Josephine in her flying machine

It's almost ready to share, readers!  I've been plowing through my Home Alone hat this week to get a pattern produced, because 1) I want to get my feet wet with pattern writing, and 2) I want to wear this hat.

I've taken serious notes while I did my knitting, and I'll be sitting down to write out a formal pattern to share with y'all this week.  The hat is 95% done, and here's what it looks like:

The bottom is quite long, because I plan to tuck it up inside the hat for double warmth.  If you stare long enough at a screen shot of the hat in the movie, you will notice that there is a smooth, unbroken edge of knitting that goes up inside the hat.  I wanted to make my version of the hat as true to the original as possible, so I tried out a few ways to accomplish that.  Originally, I cast on and knit some extra rounds to be tucked inside, then a purl round, then got going with the hat, and I didn't like the little ridge the purl round created at the edge of the hat.  I know this makes for a natural folding line in the world of tucking up a lining inside a hat, but I didn't like the effect.  Also, the way I started it involved knitting the cast on edge together with a round of live stitches (to avoid sewing it in place later), and I hated how obvious that round of stitches became.  So I ripped it out and started again.

The hat you see in the picture above was started with a provisional cast on, so now that the hat is complete, I've gone back to pick up those stitches and make the lining.  I have far more red yarn left than the grey at this point, so after a few rounds, I switched to red to make a fun contrasting lining.  And when I say lining, I actually mean that I'll be going as far as the backs of the reindeer, to fully cover the wearer's ears.  Again, if you stare intently at a screen shot of the hat on Kevin's head, you can see a slight line at the top of the reindeer's back where the lining ends. 

In good progress news, the chart worked out beautifully in the round, as I had only ever done the chart as a test knitted flat, which sucks for colourwork.  I played around with my gauge to fit my mammoth woman head (I'm a solid 22" around, just like a man), and the pattern will be written to fit a larger head size.  My next post will be just the pattern for the hat, and if I can figure it out, I'll link it to Ravelry so others can find the pattern.

And since it's been eons since I posted, let's recap all my knits since July:

I finished Slim Jim's reindeer legwarmers.  For the final chart repeat, I added an extra stitch between each reindeer repeat around to account for the calf (craftily hidden in the white space between the reindeer).  When I got to the ribbing at the top, I snuck in a few extra stitches again, for extra stretchiness.

I made a pair of octopus socks, featuring yarn from Woolverine in downtown Kitchener:

Stash's Christmas socks are complete, in a handsome pattern called It's a Guy Thing.  This puppies are folded up and waiting on my gift wrapping table to be wrapped for Christmas.  Fuzzyhead was the foot model for this picture.

From my trip to the Knitters' Frolic in April, I impulse purchased this skein of purple sock yarn because it had a cat on the label.  I earmarked it for a pair of socks for my non-knitting cat-loving coworker (I know, I know, that's a risky move, but she has said more than once that she LOVES hand knitted socks)

The socks were a great mindless knit over the summer, and I really hammered home the cat thing with a pattern called Paw Tracks.  The gift will be presented with the tag so that the cat connection is very obvious.

My current socks project is Hermione's Everyday Sock, also made from sock yarn I scored at the Frolic.  This Sweet Georgia deeply discounted yarn translates beautifully into fun stripey socks.

These are still a WIP, and they're a perfect thing to bring along to knit night or in the car.

I made use of the last half a ball of heavyweight sock yarn I bought at Rhinebeck in 2013.  I made a pair of fingerless gloves for Fuzzyhead earlier this year, and there was still so much of the yarn left that I needed to do something with it, so I made a hat.  Since the yarn was more like a sock yarn than anything else, I knitted with two strands held together to make Jason's Tweed Hat, as it calls for a chunky weight yarn.  Once I finished the folded over ribbed section to cover the ears, I was running seriously low on yarn, so I cut it back to a single strand and finished the hat.  From a distance, you can't even tell, and all the warmth anyone cares about is around the ears, so no harm done.

I finished Rockefeller, and I love it.  The picture on the left is when it was almost done, and the one on the right is the shawl all blocked and beautiful.  It's such a nice piece to wear all bundled up around your neck and shoulders.  I wear it with a shawl pin to hold the ends in.

I ran out of the blue/green yarn as I was starting the second wing, so I started to taper off the blue and increase the number of orange rows.  Then I started running out of orange, so I said "screw it" and I made the second wing shorter and round than the first (which is long and skinny and goes to a fine point like a triangular shawl wing).  It really makes no difference when I wear it, because I put the shorter end down first and wrap everything over top of it. 

I made a pair of Northman Mittens to replace my tired looking red Olympic mittens from 2010.  I wore those things down to grubby, filthy nubs, and I darned and patched them more times that I care to admit.  These mittens are my new deep winter double-thick mitts.  They are glorious.

I made them with worsted weight yarn knit on 2.25mm needles, which makes for this deliciously thick fabric.  Even without the lining, these would have been fine for cold winter needs, but the lining cleans up the inside and makes for a fun surprise when you peak inside.  I severely modified the lining mitten to make it fit inside.  When I followed the pattern as it was written, it was so cramped and crowded inside the mitten that it gave my hand a headache.  I ended up ripping it back and redoing the lining three times before I got it right.  My inner mitten has a lot fewer stitches, and I began the decreases for the finger tip area a lot sooner.  If you pulled out the inner lining and looked at it, it's quite pointy and ugly, but it fits beautifully inside the mitt.

I hammered out a pair of tweed cabled socks in a delectable golden hue.  These are Fall Mystery Socks, knitted up in my very first tweed yarn purchase from Rhinebeck.

Fuzzyhead's friend had her stomach removed because of cancer this year, so I made her a fox cowl hood so she could keep warm and toasty this winter.  This is an awesome pattern, and a quick knit.  All I want to do is knit these for every small child I know (which is none, I don't know any small children).  I knit this up in Lion Brand Wool-Ease Thick and Quick, and I used every last scrap of yarn from two balls to make this.  Every.  Last.  Scrap.  I had 10" of yarn left to sew on both foxy ears, and that was a struggle.

 I started and finished a shawl for Slim Jim using the yarn I won at the 2012 Adjudicated Show.  This lovely ombre yarn was calling for a delicate lacy shawl, and that is was I gave her.  Enter, Out of Darkness. 

I included beads, because why not?  I purchased four little tubes of 6/0 glass seed beads from Michaels and only had to go back once to get more (I needed almost exactly 5 tubes to finish, with less than 20 beads leftover).  I blocked this beauty on the back of my purple couch (even if the day ever comes to get rid of that couch, I'm going to keep it for blocking purposes).

I used almost all of my pins to block all those pointy point points.  I finished the shawl quite late one night, and even though I was pumped to get it blocked and finished, I couldn't bare the idea of pinning all those points when I was anything but perky and well rested.  Slim Jim will likely receive the shawl next year, maybe for her birthday.

I made a Ninja Bike Mask, perfectly fitted to my face shape.  I used worsted weight yarn (in crappy acrylic, because I intend to wash this a lot, because, you know, sweating) and the instructions were clear and easy to follow for modifying.  It was really written more as a set of guidelines than as a formal pattern, which I appreciated for making it with whatever yarn I had lying around.

 

I got my entrelac on with this quick little knit, which helped me use up some Noro Silk Garden Sock.  This handsome little fellow is Grey Gardens, and it's super cute when my hair is up.

And finally, my other current work in progress is the Honey Cowl, featuring sweet sweet discounted Briar Rose DK yarn from Shall We Knit? in Waterloo.

This will be a gift for my other coworker, and it's also a lovely mindless knit for knits when I don't want to think. 

Up next for this kid, trying my hand at writing a pattern, and asking nicely that a few people try it out and tell me what you think.  Stay tuned!

Double screen computers

It's been a couple weeks of knitting intensity over here, my lovelies.  I've plowed through the Polar Bear Chullo (I finished it yesterday and it's mostly dry from the blocking it received), I started a new portable sock project, and last night I started work on reindeer leg warmers.  Wanna see?

Fuzzyhead is modeling the hat, but it's a gift for Slim Jim (stop reading now, Slim, otherwise you're spoiling your birfday surprise).  I'm really pleased with how it turned out, the patterned sections are all slightly different and they look really nice and smooth.  The polar bears are adorable, but it was tricky to maintain even tension over those areas, and they're the ones that turned out a little wonky.  Blocking helped a bit, but they're still not perfect.  Oh well.  I know I much prefer colourwork projects with nice even sections of colour, where I don't have to twist the colours every few stitches. 

But, despite knowing that, I've picked up another colourwork project where the floats are not all perfectly nice and even.  Enter the reindeer socks, which I am knitting as leg warmers.

To get them a little larger and slouchier, I am knitting them with fingering weight yarn (Knit Picks Palette in Cream and Hollyberry) and using 2.75mm needles.  The needle size choice was mostly because both of my 2.25mm sets are currently in use (hexipuff blanket and my latest sock project), and my 2.5mm are being used for my one row at a time socks.  I think I might need another pair of 2.25mm needles, but for now I am actually pleased with the size and tension the 2.75s are giving me.  It's nice a loose, with lots of stretch for pulling up over ankles and calves. 

As I was working on the polar bear hat with a side of hexipuffs, I realized I was lacking a portable simple project to take to knit nights.  There were too many colours and colour changing, and too much chart-following with the polar bear hat to make it a good talk-while-you-knit project, and the hexipuffs are fiddley and require that I travel with a small handful of stuffing in my knitting bag.  I also recently found out that Slim Jim's boyfriend, Stash, would love and cherish a pair of hand knitted socks.  Huh.  I had no idea.  I think every knitter needs her/his friends and family to proclaim their interest in receiving knitted items.  I would never knit something for anyone if I wasn't sure they would love it and appreciate it, but if you don't speak up, how do I know?  So I dug through my sock yarn bin and pulled out this little beauty from my original Rhinebeck trip in 2012.

This is Sock82Me in Bronze.  Slim Jim told me Stash would appreciate any sock-type item in a brown colour since that is the colour he wears most often. 

The pattern I chose is a simple boy-approved pattern called It's a Guy Thing, and I started the socks some time two weeks ago, in time to bring them out to a knit night.

The socks can be made in pretty much any size, from itty bitty kid size to XL adult man.  The pattern is simple and easy to remember, but more interesting than straight stockinette or basic ribbing.  The seed stitch panels are separated by thin two-stitch cables, which are done in a different way from how I've ever done cables before.  Instead of doing the cables with a cable needle, or even doing the cable motion without the needle itself, these cables are formed by knitting the two stitches together, and then knitting the left stitch again before dropping both stitches off the needle.  It looks just like I did traditional cables, but it's a little more seamless in the knitting process than stopping to move stitches around for cables.  Neat.

I've also hammered out some rows on the One Row a Day socks today while scrolling through pinterest and watching my stories.

Here's the March 5 update I should have done on March 5:

And the March 12 update:

And don't forget, I've still got yarn floating around from the Knit Picks order for a pair of Nordic mittens, and I have yarn from my Rhinebeck trip in October for a shawl.  I may need to pick up a large project to keep on the go, but for now I'm pleased to have something colourwork-y and something super simple.

Onward,

vrock

In like a lamby lion

 I've picked up work on the Polar Bear Chullo again, my darlings, and I'm quite pleased with the progress.  When I last touched the hat, I was getting concerned that it was slightly too big for a normal-sized head (specifically, the head of a Slim Jim).  I didn't pick up the project for a good month as I stewed and thought about whether I should keep trucking or rip it back and start again.  Since this hat has LOTS of colourwork, and I change at least one of the colours every other row, I wasn't interested in pulling it apart and having a million little cut strands of yarn to sort out.  Instead, I took the lazy knitter's route and dropped my needle size down to 2.0mm from 2.25mm about an inch into the brim of the hat.  I also know that there are decreases coming up soon, and any extra floppiness about the bottom edge will be a fun design feature I included, and the hat should still stay on her head without any trouble.

Here's where I am as of this morning.  I did everything from the top row of the centre purple pieces (about where the top of the purple cable from my needle sits) yesterday, and that's where I made the needle size change.  I barely notice it, so Slim Jim surely won't, and a good blocking will cure what ails me.

I especially love that I'm on the polar bears now.  Look at those little polar bear feet!!

And it most definitely fits as a hat, although my head is abnormally large and it's still on the needles.  I know I look silly.

The one row per day socks are proving to be a bit of a chore.  Every time in the last month when I thought of what I could knit, my thoughts went like this: "I could work on the polar bear hat?  No, I'm afraid I have to rip that baby apart.  What about hexipuffs?  Naw, I'm getting a little bored of those right now, I've been picking up that project every day as my go-to for the last few weeks.  I should start a new project, I don't feel like I have enough variety in my current projects.  OH WAIT!  I have those socks I'm supposed to be working on."  Every time.




They're not hard, they're not tricky, they're not too easy.  I enjoy knitting them just fine, but it's the "you can only do one row per day" part that is tripping me up.  Every time I think about working on it, I know I'll just be packing it away in a few minutes and having to pick up another project.  I find myself leaving it to the end of my week (Wednesday was my start day, so my goal is to always have the week's worth of required knitting done by Wednesday) to crank out all 7 rows.  I like this system a lot better.

Despite all that, I still forced myself to catch up yesterday, and here are the missing recaps from February:

February 12:

February 19:

February 26:

And I went ahead and caught myself to the exact day I should be on, which also conveniently took me to the end of the month so I could place another marker:

What's up, March!

Onward,

vrock

The fabulous Sun Sphere

Here comes a speed post for you, readers.  I just whipped off all 7 rows that I owed you this morning, and here is the update for this week to catch me up. 

I feel like I'm always falling behind on this project.  It's more difficult than I thought to pick it up and just do one row per day.  With any other project I've ever done, I wouldn't just do one row; I would knit while I watch a show or a movie, or to get to a certain point in the pattern.  Limiting myself to one row per days has lead to me picking up other projects instead of the one I should be doing.  Bad vrock, bad.

I added a marker for the January 31st row, so that I would have an easier time tracking where I was.  When I picked it up this morning, I spent way too long trying to figure out where I left off.

It's also handy for seeing what one month of knitting looks like.

Onward,

vrock

Feeding crackers to your robot head

Solidly into the main part of the leg pattern now, readers.  I have a feeling that the updates for the next few post will be very similar.  Maybe I should start holding it up to an object for measuring the growth each week.  When I got a puppy when I was 12, we took a picture of her every week next to the same stool to see how much she grew.  While doing the same thing with my sock might not be as adorable (that's up for debate), I think it might keep things interesting.

Here's the non-exciting update for this week:

I've kept the Polar Bear Chullo in the dark this week, and I've been working more on my hexipuffs.  It's so satisfying to finish each little one during an episode of American Horror Story.  I finished 3 or 4 of them yesterday (and Netflix asked me at least three times if I still wanted to keep watching my show.  Don't judge me, Netflix!  I'll watch four continuous hours of TV if I want to).  

Most of the rainbow-y coloured ones were done yesterday, and today I emptied out all of my jars of little tiny leftover sock yarn balls from old projects.  Now my project bag is full of new colours to play with, and I've got to start thinking of a formal place to store all my hexipuffs.  With our basement still in a state of chaos from the flood/leak in January, my crafting world is spread all over the basement in the wrong places.  It makes me itchy to think of my stuff being out of order downstairs, so I've avoided going down there for craft reasons.  The rec room will likely be put back together in the spring, once we have a good solid thaw (and probably lots of rain) to confirm that the basement is solid, then the flooring goes back down, and my craft corner can be recreated.  That's still a long way off (today is February 1st, and we just got a fresh dump of snow last night), so I'm avoiding for now.  The hexipuffs are currently living on my living room coffee table, and there they shall stay.

Onward,

vrock 

Cool Runnings

Almost a week late with a post, but I'm on track with the daily knitting!  I'm on to the real patterned part of Harvest Dew now, I made it passed the ribbing.

Maybe difficult to see at this point in the project, but I've got slipped stitches every third stitch.  You can see it in the picture above - the dark blue stitches on my current row are the ones I slipped.  After three rows of this, I get to shift the pattern over and repeat for three more rows.  With the very strong striping of this yarn, I'm thinking this will be a nice effect.  We'll see as things progress!

In my last post, I shared all my new upcoming projects to be done with my latest Knit Picks order, and I'm already making solid progress on my Polar Bear Chullo for Slim Jim.

Here is an earflap:

And in fact, I have two of them!  And they're attached together in the very beginnings of a hat!

After making each earflap separately (and doing the colourwork back and forth on a FLAT piece, changing one or both colours every row, UGH), I cast on the additional in-between stitches and started making a hat.

I'm about an inch into the brim of the hat, and the colourwork isn't tricky or difficult or anything, because it's worked in the round, the way it should be.

I definitely made a goof on the foundation round of the pattern, where the placement of the white stitches would help me with all future rows of pattern.  I thought I had it right, then when I came back around on the next row to the last 1/3 of the foundation row I realized I was off with my colours, so I painstakingly unknit and fixed my colour mistakes as I came up to them, then knitted the next things I needed.  And on the third time around, thinking I had fixed it, I realized there were still errors.  Rather than rip it all back and start again, I trucked on and accepted the few little slip-ups of white stitches on the light purple.  They're subtle and I've fixed it now with the major pattern placement, so I'm leaving it.

I've also discovered that my hat is turning out a touch bigger than I was hoping.  I'm tempted to rip everything out and try again, but I might just try slipping down a needle size and see if that tightens things up.  I've only done about an inch, so maybe that would fix it?

I've kind of set this one aside as a backburner project when I'm in the mood for something fiddley, so I've picked up my hexipuff quilt pieces a lot in the last week as an easy no-brainer project.  What's that you ask?  What's a hexipuff blanket?

It's this!

Tons and tons of little puffy hexagons all knitted separately and tacked together to form a knitted quilt.  This is the Beekeeper's Quilt by TinyOwlKnits, and I love it.

I always keep those little micro balls of leftover sock yarn after a project, and until now, I've just been stashing them in a clear glass jar as decoration.  Now I can do something useful with them, so every pair of socks I've ever made can be represented in blanket form.  I have enough of some yarns to make multiple little puffs, and some will only make one, but this is going to a project that keeps going for a long time.

This is my progress so far:

I'm up to about 4 or 5 now, but it's a far cry from what I'm guessing will be the hundreds I need to finish a blanket.

Today is Wednesday and this is last week's update, so maybe I'll get my act together and share this week's update tomorrow.  If you believe in me, I'm sure I can make it happen.

Onward,

vrock

Sections of couch everywhere!

I think a Wednesday blog deadline might be a bit of a stretch for me, readers.  I definitely finished my required knitting for the week yesterday, but fitting in the blog time didn't quite happen this week, and it didn't happen last week.  I'll aim for Wednesday, but I think I'm more likely to set aside time on Thursday night.  Either way, here's what I've been working on this week:

The sock has another 7 rows on it, and I'm still not even at the end of the ribbing.  The ribbing calls for 1.5" and I'm about a week away from moving beyond the k3 p1.  A handy thing about Week 2 is that the blue-er blue worked out to be exactly 7 rows, which made it super easy for counting my rows.  The grey-blue continues on for a bit more, so it won't be an easy marker for Week 3 unfortunately.

Last week, I also introduced my Home Alone hat idea.  I was struggling to find a pattern that I could rework to fit my needs, and no chart seemed to exist to make Kevin McAllister's signature moose hat.  The best I got on Ravelry was this:






Moose Camouflage Hat

It had the trees along the crown, and the repeating moose pattern, but it wasn't close enough in my opinion. 

So I did what any dedicated Home Alone fan would do, and I made my own chart in Excel.  Fun fact: knitting stitch height and width ratios can be recreated in Excel by setting the column width to 1.67 and the row height to 13.2.  I did this, and then got to work with the best picture of the hat I could find, which showed very clear stitch definition:

Once I had one moose sketched out on the chart, it was easy!  One chart repeat is 24 stitches across from nose to tail, and the diamonds and trees work out nicely.  Just now, as I was typing that last sentence, I realized I goofed on the pine trees in my chart.  It appears that they are in two different styles - one branchy bare tree style, and one solid filled-in tree style.  Shoot. 




Problem solved, I just went back in and fixed it.  But I also realized I can't add a pdf file to my blog post, so my plan to share the chart is not going to happen right now.  I'll get back to you about that.

In other moose hat news, I also need to figure out the rest of the hat pattern so I can actually make it.  I figure the hat circumference would be six moose around, for a total of 144 stitches.  With a head circumference of roughly 23", that means I need a yarn that gives me 6 stitches per inch.  I'm thinking something DK for this one.  Worsted just seems like it would be too bulky and thick for the hat. 

I made a quick swatch in some worsted yarn I had lying around, and it confirmed my suspicions; I want a denser, tighter looking fabric, but with finer stitches.  Make sense?  My swatch was also done flat, so I had to do my colourwork on the purl side.  BALLS.  My first swatch was mostly to confirm that my knitters' graph paper dimensions in Excel were right, and that my moose wouldn't look too squat or stretched out.  The moose look perfectly in-proportion, they just need to be done in the round so I can get a sense of what they will really look like, and so I can do it in the right weight of yarn.  All in good time, lovelies.  I'm in no rush to get this project off the ground, because I have bigger fish to fry right now.

And here are my bigger fish:

This is my progress on the Nordic Mittens I mentioned last week.  I'm on a knitting roll and I threw this right mitten together in a few nights.  The Swish DK was a really nice choice for these.  It's soft and smooth, but completely machine washable, and these are a gift for a non-knitter so that's a definite must.  The left mitten is on my knitting to-do list this weekend so I can present them to my student on Monday when she's back at work.

It's a nice colourwork pattern, my only complaint is that there are some sections with longer floats between colours, and I would prefer a nice neat every 3 or 4 stitches goings back and forth between two colours.  I suppose this challenges me though, so you've won this round Nordic Mittens.

I also received a box full of yarn from Knit Picks last week, and I had every intention of taking pictures of all of my purchases to show you, but then my basement flooded and all my craft stuff had to be emergency evacuated into the laundry room.  The basement is fine, the most annoying thing is that we had to tear up our laminate flooring (which was just put down in September, but can be used again because we acted quickly to get it up off the floor), and all of our basement stuff is currently relocated around the house and it's going to be crowded and overwhelming at my house for a while.  We probably won't put the basement back together until all the snow is gone outside, just to make sure that the fixes for the cracks worked.  In the meantime, here is the gist of what I bought, with pictures courtesy of Knit Picks.

Palette fingering yarn in Cream and Hollyberry for my reindeer legwarmers:




Palette yarn in White, Ice Lily, Mulberry, Hare Heather, and Grizzly Heather for Slim Jim's polar bear hat:







And Wool of the Andes worsted for my lined nordic mittens in Garnet Heather, Gosling, and Pumice Heather:


























Feast your eyes on my yarns, and I'll catch you up next week with my progress.

Onward,

vrock