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A Great Basic Sweater to Add to Your Wardrobe

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Fancy colorwork and cabled sweaters are all well and good, but sometimes (most of the time for me) you really just want something simple you can knock out without too much trouble and wear with everything.

The Calliope sweater from Escpae Tricot is just that sort of sweater. It’s a simple raglan worked in the round from the top down with expanding ribbing in the yoke area and long ribbed sections on the sleeves.

It’s worked with lace and fingering weight yarn held together, or use a single strand of DK.

The pattern is free on Ravelry in English and French and is available in nine sizes to a finished bust circumference of 71 inches.

[Photo: Escape Tricot.]

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Knit a Hat with a Flock of Chickens

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]

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