The icicles I wrote about yesterday have pretty much all gone now, but it’s still snowing so I’m hoping some new ones might form! Last night and this morning, we even had thundersnow – snowfall with thunder and lightning! Apparently it’s rather rare, but it was so exciting! It’s like all my favourite things are happening at once :)
Anyway, I hinted at my latest project in my last post, and here it is again.
‘Tis a surprise hat for my other half, and also my first foray into double knitting. The two white lines are life lines, as I’m making things up as I go along, and don’t entirely know what I’m doing!
Double knitting is essentially knitting two layers of fabric simultaneously, and is almost like working a 1x1 rib, as you work the front and then the back layer. In normal circumstances, the idea of knitting inch upon inch of 1x1 rib would be like knitting hell to me, but I’m actually finding it quite meditative in double knitting, and am enjoying it a lot more than I thought I would. 
I’m attempting to knit a lattice design on the outside and a check pattern on the inside, and it did take me quite a while to get my head around the concept of how it worked, but as with most things, now that I’ve started it’s actually relatively straight forward.
I didn’t start out to make a double knitted hat. I was swatching away trying to find a nice manly colourwork pattern that wasn’t stripes and wasn’t too fussy, when I came across the stitch pattern that I’m now using, and decided to try and give it a try. In fact I frogged and reknit my poor little swatch a few times before I gave up, threw caution to the wind, and decided to cast on anyway (I did the old Norwegian/twisted German cast on for this – love it!) and deal with it when I came to it.
After a little false start that thankfully only involved a couple of stitches, I got the hang of it. I think what was confusing me slightly is that there are two different methods of double knitting:
Single pass, where both strands of yarn have to be carried together at the same time; and
Double pass, where you knit one round with one colour, slipping the stitches that you want to work in the other colour, and then knit the second round, knitting the slipped stitches in the new colour and slipping the stitches that you worked in the previous round.
Sounds confusing, but it's much easier to actually do and the resulting fabric is double layered, satisfyingly thick and squishy, and should be extra warm!
I’ve actually used both methods in this hat so far. I started off with a few rounds of single pass and then moved on to the double.
I’m considering writing up the pattern when I’m done, but I’ve never really written a pattern before and this seems like a tricky one to start with. I guess I’ll just wait and see.
