This beautiful yarn has been waiting around a while for the perfect pattern to come along. This may be it! I knit almost the entire thing during a Chicks with Sticks meeting. I probably could have finished it if it hadn’t been for some near breaks in the yarn I had to fix. The problem is that it has almost no slouch in it because there wasn’t enough yarn.

I did guess exactly right about how many rows I could knit before I started decreasing which kind of gives it a “meant to be” feeling, plus the fact that I didn’t do a gauge swatch. I would basically have had to knit a hat as the swatch, so there wasn’t much point. Besides, it didn’t explain if it should be measured relaxed, or stretched, or what.

Anyway, the point is, I’m going to have to get some opinions on how that hat looks before I decide if it’s going to stay or not. If not, oh well, I just get to knit some more when I make something else with it!

This pattern was a great introduction to brioche knitting. The abbreviations make the simple concept seem so scary! Even the explanations of the abbreviations are scary. But I soon figured out the concept. There are multiple abbreviations used to get the same result depending on the other stitched near it. It seems like they should be consolidated. There are multiple descriptions of how to do a yarn over, depending on the stitches around it, but they’re all called the same thing because it’s the same simple concept. Why can’t we do the same thing with some of the brioche stitches?

9/17/2011
Okay, so it finally hit me that I hadn’t blocked it yet. So I washed and blocked it, and sure enough, it looks great!