9+ Beginner Knitting Patterns That Aren't Boring ¦ Tips and Tricks for Exciting Knits for Anyone.

Hey friends! In today's video, I'll share my tips for making beginner-friendly patterns interesting and versatile. I'll also give you my top nine simple patterns, so you can try them out yourselves. So grab your knitting and stick around. Hello and welcome to Hattie Knits Along. My name is Allison, but my friends call me Hattie, and I'm a knitter living in the Pacific Northwest. On this channel, I like to talk about all things knitting. What I'm working on, what you're working on, and what we are currently nerding out about. So if that sounds like something you're into, I hope you subscribe so you never miss a video. I started knitting almost three years ago, and after I learned some basics, I became excited by all the possibilities of the items that I could make. I was what I like to call an adventurous beginner. As I explored patterns, I didn't really see limiting factors. I only saw projects that excited me. I understand that not everyone is as willing to tackle complicated projects when they first start out, but I also feel strongly that you shouldn't just limit yourselves to garter stitch scarves forever. If you are new to knitting, I hope after watching this video you will feel confident to try some of these tips. And if you're a more seasoned knitter, these tips could help you jazz up some of your more simpler knits. No boring knits around here. These are my top six tips for adding interest to your knits without making them too complicated. My first tip is really simple. It's yarn choice. Now most patterns have a yarn that the designer used to design their pattern in, but you are not limited to that yarn. There are so many different ways that you could add interest to your knits by switching up the yarn that you choose. For example, if a designer used a solid color yarn in a simple sweater, you could mix it up and use a variegated yarn. Or in socks, a simple vanilla sock is totally transformed when you use self-striping yarn. You don't even have to do anything if the yarn does it for you. Adding some fluff is always a fun way to make your knits more exciting. So adding, holding a strand of suri alpaca or mohair as you knit just adds a whole other dimension to your knit. And finally, playing around with yarn weight. If a pattern calls for a DK weight yarn, you could actually hold two fingering weights together and get a totally different effect by marling yarns together. Or as you'll see, there's other ways you can mix up yarn weight depending on the pattern that you choose. My second tip is to find patterns with mosaic knitting. Now that might sound complicated, but it actually is really simple. This is probably the easiest way to do color work in your knitting because instead of having to hold multiple strands of yarn at the same time, you actually only hold one yarn as you knit and you slip stitches of the contrasting colors. I'll share some patterns where mosaic knitting is used, but you can add little bits of mosaic knitting to socks, to hats, and all sorts of things. Stephen West has a plethora of mosaic designs that you can look up and I think it's a great way for a beginner to dip their toe into color work. Tip number three is adding stripes. Stripes don't have to be written into a pattern. You can add stripes whenever you want. Stripes are just when you start knitting with a new color. You can add stripes to a hat, you can add stripes to a sock, you could add stripes to a sweater. Stripes are a great way to use up leftover yarn that you have. If you don't have enough yarn to make a full sweater but you have lots of little cakes, you can make it a stripe sweater. And stripes are another way to add color and interest to your knits without having to hold multiple yarns at the same time. Speaking of color work, my fourth tip is try little bits of color work. Now you don't have to do a full on color work yoke sweater, that is a lot, but maybe you add color work to just the cuff of a sock or just the end of a sleeve of a sweater or you know somewhere else where you can just add a little tiny bit just to dip your toe in it. Start off with two color color work, you know the brim of a hat is fun to do that in. I wouldn't say that you have to stay away from stranded color work when you're a beginner because I think it's an important skill to learn to help you figure out your tension and things like that. But you can just do a little bit at a time to add that interest but still keep the pattern relatively simple. Similar to tip number four, my fifth tip is to add a little bit of lace or a little bit of cables into your patterns. There are so many different stitch patterns that you can do. They will make your knits look totally different depending on what you use. So a cable is simple when we're crossing stitches over each other. You can add a few of those into your knits. You can add a little bit of lace which is just yarn overs in specific places or you can do a different combination of knits and purls than you would normally do and that can add some interest into your knitting instead of just miles and miles of stockinette. So play around with those things. There are tons of stitch pattern dictionaries that you can check out at the library and try them out. You know make a swashcloth but make it in a lace pattern or find another knit and purl pattern that looks interesting to you and make a little swatch out of it just to see how that adds excitement into your knits. My last tip is to play with different constructions. Don't get stuck in the rut of making only top down raglan sweaters. That can get a little boring and your wardrobe will get very repetitive. Try a seamed sweater or try something with a drop shoulder. Try something with a bottom up construction or when you're doing your hems you know a ribbed hem always looks great but maybe add a rolled hem at the end or or at the bottom of your sweater and do a split hem. There's so many different ways that you can mix it up and to look for patterns that have those different types of construction instead of sticking with what you feel comfortable with. Like get out of your comfort zone a little bit and try out some different constructions because that's where you're really going to learn and grow and understand how things are put together and how designers minds might work in the way that they are figuring out their patterns. In this next section I'm going to go over nine different patterns that I think are relatively simple that even a beginner or an adventurous beginner could tackle. I will give you tips on how to include some of those tricks that I talked about earlier in these simple knits and to make them more exciting and not so boring. The first pattern is the I'm So Basic Sock by Summer Lee. This is a sock pattern that we like to call a vanilla sock. It means it doesn't really have any frills bells or whistles or anything like that to it but it is a great way to learn basic sock construction. I especially like Summer Lee's pattern for this because she gives you so much detail and pictures and videos and things like that to help you really understand what you're doing in each part of the socks construction. Now these socks are top down you know cuff down with the heel flapping gusset which is my preferred way of making socks. Not everybody likes that way but I think it's a great place to start if you've never made socks before. But if you don't want just plain boring old stockinette socks and you want to add some interest to them then try using a variegated yarn that will show off the colors as you're knitting them. I think it's fun to use a variegated yarn because you never know what's going to come up next and you see how the colors play with each other as you're knitting them up. Another thing you could do in these socks is add stripes to them. If you have multiple fingering weight skeins and you want to use them up then just add do like five to eight rows of a color and then switch to another color. You can make a pattern you could just do it ad hoc whatever you feel like in the moment. You can make them match exactly or they don't have to match. That's you know when a lot of people have what we call second sock syndrome where they finish the first sock but really dread casting on the second sock because they've already just made that pattern they don't want to have to do it again. Who says your socks have to match exactly? If it's more exciting to you to mix it up and have them be like cousins and not siblings then try it out and see what happens. Another way you can add little details is to have contrasting cuffs, heels, and toes. Start with one color for your cuff, work your leg, do another color for your heel or go back to that first color and then you know on the toe do a different contrasting color. That's a great way to mix it up so that you're excited for the next part of the sock when it doesn't all look like one blob of the same color. If you've mastered the vanilla sock and you want to level up your game a little I highly recommend the next pattern which is the Colorwork Cuff Club by Summer Lee. The reason why I love this pattern is because every month Summer Lee puts out a new chart that is just a little bit of color work for the cuff of your sock. She gives you the basic sock pattern which is very similar to the I'm So Basic pattern and then you just incorporate this little bit of a color work chart into the cuff of the sock and then do the rest of the sock as you normally would in stockinette. It's a great way to dip your toe into color work without it being too scary. Some of the charts do use several colors so it's a great way to use up little odds and ends of yarn that you might have. I think it's great to learn how to read charts and not have it be this really big commitment. Some of the charts are only eight rounds. That'll take you no time at all to whip up and it'll give your socks this really great interest point so they don't just look like plain boring vanilla socks. If you are ready to jump in and tackle a full-on sweater then I would recommend starting with the Step-by-Step Cardigan by Florence Miller. Now I'm saying starting with the cardigan because it's knit flat and a lot of times when we're learning how to knit we do start by knitting flat. We don't actually start by knitting in the round. A lot of people think knitting in the round is easier and I think it tends to be easier but when you're first figuring out your tension and what knits and purls are I think practicing on flat sweaters is a great thing. Florence Miller is so generous in her time and effort. The Step-by-Step Cardigan and the Step-by-Step Pullover are both free patterns and she has made these like 90-minute tutorials on YouTube to talk you through every single step of the way. So if you're worried about jumping into a cardigan pattern on your own, Florence Miller's got you. She's gonna walk you through it. It's a very basic cardigan. There's, you know, I think it's raglan shaping on the shoulders. In fact, it's top down. Yeah, it's top down raglan shaping. One thing that's great about this pattern is in her sample she uses Noro Madara in the color, I think it's called Saki, and it is a great like neutral gray color with little rainbow tweety bits all mixed in through it. So this is a simple pattern but the yarn really gets a chance to shine. So don't be afraid to try out some interesting yarns if you're gonna tackle this sweater. Maybe try some adding some mohair and holding that double. I believe this is a worsted weight pattern. So you could definitely hold multiple yarns together and get a really cool effect that is not so basic but still easy to pull off. Once you've got cardigan skills under your belt, then I would recommend trying out the Press Flowers Cardigan by Amy Kristoffers. Now I have made a video all about this pattern before because I love it so much. I knit this cardigan when I was only a year into knitting and it is a full on mosaic colorwork sweater. It's knit with a sport weight yarn from the bottom up and it has this beautiful press flowers motif all over it. The construction of it is very easy to understand. You knit from the bottom up flat and you knit the front panels for the front and then a back panel and you seam them together. I can't remember exactly, it's been a few years, but I'm pretty sure you knit the sleeves in the round after picking up stitches. It's an easy construction for even a beginner to figure out and the slip stitching mosaic knitting gives your work this beautiful look at the end of it that seems almost impossible to replicate and people will definitely give you tons of compliments. Although it is very simple to knit, you're just holding one strand of yarn at a time and slipping stitches as you go. This is a great way to also play with your yarn choice in the sweater that I made. I used Spin Cycles color shifting yarn so that the press flowers motif changed color up as the sweater went up, but you don't have to do it that way. You can pick two contrasting colors and knit them in just a two-tone sweater or you can go really low contrast with it. Maybe your contrast color has some mohair in it so your flowers are a fluffy while the rest of it is not fluffy. There's lots of different ways you can mix it up and I think it would be a really fun way to challenge yourself, but also keep it a little bit simple and then have a very beautiful finished object at the end. Let's keep going with Amy Kristoffers because she also has a wonderful beginner-friendly pattern called the Felix Pullover. The Felix Pullover is a top-down raglan sweater, but the thing that sets it apart is the raglan increases have little eyelets knitted into them so that there is this little bit of a lace motif on each of the increases. It gives you enough interest to say this is not just a stockinette raglan sweater, there's something more to it here, but it's not hard to do at all and the motif stops after you finish the increases and then it's just stockinette. When I knit my Felix Pullover, I don't think it took me long at all. I don't have the exact dates on me, but it was less than a month, maybe just a couple of weeks and I plowed through that really quickly. Also, it's a pretty big gauge. It's an Aran weight gauge, I believe, so you can really go fast with the larger stitches and have something really beautiful very quickly in the end. Now, I told you it's important to mix up your construction when you're knitting sweaters so that you're not always knitting the same kind of sweater. The next pattern is a great way to do that. The next pattern is the Weekender by Andrea Mowry. This is an older pattern of hers, but one of her very most popular and for good reason too. It is a very simple sweater. It's bottom up, mostly stockinette, but it has this very interesting shoulder detail where there's some ribbing on the top of the shoulder and then there's a three needle bind off. It also has a very wide open neckline and if you don't like that, there's a crew neck version that she also designed, so you can do that if you want. This is a signature move of Andrea Mowry to have this ribbing and then a three needle bind off on the shoulders and it gives it such a unique look that I don't think you see that replicated in ready-to-wear items very often, but it is very simple to do a three needle bind off. It looks complicated, but it's not at all. It's easier than a Kitchener stitch if you know how to do those, so I would definitely try out that pattern if you want to mix up your sweater construction and learn more about bottom up construction and what those different techniques can add to your sweaters. I believe that any beginner knitter should be very familiar with tin can knits. Tin can knits offer so many different patterns that are very accessible to every level of knitter and especially beginners. They like to take things that are pretty simple and just add a little zhuzh of something special to it so that it's not boring and one of their most popular patterns is flax. It's a worsted weight sweater, but there's also they have flax light which is a DK weight, but flax is their most popular and what sets it apart is, you know, it's a raglan, simple raglan top-down sweater, but on the sleeves there is this garter stitch all the way down and I don't know, just that little bit of garter stitch makes it look really interesting and intriguing. The other thing that's amazing about tin can knit patterns is the size range. Now, I'm not just talking about size inclusivity, which they do very well, but they also include size options for children and babies, so you could knit this sweater for every member of your family. That is a great thing when you're a beginner because you get to practice on the smaller sizes and work your way up to the bigger sizes. You could make them all matching. You could see what happens when you mix up your yarn choices and how it changes the sweaters as you knit them up. In the flax worsted version, there are 19 different sizes. What I'm telling you, that is unheard of in the knitting world. That does not happen very often at all. Also, Tin Can Knits has a great app that makes it so that when you are working one of their patterns, you can make it so you only see the size that you are working on. When there are 19 different sizes, it would be kind of difficult to see 19 different numbers listed every time they need to have a stitch number listed in the pattern. This app makes it very easy for people who don't like to look at cluttered numbers or get easily confused in that regard. I highly recommend all Tin Can Knit patterns for beginners, but also this app especially and the flax sweater for trying out some new techniques and mixing up your yarn choices as you go. Also, this is a little bonus pattern, but they also have a pattern called Strange Brew, which is all about teaching you how to do these colorwork yokes. That one allows you to mix and different colorwork patterns and charts to make your own colorwork sweater. So, Strange Brew can be as simple or as complicated as you would like it to be and that's a really fun one to try if you want to dip your toe into colorwork sweaters. My next pattern is Stripe Hype by Veronica Lindbergh and this is a pattern that is knit top down, but it uses some different construction techniques. They call it continuous knitting where you start flat, but then you pick up stitches and you slowly build around this flat section that you have. I think you start in the back, so that usually on sweaters backs are a little bit longer than fronts, so that they the front can sit nicely in and not like up on your neck like this. So, in this sweater you start in the back with a panel and then you build off of it and eventually, you know, you knit in the round. I think once you get under the underarms you knit in the round, pick up stitches for the sleeves, but what makes it really fun is the stripes. So, this pattern has instructions for making the stripes, but it's up to you what the colors look like. You could do it just, you know, two different color stripes or every color is different. You don't have a main color, you just, it's all different stripes. It's up to you, but I think it's great to practice stripes because you'll learn how to carry your yarn through your projects or you'll learn how to weave in all your ends because a striped sweater is bound to have lots of ends to weave in, which can be really hard for people. You know, a lot of people who like the knitting part of knitting don't always love the finishing parts of it, but finishing really can level up your knits to make them look more professional. And by finishing, I mean things like weaving in your ends, blocking your projects so that the stitches lay nice and flat and those types of things. There is a really great method for weaving in your ends as you go along and it's called Weaving Steven by Steven West. I will link his tutorial video below, but basically whenever you start a new color, you can weave in the end of the old color as you're knitting those first a dozen stitches or so in that pattern. And that helps so much, especially when you're doing something like a striped sweater where you're going to have a lot of ends to weave in. So looking for techniques like that will help you feel more motivated to tackle those types of projects because you won't have as much finishing to do at the end of the project. I don't know, some people definitely get that itch to start the next thing as they're ending their current project and I highly recommend taking the time to finish your project all the way through before you cast on the next thing because you want to be able to wear your finished object and you can't if you don't complete those last few steps like weaving in ends. The last pattern I'm going to talk about on here is the Muscle Burrow Hat by Ysolda Teague. You've probably heard me talk about this hat before, but I just think this is such a great hat for beginners because, well, number one, you're going to learn all different kinds of techniques as you do this hat. The cast on is really unique. You do a circular cast on, which is not something you normally do in other hats, and you also learn about increasing, you learn about knitting in the round, you learn about decreasing and casting off, and there's lots of different ways that you can customize this hat to make it your own. First of all, the hat has a bunch of different instructions depending on the weight of yarn that you want to use and the needle size that you choose. So basically, you pick your yarn, you pick your needles, you start knitting, and then you read your gauge as you get to a certain point and depending on the size of the hat you want to make, it'll tell you how many increases to make and how long to knit it, and that means that this pattern can be anything you want it to be, honestly. It's written for fingering through worsted weight and that means you can use any kind of, almost any kind of yarn you want to. You could add a strand of mohair and hold it with another yarn. You could add stripes, you could add a self-striping yarn, or you could make the inside color different than the outside color and then, you know, flip it around so that you have basically like two different hats. You could add some color work charts into there. I just saw Ysolda share a version of the hat somebody knit up that had a lot of color work, stripes, with some choice four-letter words knitted into them, which I thought was really interesting. So there's so many different ways that you can make this hat different and the also amazing thing about this is you have to buy this pattern one time and you could make dozens of hats that all look different, that all have their unique charm, over and over and over again with this one pattern. I think one of the hurdles and when you're jumping into knitting is learning about how expensive of a hobby this can be, not to mention just the yarn and all the tools that you need to buy, but then you start seeing the patterns and how expensive those are and I think it's great to find patterns where you can get a lot of bang for your buck and they're not just a single use thing for you. So the muscle burrow hat is definitely one of those patterns. It costs money but you will use it over and over and over again. I mentioned a few free patterns in here so definitely take advantage of those as well because I think, yeah, all of the patterns I mentioned today are ones that you can really mix up and use in different ways to make them look different every time you knit them and that way we don't get bored when we're making them, people don't get bored when they see us wearing them, and we learn a lot about knitting along the way. Thank you so much for watching today's video. I hope you learned something. If you did, feel free to share this with your friends and family, anybody who you think might be interested in this video. I appreciate every single one of you. Don't forget to like and leave a comment down below. Did I leave a tip out that you think is really valuable? Make sure you let me know down below and I hope you have a great week. Happy knitting! Bye!