Fishing for Brioche Ribbing (Not Just for Breakfast Any More)

The first bread cookbook I ever purchased mentioned brioche as a particularly difficult-to-make bread which is usually baked in a special fluted (ribbed) pan. While "brioche buns" have become popular in fast-food establishments, I still haven't had the experience of eating a real, fresh-from-the-oven, French brioche.

Some years later, a knitters' stitch guide I purchased included a photo of what I'd considered a particularly elegant set of patterns called "brioche rib" and "contrary brioche stitch". While I still haven't tried them out, the important thing to note is that these patterns were designed for single-color knitting.

Today, many knitting patterns with "brioche" in their names are made in a rib technique where alternating rows are either "knit below" (k1b) or "purled below" (p1b) to create a two-color rib, with the prominent "knit" stitches showing in one color and the recessed "purl" stitches in the second color. On the opposite side of the work, the colors are reversed.

I used the yarn leftover from the Koala Basket project to do up Red Heart's "Brioche Rib Fisherman's Hat". It's not that I have a lot of opportunity to wear hats (I commute by bicycle, so most of my time outdoors in cold weather is in technical cycling clothing), but rather that I wanted to learn this increasingly popular style of knitting. After a few false starts, I got the hang of the technique. After that, the bulky yarn worked up quickly.

Searching for more about brioche knitting, I found a whole website devoted to brioche stitch techniques — and I learned that what I thought was a brioche rib, and what a lot of what the mainstream knitting press has been calling "brioche rib" for the past thirty-some-odd years is actually "fisherman's rib", (and that true brioche stitch uses yarn-overs (yo) combined with adjacent stitches to create depth and stretch). But I also learned that in the Netherlands, the terms "brioche rib" and "fisherman's rib" are used interchangeably. Go figure?

While working on the hat's briochefisherman's rib-knitted brim, I decided I'd like to try making a briochefisherman's-rib-style sleeveless jacket for Donovan B. Bear in a #5 or #6 yarn. I think it could look very stylish because of, rather than despite, the yarn's disproportionate weight. And now that I know the difference, I need to learn the real brioche stitch and variations. So many project ideas, so little time!