So, wisdom teeth out! Ouch. I’m feeling much better now, and maybe I’ll actually start posting again. (Driving in Japan part 2 is still hanging out around here somewhere…) Somehow I knit something while I was spaced out on painkillers, though, and I thought I’d share a picture!
Pretty cute for drugged knitting, right? A friend of mine is having a baby girl but doesn’t want to go in for ruffles and flowers, and I thought she’d like it. (She did, actually, I gave it to her tonight and she thought it was awesome.) If you want to make your own the pattern is free over at Coffeebra. I used size 6 dpns and Lion Brand Wool-Ease in Oxford Grey, Dk Rose Heather, and Rose Heather. It was fast and fairly easy, but if I make it again I won’t be joining the brim as directed. In the pattern you’re supposed to knit the ribbing, then fold it up and knit together around to form a casing, inserting the brim as you go, so that your brim is all done once you get to the stockinette. Clever, right? Well, yeah – but knitting the cast on edge and the live stitches together was a pain, even worse where the brim was, and it made it hard to knit the stockinette above the brim for abour five rows, as well. I think I’ll stick to sewing up the brim at the end.
Well, as you may have guessed, I got the pattern for the snowboarding hat written up very quickly.
Now you can knit your very own Appi Slopes hat (creatively named after the place where my husband bruised a rib on Monday, hahaha).We’re not done yet, though! That doesn’t count as one of the six in production I mentioned a few posts back. These next patterns do – yesterday the spring issue of Crochet Uncut was released! I have two patterns in this issue that I’ve been just waiting to show off since January. First is a lovely hat:
which I’ve decided to call Meredith. You can’t see all of the hat in this picture, but when I have it I like to show a different picture than you’ll see in the pattern for the blog reveal. Go check it out!
Last but not least for today, I have puppets. (I love puppets.)
They’re Spring Finger Puppets, and they’re just begging to go into an Easter basket. They’re really, really quick to make, use teeny, tiny scraps of yarn, and the kids love them. All three fit into the little bag styled after an Easter egg, and in all I just think it’s an adorable set.
In other news, I’m getting my wisdom teeth extracted tomorrow, so I don’t expect to post for a few days. Wish me luck. 😛
So, Greg heads back to work this week. Before his first day, though, he was taking a snowboarding trip with a bunch of his friends. Last week he mentioned that he was thinking of getting a hat like he’d seen one of his buddies with – a knit black cap with a brim.
“You know, I could make a hat like that,” I told him.
“You could make one like that?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“You could make it look good?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“You could make it by Monday?” he asked.
“Ye – oh, crud,” I said.
Having knit myself into a corner, so to speak, I accepted the challenge. We looked at hats online to establish what, exactly, he was looking for.
“You want ribbing? Cables? Or just plain knitting?” I asked.
“Just plain knitting is good.”
“You know, I can do cables, it’s okay.”
“No, plain is fine.”
“What color?”
“Black, of course.”
“Okay, then. Yeah, I don’t have any black yarn that would work for that. Last time I checked, they don’t at the Arts and Crafts Store, either. But the girl who works there told me how to get to the yarn store in the next town over…”
(That’s actually why we took the trip that resulted in the photos for the ‘Driving in Japan’ series. We found the yarn store…eventually…and it was nice. It was more of a craft store, to be honest, but they had wool – which can’t be bought at the craft store on base for love or money – and they had black. Next time I go back I’ll take pictures inside the store, because it’s definitely worth a blog post all it’s own.)
So if you think you’re going to find Lion Brand or Patons or Cascade out on the town in rural Japan, you are apparently in for a shock. After careful consideration, I emerged with (among other things) this:
Three balls of Wister Mama-amu, a very nice 60/40 Wool/Acrylic blend in what appears to be DK (or possibly Sport, my WPI-detecting skills are a bit weak) weight. So, with three days to snowboarding, it was game on. There’s not much to tell about the knitting (except for the fact that I knit it on size 3s that were a bit too short for the project…), but by late, late Sunday night I had created this:
and I love it. I made the brim with plastic canvas wrapped in duct tape, and it is the most excellent brim I have ever made. Seriously. Try it the next time you need to make one. You won’t regret it. I told Greg that if he decides he’s not going to wear this for whatever reason, he shouldn’t expect it to sit around for him. Even though the 1 x 1 ribbing was death on my hands, I might make one for myself just because it’s SUCH an awesome hat.
