I've said this before (oh so very many times), but you should block your knitting. Look how much better this hat is after I blocked it. The stitches are smoother and more even.  The decreases lay down flat.  The top is nice and round and noticably less reminiscent of a screwdriver.  It's just better. And no, it's not hard.  Get it wet, get it into the shape you want it to hold, let it dry.  That's really all blocking is (there's more in depth info over here, and even more if you put 'blocking' into the search bar on the [...]

I have a bad habit.  I knit a lot of swatches (that's not the bad habit part, that's the good habit part).  And I take photos of them to share them with you (also not the bad habit part).  But then I forget to show them to you (that's the bad habit part).  So every now and then I clear out my camera's memory card and stumble across all sorts of stuff, most of which I have no memory of. Like this...all I can tell you is it's from Shibui's fluffy yarn, I have no idea of the colors (the [...]

You wouldn't think one stitch would make that much difference.  But sometimes it does. This was the first try at the decreases.  I used centered double decreases, stacked up in a nice neat line.  And while it gave the general rate of decrease I wanted, the line of decreases itself was just a little too sharp.  The top of your head would have looked rather like a screwdriver, and that's not generally my goal. So out it came (yes, ripping suck, yes, you should do it anyways). And then I tried again with the decreases bumped apart by one measly [...]

Someone needs to address the whole 'my favorite hats are all fingering weight...fingering weight hats take forever to knit' problem. I suspect the solution is for me to develop more patience.  Or for me to learn to love chunky hats more.  But so far neither of those have come to pass. And so on I go...teeny tiny stitch after teeny tiny stitch.  This is why I don't knit sweaters.  Someone sneak in and finish this up while I'm napping. There's hand sanitizer on the counter by the door.

Ahem. I am very glad I swapped yarns. Don't get me wrong, the other yarns were lovely. I'm happy to have them in the stash.  I will doubtless use them in future projects.  Just not together. But these? These belong together. Now the only problem is that fingering weight hats take For Ever.

Pssst, mailing list folks, go check your email... This is what happens when you finally acknowledge that every time you knit a cable, you secretly want to take a marker to some of the strands and color them in. Now let me say up front that you shouldn't do that. It goes poorly. Very poorly.  The idea is good...but you need to do it with yarn instead of markers.  And Interlock shows you how to do exactly that. All you're doing is holding a contrast yarn alongside your regular yarn for some of your stitches.  No really, that's all there [...]

See? That's much better (where better is defined as 'more to my liking,' I get that it's subjective). That is making the part of my brain that likes speckles and soft things and somehow gloomy-but-luminous things very very very happy. I pretty much never regret ripping if the yarn isn't quite right.  In fact, I pretty much always regret not ripping if the yarn isn't quite right. And yes, normally the swatch is enough to tell.  But every now and then it isn't. But in this case, the new pairing is an absolute delight, and I'm so glad I switched! [...]

Remember how I said I had more yarn?  That's because the good folks at A Very For Keeping Warm are still shipping yarn right now, and they had something irresistible to round out my floof collection. And I'm pretty darn sure that yellow one was the shade I actually needed to pair with that purple in the hat I just ripped.  But I've also been knocked right down dead by this pairing with the dark orange, so the purple and yellow might have to wait a bit. Don't worry though, I have a feeling I'll come back to it in [...]

This was supposed to work. These two were supposed to look all delightfully dramatic and high contrast and zippy. And they almost do.  Almost.  But in the fabric, the yellow is just a little too green. And the yellow bits on the purple yarn are just a little too peachy. And the whole thing looks a tiny bit muddled. And the yarns are too good on their own (and the pattern idea too good on its own) to doom them to a not-quite-right pairing.  So I'm going to rip it. But never fear.  I have obtained more yarn.  This will [...]