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!

Ahh....

After ripping out the beret, I realized I had the opportunity to rethink the color. I love the color changes in the skein of the Noro silk Garden, but my particular skein started with a shade of hot pink that was rather too similar to the purple base yarn. I was afraid that the center top of the beret would end up looking sort of muddled because those two colors were so close to each other.

After consulting with some people who have already finished theberet, and learning that yarn can run a little bit tight on this project, I decided to simply wind the ball inside out and start from the other end of the skein.This let me start with the green. I think it works better.

I also fell into the black hole of sleeve knitting today. I knit about 14 rows on Fulmar,and ended up gaining only 3/8 of an inch in total sleeve length.

But the real big news is a little splurge that I picked up to make my work life for little easier. I've been threatening to get voice recognition software for quite a while now,and today I did it. I'm dictating this blog post into a headset and watching the words magically appear on the screen. Once I get the hang of this I'll be able to knit and dictate at the same time. There is a learning curve, but it's not as difficult as I thought it would be. I have to say, I think this is could be some of the best money I spend all year. In fact, true confession--yes, you knew this was coming --I'm knitting a pair of socks as I dictate this. Me like. :)

A Happy Saturday

Now that's a great chair. Who can mind about the mess when the mess is made from knitting? I could spend the entire weekend happy in that chair. And I aim to try to do just that.

























The sharp-eyed brioche beret knitters among you will see the problem in this picture right away. Heck, doesn't even require sharp eyes to spot this one. It's a major ugly. Screw the prancing pony -- you could almost spot this one from outer space.






















Ah, well. The great thing about knitting is that you can always call a do-over. Or, as in this case, a do-over-and-over. This is the second time I had to rip it out. But I'm starting to grasp the logic (Ha!! logic, that's a good one) behind this stitch, so maybe the third time will be a charm on the old windmill beret.






















Thumbs up on the cashmere mittens. BIG thumbs up. Dude, look at the size of those thumbs. I will win every thumb war I declare in these mittens. With a passel of rambunctious nephews in and out of my house, that is no trivial thing. Bring 'em on.

FO Report: Cashmere Stranded Mittens

Too awesome for mere words to describe. When I am queen of the universe, everyone north of the Mason-Dixon line will get a pair of these mittens in any colors they choose. And then there will be no more wars, except for of the thumb variety, because everyone will be so happy in their cashmere mittens that the fight will go flat out of them, and also it would be really really hard to pull triggers wearing thick, warm mittens like this. Plus which you might get gun oil on the fabric, and nobody would want that.

Yarn: Debbie Bliss Pure Cashmere, appx 75 g each color (slightly more of the purple)
Pattern: Mittens from Halland from Folk Mittens
Mods: I changed the placement of the thumb on the left mitten, and it worked out just fine. By my reading, if I hadn't made that modification, I would have ended up with two right hand mittens. If I had to do it over again, I might also move the thumbholes about two rows closer to the wrists. Other than that, no modifications. It was an easy pattern.

I can't tell you how long it took to knit these. A while, several months, except that I didn't knit diligently at all. There was a crib blanket and a vest and some socks mixed in, and these mittens were something I picked up for a change of pace now and again. Working with this yarn felt like a reward -- I am absolutely in love with this yarn. Yes, the Debbie Bliss cashmeres took some PR hits a while back, but I don't care. It's spectacular to knit with.

And now there are eight....

Number Ten

This is what peer pressure looks like. Yes, that's right, peer pressure is half purple and half variegated and is knit on dpns. Who knew.

I've had nine things on the needles for a couple weeks now, ever since I cast on the Veronik Avery halter vest. And I have this rule: my current projects must number fewer than ten. Single digits. This is a lesson learned the hard way -- I get a little nutty when I have too many projects going at once, and I have to knit almost continuously until the mass of knitting bags hanging from doorknobs is no longer threatening to pull the door out of the jamb. It's just this thing I have. Single digits.

And then came Harlot Day.

How do these things happen? One minute, my knit posse is kickin it at the back table of Nana's Knitting Shop, doing our usual thing, plus watching the stream of knitters come through for the Harlot's appearance. And the next minute, someone started fondling some brioche tams, and we were all out of our chairs and diving for the Noro. We've never done a knitalong as a group. And this brioche tam is a hard pattern, a really hard pattern, so as soon as someone suggested doing it as a group, a new zeitgeist was born.

We all bought the yarn and someone downloaded a few copies of the pattern. (It's a freebie online, so nobody needs to holler about copyright, thank you.) Some folks cast on right away, though the official start date was set for last night's Stitch and Bitch gathering. I held off because I wanted to get something off the needles -- hello, single digits? -- but Wednesday night arrived before I could finish anything.

So now there are ten.

And that's one too many for peace of mind. Of course, there can be no peace of mind when one is trying to knit a brioche tam because this is a counter-intuitive and wildly confusing pattern. That little sliver of knitting in the picture? Less than three inches in diameter? Took THREE HOURS and an unknowably high number of bad words. That's some hard knitting.

But I knit two more rounds today, and it's starting to make sense, and I have some other knitting that should be coming off the needles this weekend. So who knows. Maybe this time, peer pressure will turn out to be a good thing.