Welcome everyone to the first stop on the Short Row Knits blog tour, kindly hosted by Anzula! Short Row Knits was published on the 15th of September and it can be purchased in both print and electronic formats, see here for purchase options.

I’m very excited to have this book published; I’m completely in love with short rows and use them in almost all my designs. This book really has been a labor of love; I started it nearly 2 years ago and I wanted to create a book that explored short rows in more depth than I’ve seen before. It moves from several different short row techniques right through to tutorials on different ways of actually using those techniques in your knitting. After all there’s not much use have the information if you don’t know where to use it!

I learn best by practicing rather than reading, so in addition to the technique sections, this book also has 20 patterns. Each pattern uses short rows in a different way. The type of short row used is detailed in each pattern and I’ve given little tips and suggestions along the way for anything that made knitting easier for me.

Lets take a look at the hat I designed for Anzula’s yarn; Limon. This hat uses Anzula’s Cricket yarn in color Avocado. This yarn has got a nice tight twist which is great for knitting hats as it can be knit nice and firmly. To keep the fabric firm the hat is also knit using a tight gauge on size 4 (3.5mm) needles. This gives you the structure you need for a hat and will help reduce stretching on the brim so it’ll keep fitting your head.

Limon is a side-to-side hat that uses Japanese short rows to create the generous beret shaping. When knitting a hat from side-to-side you are working a wedge shape that tapers at the crown and repeating it over and over again. If the stitch pattern at the brim doesn’t pull in then you will create a beanie shape but if you have a vertically compressed pattern at the brim you create a beret shape. That is what happens with Limon, the brim uses a slipstitch pattern that is very dense vertically which means that for the same number of rows the brim is much smaller than the body of the hat. I love the full beret shape this creates, its very flattering to wear.

I opted to use Japanese short rows for the brim. You are working many short rows one after the other and by using a series of Japanese short rows with the yarn loop held on a single strip of waste yarn it becomes very fast and intuitive to work. The hat begins with a provisional cast-on and when all of the wedges for your size are finished you end by grafting the live stitches at the end of your work with the provisional cast-on stitches at the very beginning.

Have you seen the great Cricket colors that you can knit your Limon in?

Anzula is offering a giveaway of Cricket yarn and a copy of the book. Leave a comment on the blog and let us know what color Cricket yarn you’ll knit your Limon in! Anzula will use a random number generator and announce the winner on September 25th below and on Facebook. Shipping to US and Canada only.

If you want to keep following along on our blog tour, the next stop is on September 21st with Knitspot.

And the winner is....

Well, we picked two winners. We just couldn't help ourselves. We had 32 participants, duplicate comments were not counted and used the random number generator at Random.org.