Celebrate March Mayhem and Track Favorite Knitting Patterns

This is a thing I would never have the energy to do, but I’m pretty glad it exists.

Mason-Dixon Knitting has put together a bracket of beloved knitting patterns and is allowing knitters to vote for their favorites. It’s not quite set up like a basketball bracket (though they did design one) in that the voting is happening in genres of patterns — sweaters; shawls; head, feet and hands; and home, baby, toy.

The top eight from each section make it to the next round, where each category is narrowed to four, then two, then the winners of each category go head to head (to head to head, I suppose) to determine the overall winner. Bragging rights are all that’s at stake, but still, this sounds pretty fun.

Have you voted? Are you going to? This whole bracket makes me feel like I’ve missed a lot of cool knitting projects because there are quite a few I missed (all but two were published last year, and all but one is a paid pattern, because paying designers is awesome).

[Photo by Mason-Dixon Knitting.]

Generally I like knitting patterns where I feel like you can use whatever yarn you have (because my stash is big enough and I want to use it, thanks) and make a successful project. This is one of those times when a special yarn makes the process that much easier.

The Floral Bouquet Shawl from Xandy Peters uses a specific extended color pooling yarn from Feisty Fibers, which allows you to place the bobble flowers with increasing frequency as you knit the project.

It starts with a solid color yarn, then the two color yarn is added in, and you make a bobble whenever you encounter the color pops. This would be hard to replicate with other yarn that doesn’t have the extended color pooling built in.

The background of the shawl is ribbed, making the project reversible.

The shawl uses fingering/sock yarn and comes out to be an asymmetrical triangle that’s 54 inches/137 cm long and 36 inches/ 90 cm deep and 60 inches/150 cm across the top edge.

Xandy says the pattern is for intermediate to advanced knitters. Knowing how to work traditional bobbles would probably help, but there’s a great video tutorial for how to work the floral bobbles so you can practice on other yarn or even incorporate the bobbles into other projects.

The bobbles are five-petaled flowers but they also kind of look like starfish to me, which could be fun on a child’s cardigan or other pattern. They’d also be fun on the leg of a sock or around the brim of a hat for extra whimsy.

The pattern includes photo and video tutorials, and written and charted instructions. It also includes tips on what to look for if you choose to use different yarn for the project, and instructions on how to dye your own yarn to use in the project.

If you want to give it a try, you can find the pattern on Ravelry.

[Photo: Xandy Peters]

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