So after the knot the other day, I wound up all the rest of the yarn to make sure I wouldn't hit that problem again (insert lecture about this being one of the many benefits of winding your yarn before you start your project, a lecture I apparently need to give myself). I found the longest stretch of good yarn (I had a couple of different skeins to check) and declared it would be for the body of the hat. And the shorter pieces would be fine for the matching mitts. So it will be fine. There's no actual particular [...]

Ok, so no one likes knots. But most of the time, they're just a small irritation. However, on long color change yarns, they can actually be sort of a problem.⁠ See how the yarn on one side is blue? And the yarn on the other side is white? Yeah. Not cool. If the color transition had continued smoothly across the knot, it wouldn't have been a big deal. I'd have just left enough yarn to weave in the ends and kept knitting. But because the color changes from one strand to the next, that would be hugely jarring. Instead of [...]

Remember this lovely thing from way back in December? Back before the holidays beat you up and took your lunch money? Back before the mending project distracted me for a solid week? Back before I got infatuated with tiny envelopes and had to knit a whole post office full of them? Yeah, well I didn't forget about it. In fact, I knit a second iteration of it (this time in something not the color of week old snow on a cloudy day).  And I shall be bombarding you with it for the next little while, because it's rather fetching!   [...]

So I kept looking at the first of the baby hats.  Looking at it and thinking it was just a smidge too short.  Not a lot...it still looked like a hat.  But just enough that it was bugging me.  The time honored tradition of sort of tugging on it a bit to encourage it to grow wasn't working. So I said a lot of very uncivilized things under my breath about how I am a Fairly Experienced Hat Knitter and how I Should Know Better and how It Would Have Been Faster To Do It Right The First Time.  And [...]

This might possibly have the biggest 'just one more row' vibes of anything I've ever knit. You create each row of zig zags over the course of a couple of rows of knitting, and the urge to just blast through the rows it takes to get on more perfect line of zig zags is more or less irresistible. I mean not that I'm complaining, this is not sad news. But it does mean you're done awfully quickly. Which means you get to admire that...which may just be the cutest hat crown ever. Yes, there will be a pattern (the folks [...]

Look, you knew I was going to have a hard time stopping at just one.  Especially when there was rather a lot of yarn left. This was more or less inevitable. And don't fret, babies don't yet have terribly developed fashion sense, so you can put most anything on their head.  At least at first. Take advantage of it while you can.

If you’ve been following along for the last few weeks, you know I am neck deep in a massive shop reorganization.  At the beginning of the year, I took my whole ravelry store down (yes, very very very scary).  And I’ve been busy bringing patterns back out as I get them revised and reformatted. I am having more fun with this than I should probably admit (look, I'm one of those people who responds to stress by reorganizing my bookcases, you had to know this would be my sort of project).  But you're probably not interested in what makes my [...]

There we go, ends woven in (yes, yes there are a lot of ends, but it's fine, I kind of like weaving them in).  Blocked (always).  And cute as can be. Possibly slightly cuter than is allowed by law.  But I won't tell if you don't. The only problem (and I use problem very loosely) is that I have yarn left.  So we may just have to do it all again with a few variations.

So here's the bit where I glower at you and tell you you should be blocking things. All that generally means is 'toss it a sink full of cool water (kitten supervisor is optional), let it soak for half an hour, squeeze out the excess water, smooth it out, and let it dry.'  If you happen to have a bowl or a balloon or a wig stand or something head shaped, let it dry on that. But if not, just letting it dry flat is better than not blocking it at all. But for this one, you'll notice I did [...]