Brioche
A serving of humble pie
I needed a hat. Simple. But why do something simple when there’s so many cool knitting techniques out there I’ve yet to try? Take double-sided knitting, most commonly used to make reversible colorwork patterns by alternating knit and purl stitches between rows (2 colors are cast on alternating, then every other stitch is knitted, then the other color stitches are purled…. listen it’s easier to understand once you see the stitches on a needle).
A double-sided knitting technique with a little * extra * on top is brioche, which involves doing extra yarn-overs to make what I call a ‘shadow ribbing’ effect - one side is stockinette but with every other column sticking out, the other side is almost like ribbing. I had first seen brioche used to make these really funky sweaters from Les Filles Ducoeur, and next thing I know I see brioche everywhere (oops now my Instagram is also entirely knitting).
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Left: Malmo zipper sweater. Right: Copenhagen sweater, as knitted by madebycapu. Both designs by Les Filles Ducoeur.
It’s coral…it’s brain. It’s very very interesting. Gotta try this in a hat. So I did.
Project Info
Yarn:
- [Main color] Essential wool by K&C (discontinued line from the store formerly known as Jo-Ann), green olive colorway, 100% superwash merino, worsted weight
- [Contrasting color] Malabrigo Rios, sagitarius colorway, 100% superwash merino, worsted weight
Needles: US 6
Misc: failure
I mean, it had to happen eventually. That is, I think hubris finally caught up to me. So it’s a new technique… it’s just a hat, right? WRONG. From the start, I struggled. First, with any kind of double knitting, the count of stitches/rows is complex. The way the knitting is done, you are only knitting half the stitches each round (round 1 main color, round 2 contrasting color) so the stitch count got really confusing for me. Lots of instructions are opaque and implicit; does “cast on 64 stitches” mean 64 loops or is each stitch pair (main color with adjacent contrasting stitch) count as one, giving 64x2 physical stitches? (my god it’s cpu/core/thread notation all over again)
Second, the method itself is a bit confusing to parse:
“With Main Color yarn, knit 1 stitch together with the yarn-over that is wrapped around it; bring yarn between needles to front of work, slip 1 stitch, then bring yarn up over top of needle to create a yarn-over that is wrapped around the slipped stitch, and yarn is now in back ready to knit the next stitch to end.”
You’ll have to believe me that it took 3 tries to even get past more than a few rows. The yarn-overs killed me and, like learning how to read knit/purl stitches, it took me forever to get the hang of switching between the main and contrasting yarns. It’s because 1 unit of brioche is really 2 stitches - slip the first stitch, knit the second and yarn-over stitch together (or purl if on the contrasting yarn)… so if there’s any mistake there’s 3x as many loops as usual. So it’s a hell of a time trying to ladder down to find a dropped stitch. God help you if you’re faced with a missing loop - are you short a slip stitch, a yarn-over, or the normal stitch? Do you need to pick a stitch up that was dropped or did you forget to yarn-over on the previous round? And so on.
I also could not settle on the yarn color combo. I knew I wanted to use the K&C yarn gifted to me but I didn’t have any good contrasting yarn on hand so I bought some cheap striping yarn from Michaels but it ended up looking really…tacky?…so then I tried to use left over yarn from my sweater project but that clashed with the green and I really just about set the whole thing on fire. I ended up taking a week long break from knitting (a story for another time) and when I revisited this project I decided to treat it right and pick up a skein of Malabrigo for a more (in my opinion) tasteful dash of color.
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A triptych of failure. Not pictured: 1) first try cast on, ending in too many mistakes and not liking the contrasting yarn, 2) second cast on in totally different colors but again not liking it.
Left: attempt 3 with brighter striping yarn, hated it too. Middle: attempt 4 going back to first choice contrasting yarn, lots of mistakes but now some intuition on how to fix. Right: finally following gut feeling on yarn color, taking it off needles to start again with Malabrigo and WHAT THE FUCK WHY IS IT 40 INCHES AROUND. Yep turns out the answer to the above was 64 stitches total cast on, not 128.
So it’s been a time. (Cole I think has been silently pleased that I haven’t been able to breeze through this one. He was hoping I’d hit a challenge with the sweater). But I’m absolutely loving the contrasting yarn. You can never go wrong with Malabrigo. It’s like pieces of jewel-toned sea glass peaking through the green columns. Exactly what I wanted.
I’m about 2.5 inches from finishing the main part, after which will be decreasing to shape the crown. I’m pumped for that because that’s where the coral-like striations come into play. Like a continuous line of forking paths leading from the top to the bottom. Extremely fun. I’ll check back in when we’re finished (hallelujah).