Woolly Wormhead and the Meret
February 23rd, 2009 § 1 Comment
One our favourites at Artemis Adornments is the delightful hatter and travelling pattern-writer Ruth aka Woolly Wormhead. At last count her caravan was parked in sunny Rimini, whence she conducts the maths required to create her superbly fitting hats. Ruth continues in the very best of Web2 traditions, to generally encourage, enthuse, answer even the daftest queries, about how to make these magnificent titfers.
Woolly Wormhead currently has two books for sale, one for little people, and Going Straight for the goddess in us all. And in the winter of 2008, Woolly Wormhead published a first mystery pattern, to an excited and eager audience. Not for the fainthearted, a mystery pattern is one where you don’t quite know the outcome. A hat is all we knew, as we few intrepid Wormhead fans begun to cast on.
And so the Mystery Beret became the Meret and at the time of writing, more than 730 Merets have been made. Including these:
The first was made with some handspun laceweight tweedy silk/lambswool, held tripled to create an 8-ply DK equivalent. This is a great way to use up sock yarn or the odd skein of laceweight. This is the second:
This yarn is the very last of a batch of recycled yarn rescued from a charity shop sweater. There are lots of posts out there on the knitting blogosphere showing how to do this, and it’s very easy, if time consuming. The yarn here is a lovely mixture of soft cotton and wool, with little acrylic sparkly bits plied in. Artemis is a big fan of found objects and recycling.
Both of these Merets show the shape of the horseshoe leaf pattern. In the design, the main motif uses yarnovers (YO) and decreases (K2tog) to create the shaping. One very useful tip when using yarnovers:
1. If you want a closed eyelet in your stitch, knit or purl into the FRONT loop of the yarnover on the following row. The green tweed and the soft cotton Merets both use a closed yarnover method.
2. If you want an open eyelet in your stitch, knit or purl into the BACK loop of the yarnover on the following row. Like this:
This pink Meret was made using Sublime Yarn’s Cashmerino and as a present for a beloved 80-year old. It is scrumptiously soft and very warm. More on this Meret and its derivations, including what that blue yarn is doing, in a later post.
Make one!
[...] 2009 February 27 tags: lace, Meret, pink, scarf, snuggler, stole by Brendadada So as the Meret craze began in earnest, people wanted scarves, and mittens, and while there were a couple of rather [...]