Dad's Hat

Almost done!! I wasn't feeling well today, so I took a few hours and worked on it. I will hopefully be able to finish it tonight. I will take pics, of course! :-)

UPDATE: Dad's Hat is finished (all but the weaving in... ugh...) I am semi-happy with the outcome, but I'm sure Dad will be happy with it and that's all that matters! Pics coming tomorrow when I can utilize the sunlight.

Dad's Hat

This is Dad's hat, with the brim down, and then with the brim up. I've been so busy lately I haven't been able to knit much at all, but it's coming along slowly but surely.

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Trey, the mighty toilet wand warrior!

FINISHED!!! WOOOOT

Packaged, outside, inside, and being modeled.

(Keep in mind this is my first "stranded" project, and my first attempt using a pattern of my own.)

(Happy Valentine's Day, Kim!)
This will be brought to you as soon as Charles can get back to work.

Ally modeling PurpleRain

Its still smaller than I'd hoped. Man, I just don't GET it!!! The guage is right on... So, here is my solution for future hats. I will increase the number of stitches on the beginning and end of the pattern (each round) so that there will be more stitches cast on. I'm updating the patterns I've already made right now.




Alright, I have made some adjustments to this pattern, to make it wider. It is 4sts wider in each repeat, so 16st total all the way around. This will increase it about 2in, which should be good. Its also 1 row longer. The pics aren't the same size because I had changed the template size between the edits lol, sorry...

[Old vs. New]

PurpleRain update

I pinned this down to be able to see it easier and actually checked my guage and its right on so far... I'm knitting it VERY VERY VERY loosely so hopefully it will work out. I am a tight knitter naturally so I keep feeling like this is gonna fall apart lol. I am taking a risk, though - I'm using RedHeart SportWeight (purple) and Caron Simply Soft (cream) and they are slightly different weights, but it seems ok so far. Again, this is all with cheap yarn so they are kind of practice anyway, right??

Pirate Hat and something FUNNY

The outside is completely done and I've done 2.5 rows of the STST of the lining. It fits the kids really well, and they really like it. *sniff sniff - guess I'll have to make mine out of the Dale of Norway Hauk once my mom gets it for me*.

Look closely - do you see the crazy skull on the top row at the far right?? LOL He has a HUGE mouth - I messed up the row right there and he got all scary looking haha.



Now, for your grins & giggles...

Willy Warmers

Guage (and other things)

Well, I actually kind of sort of maybe a little did a swatch-ish type thing before I started my pirates hat. I had the guage right on. And it STAYED right on, until I realized the problem was my circ's size (that sounds like a man's problem not a knitters, huh, but I digress...) and had to switch to a 16" instead of my 29". I thought is was going along well, and just seemed littler because it was next to that tiny size circ. Well, I may have been wrong.

Cathy noticed this last night at the knit-in and asked me about my guage. So I dragged out my handy dandy super duper guage-o-meter and lo and behold she was right. I had gone from 6st=1in to about 7.5st=1in. Now, someone else mentioned a good point, I'm nearing the top of the hat and it really shouldn't matter if its smaller because I will be decreasing soon anyway. Well, I hope they are right, because when I try to smash it onto my head on the needle, it seems very iffy that it will fit me. *cry*

Oh well - like I always say, my projects always have one monumental error - this time, as with others, its size...

I will put a pic up soon so you can see for yourself.

On to other news... I went to Mass Ave Knits again today to have my recycled yarned balled up. It was very exciting. I got two big balls out of it - I will post pics of that soon as well. (Charles still has my batteries in the X-Box controller... *grrr*)
I have another sweater almost picked apart, too. It was a striped sweater so that made things a little interesting lol. Oh, and I got two more skeins of Katia sock yarn on sale for $3/ea, and three patterns. One was FREE!!! Yup, a whole sock pattern book for free cuz it was really old and worn but idc about that lol. The other was a sock/mitten/hat set pattern and the last was a pattern book FULL of sweaters for kids. Did I mention that those two books were $1/ea????? :-) Happy Camper Am I. (And since I'm a picture junkie, I'll show it all to you soon.)

I feel like crap today, so I'm going to go try to finish my hat and watch tv.

Hat Patterns

I used the pattern at Hello Yarn to make a blank Hat Template" so I could design my own hat patterns.

Inspirations (always acknowledge credit):
Skulls #01
Latvian Hat #01
Pink & Red

I have added a space on the sidebar for these patterns as I complete them. There are "Norwegian" style hats and "Latvian" style hats.

WCTP Hat

I'm too late to be in the actual KAL, but I'm making a hat anyway.

Its my first Fair Isle, my first hat in the round, and my first provisional cast on. It seems to be going well so far - well, not counting the needle drama of course.

[The gold in it aren't stitches, they are my stitch markers, I use jump rings for small guages.]

On the Needles:

I just finished Trey's hat. I am less than thrilled with it. The yarn is just cheap RedHeart but I hoped it would be cuter... The "winging it" didn't go as well as planned either, next time I will stick to a pattern.

The socks are my first "real socks". I'm using Magic Stripe yarn, and its not stretchy at all and I'm afraid the socks will be less than comfortable, but we'll see. There is a pattern/texture to the stitches, but it doesn't show up too well with the stripes, and that's ok.

Finally!!!

This is Trey's sock. This particular one is the 1st one I made and its actually wrong, but you can't see it in the picture. I accidentally made the foot of the sock 20rows instead of 16rows so this sock is about an inch longer than the other one, but he doesn't care. And the 2nd pic is my Cascade Fixation sock (and my very first sock on dpns). It is MUCH smaller than I'd hoped. I made it for Syd, but while making it realized that it would never fit, so thought I'd make it for Ally... well, it barely fits her either but she plays with it anyway. Notice how the cuff is so big? I'm trying to solve that problem on the current sock I'm knitting but we'll see how that goes. (Yup, you guess it, only one made so far...)



Ally's mitten. (No, I haven't knitted the 2nd one yet - I can't find my sz8 needles ANYWHERE...) I just love this cute little baby bootie. (It also uses the sz8 needles that I can't find, so there is only 1 made so far)... (I suffer from SSS severely lol).



The next two are of Syd's sweater. It's a WIP, but I have had to put it down for a few weeks because I've screwed up part of it and frogging an inch or so isn't appealing to me right now so I'm trying to think of a way to hide the error without frogging. Unfortunately each time I grab the sweater I stress out about it so it's on hold. The stitch is called something like "stacked blocks" but its hard to see in the photos.



This is Ally's fuzzy hat, she adores this hat, its just so "her"! :-)
And this is the hat I crocheted last night, cute huh?? Maybe not as cute as my AC/DC hat I got for $5 at Wal-Mart, but still very cute. :-) It's kind of hard to really see his hat in the picture because of all the open areas.



Last but not least and totally OT, but this is Athena, our Rottweiler, with my super cute AC/DC hat (and somehow my toe...) LOL

Camera... and um... eww

Well I took pictures of Ally's hat and the hat I crocheted tonight and something is wrong with the cable used to upload from the camera to iPhoto. **sigh**
Anyway, I actually CROCHETED something tonight! I've never really been able to crochet anything and have it even remotely turn out ok so I am so excited. Its a VERY simple hat, a very open lacey-type pattern. I will get a pic up here tomorrow.


And um... have you seen this??? Very unusual indeed. LOL Can you imagine if your biology teacher had brought THIS to class? :-) (Personally I think the liver looks like a beret, but that could be because I have made so many hats lately.) They also have a penis cozy... hmmmmmmmm can't imagine anyone who would wear one but hey, if the shoe fits - or in this case the cozy..... (imagine taking the measurements for that hehe).

Strange But Trewe

Hat #1 and Hat #3

These aren't the greatest pictures, they were taken with a camera phone. The first picture is Ally's hat (Hat #1). She likes her other hat better but this was my first attempt at a hat, so I think it's pretty good for a first hat. :-). The 2nd pic is Syd's hat (Hat #3) I finished today, the shape is really cute, much cuter than I thought it would be when I started it.

Two hats in one evening...

Well, my 5yo dd decided to cut off nearly all her hair night before last. (Personally I wasn't that upset about it- its just hair and it WILL grow back - and besides - its HER head, not mine lol she is the one who has to deal with the consequences). Anyway - I decided to "yarn her up" (as my kids would say) a new hat. The first one was with WalMart ordinary RedHeart in "Bikini". It turned out cute, so I decided to use some of the nicer yarn I had in my stash. Unfortunately I can't remember the kind it was, but I assume it was YarnBee because I bought it at HobbyLobby. It was an "eyelash" type yarn and VERY soft. The hat is A-D-O-R-A-B-L-E! So now my 8yo dd and my 5yo ds are very jealous. LOL. After another trip to Wallyworld I picked up some camo-colored yarn and some yummy purple Bernat. I'm using a different pattern - one from a book my mom gave me today. It has a cable row for the brim and then a generic STST type beanie with a pompom, which I will probably leave off lol....
I hope to get pics of everything I've made up on here tomorrow and get this blog up and running like I want it, even if I am the only person who ever reads it. :-)