I’m making a Nancy Marchant windmill hat for my “knitting spring into existence” project. I’m using a wool/silk solid purple single-ply from JKnits, and a multicolor silk/wool Noro Silk Garden. It’s Brioche stitch, but not just that, it’s Brioche two-color in the round. I’ve never done this sort of knitting before and I find it very satisfying.

The cool thing about this sort of colorwork is that you only work with one color at a time. You work an entire round with one yarn, then you switch yarns and work the next round with the second one. For folks who crave colorwork but struggle with the two-colors-at-once issue, this is a great method.

Nancy Marchant is very big into brioche stitch of all sorts. She has a very deep website and she also has YouTube videos showing the techniques required in her patterns. I used one of the videos, myself. I love how videos on the web can really enhance the knitting realm!

Nancy has free patterns for hats on her site. She calls them berets, although for the record French berets are knit in short rows going around (knit one pie slice, then knit another slice, then another until you finish, then complete the disc with a seam). This hat is knit from the top down, in the round (backwards from a traditional Scottish tam). Whatever they might be called, the hats are delightful.

I first saw her Pecan Pie pattern on Knitty, but that one has Noro Kureyon and that comes out to a larger gauge than the Silk Garden. So I went to her website and chose a hat which specified Silk Garden, so my gauge was more likely to be right.

This is very fun knitting, I highly recommend it. Here are photos of the “before” project and the first session of knitting. I’ll show more photos as I proceed.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 7th, 2008 at 11:48 amand is filed under Knitting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.