New version of the pattern added 19 February 2010.

By popular request (and my own long-delayed intention), the Columbia pattern has been modified to include a medium size that will fit smaller heads or those who like a real beret rather than a beret/snood. I’ve also corrected the instructions for setting up the stitches to knit the ties on top. Get the new version here:

Columbia Beret 1.2

The wool I used is a soft 2-ply Columbia wool from Oregon’s Imperial Stock Ranch; you could substitute any worsted weight wool, but a fuzzy woolen-spun will give you a cohesive, warm fabric. The slouchy beret is worked on needles slightly smaller than recommended for extra structure and a felt-like hand. Lines of yarnover eyelets swirl decoratively up to a knit-on garter-stitch topper. The Columbia wool will full quite readily if you wish to tailor the fit after knitting.

Friends, the Danes have been holding out on us. They’ve been smugly sitting on one of the nicest yarns on the planet, just hoarding it all, apparently. But the secret is out, and now that we Americans can buy Marianne Isager’s Alpaca 2 without traveling to Europe (which this American loves the excuse to do, but there’s this teensy problem with the economy just now), my life may never be the same. Sweet heavenly saints, people, I don’t know where this stuff has been all my knitting days. I saw. I touched. I read the ridiculously reasonable price tag. I bought. I knit, immediately.

As you can see, I couldn’t resist whipping some some stranded colorwork. I’d already been salivating over Kate Gagnon’s beautiful Selbu Modern beret on Ravelry for a week or so. Now, I love me a beret, but I’d just made one and didn’t think a fine, drapey, alpaca fabric would be exactly suited for the tam shape anyway. So I improvised: I started the brim like a sweater hem (with a purl turning round in the contrast color); then threw in a couple of tuck rows (so easy with a contrast color involved: work a round in it, then knit some rows – five, in my case – in the main color, then on the next round reach down the backside of the work, lift the top of the CC stitch onto the left needle tip, knit it together with the next regular stitch; repeat all the way around); worked a tier of pretty berry sprigs, a classic Selbu motif seen on mitten cuffs; added another tuck round; increased a bit to get my stitch count up to a multiple of 24; then began Kate’s colorwork chart. I omitted one repetition both horizontally and vertically to account for my desired clochey shape, but otherwise the rest of the hat is just as Kate wrote it.

I just love those tuck rows. They’re so simple, and they add a lot of shape and style, don’t you think? I may have to put them on all my hats. I’ve already worn this one five or six times. It fits under my bike helmet (which looks totally weird, but keeps my head warm), and I can wear it with my dressier jackets or, as seen here, with my dog park duds. Love the versatility. (And also the mild fall weather we’ve been having.)

Go knit one now! You won’t be sorry. And you can tell your Danish friends you’re onto them.

I’ve also been working on my Confectionary vest experiment. It may be too small. It may also be bulletproof. But the color changes are so seductive that I’m just gonna keep on knitting…

P.S. I’m naming my firstborn Marianne Isager. (Okay, maybe just Isager if it’s a boy.)

Would you believe me if I told you knitters’ heaven is at a Holiday Inn in Marshfield, Wisconsin? I don’t know about eternity, but I could spend an awfully long, happy time amid the heaps of beautiful sweaters, hats, mittens, etc. knit by Elizabeth Zimmermann, under the kind and gracious tutelage of Meg, Joyce, and Amy, with scores of inspiring knitterly comrades. We stuffed our brains with new techniques and sage advice, we drank good beer at the pub across the street, we laughed and chattered for hours and applauded each other’s successes. And we knit like fiends all day long and into the night. Jen and I even woke up early to knit and watch the Tour from our beds.

All too soon the weekend was over and I was boarding a plane to return home. As I did so, I came crashing back to earth most unpleasantly: I discovered that I am going to run out of wool for my yellow cardigan. I thought 850 yards was plenty, but I was wrong. Of course, when I misjudge things like this, I pay heavily. The yarn is from Uruguay; it’s been in the stash for three years; they’re not making the same color any longer. So yesterday saw me in a frantic scramble around town to find a yellow laceweight that was similar enough to substitute. No dice. I bought a skein of Socks That Rock mediumweight in 24 Karat with the insane idea that I might be able to unravel it and use a single ply. This is madness, of course, and will probably lead to ruination (the yarn’s) and despair (mine). I also went online and ordered a skein of Lanas Puras Melosa laceweight in Sunset, which looks like a very similar yarn, but seems to have more brown than my yarn. If it’s really brown, I’m tempted to go all Kay Gardiner and take the bleach to it. (Of course I’ll try this on a single strand before I dip half a skein in. I’m not that far gone. UPDATE: DON’T BLEACH WOOL. It dissolves. Luckily Véronique pointed me to a scientific article about this; I didn’t find out the hard way.) Either way, I’m like poor John-Lee Augustyn, having face-planted off the mountainside and lost my bicycle down the scree, now forced to wait by the road for the team car to bring up a new machine. So I thought I’d keep the French spirit of my knitting alive and finish this:

This is something I’ve been plotting for a long while. My grandmother was fond of the work of a French surrealist named Jean Lurçat, who worked in both textiles and ceramics. I don’t know much about him, but I’ve seen a tapestry of his in the Vatican Museums, and my grandmother (a needlepoint artist herself) had purchased the most wonderful rooster tapestry on one of her visits to her brother and family in France. My cousin has it now. We also have a small collection of black-on-yellow ceramic tiles by Lurçat, the best of which I let my brother take on the condition that he send me a picture of it so I could incorporate it into a knitting design:

I wasn’t sure how I was going to pull this off until I saw Joyce and Meg’s book on Armenian Knitting last fall. Aha! You carry both colors throughout the entire hat, intending the trapped stitches to show through, and then you just bring the contrast color to the fore to make your design! Genius!

See the little flecks of yellow showing through the black? Doesn’t it look tweedy? You know how I feel about tweed.

Inside, it looks like this:

Loose floats all over, but you can just make out the rooster in reverse where I carried the yellow as the main color and trapped the black. These yarns, by the by, are both Socks That Rock lightweight. Korppi and Pondscum. The best part is that when I picked them out at Madrona last winter and explained what I was going to do with them, Tina knew who Lurçat was and was enthusiastic about the project.

So, one Camp project down. I’ve got another to show as soon as I weave in the ends, and a third to work on during the Tour over the next day or two while I wait for my yellow laceweight to come. Hurry, little skeinlet! I need to get back in the race!

Last day of winter: Drifting Pleats in the fading light.