It’s a new month, so time to welcome the next Boost Your Knitting pattern, designer, and technique! Meet the Marangoni Hat, designed by colourwork aficionado Tori Seierstad! Are you ready to learn some really handy techniques for managing yarns this month?

The Marangoni Hat features a circular motif — reminiscent of soap bubbles which are stabilised thanks to the Marangoni effect, thus the hat’s name! These bold bubbles pop against subtle changes in background colour, punctuated by a brighter stripe. The result, I think you’ll agree, is a really cheerful and unique hat that’ll keep your ears toasty all winter long!

The combination of bold foreground colour, shifting background shades, and stripes give lots of scope for practicing different techniques for joining in new yarns, this month’s featured Boost Your Knitting technique. Now, joining in yarns might not seem like a showstopping technique, but what it lacks in glamour it more than makes up for in usability — unless you only ever knit one skein projects, learning new methods for joining in yarns can be really handy and save you time on weaving in ends during finishing. This month, we’ll cover splicing in new yarns, which is used for the background colour shifts in Tori’s clever design, which of course requires you to be using a yarn that can be spliced (i.e. predominately wool and non-superwash). We’lll also be covering how to knit in a new yarn and knitting in the end of an old yarn, which let you “weave” in pesky ends as you go, rather than contending with them in the finishing of a project. In Tori’s design, we suggest using this method for the foreground colour and the contrast stripe — but it works equally well in a single colour project when it’s time to add in a new ball. And, unlike splicing, you can use this method no matter the type of yarn you’re knitting with (though you’ll need to take care if you’re using quite slippery yarns!)

With the Marangoni Hat featuring colourwork and splicing, you won’t be surprised to hear that the called for yarn is Jamieson & Smith 2ply Jumper Weight, always our first point of call for colourwork projects! You’ll need one ball each of six shades and will have leftovers. We still have some Boost Your Knitting Autumn Kits in the designer and my colour choices available in the online shop — but of course we also have individual balls of J&S plus our starter packs to boost your colourwork yarn pantry. This is also a great project for using up yarn leftover from other projects if you fancy a bit of stash diving!

We’ll be running a knitalong all month over in the Ravelry group — any project that uses this month’s featured technique is welcome! And if you’d like to knit Tori’s amazing hat, you can purchase Boost Your Knitting in the online shop! I can’t wait to see the Marangoni Hats all you intrepid Boost Knitters come up with!