Back to Brioche

Yes, it turns out I do get distracted easily. Pretty colours, luscious textures, challenging new techniques and gorgeous patterns just keep popping up everywhere and taking me off on tangents.
This time it’s a combination of all of these that have me obsessed.

Interweave hat in teeny sock yarn

We have the beautiful Misti Alpaca Hand Paint Sock that my husband only wanted ankle length socks out of. I’m not one to argue when it leaves me half the skein to play with! I did love making them and he does love to wear them, so it’s certainly up there on my list of successful projects. This yarn is just gorgeous knit up normally, I was stupidly excited by the idea of trying it in brioche. It's just the most amazing combination of colour and texture.
I picked this one up on a weekend trip to Launceston, a lovely yarn store called Knits Needles and Wool.

Misti Alpaca Hand Paint Sock

On my next adventure, I picked up the contrast, also Misti Alpaca Sock in a gradient dye at the Woolshed in Canberra. It’s now my mission to visit these little shops everywhere I go, they are all so wonderful!

I’ve had the Interweave Hat in my Ravelry queue since my last affair with brioche early last year. I think there are another two or three pairs of yarn in my stash that are also slated for making this hat. It's so pretty and a very sensible pattern, once you get the hang of it. Of course sock yarn was probably not the ideal thing to try it out for the first time but I’m a deep end kinda girl. Same goes for my first attempt at one-pass brioche.

I found the Sockmatician’s One-Pass Brioche technique as I was learning early last year and immediately put in the Too Hard basket. As it turns out, it’s not much more complicated than regular brioche knitting per stitch, keeps things simpler with all the yarn at the same spot in the project, and really does get a beautiful rhythm to it.

It also turns out that the increase and decrease instructions I left for myself on my intro brioche post were terrifying, so I'll work on putting something much better together.

For now I keep my fingers crossed that I will have enough variegated yarn to get through this quite ambitious project, and in the meantime just really, really enjoy myself!