Zig Zag Knit Beanie Tutorial | Easy Mosaic Knitting for Beginners

Hey everyone, I'm about to lose it. Hey everyone, it's Deja with Knit and Crochet Ever After and today I have a new limited time free pattern, the zigzag beanie. If you're new to this channel and you don't know what a limited time free pattern is, let me tell you about it. First, welcome, I'm Deja. I do knit and crochet patterns and tutorials and other stuff, but With the patterns, I sometimes give them away for free and I do tutorials with them. You'll find those in the playlist or search the videos if you want to see what I have to offer. Other times, I sell them so you might see a pattern reveal where it's only for sale, no freebies, sorry. And then I have something like this where it is free for a limited time only. So that means that if you can see a link to my website down below, It's still free, so you click on that and you'll get taken to the pattern. Otherwise, if you see a link to Etsy or Ravelry, it's now a paid pattern. I've been trying to give back this year because it's so hard. Inflation, pandemic, everything is more expensive, so I've decided to go the opposite way and try to like Ease the burden a little, give you some stuff for free. If it's not free, if it's past that point, it can vary for every pattern. I had one pattern up for three days, one for three weeks. It just varies depending on how I feel that day, if I want to take it down or not. But I want to share these as much as I can with my supporters, so if you're following If you're following me and hitting notification bells or I posted on Instagram, Facebook, my website, here, it's everywhere, so it's hard to miss if you follow me on one of those, but I want to give back so that you guys can get it for free. I totally appreciate if you purchase it, because that helps me make more free stuff, but if you can't, hit those notification bells so that you can get notified when these free ones come out so you can jump on it when it happens. So let's get back to the pattern. So this is the zigzag knit beanie. It is not fair isle. So you may look at it and think that it's fair isle because it looks like it has stranded color work. You can see different colors in each row, but it's actually fake. And even if you look at the inside, you might go, well, that definitely is fair isle. I see strands and floats. Mm-mm. Nope. Something way easier. So if you haven't heard of mosaic or slip stitch knitting, that's what this is made of. And I'm gonna explain why it's way easier than Fair Isle. I originally learned to mosaic knit from Knit Crate from their Learn to Knit series that they used to have years ago. I don't know if they still have that anymore. If they do, go check it out because it's a really good program. But I had done, I think it was a purse. I think it was like a little bag that we made. And I was like, where has this been? This is like the easiest way to do color work. And I fell in love with it. And then like, I never made anything else. I kept meaning to and then so finally I'm back into it. I I want to explore this more So I'm going to be doing some more slip stitch knits I should never say that because every time I say I'm gonna do something like that Like I think I have like one video where I say I'm gonna do appliques more and I haven't done any since like I need To stop saying that Eventually, I will do more of these hopefully soon because they're very easy and fun. Let me explain what it is. So With the color changes, it's not really a color change. With Fair Isle, you do have floats, and you can kind of see floats here, but it's a different thing. With Fair Isle, you're using two colors every round or row, and you're changing colors as you come to each little change. So like where the white goes to purple, you would actually change the color from white to purple. Mosaic, you don't do that. It's so awesome. It is using one color every round or row, just one, and the changes in the color are from slip stitches. So you're literally, this beanie is just knitting and slip stitches with one color every round, and you get this very cool outcome. So when you look closely at it and I'll show you in the close-up of the tutorial which is part of the limited free time there this video will always be up so if you're purchasing the pattern and you don't do it for a month don't worry this video will stay so that you can still use the tutorial because I'm going to walk you through. This is a four round repeat for each color and two of the rounds is just knitting so it's like the simplest thing ever. But I'm gonna walk you through the four rounds so that you understand how the mosaic works or slip stitch knitting, whichever you wanna call it. So I use some Knit Picks Mighty Stitch, which is a great worsted yarn. It has like a slight sheen to it, so it's really pretty. It really shows the stuff, stuff definition, the stitch definition. So you can see like up on the decreases up top. It's a really nice yarn. It's very soft. Very easy to work with, doesn't split. So I'll link that in the description as well so you can go check it out. And it's really cheap. It's a really good price. So I love Knit Picks. I'm going to talk today. Knit Picks yarn. But we're going to start off with working on the beanie. So the pattern will walk you through the brim and it will tell you when to start changing colors. But I'm going to show you the four row repeat or four round repeat right now. Okay, so we are going to be working the four round repeat to get. The zigzags in this beanie. I'm here at the end of one of the four round repeats that I just did in purple or CA. I just wanted to show you the inside before I start. You'll see that I have all three yarns attached. I don't fasten off after each color change. Instead, I just run the tails up the inside. It makes it a lot easier, a lot less color changes. Also let me show you kind of the inside of what this looks like with the floats because you still do get floats but it's so much more manageable because you're only using one strand of yarn each round which I absolutely love. You're not having to managing two or even more if you're doing like a crazy kind of knit that you only have to do just one yarn at a time. So what we're going to do is just finish off this round and begin the next round where we're joining back in the white. So I'm going to slip my stitch marker. And now I'm ready to join my white. So I'm going to start my first knit stitch of the round and it is a knit one for the repeat. It's a four stitch repeat, super simple. I'm going to grab my white from my pile and just bring it around just like a regular knit stitch. So I just want to make sure that when I do that I give it some room because I'm pulling it from all the way down here So I don't want to pull too tight and scrunch the beanie up. But I also don't want it too loose so I just want to kind of get it a good little tension. Then we're going to do the three stitches of the rest of the four stitch repeat which is just putting the yarn in the back and we're slipping as if to purl three stitches across. So one two three and then before because that's the end that's all you do you knit one and slide three. So before I go to knit my next stitch I We'll pull out and stretch out these stitches so that I have a good float that I'm not scrunching my beanie up and then I'm going to do that knit one. So again, I'm going to slide the three so you can slide them real close together. Get them into your other hand. I just kind of, I grab kind of the needle and then I grab the yarn with my other fingers. You can kind of see them through there and I just pull on it so that it'll stretch it out. So I kind of have this first stitch I'm holding on to and then I stretch the rest so you can see it kind of stretches it out so that I have enough room that when we're wearing the beanie And it's stretching out, you have space for that yarn and it doesn't, um, get too tight so you can see i've got good space here and a good little run there so again we're slipping so i'll kind of show real time because it's it's just like a one little extra step on this round because the next round we're only slipping one stitch so the float is much shorter but this one i just kind of pull on it as i'm doing it so you can see my fingers kind of doing the work in the background i'm just sliding pulling and then knitting So we just do that all the way around and then we'll come back for our row two, round two, repeat of our four repeat. Okay here I am at the end of the round and I'm just doing my last three slip stitches. So when you join and you'll see I have like this big gigantic gap, don't worry you can see down below that it closes right up because you'll have like a lot of kind of excess yarn from the ones where you haven't brought the yarn through again but when you Or whatever you're doing. weaving in that'll close up any kind of excess yarn if you aren't actually traveling up you know once you get to the top of the beanie. So for our next round we are now going to knit two and it's um it the way that it spelled out in the pattern is knit two slip one and then knit one. But once you get past this first slip, you're really doing three knits and then one slip. So you can kind of remember it that way. So I have one, two, and then a slip. And you'll see that I'm not really focused on spreading out my stitches this time because the float is much shorter. So you can see it's a little short float this time. So it goes really fast because you're just almost just knitting, you know, you're just kind of knitting. And then every once in a while you slide one. And it's such a fun technique that produces really good results because when we're looking at this nice and close you can see you can see these slip stitches like in the white it's very visible you can see how it's a much taller stitch because that's that stitch that we are slipping twice we're slipping it in two rows two rounds so it's pulling it up two rounds high so it creates that actual zigzag But all it is is just slipping stitches, it's just making them taller to make it look like there's a color change. So it's such an easy technique because you're not messing around with two strands of yarn in each round or each row and you're just going to town with these knits. So if you enjoy knitting, this is a really, you know, as in you enjoy the knit stitch. This is a great technique that can give you interesting results without a whole lot of work and you get to really just kind of knit the whole time. So we're doing this for this round and then the next two rounds we are just knitting. That is it. So I'm not even going to show you those two rounds because it's just knit. You're just going to knit all the way around for both rounds and And then you're going to change color and start the next four-row repeat. So again... It's just four rows. As I said before, you can get really creative and change color every single four rows. You know, you don't have to stick with this color scheme. You can do two and two, four and one, like whatever you want. You can do just... Tons of different options, and I would love to see them, so really make stuff and tag me on Instagram, because I want to see what you're making. But let's go do some final thoughts and wrap this up. So that is the repeat. How simple was it? Like, really, it's like one of the simplest types of knits to do. The only difficult part is just making sure that you get your floats not too tight so that your beanie will actually stretch. So if you, you know, are working it and you're pulling them too tight, you're going to want to start over. I'll show you kind of, I just did like a little bow up top for For that, I didn't weave in ends, I'm too lazy. But you can see the runs from From all the different color changes. So simple, only a couple of ends to weave in. I love this type of knitting so much. I would love to see what color combos you do. Please tag me on Instagram if you make these cause I want to see and gush and love all over it. I love seeing what you guys do. So be sure to follow. Like, subscribe, notify, all that stuff so that you don't miss out on any of these free patterns. I hope you enjoyed this. I'm Deja with Knit and Crochet Ever After, and thank you for watching.