is done with two colors, which is common for the brioche technique, since you slip every other stitch, it's almost easier to do with two colors than one.  The brioche purls are done with pink and the brioche knits are done with yellow. Each round is actually two passes with the colors done separately.  In the first pass, with the yellow main color, you slip the purl stitches and yarn over them, then knit the knit stitches with their pink yarn overs.  The second pass is with the pink, you purl the purls with their yellow yarn overs and slip the knits and yarn over them.

 In brioche, increases and decreases are done in pairs.  You cannot simply increase one stitch, you have to add the purl stitch to go with it.  And similarly, you cannot simply decrease one stitch, you have to take away that purl stitch too.  In brioche, the topography of stitches is hugely important.  In knitting, increasing and decreasing are directional, based on the stitch that ends up on the top of a decrease (or the direction an increase leans from the originating stitch), in brioche you pass stitches on top of other stitches to decrease them away, and which one you do last determines the direction of the decrease.  So, the same as normal knitting, but turned up to eleven, since you can't just pass one stitch on top of the other, you have to get rid of pairs of stitches.

That is a lot to say that brioche keeps you on your toes, and is a super fun technique to try out sometime.  If you're nervous, there are a ton of resources available to teach you everything you need to know to get started.  I read Nancy Marchant's book about brioche a few years ago, an it was very enlightening. But there are videos and blogs available for free.  Brioche has been gaining popularity as a knitting technique in the last few years, and it's fun to see what patterns people have been coming out with.

In the midst of all of this excitement, there are Toby's knee socks.  I've started the toe of the second sock last night! (if you recall, the second sock was done top down, with an afterthought heel) so I have to finish the toe and knit the heel.  I don't have a picture, I don't really like to take pictures of second socks until it's a finished pair.  It seems oddly indulgent. XD  His birthday was yesterday, so unfortunately I didn't make that deadline.  He'll still enjoy getting them when they are completed.

I also have cross stitch to talk about.  I don't know if you remember I was working on a Mirabilia cross stitch again after finishing the pokemon.  Well, I did an odd thing and ordered fabric for starting over.  There are very good reasons for this.

When I cross stitch, I like to do it horizontally.  That is do half stitches across a row and then come back the way I came to finish the full stitches.  There are a few sections on the lady's dress that are vertical.  And I did those stitches vertical.  It completely messed up the gauge of the fabric and the stitches around it.  It gave the fabric a ridge there.  It was depressing. D:

The fabric I ordered was a 14 stitch count gauge rather than 16.  Technically this was an error, but I am actually enjoying the stitching that much more with the larger gauge.  My eyes are not what they used to be.  I haven't gotten very far on her, but I'm a lot happier with it:

 

And finally, I got some pictures of our house WIP:

 

 

The first was essentially a hole in the ground, and they were about to pour the foundation.  The second was taken yesterday.  They have framed the house!  There's a long way to go, and we'll be talking to the design team to choose things like flooring, tiling, and countertops.  Most of the stuff was chosen for us, but I am thrilled to pick out backsplash in the kitchen and a few other things.  It's an exciting time!

I know this post was very long with lots of reading.  I hope you got something interesting out of it.  I did not mention spinning, but I honestly haven't done that much of it.  I have been bringing my spindle to spin while I wait for the kids after school, which is a fun thing that I really enjoy doing.  It makes progress happen slowly, but surely.  It makes taking good pictures of it impossible though, since it's all direct sunlight.

Anyway, cheers!