The Wheel of the Year is here!

In the last few years, Knitted Wit began to release seasonal holiday colors that line up with the solstices/equinoxes and the cross-quarter days that occur between them as part of their “Witch in a Box” line. For some reason, I decided to get these in DK weight instead of fingering, which is my go-to (as you might imagine from all the socks). Then, the 8 skeins marinated in my stash for many months while I noodled on how to best get them all into a single project. Originally I thought about doing some kind of mega-cardigan and striping the colors together, but ultimately I wanted each color to get to shine on its own.

Thus, the shlanket was born! I considered working it horizontally, but that would mean another provisional cast-on (which I LOVE and will never give up, but both of the other 2 designs in the Marking Time collection use it and I just wanted to take a break), and it would make stitch patterns tricky to fit into the short rows. Instead, I decided to work the sections of the shawl like pie slices, from the pointy end to the crust. Yum.

In order to get a good size shawl, I just kept knitting until I had about 30 inches of shawl - my initial attempt stopped at about 24 inches and just wasn’t a satisfying half-pi shawl size. But, working that much length meant I needed a lot of rows, and I get bored easily. Thus, each section in between the increase rows has a new stitch pattern to look forward to, just for interesting knitting!

Connecting each section isn’t as bad as you think - it’s a simple matter of picking up stitches along the edge of the previous section! The last section that joins to the very first one and creates the whole circular shawl is a bit fiddly in the first few rows, but it’s worth it if you want a big, snuggly blanket! Of course, if that’s not your deal you can always stop after 4 (or 5, or 6…)

Try it for yourself here:

Black Flame Candle is here!

A bit late, but I couldn’t not talk about the creation of Black Flame Candle, my contribution to the 2020 Super Sock Scarefest knitalong (Ravelry link). The general theme of the Scarefest is that all sock patterns are inspired by scary movies. Of course, what constitutes a scary movie varies depending on who you ask! That’s why this year I went with our household favorite Hocus Pocus. I knew I wanted something that would hopefully be immediately recognizable to the film, but I couldn’t come up with anything for the human characters. The next most memorable element, for me (besides the cat), is the ~Black Flame Candle~ that sets the whole series of events in motion.

At first I tried to find a decent picture of the candle itself - it seems to have lots of writing on it, and I thought maybe I could design a colorwork pattern that resembled the candle itself. Unfortunately, the movie is old and there are few enough closeups of the candle that this proved impossible. There are some really enterprising individuals out there who have made their own versions, though, should you need to decorate a candle for your own home!

From there, I decided to focus on the flame itself. I started looking up stitch patterns that resemble flames (or leaves; frankly they often look interchangeable to me) and finally settled on the one I used in this pattern. In its original state, it was single color (and the written instructions had all the knits as “k” instead of “ktbl” even though based on the reference image, they were clearly “ktbl”!), so I spent a long time swatching with two colors to figure out if I could make it mosaic. I really wanted that bright outline so the flame would look like the one in the movie - dark in the center, with the white-hot outline to show you it was burning. As important as swatching is, I still don’t like doing it, so my swatch was only 20 stitches on each side and about 4 inches long since I worked the pattern a few different times.

After I had the flame motif worked out, I had to figure out how to make it work on the sock itself. Since it involves an “intro” and “outro” section where the stitch count is less than the main repeat of the pattern, I had to figure out how to handle the making the sock fit the same circumference of leg in those sections. Hopefully I hit on the right balance of increases and decreases - I didn’t get too many questions about it during the KAL so I think so?

The great thing about having this pattern be part of a KAL is there are so many projects to browse to see all the different color combo ideas folks had! If Ravelry is safe to use for you, I hope you’ll check out the different takes each knitter had.

You can get the pattern from any of the links below!