FO: Bray cap

I started out with good intentions.  Really, I did.

All of the yarn that I bought at Unwind Brighton was all meant to be knitted up and gifted to friends and family.  I got a lot of guy-colors and neutrals because of it.

I started this hat thinking it would be a gift for a guy friend of ours.  I had made his wife a pair of socks after she did all of the cleaning up after Thanksgiving dinner but haven't made him a thing despite his freshly-shorn head.

I cast on.  I started knitting.

I fell in love.

It's mine now.

Besides, it is far too slouchy for a guy.  Right?  Right?

I try not to be a selfish knitter.  I mean, I have plenty of hats.  I don't need another one.  And yet...there was something about this.  The cables, the lace, the slouch, the soft silky yarn.  I'm not an orange person at all, but suddenly this speaks to me.

The yarn is Juno Fibre Arts Buffy BFL in "Campfire".  I love it.  I want more.  For myself, for everyone I know.  The world needs more things knitted from this yarn.

The pattern is Bray Cap by Jared Flood.  It's not complicated at all, but it is something I had to sit down and concentrate on.  I still love almost all the Brooklyn Tweed patterns, but he designs so damn many I can't keep up.

FO: Wayfarer Scarf

Wait...I'm a knitter?

Yes.

All the way from my home state came two skeins of organic merino.

Not all merino is created equal. This is the best I've ever had the pleasure of working with. Swans Island has amazing yarns. Soft, bouncy, itch-free, and warm. It's exactly what I want in a wool yarn. The price tag is higher than the medical marijuana users there, but who could resist the most delightful of raspberry pink colors? I, for one, could not.

I cast on for the Wayfarer scarf, a basic but classic Jared Flood pattern.

It alternates between lots of garter stitch and an undulating slip-stitch pattern. Not the most exciting thing to knit, but I love the way this yarn made the slipped stitches pop, and I was comforted at the ease at which this worked up.

It's snuggly warm and I actually look forward to going out on cold days because I get to wear this.

I made mine a tad longer than written since I had the yardage, and I just love the way it drapes as I give it the multi-wrap treatment. After several wears, there is not a pill to be plucked. If I didn't choose such a shockingly femme pink, this pattern would be totally appropriate for a man's scarf as well.

FO: Turn a Square for Jerry

For the most part, I like my co-workers. Some of them have the uncanny ability to drive me to drink, but I can honestly step back from the situation and view it as almost entirely positive as far as a corporate job goes. I get paid well, I get a stack of gift certificates and bottles of Scotch for Xmas, and every once in a while, they let me take the group someplace nice so they can golf and get enough alcohol in their systems to stop thinking about work.

No one is a baby and calls HR on me when they get thrown in the pool, and I don't call HR on them when they end up getting hospitalized for dehydration while they are at a strip club.

It's good to have co-workers who are willing to talk about something other than work. Jerry is the source of good office gossip, the fixer of the Web-exes that I tend to screw up, installer of big heavy servers that I can't rack myself, and the bearer of cute kids that he'll bring to the office so I can feed them Sour Patch kids until there is a sticky mess of vibrating children to be rounded up for the long ride home at the end of the day.



Oh, that's a terrible picture of him. Here's a hatless one that I like better. I took that for his linked-in picture. I think he has the same problem as I do with those corporate website pictures as almost every picture I have I'm either wearing sunglasses and/or have a drink in my hand.



There. Just imagine him with a hat now.



I felt like it was overdue that he gets some knitwear. He's been begging for socks for years, but I have put on a sinister squint and asked him if he and his wife was ready for the commitment of handwash only. So he gets a hat instead.

It's my go-to guy hat, the Turn a Square. I used leftover scraps of Noro Silk Garden from a few different projects and the last bit of Shelter in "Nest". I tried doing it from memory and realized when I was done that the pattern calls for stripes every 3 and 2 rows. I just did every 2 rows but I don't think that's wrong in any way.

I told him he could wear it on his foot if he wanted to.

FO: Odessa Hat and Another Fortnight

I am a spontaneous gift-giver. There's usually no rhyme or reason to the care packages I send out. It's just, surprise!, it's August, but I made you mittens because it will be cold one day. It's not the most practicable way to be, but I find that life is more fun that way.

My co-workers won't adopt my system. Bummer. Like clockwork, the week before Xmas, the bottles of booze start piling up on my desk to the point where it seems like I might have a drinking problem. I don't; I can't get through 7 bottles of Scotch this year, that's all. I've tried to politely hint "please stop" by just keeping these bottles around to gather dust, but it just seems to give people the idea that I love this Scotch so much and oh, here's another bottle. Granted, I do love the stuff. The rocky romanticism of the Scottish isles come alive on the palate- it's really quite transporting and one of the most reassuring taste I could imagine. I'm just a sipper though- I'll have a wee dram watered down before bedtime in the cold dark winter, and that's about it. It's really hard to finish a bottle. It might take years.

In return for their generosity, I usually run home, paw through my stash, and cast on for a hat. The next day, my co-worker of choice will have a nice warm hat to keep their ears warm when they choose to wear a hat, which is usually not often since their is a vanity issue with the hair gel and styled spikes and whatnot. It's the most non-corporate gift ever, and they really don't know what to do with it, but they are usually tickled to death to get one.

First up (and for my only female co-worker) is the Odessa hat:



I used yarn leftover from my Eastlake pullover. Actually, I tried to make a frilly pair of beaded wristwarmers with it, but they came out so sloppy and weird that I frogged it and re-purposed the yarn. It's Berroco Inca Gold merino and silk blend, and it held up fine through the entire process and looks fantastic. The hat is a free pattern (I do love spirals) and it took me a bit of the afternoon to make.



The second hat was the exact replica of another hat I made this past fall- the Fortnight. I used leftover Shelter from the Grove mittens. The color is "Soot".



It's simple and fun- tons of garter stitch with a slip-stitch cable pattern at the crown. Another hat I could turn around in a day. That's exactly what is needed as I'm fairly certain that both of these hats will end up in the wash cycle on hot, and a nice hot spin in the drier as well, and then re-gifted to a newly-born sprogling. I leave instructions on pretty custom gift tags. They are usually ignored. Maybe this is why I need a barrel of Scotch in my office.

FO: Grove Mittens

I've been quietly knitting away, and spinning as well. It all kind of feels like a sneaky little guilty pleasure at this point. I still don't really have the proper mind to write a proper post though. The constant distractions I'm dealing with (aka "work") make it hard for me to form a sentence otherwise. My creativity suffers so.

I did finish these mittens quite a while ago though.



They are the Grove Mittens by Jared Flood, from the "Made in Brooklyn" book. Indeed.



There were so many twisted stitches that I'm not quite sure if I would ever be able to un-twist ever again. In retrospect, I did not choose the right yarn. The fuzzy woolen-spun Shelter yarn really obscured the subtle pattern. Something with more stitch definition would probably have worked better. Regardless, I like them- they really do look like the bark of a noble old tree.



I especially like the twisted cabled cuffs. It's a great touch. The tops of the mittens are much more blunted off than most- kind of a frankenmitten look. That could be easily fixed, but, eh, I kind of like it.

I used a tad over a skein of Shelter in the colorway "Soot". I used size 5 needles, so they zipped right along. I started these Rhinebeck weekend, got home and promptly discarded them to the corner to collect dust for a month because I dislike picking up stitches for the thumbs. Eventually I but picked them back up just to finish them and get them out of the pile. Life is good.

FO: Fortnight Hat

BT Shelter has fast become one of my favorite yarns.



It's a blend of Targhee and Columbia wools, very lofty and springy. It's a rustic, imperfect tweedy yarn, and it knits up to almost a velvety texture.

I brought along a hat pattern and a skein on my Rhinebeck weekend trip to have something simple to work on. This is the Fornight pattern from Jared Flood. He's really masterful at writing patterns to suit his yarn.



So I cheated a little bit and I decided to work the garter stitch section flat, instead of in the round as it is written. I love plain garter stitch and I don't do it often enough. When I hit the cable section, I joined in the round and then seemed up the garter section. I am the laziest motivated person on earth. You can barely see the seam. I can't chew gum and walk, so doing any other kind of knitting when running my gob in a social situation means I have to choose my projects wisely. I end up making a lot of sleeves and other plain things when I'm socializing or else it will look like a spider on LSD made it.





It only took me a couple days to make. It's a great little hat- completely unisex, cozy and easy to wear.

The cables have slip-stitches, which give them an elegant exaggeration that might have gotten lost in the fuzz of the yarn otherwise.



I'm currently working on a pair of textured lace mittens out of the same yarn- the color is "Soot"- and I'm hoping to have enough leftover yarn to whip up another Fortnight hat.



I didn't use up quite 1 skein for the original hat, and it seems like I'll have plenty of yarn leftover from the mittens.

FO: Juneberry Shawl

Well now. It's been quite the eventful past couple months. City life means you very infrequently get a little time to yourself, and when you do, I find myself just thrilled to be able to sit down and have a couple minutes of quiet time to myself.

So we had a weird spring where it was either cold or raining, and just when I started to get into the asparagus that was crowding the markets, it becomes unbearably hot and humid. I really had to convince myself that turning the oven on is a great, fabulous idea and I've paid good money all winter for the privilege to sit in a sauna and a steam room, so now I get it for free.



Asparagus did eventually get cooked and eaten. It was a trial though.

In my attempt to keep my stash in check, I dug up 4 skeins of Shelter. The color is "Almanac".



I cast on for the Juneberry Shawl a couple months ago. I fell in love with the textured lace. LOVE LOVE LOVE.



The knitting of the actual body of the shawl hummed around at a nice pace. I honestly thought this would be done in two weeks. The pattern was so well-written and charted, I zipped through it with no problems at all.

Then I came to the knitted edging. It was much bigger shawl than I anticipated, and I spent a couple of weeks plugging away at the edging. It wasn't hard at all, but the pattern was complicated enough to require my full attention.

I got to the halfway point and to my dismay, I realized I was pretty much out of yarn. Not doing a gauge swatch will cause that to happen. In the end, I was about 25 yards short. Sad face.

I was about to buy a new skein when Ravelry came to my rescue. I found another knitter who had leftovers of the same color, and they were willing to send it along to me. Brilliant! I groveled quite a bit and thanked them profusely, and I promise to do the same with any leftover yarn I have from future projects.

It only took me another hour to finish it up. I blocked it on my bed, where it took up the entire bed and I had to hinge it over the edge of the mattress to get the lace to open up.

And....



VOILA!



It's enormous! I love the textured lace and how it transitions from one theme to another.





I really should have gone down a needle size and ended up with a smaller shawl (and no issue of running out of yarn).



It's so dramatic and lovely.



I feel that this shawl has ceased to be an accessory. It's the main event.



Props to Jared Flood for another impeccable pattern.



The specs:

The Juneberry Triangle by Jared Flood. I used 4.5 skeins of Brooklyn Tweed Shelter yarn and US size 9 needles. The bouncy targhee-columbia yarn blend made for great lace stitch definition.

FO: Turn a Square

Oooh boy. I have lots of catching up to do. This has been a winter of constantly being sick, or in the process of getting sick. Those who know me well know that I never, ever, ever get as much as a sniffle most winters and plow right through whatever bug is going around. Not so much this winter. So there is a nice dose of Schadenfreude for you.

Let me tell you about my co-workers for a second (you know I don't like to mix my work life in with anything else, but it's good back story). I work in a sales department, which attracts the kind of people that are competitive in everything that they do, including gift-giving. I use this to my advantage as much as possible, especially around the holidays. If they want to assign their love for me with a cash value, I'm okay with this. If they want to put a little more thought into to get in my good graces and get me a nice fat gift certificate to an upscale yarn boutique, I wouldn't say no. They also tend to stock my personal bar with top-shelf goodness that will keep me warm and happy year-round.

So off to Purl Soho I marched on a bitter cold January day, with my freshly printed gift certificate in hand. It's a beautiful store with equally "beautiful people" clientele, all of them ready to drop a small fortune on a sweater's worth of cashmere. You have a rather unsettled feeling in that shop that the sheep that produce the wool for their yarn somehow produce no poo at all, and are a magic breed of sheep that have the ability to fly at night when no one is watching. It's priced accordingly.

I picked up a sweater's worth of thyme-green Merino and some Brooklyn Tweed Shelter, a new yarn that everyone has been buzzing about.



It's not particularly soft, but it's an interesting blend of Columbia and Tarhgee wools, which makes it very lofty and bouncy. It's rustically spun woolen-style, with lots of interesting neps spun in for texture and a heathered effect. Jared Flood has been blogging about the whole wool-into-yarn process on his blog recently. It's fascinating and I recommend checking it out.

I used some of the pretty brown color, Nest, to make a hat.



I choose the "Turn a Square" pattern, which, appropriately enough, is a Jared Flood pattern. I dug out a skein of Noro Silk Garden that was leftover from a coat I made a couple years ago to use as stripes. The results:





The stripes are very subtle. I love it. Best of all, this took me all of 3 days worth of commuting from start to finish.



He's already worn it a bunch, hence that slightly rumpled look. The requisite guy hat must be able to be crumpled down and shoved into a pocket, and it fits that need quite well. It's a good guy-beanie shape with the square top. It's cozy and warm and already looks like a favorite.



I did a jogless stripe technique to make the seam less visible. You can still see it though.

The best part is that this barely used half a skein of each, so there is definitely enough yarn leftover to make a second one. I did enjoy working with the Shelter. However, I found that when I tinked back to fix a mistake, the yarn would sometimes come unspun completely and break. It spit-splices really well, so it's not bad to fix. Just a bit troublesome that it does that.

The specs: I'm a super-loose knitter so I had to go down several needle sizes in order to get a hat that fit. I used US 3 needles for the ribbing and US 5 for the main part of the hat. I only used about 70 yards of the solid brown Shelter, and even less that with the Silk Garden, making this a great hat if you have scraps to use up. The pattern was well-written and simple.