handspun

The tree in my apartment is decorated.

The cat is finally satisfied that I’ve paid enough attention to her.

And my yarn is spun.

The fiber is from into the whirled, in the “bird girl” colourway. (Someday, I will remember to take a photo of my unspun fiber before I turn it into yarn, but today is not that day, unfortunately.) It’s 4oz of polwarth, which is my absolute favourite kind of sheep, spun into 212ish meters of worstedish weight yarn.

(I was going for bulky weight, since I planned to knit it into the Capucine hat, but it’s harder than I thought it would be to consistently spin heavy-weight yarn. Most of it is close to a heavy worsted weight, some of it is a bit on the thin side and closer to heavy fingering weight.)

It is a good weekend for some knitting, I think.

finished: urban whatever/mystery hat

The second iteration of my hat is done, and I am much happier with this version than the first one. It actually fits my head! The stripes turned out the way I wanted! It’s slouchy, but not comically so!

Pattern: my own (I’ve nicknamed it Urban Whatever on Ravelry)
Yarn: almost exactly two skeins of Blue Sky Alpacas 100% Alpaca Sport
Needles: 3.0 mm dpns and a 3.25 mm circular needle

Despite the fact that this hat uses very small needles (those are US size 2 1/2 and 3), it actually went pretty quickly. I knit the hat itself in about three days (you could definitely pull it off in a weekend, if you weren’t doing much). The biggest delay was actually blocking – the hat took two full days to dry because of the summer humidity! I’m really glad that I did block this, though, because that was totally the key to getting the shape that I wanted out of this hat: I knit it a little too big and a little too short, and then blocked it taller.

I’d like to write this up as a pattern, I think, so stay tuned for that!

i will crochet you a hat

IMG_7539, originally uploaded by pirateygoodness.

This is the project I decided to knit up after I cast off for my sweater, that I first blogged here. It’s a hat. A purple, tweedy hat with garter stitch (and really, there are few things in life I find more satisfying than working with good quality tweedy yarn. I may start sucking it up and paying the stupid-expensive prices to use it for bigger projects.) and earflaps and stupid goofy braids, because it is cold out and I wanted to wear something that felt warm, you know?

It’s a little large on me – not length-wise, but circumference-wise. I definitely could have worked it up with fewer stitches and been okay. That said, I was sort of winging it anyway – the pattern I used is Thorpe (on Ravelry here), which is very well-written but for chunky yarn on large needles. I worked this hat up on Takhi Yarns Donegal Tweed (in purple, obviously) on 3.75mm needles, so I had to make some modifications. I also opted to not do the half-crochet along the edges, partly because I’m not actually that good at crocheting, partly because I didn’t have an appropriately-sized crochet hook around the house and I wanted to have a finished hat more than I wanted pretty edging.

I forgot how satisfying it is to knit toques. I really should do it more often.

Song of the Entry: Sufjan Stevens – Sister