Shear Charlie 3

California summer is in full swing. These summer nights are what the Shear Series is all about. The open, loosely-knit ribbing breathes so well, especially on those night time bike rides. If you've never gone on a bike ride on a warm summer night, you probably don't even know what I'm talking about. Go do it tonight. It's awesome.

This is Shear Charlie #3. I clarified the design on the second one, and I wanted to do one in this charcoal lamb's wool. This is the sixth hat I've knit from this yarn batch. It used to be a men's sweater from The Gap. I have enough for one more, but I did manage to find another one of these sweaters. The exact same sweater. That seriously never happens, so yeah, awesome.



Charlie 3 is definitely my favorite Shear so far. I dig the way the fold-over matches the banding. Shear also does a lot of subtle, technique-type things which would just confuse everyone if I tried to explain it, so I won't even try. I dunno what I expect you to walk away with from that last sentence. Maybe that as a conceptual design, the parallelogram element has matured significantly since it's inception in the Skew Series which managed to go from Alpha to Foxtrot (that's six versions) before evolving into Shear. And yes, I'm still pushing forward.



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Shear Charlie 2

Spring/Summer is in full swing, and although Spring is pretty much over, I still want some color in my shop. I don't list much during these hotter months. There just isn't a market for such things this time of year. But I look at this as an opportunity to let the stock pile up.

I've made a slight modification to this design. The original had more of that 1x3 ribbing near the top. I've shortened that section to harmonize with the 1x1 ribbing near the crown so they both frame the central section. This meant tweaking the math slightly where the garter rib meets the 1x3. In order to achieve the same length as the original, I had to re-orchestrate the transitions to stay within the confines of the row totals. That's starting to sound complicated. The 1x3 ribbing section is shorter. That pretty much sums it up.



So by doing this the parallelogram shape is framed by a 1x3 section at the top, and a 1x1 section near the brim. This does a couple of things to the design that I'm really geeking out about. One: it adds variety while still maintaining unity. Two: since both framing sections are the same length, this variety can be seen whether the hat is worn long or folded up.

This hat looks particularly awesome when it's worn folded up, as the 1x3 ribbing aligns with the brim section which is inversed (3x1). I really like how it does that. I suppose that's one of the reasons why I like messing around with ribbed hats. You can play with these reversals that occur at the brim, and unify elements in fun ways.

Aside from this slight clarification to the design, nothing else is different. The yarn is the same 100% lamb's wool as the original, a rich hunter green recycled from a J Crew sweater. I feel motivated to do another, so I may just do a light gray one. And a charcoal one.

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Creative/Process

In an effort to wrangle more control over my online content, I'm examining my blog post tags. This has given me a chance to look hard at the content of this blog, and see the bigger picture. From the start this has been a place for me to share what I'm up to creatively. Very rarely have I posted something on here that wasn't created by me. Original content.

So this process of tag analysis led me to delete a few tags, and create a few new ones. The two primary content types are 'Craft' and 'Creative.' As you can see they branch out into their own subcategories. Blog posts are tagged with the primary tag, then the secondary tag, then the tertiary tag where applicable.

Interestingly, I realized the tag 'Graphic Design' was unnecessary. I didn't need it. As a primary tag, 'Creative' covered everything better, and the secondary tags proved to be more accurate. I guess that was weird to me since this blog started as a graphic design blog. I dunno, whatever. I'll be dropping a few others eventually, too.

This post is tagged with a new secondary tag that I've added, 'Process.' I hope that by sharing creative process with you that you may find it helpful in understanding your own content. I'm not gonna act like I'm the king of content or anything, I'm really not. I suck actually which is why I'm doing this in the first place.

Come Together

Here's another light weight knit for the springtime. People seem to dig Reflect Bravo, so I made one in charcoal. I mentioned previously that I don't have much of this color, and that got me thinking of solutions.

What I ended up doing was combining yarn recycled from two sweaters. They're both charcoal merino, but one is slightly darker than the other. As I knit this up the only discernible difference was that the combined color was lighter when viewed from afar, but that's it. The heathered nature of charcoal yarns seems to visually equalize the hue values.

So yeah, it looks pretty great. I think I'm gonna focus on these high gauge pieces for the shop during the warmer months. I'd love it if my shop was nothing but high gauge. I'll just have to work on that.

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Easy

It never fails to amaze me how strong these thread weight merino yarns are. I unraveled these sweaters directly from the disassembled pieces onto the swift. Typically I have to pull out a few yards, then wind the swift in a two step process, but these came apart very smoothly with minimal tension. I just attached the end, and wound away. I suppose them being in great condition helped somewhat.

The Ann Taylor was a short sleeved crew neck number in a country blue. The other was a long sleeved cardigan by David Jones Plus, the first true black I've found thus far (stoked about that). Both are 100% merino wool, and will undoubtedly be quadrupled for the Reflect Series.