FO: Shwook

Back in October when I visited the Knitting in Stitching Show at Ally Pally, I mostly behaved myself as far as purchase power was concerned and walked away only burdened by a few small skeins of Jamiesons Shetland in tow.  It seemed serendipitous: having just returned to civilization after a very long walk through Scotland (but nowhere near the Shetland Isles) and I felt the need for an after-the-trip souvenir, since the only thing that I bought in Scotland ended up being cold meds to ease miserable flu symptoms on the train ride home.   Backpacking makes you weary of every extra ounce you are schlepping.

But I love to work with Shetland, and I do love colorwork in small doses (a pullover this colorful and picky would be my personal hell).  I picked a hat pattern to go with and resolved that these five green skeins would not be sitting around in my stash for years.

Speaking of backpacking, I did want a really warm hat that would cover my ears completely.  This one fit the bill nicely: a generous slouch, with the strands of colorwork carried in back to make it extra wind-resistant.

It's cheerful in shades of chartreuse and sage, willow and ivy and eucalyptus greens.  My only complaint?  I should have done the brim doubled: folded over with a picot edge to give it extra warmth and a polished finished edge.  Just having ribbing on such a complex colorwork pattern is about as fitting as putting a Honda Civic medallion on a Rolls Royce.  

The nifty thing is that this used up very little yarn.  Meaning, if I juggle the colors a bit, I have plenty of yarn leftover for another similar hat.  

But, sigh.  My resolve of walking through the winter has somewhat failed me.  The vanity of having new boots (NEW BOOTS!) that I'm unwilling to walk through bog with yet, coupled with the tiresome gray skies and drizzle cold means I've been quite the homebody in my free time, but whipping up some fantastic things in the kitchen and furiously scheming the next few bank holiday weekends.  Meanwhile, I grow comfortingly fat on dry Manhattans and thick, hearty Lebanese lentil stews, waiting with a mixture of excitement and dread the day a large hill rears up directly in my path.

The pattern is called Shwook- it's a free pattern to celebrate Shetland Wool Week 2014, and it's still available on the website.

FO: Scrollwork Hat

After my last blog post, I totally shamed myself into finishing this hat:

The Scrollwork, a classy little number from Wool People Vol 4. It sat crammed on a shelf (a former CD tower, now useful as a place to put all the odds and ends of life when you live in a 1 bedroom flat- flashlights, stationary, pens, pocketknives, sunglasses, a button jar, scissors, and odd balls of yarn and anything you want off the table when you sit down for dinner) with just the brim done for more than a month, waiting for me to just put a couple of hours in to turn it into something more useful.

And finally:

The color is much more accurate in the first photo: a lovely, dusty pink with bits of tweed (as it is still permanently nighttime here, it's hard to get knitwear photos during good light, especially if one might be a desk jockey for pay all day).  The yarn is Classic Elite Portland Tweed, now discontinued.  Why?  Because it's weird, most likely.  It's a blend of 50% wool, 25% alpaca and 25% rayon, which is just...odd.   While I didn't curse it and hate it, it was not my favorite to work with- very little give and spring and life to it.  It's not terribly soft, and the alpaca/rayon makes it drape really nice, but I was warned up and down the internet that it would grow terribly huge and lose shape right away.  Also:  it is labeled aran weight, and it is nowhere near that chunky- it knit up DK.  So I knit it down 3 needle sizes for a very tight fabric, and the moment the heat from my head warmed it up during my victory lap (I always don whatever knitwear I just finish, at least for a couple hours when I finish) it started to relax and grow slouchy and loose and start to creep down my forehead and splay out where it hit the back of my neck, threatening to eventually suffocate me and perhaps even eat my brains.  

What to do?  I washed it and threw it in the dryer, tightening it up quite a lot, and with these puny Euro energy efficient driers, it was nowhere near enough heat or agitation to felt the fabric into a stuff, unyielding mass .  It's better now.  I would never normally do that- knitwear gets washed by hand in a bucket and dried flat in world.  I just recently started using the spin cycle on the dryer to wring it out to expedite the drying.  

But looksie, it fits perfect!  At least my head, which it is not intended for.  

FO: Plethora of Hats

A cold chill has swept the land.  After a bit of petered-out hurricane Gonzalo blew through England, it went from balmy and windy, to rainy and windy, to cold and windy in a 24 hour period.   Sweater weather!  Cuddly hats and snugly scarfs and indulging in all sorts of edibles that you've been turning your nose up all summer.  Sweet potatoes and soups and sweet potato soup, squash and crispy sweet apples and I've not turned down any offers of hot chocolate.

I've been plugging away on hats.  It's become a bit of a joke in my knit circle: another week, another hat.  And it's true, I've been knocking out about one a week.  These aren't difficult patterns, and most of them are worsted-weight, so it only takes me a few hours a piece.  

As always, fantastic gifts.  All of these are being flung to the four corners of the earth.

First up: 

The Botanic Hat, a clever little Stephen West Beanie.  It's completely reversible, and looks remarkably different when you give it a flip.

See?  The best thing about this is that when I finished, I weighed the leftover skeins and realized I had enough for a mirror-image:

The pair of hats used exactly two skeins of Rowan Lima, an alpaca yarn that makes me rethink alpaca yarn.  It's velevety.  Instead of being twisted into plies, it is chained, so it makes for less drapey structure-less fabric as it seems to behave much more like wool.  It's not bad at all..

Another creating- the Windsor Hat.  It's a free pattern on the Rowan site and I loved how feminine and girly it was (and I'm not a girly girl by any means).  The pattern was a huge pain in the ass though- it was written Rowan-style to be knitted flat, which is as complicated as you could possibly get.  Still- it is slouchy and warm and after a glance at the pattern, I was able to improvise and knit it in the round, and all was right in the world once again.

The yarn was an odd skein of Creative Worsted, a wool/mohair blend, and the pink was leftovers of Swans Island worsted Merino from my Wayfarer scarf.  

This bad boy is going to a friend of mine who just moved from a balmy climate to a cold one:

It's the Greenery hat.  I made an extra-thick brim so it can be worn as a big slouch or doubled over the ears (which hides the cabling a bit, eh?).  The yarn?  Ah, the yarn.  A few skeins of wool yarn I picked up at Monoprix in Paris out of pure curiosity.  While I miss Monoprix badly (like Target in the US, they had great chic clothes) this yarn was not the best.  It was really dense- this hat is heavy!- and had a weird acrylic-like squeak even though it was pure wool.  It's not terribly scratchy though, and I think it will keep a head very warm.

Finally:

I used all the scraps that haunt the flat from the ghosts of hats past and made a Kex hat, another  reversible beanie from Stephen West.  I've been making a ton of his patterns lately...I just find they are brilliantly unisex and uniquely constructed.  

I have some more projects to flaunt, but some are gifts and need to be gifted first, but I'm enjoying this sudden drop of temperature to inspire me to cover everyone I know in wool.  

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: A couple of hats....

I think I might have expressed this before, but I do love making hats.

They take very little time.  I can usually crank one out in four hours or so, unless it is with very skinny yarn or very complicated.  That's about a week's worth of commuting time, or some idle tv time in the evenings.  Speaking of which, 2007 called and I'm really into the Danish show "The Killing" right now, and it's NOT JUST BECAUSE OF THE AWESOME KNITWEAR.  Why am I watching a dark, wintry, Danish crime drama in high summer?  I can't answer that, but the UK Netflix doesn't get nearly as many films as the US counterpart, and it's mostly loaded with British sitcoms, which, like almost all sitcoms, I find insufferable.    

Anyway, hats make fantastic gifts.  Everyone could use one.  Or eight.  I made these both as gifts.  They also take up odd skeins of yarn- a ball leftover from a sweater, some scraps from your scrap bin, a skein that you impulsively bought with no real project in mind for but you just had to try it.  

First up is the Nantes hat from Interweave Knits Winter 2011.  

It's got the perfect amount of cables and lace, making a lovely cathedral-like pattern.  I loved this pattern and will be making it again in the future.

I made mine slouchy, but you could go down a needle size and make a beanie and it would work as well.  I do love slouchy over-sized hats.  I tend to not wear hats with the brims straight across my forehead, but I rather like to push them back so they cover my ears.

The yarn is Rowan Pure Wool Aran, a soft superwash wool.  It comes in 186 yard balls, and I shortened the pattern by three rows so I would have enough yarn to finish it nicely.

Next up is the Nottingham hat.  I used a skein of Quince and Co Osprey leftover from my Aidez cardigan that I made last winter.  The color is pea-green, which, honestly, is a tough color to pull off this close to your face.

It's slouchy as well.  Almost rasta-like, but I did want to use up every last bit of wool.  The lace pattern makes nice diagonals, it was simple and it looks fantastically hip if you can pull off this color green.

These will both be gifted eventually.  The right person, the right season.  No one I know is allowed to be cold.  

FO: Pup Tent

Growing up, I had many, many cousins. I lived pretty far from them, so I wasn't really part of the tight-knit core group. When I would visit them, it was fun, if mostly because I got to ride around in the bed of a pickup truck and I was allowed to operate heavy farm machinery at a tender age. Plus, my vocabulary of bad words and insults would grow tenfold anytime I spent more than a few minutes with them. That is if I could stop coughing enough from all the cigarette smoke being inhaled second-handedly.

Anyway.

The name of this hat is Pup Tent. I can not say the words "pup tent" without cracking up a little bit. It's mostly because my disrespectful trash-talking cousin once yelled while observing clothes hanging out on the line, "Aunt Linda, your underwear are so big, I could use them as a pup tent!" and then we all scattered like so may giggling deer to escape the wrath of a chubby, angry aunt. When you are six, it's funny. Or, as we might say, "wicked funny".

The pattern is a freebie. I made it a little larger to use up the yardage and ended up with a nice slouch. I used it to use up the last 150 yards of Canopy Worsted leftover from the Vine Yoke Cardigan. It's simple and it used up what I had left, and it will now make a very nice gift for a winter-climate dweller (although perhaps just not for my Aunt Linda).

FO: Foliage Hat

Hello! I've missed our fireside chats as of late. I've had some adventures, and I'm planning more, and eventually there will be pictures of everything. I have a hard time sitting down and collecting my thoughts at times, and I'm just going through one of those phases. It doesn't help that I've taken thousands of pictures in the past couple weeks, and I'll probably take hundreds more before the weekend is through.

When I go back through the years of archived photographs I have, I find it really amazing how the switch to digital really influenced my style. Back when I had my big clunky Minolta SLR and film and the cost of developing and printing was not cheap, I shot so sparingly. Like, life events were marked by just a photo or two of carefully timed and composed shots. When I made the switch to digital, I shot in much the same fashion: early trips abroad were marked by a few photos here and there of something interesting I saw, and I was always a bit worried about running out of battery and memory (those early digital big cameras were battery beasts, especially in the cold). So now that memory is cheap and the camera is dependable, I've been insane. I'm surprised that the shutter button on the camera isn't worn down to nothing, or I've done some permanent damage to my right index finger. And, being me, I have to spend some time whittling down those thousands to a select few that I thought were decent enough to share. I really dislike it when people are all, "here, see all the pictures I took" and they leave in all their duds, blurry, out of focus and not really illustrating much of anything, and you are left flipping through dozens of pictures of their hotel room in Fiji or the view from their balcony overlooking the parking lot in Lisbon, searching for a hint at what really happened on their trip. Booooring.

Anyway.

Here's a hat I made.

The process of springtime has been quite slow all over the world it seems. I'm still quite chilly here, especially at night. I half-heartedly put away my winter coat only to pull it back out again, and I watch the sad struggle of the cherry trees trying to blossom in what amounts to November. I keep churning out hats, and recipients keep grabbing them up and they are getting wear despite it being the time of year where you start to think about a pedicure.

The pattern is Foliage from Knitty.com. Easy lace, I made it with a bit of ease as to be slouchy. It's blaze-orange Cascade 220 tweed, which is an excellent fashion accessory if you live near the woods in October or November in the states. I've found that hats are idea gifts, since I can pack them flat in a big envelope and I don't have to deal with a customs form. Practical and slightly lazy, which is just my style.

FO: Selbu Modern

While I'm at it, here's another hat I finished and it's my go-to winter hat this year.

It's the Selbu Modern by Kate Gagnon Osborn. I've been meaning to make it for years now.

While the pattern is written well, colorwork is always a little time-consuming as I can't read charts when I'm anywhere but home, so it takes me a little while to complete something.

The yarn is The Fiber Company Canopy Fingering in the colors "Orchid" and "Fern". I wanted something subtle and washed out to go with my muted winter palate this year. I love this pattern- it reminds me of an eastern architectural motif- and I could see stealing it for a colorwork yoke sweater.

While I could have gone up a needle size on the main part of the hat to make it slouchier as written, I like it as it is. It's very warm- the yarn floats in back makes it particularly wind-proof. Coming back to Paris after spending some balmy days in New York and it's exactly what I need to keep my ears covered. It's been barely breaking freezing in the mid-afternoon, and the dark has really set in. I'm getting used to it, but it's really wrecking havoc on my sleep cycle as I'm waking up in the morning to a few more hours of night, and that's just weird. So I'm embracing it- dressing warm and waiting for the return of the sun.

FO: Ripley Hat

I made this quite a while ago, while I was still in New York. I wanted to get rid of a few single skeins of yarn I had, as it seemed wasteful to pack them away in storage and bring them with me, as it wouldn't take very long to turn them into a real garment.

This was a skein of long-discontinued, super luxurious Gaia Worsted from the Sanguine Gryphon. The color was "Dew on the Dragonfly". It's 55% silk, 45% cashmere and it just melts in your hands, and it's a precious little 150 yards in a skein. I needed a special something I could whip up quick that would show off the lovely color, and take advantage of how soft and lovely the yarn was.

A quick search around and I remembered a pattern I had been wanting to do for a bit: the Ripley Hat by Ysolda. It had a couple variations you could do, and some optional folds to make the hat slouchier. A perfect way to use up limited yardage.

The pattern was straight forward and a quick knit- even with all the extra folds it took me just a couple days. I opted for the slouchy version with a lacy brim. I packed it in my suitcase and it really came in handy in Iceland. Maybe not the most rugged piece to wear there, but it actually wasn't too cold so it suit my purpose just fine.

Added bonus being that the silk is water replant enough to keep my ears dry in heavy mist/light drizzle.