Jamie’s drama group is putting on The Hobbit, and they needed beards for the dwarves.

It turns out, to be brutally honest, that beard patterns aren’t things that designers who are really interested in perfection and professionalism are churning out. Every one of these patterns was workable, but I was also rewriting them on the fly, substituting nicer increases/decreases and other shaping techniques, and fixing little things that probably would have been caught by a tech editor.

I’m also working with two strands of worsted/aran weight yarn, in all cases, because that’s what was cheap/what was in my stash, and so I’ve fudged the numbers and scaled some of the patterns a bit to make them work. Eventually I started just making up my own variations, including the forked beard.

I’m focusing on trying to get the basic beards made, and I’ll give Jamie and his students the extra yarn in case they want to add more braids or fringey bits for character. I could spend hours playing with that, but I’ve got 3.5 weeks to do 11 beards, and my hands don’t love working at this gauge (especially with acrylic yarn).