Raspberry Beret

This is the top of the hat. I love the way the colors flow. It feels almost too bright for summer, but come winter, when the clouds blanket Chicago in gray for 45 consecutive days, I'm betting these colors will be just right.


























And the inside. All I have left to do is the braided bind-off. I will have plenty of yarn leftover. My hat is running smaller than expected, certainly smaller than some of the other hats my SnB group is making. It measures about 10.5" in diameter, and my plan is to keep knitting in blissful ignorance of whether that's large enough.

I took this hat to the lake house this past week -- as a matter of fact, knitting and the beach DO go together ;) -- and Miss Seven dubbed it the Rainbow Stripe hat. If it turns out to be too small for me, then I will probably give it to her.


In other news, I taught her how to make a chain loop with a crochet hook this weekend. She had a lot of trouble with it, and thought it was way more fun to try to turn my Fulmar gauge swatch into a wristband. But she did manage to make a couple of loops, and she proved to be a true adept at dropping stitches -- talk about talents that run in the family!

I've always let her play with my little tools. She loves tape measures and, oh!! best ever is the metal plate with the little holes that you can use to check needle size. She tests all of my needles over and over again. And we talk a lot about what I'm making and how it all works. She's full of questions, and some of them are surprisingly penetrating design and technique questions. Of course, most of that conversation stems from the fact that she loves to talk and will talk about anything at all. It doesn't seem to matter what we do -- flipping pancakes, folding laundry, and knitting a murderflocking brioche beret can all stimulate her chatter.

So I haven't pushed her to learn. I've let her play, and this weekend, I showed her the chain loop thing to see how she would take to it. She fought it until she made a couple of loops, and then went back to measuring my stitch markers.

But it's a start. Today, chain loops. Tomorrow, p5tbl!