Back in November I spent a day at Interweave Knitting Lab. The small but excellent market included a booth selling Peruvian textiles - mostly woven, but including some wonderful knitted caps, one of which I bought:

It's baby-sized, knitted from handspun yarn (wool? alpaca? not sure, the label just said "natural fiber", though it feels more wool- than alpaca-like) at an extremely tight gauge of about 12 stitches per inch. It's worked intarsia-style in about 10 beautiful naturally-dyed colors. Here's the inside - gorgeous, no?

Most amazing of all, it's completely covered with tiny bobbles:

and I mean tiny - they're about 1/8" across. I realized the bobbles must make it very warm by adding an insulating, air-trapping layer. But how the heck could you knit those tiny things?

The answer is, you don't. I knew I'd read an article somewhere about Andean bobbles, and a little sleuthing turned it up in an old issue of Interweave Knits. According to Linda Ligon, they are added to the yarn before the knitting happens: knitters take their 2-ply handspun and finger-crochet three to five chain stitches for each bobble. ("Innovation in the Andes: Making Bobble Yarn," IK Winter 2006, page 50). Brilliant, right? Simple, right? Well, try it - I did, very clumsily, and have just as much admiration for the bobble-making as if they had been knitted. They have to be evenly sized and spaced perfectly so they can be placed just so in the knitting.

The ultimate source of this wonderful cap was the Center for Traditional Textiles of Cusco, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to preserve traditional Andean weaving and knitting traditions by buying and selling woven and knitted textiles and - more importantly - teaching young people the crafts. Explore the site to see how beautiful this work is. You can buy directly from them. Cloth Roads in the U.S. also imports and sells some of the wovens. Here's a woven cloth from Patabamba to give you an idea what they look like:

I paid $35 for her handiwork, not enough really...but it will be treasured. It's made its way to chilly Wisconsin to live with granddaughter Malena...

and no doubt to be passed down to other children when she outgrows it.