Finished Baby Hats & Rambling About Stuff

Modified Baby Hat
Originally uploaded by Elabeth.

Little Devil Hat
Originally uploaded by Elabeth.
I made these two baby hats for my friend Billy's new boy John. The red one is supposed to have horns, but I thought it looked cute as-is. It's brand new baby sized.

The skully one is more toddler/preschooler size and uses a motif from the new Son Of Stitch N Bitch book. The adult-sized hat in the book is made with baby yarn, and the corrugated rib is on the matching mittens in the book not on the hat. I did my toddler-size hat with worsted weight yarn. The skull design is a 10 stitch repeat, so it's super easy to slap on just about anything. I may need a sweater with this as part of the yoke at some point.

I'm still working on the Sunrise Circle Jacket down at the store. I'm about 3/4 of the way up the back. It's pretty boring. At home I've started back to work on the Lady Eleanor Entrelac Stole which has been hibernating since it got too big to flip around eleventy million times per row. The being able to knit backwards stuff really kicks that thing's ass, I must say.

Yesterday was the first day I've had to keep on working with a migraine. It totally sucked. Especially the hour and a half where I could barely see and the other hour before the meds kicked in where it felt like my left eye was probably hanging out on a spindly stalk dripping down my cheek. (pretty!) After that I was pretty much just feeling stoned and like I might barf at any moment. Thank goodness nobody came in needing help on anything complicated.

I keep getting ideas for art projects, then getting side-tracked and forgetting them. I need to get one of the many empty sketchbooks I have and start using that sucker to write this stuff down.

HA!

Due to the mind-numbing ton of stockinette involved in the Sunrise Circle Jacket, I just taught myself to knit and purl left handed/backwards. (loops are worked off the right handed needle onto the left so in theory I'd never have to flip my work again.)
It's freaky and makes my usual Continental style go from picking to throwing. I tried switching hands with the working yarn so that I held it in my right hand and still picked, but it just felt WEIRD and I couldn't keep it up.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Actual Knitting Content

That's my recently completed Hemlock Ring Doily thing. I first saw this on Brooklyntweed and figured it would be a brain strainer, but after looking the pattern over I discovered it couldn't be further from the truth. This thing is easy peasy if you've ever done any lace at all. I only needed one stitch marker to mark the beginning of the round and could even work on it while people talked to me and I talked back to them. Seriously.
I didn't take it all the way out to blanket size because I wanted to use this as a centerpiece for the table down at the yarn store. It'll give people something to set their drinks on and it kinda makes me look like a badass to newbies. haha Here it is in action at the store:

Pretty, no?
I used size 6 needles and two skeins of Brown Sheep Cotton Fleece.

Another recently completed store samples project is my dishcloth experiment.
SWTC's Vickie Howell Craft yarn is cotton and milk fiber. The label says hand wash dry flat, but that stuff looked pretty tough to me so I took two balls, made these three washcloths, then used the heck out of them and washed them in my washer at home. As you can see, they survived and still look great.

I'd totally use that stuff for baby projects now knowing this.

So, my newest project is the Sunrise Circle Jacket from an old issue of Interweave Knits. I had two bags of Cascade Lana D'Oro Tweed in the yarn room waiting to make this sweater so I broke into it last week. I'm trying to leave this project at the store so I'll be forced to knit on hats and xmas gift knitting at home, but it's gonna be hard. I want this thing to wear YESTERDAY.
Here is my progress on the back section so far:

I know it looks pretty boring right now, but just you wait till I start sprouting cardigan fronts out of my armpits and we'll see about that. haha