Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Hats!
I finished the Even Better Bucket Hat back in late spring. It was my first project using the ever popular Malabrigo Merino Worsted yarn in the American Beauty colorway. I am now IN LOVE with this yarn. It is dreamily soft and comes in amazingly vibrant colors. Plus, the yarn is hand-dyed by a women's cooperative in Uruguay.
In this project, I tackled the provisional cast-on for the first time with uneven success. Fortunately the join is on the inside of the hat (the brim is doubled), so no one is any wiser.
After the Bucket Hat, I worked on a number of projects simultaneously over the summer. Some of them are still in progress, but I finished another two hats pretty close to each other in Septemberish.
I finished the Amanda Hat first (I think). Another Malabrigo project, this time I knit with a variegated yarn called Alpine Pearl. This was an interesting project because it was such a completely different architecture from the bucket hat. The knotty stitches in the Amanda hat gave it a firm, plush shape--the hat will stand up on its own! It's also interesting to see how the variegation plays out in the stitch pattern.
The Raisin Beret is the third hat. It was a quick knit...but I also think I was gaining speed by the time I took on this pattern because even the lace sections seemed surprisingly easy after the Amanda hat. I was hoping this would turn out as a good everyday fall hat and so far it has worked out quite well and now lives in my tote bag for the days at the office where the a/c still thinks it's summer.
Monday, July 28, 2008
Beaufort Hat
I'd picked this pattern out well before our trip to San Francisco, then while engaging in some serious stash enhancement during our adventures there, I came across some Jo Sharp Desert Garden Aran Cotton yarn. This stuff is really wild. It's 65% cotton and 35% microfiber. The microfiber gives it a lot of smoothness, spring and bounce, so much so in fact that strands of it remain almost eerily tubular. Combined with cotton's flatness of color, the yarn almost looks like clay, which means you get some amazing stitch definition.
It was one of the recommended yarns for the pattern, so I got started on the pattern almost immediately. I needed something to work on when we got back to the hotel room and were braindead from a full day of San Francisco excitement.
The pattern knit up quickly and the yarn was a great match for it. The design is a clever spiral of yarn overs and knit togethers, not actual cables. Best of all, this hat actually fits!
Monday, June 16, 2008
Cereal Killers
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
First Hat
I finished my first hat over a week ago, but have only now gotten around to posting about it. There are many wonderful things about this hat, but the aspect you are likely to notice first in this photo is probably the one that doesn't make me so happy. The hat turned out a bit LARGE. It's supposed to be a rolled brim style hat, but if I roll it up so that I can actually see, the brim is a) enormously fat and b) immediately starts unfurling. I'm not sure exactly what went wrong. The hat is spot on for circumference, so it's not like I messed up and made the whole thing too big based on a bad choice in yarn substitution (Lorna's Laces Shepherd Worsted was a joy to knit with, by the way). And I swatched! However, I did swatch on straight bamboo needles, then knit on circular bamboos, before I learned you're supposed to swatch on circulars if that's what you're going to knit on. Furthermore, after I frogged my first attempt, I switched to metal circulars... Could that have something to do with it? And what about the uberpoofy brim? The mystery continues...
Now, on to the positives. The yarn was indeed a joy. The texture and colors were wonderful to work with and I love how they knit up. More importantly, although this hat was a very simple pattern, I learned a lot, which was my goal in the first place. I sorted out circular needles and double points, neither of which I had tackled before. I was especially thrilled with how well the crown turned out, given that I'd never done decreases before either.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
362 days and 100 degrees
Besides the fact that this is crazy hot even for Texas in late May, it is also 362 days until my wedding. I find myself wondering if May 31 is the new Texas summer (according to global warming) and if I need to change the date or start reserving a LOT of fans.
Friday, May 16, 2008
y@rn pr0n
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
First Finished Object!
My curiosity about the yarn was piqued by a Ravelry forum post about a sale on Be Sweet Magic Ball. The yarn itself is a lot of fun -- a wonderful variety of colors and textures that change as you work. If you're knitting from a center-pull ball, you don't know what's coming next, so it starts to have the same effect as reading a great page-turner -- you don't want to put down your needles because you're dying to see what happens next. In addition, Be Sweet is a very cool company. The yarn is hand spun and dyed by women in South Africa under a job creation program that has offered opportunity in an economically depressed rural region.
The colorway I used for my scarf is called Shakespeare. I have two more in my stash called Quarry Stones and Wild Berries. I'm thinking I may do a scarf with horizontal stripes with one and a hat with the other.