I Don't Even Know What This Is

 

This was the other project I took on our trip, and while I had a well defined plan when we left town, I completely changed that plan before lunchtime on the first day.

The yarn is Handmaiden Mini Maiden in Ruby Red.  It's a fingering weight singles yarn, similar to Madelinetosh TML or Malabrigo Mechita, but the Mini Maiden is 50% silk, so it has more shine and drape than the other two.  The original plan was to knit Brickless and I looked on Ravelry to find other Brickless projects knit in this yarn.  I grabbed my US 5's (3.75mm) because that seemed like the right size, printed out the pattern and tossed the whole thing in the car.  Once I got started, I changed my mind.

Brickless has three sections: lace, ribbing, and garter stitch (I think, it might be stockinette, I'm not looking at the pattern right this second).  I was loving the lace (it's a simple mesh type lace), and I was fine with the garter stitch/stockinette section as well.  I wasn't loving the ribbing.  It just wasn't working for me on those needles with the singles yarn.  I think if I'd had a plied yarn or smaller needles, everything might have been OK, but I had the one yarn and the one pair of needles with me.  I thought about it for a bit and tried to decide what to do.  I knew I was enjoying the lace stitch pattern, so I wondered if I could plug it into the Hitchhiker shaping.  Never mind that I have Dropbox on my phone, so I could have pulled up the Hitchhiker pattern to double check, I just went by memory.  There was some scribbling on the back of the Brickless pattern and a chart of questionable usefulness was drawn, but then I was off!

The best way I know to explain this is that it's the lace stitch pattern of Brickless combined with what I think is the shaping of Hitchhiker.  I still have no idea how accurate the Hitchhiker memory is, I've been too lazy to look it up.  So this might be what I think it is, or it might be something completely different altogether.  I just don't know.  I'm calling it Ruby Hybrid on Ravelry.

(I don't want to give too many specific details because Martina Behm has written so many variations of Hitchhiker, that it's possible that this is one of her patterns.  In addition to being too lazy to look up Hitchhiker, I've been too lazy to look through her designs and see if I reverse engineered one of them accidentally.)