Learn New Stitches for the New Year

Vickie Howell from The Knit Show with Vickie Howell wants to inspire you to learn some new knitting and crochet skills this year, and she’s taking to Instagram to do it.

Each day this month the Knit Show Instagram feed will showcase a different knit or crochet stitch, with the instructions right there in the post, and sometimes an Instagram Story or link to more information on completing the required techniques.

As I write this there have been three days of knitting patterns and one crochet stitch, so there’s a lot of fun learning (and great yarny eye candy, like this post featuring Star Stitch in a fun yarn from Spun Right Round) to be had, and the month’s just getting started!

[Photo: Vickie Howell, via Instagram.]

Next Pattern:

It’s well known (among knitters, anyway) that knitters seem to love chickens as a motif and a subject of our knitting projects. The Emotional Support Chicken and all the other chicken knitting patterns are just the beginning of our devotion to farmyard friends.

For example, there’s Farmer Dennis’ Chicken Hat. This free pattern from Stacy Black is a simple worsted weight beanie sized for adults and decorate with a couple of little rounds of colorwork fences and a flock of chickens strutting around the body of the hat.

You don’t need a lot of any of the colors for the chickens, their facial features or the fences, so this is a great project for using little leftover bits from other projects. The main color for the body of the hat is less than a skein using the yarn suggested, so you might just have everything you need in your house to start stitching up this hat right away.

The colorwork is presented as a chart, with a 16 stitch section that repeats around the body of the hat. All the color changes are shown on the chart but I think it would be easier to knit the whole chicken in the chicken color and add the eye, beak and other features using duplicate stitch when the knitting is done. That way you don’t have to carry those yarns around the whole hat for just a few stitches.

As the name suggests, the original hat was given to a farmer who shared their eggs, but anyone who raises chickens or just has a thing for the fowl is sure to love this cute hat. It wouldn’t be too difficult for someone new to stranded knitting or reading charts to make, either, so if that’s you, give it a try.

The pattern is available for free on Ravelry.

[Photo: Stacy Black]

Knitting Patterns for Little Chicks

Tiny Hens to Knit

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