3KCBWDAY4 - Knitting and Crochet Blog Week, Day 4 - The Seasons

Now: the question posed by @eskimimi for today's blog entry is an easy peasy one - Do the seasons affect your knitting?

This picture says it all. In fact, I had a rather embarrassingly large cache of, er, pictures of hot water bottle covers which I could have chosen from. They're great to knit: good gifts, quite quick and really nice to use. I use the fantastic Aran pattern by Rachael Herron on Yarn-a-go-go, among others. The one above is pretty much my own pattern - I wanted to learn how to do the Fair Isle kind of patterns so I drew it out.

Anyway: in winter, yes, I want to knit wrist warmers and mug huggers while drinking red wine in front of the fire. I like browsing through the Aran and chunky patterns for big cosy jumpers and those over-sized Rowan jackets. However, I've never really liked knitting with cotton so, in Summer, I'm still knitting those big jumpers, just very slowly!

Now - off to sample some real ale!

Queen of the Knitted Hottie?

There's Fair Isle Knitting everywhere, due to The Killing. There's also quite a lot written about the origins of the patterns. I don't think I'm up to knitting a Fair Isle jumper, but I wanted to try this kind of pattern. It turns out to be easier than I thought: you just knit the stitch in the colour you want, making a chart on squared paper for the contrast pattern. There are numerous charts and hottie patterns on Ravelry and a great one in Jenny Lord's Purls of Wisdom too, so I just picked one and changed the main pattern to stocking stitch. The wool is Sirdar Click Aran - a lovely cornflower blue and plain cream. This star is knitted through 11 stitches over 11 rows and I arranged them by eye - though I have jotted down their position in case I want to knit another one!