Spring+Summer Knitty is Here!

It’s Knitty time again, and it looks like the spring+summer issue is bringing us lots of great projects to queue, as usual.

My favorite may well be the colorful Easy as Pie Blanket, perfect for the little kid in your life. It’s shaped with short rows and would be a great stash buster if you didn’t mind the circles not matching.

Heading into summer there are lots of tank top patterns here. I like the super-sultry Daphne Tank, perfect knitting for your inner bombshell, and the lace-paneled Etherial Tank, which may actually be going in my queue.

There are several great shawls in this issue, too, to help you make the transition to warmer weather and protect you in the air conditioning. The Nori Shawl is a lovely lace number worked sideways form tip to tip in a sort of zig-zag lace, and it only uses one skein of sock yarn. And then there’s the fun Steps Shawl, which uses tucked pieces worked in different colors to shape the shawl into a spiral. Fun!

See anything you like? I’d love to here what’s going in your queue!

[Photo via Knitty.]

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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