Hilde's Corner

Have you ever wanted to try going “off-roading” with a pattern? Want to put your own spin on your own creation? I think the absolute easiest way to do this is by adding stripes. You can put stripes on anything, and stripes are so versatile! At first glance, adding stripes seems so basic, but when you stop and think about it, there are a lot of ways you can create with stripes!

Adding basic stripes has a lot of combination possibilities. How will you place the colors? Will you intersperse each color with a main color? How wide will the stripes be? How wide will the background be between stripes? Will the stripes vary in width? Will there be stripes all over the project or just at an edge?

We now carry Blue Sky Fibers Woolstok, and that includes Woolstok bundles of worsted weight minis. The Woolstok Bundles have 21 minis, 3 tiny skeins of each color, making it 7 colors all together. Each mini is 5g or 12 yds. Seeing the beautiful color pairings I knew I wanted to try it in something, but what? I knew it had to be stripes!

As a starting point, using basic stripes, you could knit this Alpine Hat by Karnina Marie free on Ravelry. 

Or try this Tunisian crochet cowl with basic stripes. Called Color Wheel Cowl by Nicole Michael it sells for $5 on Ravelry. 

I began looking up patterns and found that Blue Sky Fibers has a few patterns utilizing the mini bundles and just going through some of them I could feel the creative juices begin to flow even more. Because you can’t just stop at basic stripes!

To bring more flair to your stripes, add texture to each stripe by using different stitch patterns for each color, like in this pattern called Ellensburg Cowl by Alyssa Rasmussen and free on Ravelry. It uses one Woolstok mini Bundle plus one 50g Woolstok skein. It’s like a sampler of stitches. Or do your own thing, and using a book of knitting stitches, come up with your own stitch sampler cowl. 

For a crochet version, try Sonic Waves Cowl by Marie Segares for $5 on Ravelry. It uses different stitches to create alternating heights of stripes.

Breaking up basic stripes by knitting every other stitch with a main or background color results in stripes of dots (or stitches) as has been done in Breckenridge Bundle Hat

by Bobbi IntVeld which sells for $3 on Ravelry. It uses one Woolstok mini Bundle plus one 50g skein for the background color. Take it a step further and you could increase how many stitches of background go between each color so the dots are spaced further apart, or vice versa - knit more stitches of each color between main color stitches that would result in dashes! That would be cool. (do you see how the creative juices are flowing now? Do you feel it?) I knit up this hat using the Woolstok Bundle and just deciding on color placement alone was a lot of fun. This hat only used one of each mini color, leaving 2 mini’s left of each color which meant there was a lot of room to play with colors. I was not limited to using one color once. I could have repeated a color three times, had I wanted to.

This next cowl uses texture to break up the stripes. It’s called Chilton Cowl by Bobbi IntVeld going for $3 on Ravelry. It calls for one Woolstok minis Bundle and two 50g skeins of a Main Color. It utilizes a type of slipped stitch to break up and add texture to the stripes to great effect. I knit this cowl up, too, and it was great fun to play with and resulted in a wonderfully squishy cowl. It used 2 of the 3 minis of each color, so there was still enough of each color to knit something else if I wanted.

With all these examples of how to use stripes in a project, wouldn’t it be fun to throw a few here and there on a cowl or a hat, or on the sleeve or edge of a sweater? It would be a very simple addition and would be unique to you! Stripes are an easy way to stretch your creative mind.