Author: Nancy J. Thomas
Publisher: Potter Craft
Rating:
Buy Tweed on Amazon.com

Once again, the copy I am reviewing was generously provided by Potter Craft. Tweed is a combination knitting history/pattern book scheduled to be released on Tuesday. If you pre-order it now, Amazon will give you an extra 5% off.

I don’t know if you guys have noticed, but I have never knit anything with a tweed yarn. Go ahead, check out the finished projects. No tweed yarns. But then I started lusting after Eunny’s Tangled Yoke Cardigan, which is knit with a tweed yarn, and all of a sudden I wanted to learn more about tweed.

Tweed‘s first two chapters are full of the history and making of tweed yarn. Did you know that:

• Coco Chanel popularized the use of tweed fabrics in high fashion?
• tweed yarns are more prone to felting?

The third chapter contains stitch patterns with pictures of swatches knit up in tweed yarns. This chapter was especially useful to me, as a tweed newbie and fledgling knitwear designer, to see which patterns are made more interesting with tweed yarns and which patterns are strong enough not to be obscured by the tweed flecks.

The last section is full of knitting patterns, grouped by skill level. There are 22 projects total, including hats, scarves, bags, sweaters, vests, pillows, and throws. Although all of my favorite projects below happen to be sweaters, sweaters make up less than half of the total pattern count.

Pattern previews after the jump!

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Like many people, I keep an array of doohickeys and knick-knacks on top of my computer, the better to gather dust with. And I just realized that my doohickeys and knick-knacks are either: a) small plush toys, or b) random knitting that I didn’t know what to do with.

1. The Yoshi beanie is wearing a cape, which happens to be the first thing I ever knit that has both knit and purl stitches in it. I came home from my knitting class, thrilled that I had managed to produce a mostly-even swatch of off-the-cuff stitch patterns and couldn’t bear to just hide it away somewhere. So Yoshi got a cape.
2. The first baby hat I ever knit. One of my friends had a baby shortly after I learned how to knit and I was determined to make her some baby thing. But I wasn’t yet confident in my ability to make gift-able items, so I bought a ball of the cheapest yarn I could find to practice on. This was the practice hat. Of course, I discovered after I went to knit the real hat that kitchen cotton behaves really differently from wool blends.
3. This is a recent addition. And it’s not knitting. Did I mention that I was trying to crochet again? Ah yes, I did. It just clicked for me this time around and I’ve made quite a few random swatches and medallions just to prove to myself I know what I’m doing now. And I made a dismembered frog head. There will be a body eventually. Until then, it will continue to stare down at me creepily.

Debbie recently asked me for help in assembling the Bear in Lamb Sleep Suit. While there are some tips for assembly in my original post, here I’ve added schematics for the trickiest bits to assemble: the head and the legs.

Back of Head

In the diagram below, the light blue arrows indicate the direction of knitting.

Note that the back of the head is constructed in much the same way as the arms and the body. You make conjoined octagons and then sew the seams indicated by the black double-pointed arrows. After you are done with this bit, you will have a small bowl-shaped piece.

Front of Head

The front of the head is a little trickier. First, line up the pieces as pictured, with the right sides facing you—if you’ve done this correctly, the two bound-off stitches at the side of each piece should meet in the middle. The blue dots represent the row markers you placed while knitting.

The first thing you should do is sew the right side and the left side together where indicated by the double-pointed arrows—this is the side of each piece from the cast-on edge to the first marker. This seam runs from the center chin to the nose. Do not sew the cast-on edges together! This will be the neck opening you use to stuff the head.

Next, sew the head gusset in. Line up the tip of the triangle with the center of the V where the bound-off stitches meet. Then seam each side of the triangle to each side of the head, lining up the head gusset’s cast-on edge with the second marker. Note that the cast-on edge for the gusset is the top of the bear’s head.

You should now have another bowl-shaped piece (this one has a little point at the center) for the front of the head. Sew the back and front of the head together at the sides and at the top, leaving the neck open for stuffing.

Instructions for leg assembly after the jump.

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