Knitting progress
Boy, lots to catch up on here…
There's the hat I knit on the loom to match Nathan's scarf. It came out pretty nice, though it's a little small. That the variegation in the yarn lined up to make a rainbow stripe around most of the hat was a bonus. The loom knitting is really fast, and you can do a lot of fancy stuff with it, but the fancy stuff is more time-consuming. Making a simple purl stitch (say, for ribbing the edge of a hat so it doesn't roll up like this one) is a very different operation than a knit stitch. I prefer knitting on needles.
Nate's getting bored with row after row of knit stitches. He knit an infant hat (he wanted a toddler hat, but I couldn't convince him he'd chosen too small a loom), and not having someone to give it to took the wind out of his sails. I'm not sure if introducing him something like cables or Fair Isle color patterns would help that or not. It requires more concentration and provides more chances of mistakes.
After that, I knit a hair band for my wife for Christmas at the last minute (and finished it a few days after Christmas). I'll talk about that project in the next post.
And then I got back to the hat that started all of this. I finally got into a rhythm, knit 2, purl 2 ribbing… but I discovered I'd made a major mistake. The pattern calls for K1P1 ribbing, and I'd started out that way… and somewhere in between projects, I'd misremembered and started K2P2. No wonder it didn't look right at all. So I frogged the whole thing on Sunday, and last night I cast on, more loosely this time since the tight cast-on gave me fits, and with ten extra stitches 'cause I think the original was going to be a tad small. Fortunately, the decrease counts on groups of ten stitches, because I didn't think to check the math before I'd cast on and knit an entire row. So I feel better about that one.
And before that's done, I looks like I'm going to start a Felted Indoor Boot as part of a men's Knit-Along (KAL). I bought pretty wool, and someone at Twist has offered to teach me to spin. I bought way too much expensive yarn at Twist's recent sale, but it was buy-3-get-1-free, and it's darned pretty. I needed some of it for a new hair band, and I think I'll make some fingerless gloves for myself. Plenty more unaccounted for, though.
Spending time down at Twist more, but not quite as much as I'd like, and it's slow getting to know people because I'm not the "walk up and introduce myself" type.
Maybe going to the Wamego Winter Woolfest this weekend. But it looks like everyone I know is bailing, and I might be going alone. I'd invite my mom (she crochets), but she's recovering from pnemonia.
Whew.
Knitting with Nathan
So my knitting has taken an immediate detour… I started working on a hat for myself (Eco Alpaca's Charcoal Grey undyed baby alpaca) and it's going well, but Nathan, and Christmas, have side-tracked me.
On the way out of Twist a week ago, Nathan (our 9-year-old) saw some bright orange yarn… orange and blue are his school colors (their mascot is a tiger), and he wanted to make a scarf for a teacher.
So last Saturday, we dropped by Twist to knit and I bought him a couple skeins of Cascade wool yarn in bright orange and a darkish blue. Borrowed the round "hat" weaving looms out of the library and Mona, one of the Twist regulars, taught him how to knit on the loom. We abandoned that little bit of work and left the looms behind, and Sunday I bought a set of "long" ("double-rake") looms at Michael's, since he wanted to knit a scarf, and the Knifty Knitter double-rakes are set to a smaller gauge than the round "hat" looms, which is more appropriate for the worsted weight yarn he picked. I also ordered the Knitting Loom Primer from Amazon Sunday afternoon, and thanks to Amazon Prime's two-day shipping and the book shipping from the Oklahoma warehouse, it arrived yesterday.
So when I got home from work yesterday, Nathan had the book out and had started the scarf by himself. He wasn't far in and was having trouble with getting the wrapping right, so I helped him set it straight and he knit three rows before deciding to play a board game. But he enjoyed it, and likes how quickly it goes, and he's making big plans to make all kinds of things and to learn to knit on needles. I'm just hoping he finishes this project.
While we played the board game, I started a hat with the other skein of yarn that matches his scarf. There are a lot of neat patterns and techniques in the book (dang, you can purl, increase/decrease, cable knit and even do Fair Isle patterns… the makers of knitting looms are under-marketing them) and I figured it was a good idea to get ahead of Nathan a bit, so I could help him when he tried something more advanced and had trouble. And he's more likely to finish his work if he sees me finishing something similar. So I'm making a hat, and I've got another small Christmas project I want to knock out, so my own hat is on-hold for awhile. Which is cool.