Knitting

Patterns, projects and techniques

Free Pattern: Stranded in Oz Tam/Beret

, by . Leave a Comment

stranded in oz beretIt may be hot in the northern part of the world, but that doesn’t mean it won’t cool down again soon. Some winter accessories make great summer knitting projects because they’re small and easy and fun to knit.

Case in point, this Stranded in Oz beret or tam knit by Melissa Deutsch Scott. It’s a super-simple pattern worked in pretty hand-painted yarn, with a carry along of prestrung sequins used on the body of the hat.

Simple increasing and decreasing means the yarn is the star, and it’s easy to alter the pattern to make it bigger or smaller, or to suit whatever beautiful yarn you have on hand that you want to have on head when it’s colder.

Do you knit ahead of the season, or are you like me, always getting caught without a new hat when the first cold snap comes? Spill it!

[Photo by Stranded in Oz.]

Next Pattern:

Have you read?

Tips for Picking the Right Color Yarn for Your Project

I have never been all that picky about the colors I use in knitting projects. When choosing colors for projects to go in my books, I try to pick colors that go together in individual projects and also to use a variety of colors among the projects in the book, so while I love blue and green I make sure to throw in orange and yellow as well, for example.

When knitting projects for myself I’m usually using stash so whatever I have is good enough. Or if I do happen to be buying yarn for a project, it’s usually more about the texture or fiber content of the yarn first, then choosing a color I like, rather than having a color in mind then finding a yarn with that in its line.

Marie at Olive Knits was looking for the perfect green yarn to replace a store bought sweater, and she found that picking out exactly the right shade was trickier than she expected.

She wrote a blog post full of tips for finding the right yarn when you’re looking for a particular color.

I think the hardest part of this these days is that we tend to do so much online shopping for yarn, either because we don’t have a local yarn store, we can’t get what we want locally or we want to support independent makers who live elsewhere. And if you’ve ever received yarn that isn’t quite the color you were expecting you know what I’m talking about.

One of her tips, then, is to look at a color swatch for the yarn you’re thinking about buying on every monitor or device you have available because it probably will look different on different screens (and maybe different still in person, and under different lighting conditions, or if you use it in a project with other colors…).

Check out her post for more tips on finding the right color for your project.

[Photo: Olive Knits.]

Leave a Reply