knitting content! I finished a hat!

I'm sorry I've been so AWOL lately, dear reader. I have been extremely busy doing lots of stuff and I realize I haven't given you any knitting content in a long time. So here is my most recent finished object.

It's called the Hermione Hat. See, I woke up one morning with a strong compulsion to knit something in red, the colour of the base chakra, Muladhara. Don't ask me why I'm suddenly interested in chakras, that's a long story that I'll get around to sometime. At any rate, I went through my small and dwindling stash to see what red yarn I had. This I bought when I was working at Knits by the Sea in Tofino. It's Blue Sky Alpaca sport, I had two skeins of it. I went to Ravelry's advanced search and asked what I could do with this amount of yarn. It said, among other things, this hat! It's a free pattern, I had the needles, and I could get started just as soon as I wound up my yarn into balls.

Sigh. I so desperately wish I had a swift and winder. It's not so bad doing it by hand when it's a skein of worsted or heavier yarn, but when you are doing, say, sock yarn, that has 400+ yards, that means winding for like 20 minutes, precious knitting time! I just can't afford a swift & winder at the moment, so I go by hand.

At any rate, this project consumed me until I got it done, and I couldn't put it down until something like 11pm on Wednesday night (started on Monday). It's pretty. I like it. It's soft. Today I will cast on for an accessory to match this, with colours that are next up the chakras.

me, redrawn

I would love to have skills with drawing and illustrating. Once I had big plans to make an illustrated history of my family. Skills require practice though, and I have only ever dabbled in drawing, so no great skill. Thus, whenever I have drawn myself, I have always drawn me as a stick figure.

Stacey as stick figure

 In mid January, I decided it was time, suddenly to cut off all my hair. Part of it is that I was not interested in maintaining the artificial colour anymore, and part of it was that I had always wanted to experience really short hair, possibly a shaved head. I was telling Toni about this over breakfast and then, that morning, I felt so compelled to cut it off that I could think of nothing else until I got out the scissors.

Stacey with scissors

Scissors and hand mirror

So I went at it. I have been cutting my own hair for a very long time and have gotten rather handy with scissors, hand mirrors and angles. Here I go!

I looked down and saw all my hair on the floor. 

I discovered the real reason people give themselves Mohawk haircuts. It's because even if they can do a fine job on the sides, getting the middle and especially the back is hard. 

In this process, I made a couple of important discoveries. Discovery the first: I have big ears. 

Discovery the second: with not much to weigh this hair down, its natural inclination is to stick straight up! This will not do. 

I made a wonderful discovery after this. For Christmas I received a most excellent running cap, and not only does it warm my head and protect against the rain, but it also squishes my spiky hair down into a smooth flat mane. 

 As a knitter, I was excited to have more excuses to wear hats (short hair = cold head!) Below is a triumphant me wearing my favorite hand-knit hat, my Brattleboro hat made of Malabrigo Worsted.
 

Something bad happened. When Dan was here, and I was doing laundry one day, somehow my beloved hat made it into the laundry and I shrunk my Brattleboro hat! It went from fitting my 22 1/2 inch head to having only a 15 inch circumference, suitable only for newborns. This sure made me sad! I still have the pattern and once I get some replacement yarn I will knit another one. 

But the real dilemma, and the point of this post, was that of how to draw myself when I have short hair? What am I going to do? I spent a fair bit of time drawing different incarnations of myself with different hair, some of it quite imaginative. Me as a stick person with short hair itself is not very interesting so I think I will actually knit a headband with a feature like this to wear around until my hair grows out a bit. I should also probably knit (or sew?) a bunch of triangle-shaped dresses to make sure my stick person persona matches the reality! 

new hair, new hat

I got tired of having to bleach my hair blonde every six weeks, and my poor hair was also ready to back to dark I was a bit scared of what might happen, so the woman who cut my hair a few weeks ago recommended an intermediary color before going back to brown. I chose chocolate cherry.

I have been doing this a long time and have been pretty lucky as far as mishaps go. Sigh. Until yesterday. It wasn't a complete disaster, but there is a band of yellow (only noticeable in some light) on the back of my head where the darker color didn't saturate entirely.

 Well, it *is* an intermediary color. And Dan likes it, so how can I complain? At any rate, this gave me the impetus to knit like a woman possessed and get my first Escargot done. Yes, you heard me, my first. I fell in love with this pattern as soon as it came out last week and have been thinking about little else until I could get to knit this hat. So here it is.

I'm not one of those people who normally knits the new "it" thing as soon as it comes out. In fact, I seldom pay attention to those things. But someone on Twitter mentioned the new Knitty was out, so I looked, and WOW I must have that hat. Soon.

So please don't tell my mum but I opened the Christmas present from her early. I had to, see, because I am in limbo right now and I thought that her gift might be a useful thing and I sure didn't want to have to lug around a box of something. It turned out to be yarn. My mum is so sweet, buying me yarn. It's Sirdar Family Worsted With Wool, with a 75% acrylic content, which I wasn't very excited about (I hate knitting with acrylic), but it has actually been a pretty good yarn to knit with. She gave me two balls of green and two of ivory, about 800 yards in total. I can probably get four hats out of that. My next Escargot will be ivory with green trim.


I had issues with this right off the bat because it wants you to cast on 240 stitches. Whoa whoa whoa, right away, once there are more than say, 60 stitches, I run into problems if I don't use a stitch marker. (Remember the Mezquita?) I had way too many, so took a bunch off, then I think there was a problem with the second row and me not reading the pattern right (that's what I get for watching movies with subtitles while knitting), so I frogged and restarted. And then I just couldn't put the thing down.

It was at about 11pm last night where, less than an inch away from starting the crown decrease, that I actually had to admit I was tired and needed to go to bed. So I did. But you can bet the first thing I did when I got up this morning (after I made coffee of course) was pick it up. I had it finished and ends woven in by 2pm today, with a few interruptions (or else it would have been done sooner).

I haven't blocked it yet, and I have several items that need to be blocked so I think I will get to that in the next few days. But I'm pretty excited about this hat and think that you should totally knit one too.

This week: on/off the needles/hook

The Candy poncho is coming along swimmingly. I put my slippered foot next to it for scale - the slipper is felted and I can't locate the photos of those, but there you are. Two in one. I am about halfway through the last ball of pink yarn (I have more of this yarn, but that's all I'm devoting to this project) and I'll finish with a red. Then I will be done. 

These are coming along rather well too. But you work for two days on something like this and only come out with two more inches, it seems a little defeating. O well, it's lovely yarn to knit with and I am enjoying this. 

O no. I really shouldn't have started another project. And yet... This is going to be another Sideways Single Crochet scarf. I think I have enough pink yarns now that I can do this, to wear with my Brattleboro hat and my pink/white stranded mittens (when I finish them). 

 
Now these little things were out of the premiere issue of a magazine called Knitting today!. It's not a great magazine, in my opinion, but I was absolutely intrigued by these ornaments. The gingerbread man was knit first. He came together pretty quickly, but the finishing is what took a long time. The candy cane is knit flat, if you can believe it, seamed (not very tidily), and then a string pulled through to make it bend. Given how much time each of these took, I'm unlikely to ever knit them again.

This was knit last fall - a test piece for the felting process. I really should have before pictures so you can see the difference felting makes. It was fun and annoying all at the same time. 

Gratuitous Cute Kitty shot. Actually, I knit this hat a few years ago. It's unwearable (I didn't use a pattern, completely botched the shaping) so now it goes on things like kitties and fish. If you got a Christmas card from me, you might have seen a photo of fish with this hat on...

Oh! I know why I feel like I've done a lot of knitting but have nothing to show for it! I'm test knitting a Thing for a designer and I'm not allowed to talk about it yet. I can't wait though, as soon as she says Go, I will have two or more of the things to show you - I like the pattern that much.

This week: on/off the needles/hook

Bulky Purple hat with pompom

 I am going to attempt to keep up with my knitting/crocheting (yes! crocheting! me!) and post regular updates about my progress. This is inspired by Ursa over at Dyer in the Rough  who has (until the Christmas/cold season took over) been faithfully updating her blog with her progress.

  So this here purple hat came together in an evening, twice. I received this yarn as a gift for Christmas, and as soon as the gift-opening bonanza was over, I set to work on knitting up a hat. I got out my 7mm dpns, cast on 60 stitches, and went in a 1x1 rib until I ran out of yarn.

  It was fun to wear as  a beanie, but it didn't cover my ears. A few days later, I frogged it and re-knit it with the same needles, but with only 48 stitches. This time it is a much better fit, and I had enough yarn left over for a pompom, which I didn't know I even liked until now.

   This Sideways Single Crochet scarf is inspired by Amanda from Nerdy Together.  I met her on a Twitter chat last week hosted by Natalie from the Cloudy with a Chance of Fiber podcast. Amanda has an ambitious project: to create 365 scarves in 2011, and photograph/blog about them every day. January 2nd's entry inspired me to bust some of my stash, as I am in desperate need of more scarves that match my growing hat collection. This is as it sounds, Chain something like 200 stitches or so, and keep going in single crochet until you have either run out of yarn or the scarf is as wide as you want it! I'm hoping to get done this today.

  I'm calling this my candy poncho. I got this yarn from Rosemarie, who is the aunt of Ursa (above Dyer in the Rough). Rosemarie invited me to come help her destash her attic last month, I came home with several bags of yarn. As in "it's a good thing we have a pick up truck" amounts. This yarn is called Fluff, and is 80% acrylic and 20% mohair. Normally I would scoff at such a high acrylic content (if at all), but as this is my first foray into knitting with mohair (I was very afraid), and the yarn came free, I have been knitting with reckless abandon. (Actually, the other night I had some friends over who came without their knitting. Lucky I had several projects on the go I could dole out my knitting! But that's another story).  

  I have miles of this blue hemp/wool yarn. It was almost a blanket. I had three strips of 6 feet by 16 inches - the third panel was almost finished when I decided I didn't like the way this blanket was turning out, that I'm a much better knitter than when I started five years previous, and frogged the whole darn thing. This yarn's fate is to become a million dishcloths. I must confess here that I only cast on and knit a few rows of this, as on the above mentioned evening of Stacey's Knitting Sweatshop, my friend T worked the majority of this. 

  The Socks that Took Forever. Are taking forever. The black one will one day be a pair of socks with a BMW logo on it. The self-patterning will be socks for Dan. I lost my sock knitting mojo a while back and it is only now returning. 

  I am at the point where I need to turn the heel. When I have a few hours of uninterrupted time, I'll do that. 

  Then I can get going on the BMW logo. I haven't charted it out yet, but I do have the blue and white yarn for it. I'll embroider the letters on afterward; it's too complicated otherwise.

  I forgot to get a photo of the slippers, but they are in the process of being felted at the moment. They were a hard grind to get done, which almost involved tears, and may therefore warrant a separate post of their own. Stay tuned.