CSM Hexipuffs

I found myself in a really unfortunate position last time I went out to staff the Th’red Head Designs booth at the Kansas City Renaissance Festival.

I grabbed a project bag as I ran out the door (late, per usual), but when I arrived, the project was not in the bag. I knew it was safe at home on the couch from the night before, but I found myself staffing a booth with nothing to knit. I reminded myself that plenty of the artists out at Faire are unable to work on their projects while staffing their booth. I had the discipline to sit there without it. It was only enough discipline to last about half an hour before I grabbed a mini skein from the booth, but it was there!

I wanted something small and easy to knit from this emergency mini, and I landed on a popular knit I’d been able to avoid for over a decade: a hexipuff. I decided it was finally time to make a Beekeeper’s Quilt (and if I found myself in this situation again, it would be an easy fix!).

I made two, actually, and I stuffed them just enough. They’re super pleasant to squish, and it got me thinking: an even quicker way to make these would be on the Circular Sock Machine. I could use up the last little bits on cones, and the blanket would come together all the quicker, hopefully saving it from the fate of the dreaded WIP pile.

The trick was, though, I wanted to be able to use both hand-knit and machine-knit hexipuffs in this same blanket, which takes some finagling. Not only are the gauges, or how many stitches per inch, will be different, the construction is almost completely the opposite.

Where the hand-knit hexipuffs start at the bottom, increase to the center, and then decrease to the top, the machine-knit hexipuffs are essentially two sock heels stacked on top of each other (so, starting from the middle, short rows to the top, and another set of short rows to the bottom, kitchener the middle shut). I decided the little differences between the two wouldn’t bother me, but for construction purposes, they have to be the same size. So, I ran a little experiment.

My hand-knit hexipuffs start with ten stitches, increase to 20, and decrease back down to 10. My standard heel on the CSM is 30 stitches, but I wanted to see what would happen if I kept the same number of stitches as the hand-made ones.

So two quick heels and one standard kitchener later, I had this wild looking hexipuff! It reminds me of a rupee from the Legend of Zelda games. The great news is the 10-stitch “top” and “bottom” do match up with the hand-knit hexipuff, so all I should need to do is bump that middle up to my standard 30 stitches! That’s 20 short rows instead of ten, and should address the oblong shape.

I’m so excited to use up all the cone scraps and get this blanket going!