With the change of season comes the change of passion, from gardening to knitting…. I’ve completed several projects in the last month or so; I feel particularly proud of the skirt I finished for my daughter, I finished knitting it back in November of 2009, but did not have enough gusto to sew the seam, and for that reason it laid untouched for 11 months… Now nearly a year later the skirt is complete, and my daughter has worn it several times; the saying “better late than never”, definitely applies here!!!
Between last post and now, I’ve managed to knit and complete, complete is a key word here, a wool charcoal gray cardigan for my girl, this cardigan is very simple with half sleeves and a mock neckline. She loves it as it’s versatile and she has worn it to church as well as to school several times now.
The most challenging and frustrating project of the month has turned out to be an orange hat for our baby. I though it would be exiting to try something new and decided to make a visor cap with earflaps- well what a chaos. Generally speaking I don’t follow any patterns but may look at pictures to get ideas flowing… This hat was started as a simple orange hat with a knit 2, purl 1 ribbing in 100% cotton, once this hat was half way complete, I decided that I wanted to try a different finishing technique, to go over the top much like in a sock finish, that took 4 tries and no satisfaction, so we then opted for an envelope finish, that took 2 tries, finally we succeeded. Visor- that was a week’s worth of work all on it’s own, being that I don’t use patterns or directions, I had to figure out a creative way of making it work, considering I am a newbie to the world of visors- I though I did pretty well; of course like everything else with this hat, it took three tries of cutting out the correct visor, then additional three tries knitting over the visor, as the decreases on both ends didn’t look very even to me. Eventually I gave in thinking perhaps a first try wasn’t worth this much… With the visor complete the knit2, purl1 ribbing was looking way too chunky, so then a genius idea hit me - clipping with scissors at the bottom of the hat and undoing it, the ribbing part,- let me warn you- don’t ever try this- what a CHAOS, yarn everywhere and you had pull the whole piece of yarn through every purl stitch, but I felt like a true trooper, that giving in into the yarn frustration was not a choice, couple of hours later it was undone and the stockinette stitches were back on my 4 needles…. With that I began re-knitting the bottom of the hat, with it came the new dilemma of ever popular curling of the stockinette knit- not a desired effect for this particular project. It was decided that a row or two of simple crochet at the end will cure the problem. We’ll get back to that in a second… Earflaps…. I’ve knitting earflaped hats before so it was not a difficulty issue but rather a practicality as I’ve wanted to make this hat practical and my reasoning was saying that unless a hat has earflaps- an year old boy may not be using it that much, so here came the earflaps. Well between the addition of earflaps and a visor I was beginning to now run short on yarn, earflaps turned out somewhat small- but I HAD to compromise as I still had to crochet around it so that it wouldn’t curl…. The finished product- earflaps curl a bit as there was not enough yarn to go over them, the visor sometimes unbends and becomes flat instead of slightly curved, but I am still glad that I dared to go on the adventure of visor hats as I now have an order from my oldest son. Lesson learned- don’t try so many new techniques on one small project, and always have more yarn than you think you may need!
