Heads Up

I mentioned last month that this years edition of the Better Homes and Garden Knitting & Crochet Collection was out and whilst reading it I already had a pattern in mind that I was wanting to try as it jumped out at me straight away. Days after reading the magazine I had the project on my needles and didn’t stop at one knitting 3 of the pattern in quick succession.

In my mind I have a list of things that “real knitters do” I don’t know where this idea came from. I guess the list is like a list of knitting skills or projects. My knitting is mostly basic or adventurous beginner. I don’t do a lot of complex knitting as I don’t have the concentration skills or patience to do projects that involve a lot of counting or take forever to finish. On skill on my list was to knit cables. I have always been fascinated by cables. The geometric side of my brain loves the patterns they create and is intrigued by how they occur. You always think of knitting as a flat piece but cables create texture to a flat piece of work. Last year I brought a cable needle and thought during the Covid lockdown I’m going to learn how to knit cables. Fortunately I didn’t have the Covid lockdown a lot of people faced as I was working full time and caring for Mr StitchNSew. Any knitting time I had I focused on relaxing project as my brain needed to slow down and wasn’t up to learning anything new. When I saw the headband pattern and read the instructions I thought yep I can do this, now is the time to learn cables.

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The pattern is officially called Heads Up. I would’ve loved to have made this pattern for myself however I don’t really have the need for a headband. Instead I decided to make it to add to our Charity Bags this year. I had leftover yarn from when I knitted the scarves earlier this year so I choose one colour from each scarf and knitted a matching headband. These were incredibly quick to knit. Each one is only 50cm in length then joined up. I finished the 3 in just over a week!

I can now tick another project off my challenge to make something out of every edition of the Better Homes and Garden Knitting & Crochet Collection magazines

♦ 2014
♦ 2015 – Builder’s Work Wear
♦ 2016
♦ 2017 – Oui Oui Mon Cheri
♦ 2018
♦ 2019
♦ 2020
♦ 2021 – Heads Up

I was surprised that I could knit cables whilst watching tv, in my mind I thought they would be more difficult but this pattern was very easy to follow and a good pattern to learn cables on. One thing I did do was put a life line which is a length of yarn threaded through the stitches at the end of each 8 row repeat so if I made a mistake I could easily pull the headband back to the start of the pattern repeat and restart the pattern from there. The lifeline came in handy a few times when I miscounted or forgot midway which part of the cable that I was up to. Each 8 row repeat took no time at all so it wasn’t a big deal if I had to pull my yarn back and start again. After making these headbands I’m inspired to try another project which has cables in it.

Cassiy

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