Cabled hats and Cuties

I'm definitely pretty late posting these, but winter isn't over yet. :)
I made these hats in December and January and thought they came out great. The lighter blue one was actually my first cabled project ever! Raveled here and here.
Gotta love a hat with ear flaps and pom pom!


The pattern is called Master Charles and is a $1.99 download available through KnitPicks.com. This may be the cutest hat pattern ever! One of the best features of the pattern is that it includes sizes from infant through adult. I actually used a mix of sizes for my boys. Disturbingly, the almost-4-year old and the 18-month old have the same size head!
I made both with Malabrigo worsted in the Blue Surf and Stone Blue colorways. Yummy yarn.


A high school friend of my husband is a wedding photographer now and we did a portrait session with her for the kids. Her name is Lorraine Daley. I thought the hats would be a cute prop and raced to finish the 2nd one for the shoot. I think they look good! (the hats and the kids of course)



A few more cute kid pics!

Mmmmmmmalabrigo!

Yummy.
I'm loving knitting with Malabrigo Merino Worsted! It's so soft. I love the subtle changes in the mostly-solids (though the wild colors are fun too!) I also appreciate the nice sized 210-yard hanks and the price isn't bad at all.
I chose the Burgundy colorway to make a nice hat/scarf/mitten set. I have the hat and scarf and maybe when I can decide on a mitten pattern I'll get to work on that too.



For the scarf I did something a bit different - a lace triangle. The pattern is called 198 yds. of Heaven but I actually used even less - a measly 147 yards (a guess, based on weight). It's certainly not a shawl, but I was only meaning to make a scarf to wrap around my neck. After blocking it measured 31" wide. Small but perfectly useful and it feels so nice to wear next my skin.

Raveled here. The pattern is free and suitable for a beginner (charted or written out) but it's only on Ravelry.



The hat was a more challenging pattern. It's the Laurel from the Made in Brooklyn pattern booklet. It's meant to be a tam but um, I don't think I could pull that look off. I just wanted a regular beanie-type hat but I really liked the cabled and bobbled pattern. I ended up modifying it a bit - I did 5 repeats instead of 6 (to reduce the width) and removed 4 rows and redid the ending (to reduce the height). My previous attempts to tinker with a pattern were NOT promising but this one came out great! The pattern had 4 different cables, bobbles, a very very busy chart and tons of errata. Do not attempt this without checking those!
Raveled here

Mittens and Hats

Brrrr! Suddenly it got very cold here and I had to admit that just throwing on a hoodie on myself and the kids wasn't going to cut it anymore. I dug out our box of mittens/gloves/scarves and then scavenged around to see if coats from last year would fit the boys this winter. It looks like we are OK on coats, but Nate only had one mitten. I found a pair of Nate's old mittens that would be fine for Ben but I have vivid memories of wrestling Nate's fingers into them and thought we could do with a easier pair.
Some new mittens were definitely in order!

Now I've been bitten by the knitting bug but no way could I have finished 2 knit pairs in one evening like I did sewing up these fleece pairs:


Fortunately I still had the mitten pattern pieces I used last year when I made mittens/scarf/hat sets for all the toddlers. The pattern is free, but there is some work involved scaling the pattern to the right size for the user. It was great to just be able to cut and sew! For Ben's I just basically winged it. No thumbs on his. I used up all of the blue making Nate's pair and didn't have a good other color for Ben's. So I ended up using this luscious smooth minkee. I used white fleece for the inside to make sure it would be warm enough. (Of course white wouldn't have stayed clean for long on the outside!) These were pretty quick jobs but definitely functional. :)

Then back to the saga of the pumpkin hat. Sigh. I really had a lot of problems with this. My first hat was too big and stretched even bigger. I also didn't love the rolled edge (especially with the stretchiness.) I ended up taking out some bottom rows and knitting a ribbed bottom instead. However, it is too big for Ben and almost too big for Nate! So it's officially Nate's hat now. I started knitting another, making it a bit smaller, for Ben. I finished it and tried it on him (bad idea to wait to the end to do this!) and it was too small now!! My notes for the first hat were wrong and I knit the 2nd one with a much smaller gauge resulting in too small a hat. Argh! I had to put it away for about a week I was so frustrated with it.

But the cold weather made me determined to pick it up again. I undid the bottom, knitted up more rows, put a nice garter stitch edge on and bound off. I was as usual, so very very close to running out of yarn! But it finally FITS him now. (Of course, he still hates wearing hats!) I have a bit more green yarn (no more orange) that I may use to make ties for this still. We'll see.



I shared this project before but I'm really only calling it complete now that I found the perfect button for my hat!


And this won't really be a cold-weather scarf but the fall colors definitely make me want to get it done NOW! It's knit with lovely Koigu KPPPM yarn which is sock weight meaning it isn't a fast knit, though it is fun and pretty easy. I love love love the colors on display here. Only a few more feet to go! ;)

Arrrrr! Pirate Baby doesn't like his pumpkin hat!

Babies. So silly.
A few weeks ago Ben's older brother was playing with his dress up clothes. I decided to put a pirate hat and eye patch on the baby so he wouldn't feel left out and also because it would look ridiculous. Oh and it did. But he crawled around wearing them for a while! Wearing an eye patch and he didn't mind it at all! So you'd think he'd wear just about anything.
Anything except his pumpkin hat as it turns out. :(



I finished two more knitting projects - hats! As soon as I saw a pattern for a pumpkin hat I was set on making one for Ben. I thought it would be so cute!
It was an easy, quick project and I learned a lot of new skills making it (magic loop instead of DPNs, colorwork, i-cord). Raveled here. But the pirate baby won't let me take a picture of him wearing it. Crazy enough, my 3.5-year old has the same size head just about and he was happy to model:


I love how the decreases look as parts of the leaf pattern!


The other hat I made for myself. Raveled here. I do still need to find an interesting, big button for it. You can't see it well in the picture but there is actually a flap on the seed stitch section.


I started on it way back in the spring. It got warm and I just didn't want to work on a wool hat at the time so I started my feather and fan shawl instead. I also needed to switch to DPNs (double-pointed needles) to join it in a round and I didn't own those yet! I have since learned the magic loop technique and I am HOOKED. Basically you just use a long (40" or so) circular and then you don't need DPNs, or shorter length circulars either. I particularly love this since I use the interchangeable Options needles from Knit Picks. Instead of buying circulars in every size I just needed one longer cable (which I already had and liked using for the shawl) and now I can magic loop for all my needle sizes!



I love all the colors in this yarn (Sheep Shop Sheep 1) and the way each nub of the seed stitch is a different color. I ended up buying 2 more hanks of this yarn/color to make mittens and neck warmer.


Oh and one more fun thing - Craig over at Loop put my feather and fan shawl on their blog! It was actually an old post on that blog which led me to that pattern in the first place. The lovely Lorna's Laces yarn I used was purchased at Loop.