texture – Granary Knits

31 January 202631 January 2026

The Wheel

The Wheel of the Year encompasses the eight festivals of the Celtic and Pagan year. It begins with Samhain, the celebration of the ancestors in October/November, and ends with Mabon, the Autumnal Equinox or Harvest Home in the Northern Hemisphere. The year is a circle and also an infinite loop, and so for this my last celebratory pattern I have chosen the Möbius loop as a vehicle for a contemplative design and an adaptable accessory.

This design lends itself to three separate items of the same basic pattern: a headband, a cowl (either single- or double-wrap), and a shoulder-warming wrap in three sizes. To determine tension, I recommend making the headband in your desired yarn as your gauge swatch, before making the cowl or wrap; I found the Möbius shape to be stretchy and accommodating to many sizes, so the medium size headband actually fits a large adult head (snugly) as well as a child/teen, and uses surprisingly little yarn.

The pattern is a memorable sequence of stitches, rhythmic and contemplative. It can be knit in any weight of yarn; this pattern gives calculations for light fingering/sock, 4ply/fingering, DK, worsted, aran, and chunky weights. It uses Cat Bordhi’s Möbius cast on as its basis, and I strongly recommend watching her video for the technique.

Cat Bordhi’s Möbius cast on video tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVnTda7F2V4

See the tables below for approximate yarn requirements and the circumferences achieved for each yarn weight.

The Wheel pattern is now available in The Granary Knits pattern stores on Ravelry and Payhip.

22 September 202522 September 2025

Mabon

Mabon is the eighth and final festival in the Wheel of the Year. This year, it falls on 22nd September, and is also known as the Autumnal Equinox or Harvest Home in the Northern Hemisphere, Spring Equinox in the Southern Hemisphere. The year has almost come full circle, the second harvest has finished: apples have been picked and stored, bread baked, enjoyed and shared. The year is winding down towards winter, but there are still fine days to be celebrated. Mabon is a time of contemplation, of looking back over the year that has passed and forward to the winter that is to come.

Mabon the shawl is a semicircle of texture. The pattern is a memorable sequence of stitches, rhythmic and contemplative. It can be knit in any weight of yarn; the pattern gives calculations for 4ply/fingering, DK and worsted weights. It uses short row techniques to achieve the semicircular shape and, since the shawl is worked in wedges, these can be knit in multiple colours. The samples show parti-colour (one half in teal, one in turquoise), alternating colours (one wedge in light grey, the next in darker grey), and all wedges the same colour. A page of blank schematics is provided at the end of the pattern for you to print out and experiment with choosing and placing colours.

Four different treatments for the final unifying top edge are described.

For details of the pattern requirements, see the pattern page at either Payhip or Ravelry.

13 December 201930 December 2021

Wild Geese Hap

Did you know that a group of geese on the ground is known as a gaggle, but in the air, flying in V-formation, it is known as a skein? I love the idea of geese and yarn being connected in this way.

Wild Geese flying into the sunset over our house

Wild geese fly over our house every Autumn, sometimes just one or two, sometimes in huge skeins of a hundred or more birds. They gather around our local reservoirs, ready to move off to their winter pastures. Their flight and call has long been a source of inspiration to me, and feeds into my sense of place in this landscape of dry stone walls, small streams and becks, hills and reservoirs.

The Wild Geese Hap is my response to this Autumnal landscape. Its texture denotes the skeins of geese in flight, becoming gradually larger as the hap grows, divided by ridges forming the dry stone walls, and ending with the ripples on the surface of the reservoirs, in the colours of the Canada Goose. The hap can be finished with either a plain cast off, or a knit-on edging in a triangular lacy design which looks uncannily like the wing of a goose in flight.

Wild Geese Hap blocking on a hap stretcher

The pattern for Wild Geese Hap is available from the Payhip Granary Knits Pattern Store. It features two sizes, a 2m square hap or a 1m square lapghan. It is knit in scrumptious aran/worsted weight yarn in lovely natural colours, and in the round from the centre out. I used Daughter of a Shepherd Ram Jam and Castlemilk Moorit DK (which knits up as aran weight) yarns for both the hap and the lapghan. I love the sheepiness of the DoaS yarns, their wonderful bloom when they have been washed and dried, the natural colours of sheep, and the sheer warmth of the finished item.

Both sizes of the Wild Geese Hap are worked from charts, from the centre out. The blanket size is shown above with the lace border; the lapghan, shown below, has been finished with a very stretchy simple cast off, which accentuates the rippled edging and the points at the corners.

20 June 201930 December 2021

Diagoniella Cowl Pattern Now Published

The textured design for this pattern sprang from my research into the fossils found at the Burgess Shale fossil site in Canada, a wealth of amazing plants and creatures which lived in the pre-Cambrian seas over 500 million years ago. Diagoniella was a protosponge, tubular in shape but with an intriguing diagonal skeletal structure which just cried out to be turned into knitting!

This cowl is designed to suit everyone. The textured pattern is understated but detailed enough to be interesting, and the deep moss ribbing ensures that cold winds are kept firmly away from the neck. It can easily be turned into a deeper cowl/snood by adding more vertical repeats of the pattern; it is written for knitting in the round. It was designed for someone who cannot tolerate wool next to the skin, and the yarn suggestions are both cotton blends that give excellent stitch definition. The cowl/snood can be knit in any DK weight yarn which has good stitch definition.

Instructions are given for three sizes, a short cowl 25 cm (approx. 10”) tall; a medium cowl 40 cm (approx. 15 ½”); and a snood 55 cm (approx. 21 ¾”).

The pattern is available in the Granary Knits Pattern Store.