Third time's the charm

I just could not let that orange hat get the better of me. Once I gave up trying to be clever, all went well. At least, until I was ready to turn the hem and could not find my US8 16" circs, misplaced during the remodeling. I bought new ones, finished the hat, and *then* found the missing needles. Isn't that the way it always goes?

Pattern: Basic hat pattern, by Ann Budd, hemmed edge, size large
Yarn: Plymouth Yarn Encore Worsted, colorway 479
Needles: Started with US7 circs, switched to US8 after turning the hem.
Modifications: Cast on 112 stitches instead of 114, eliminating the first crown row which decreases by 2.

There is still a bit of a ridge that I expect will be less so once the hat has a good soak. Doing the hemmed edge has given me the idea of making ear bands with partial skeins. And now I have an FO to tide me over while I continue with this:

Second guessing

I am *finally* getting back to the Easy as Pie blanket. So much time has elapsed that I am having trouble remembering the difficult bits, like how to graft garter stitch. I had figured out how to do it myself, but my notes no longer made sense to me. I looked up instructions online, but they did not seem right for how the stitches were set up on the two needles. Still, I tried it "their" way, only to have the contrasting colors intermix. Then I checked the finished projects on Ravelry for a clue, testing out one of the methods recommended by several. Still wrong. And *then* I found these instructions on lethalknits.com. My situation calls for grafting reverse garter stitch, which I have never heard of but which is what I was doing in the first place! The graft just looked wrong because I pulled the stitches too tight. So now I am equipped to carry on. Huzzah!

February Little Lady sweater DONE

This sweater took exactly two months to knit, from casting on to attaching buttons. It was a surprisingly painful journey for such a simple knit. Somewhere along the way, I screwed up the stitch count in the yoke and, rather than starting over, I added a placket. Other mistakes were made along the way as well, including an attempt to cap the sleeves which was rapidly abandoned, and then there was the massive procrastination in buying the buttons and another one in sewing them on. But finally, FINALLY, it is finished.

Took long enough, huh?

Pattern: February Little Lady sweater, adapted by Paula Fletcher from EZ's February Baby sweater
Yarn: Elan Den-M-Nit Pure Indigo Cotton
Needles: US7
Modifications: Intentional: short sleeves; unintentional: mistake placket

Goofy face

Despite the setbacks, I am happy with the results. The gull stitch did not get all wonky from the denim yarn shrinking in the wash. There is plenty of room for growth horizontally but I can add to the sweater vertically if that becomes necessary. And there is no way my daughter can felt this sweater in the laundry. Win, win, win!

This yarn stinks

While shopping for buttons for the February Little Lady sweater, we took a quick cruise through the yarn section of JoAnn. Mistake. My granddaughter glommed onto a ball of Sugar n Cream cotton in multiple pastels. I am not short of cotton yarn, not at all, but I still added it to our basket. After all, it was pretty, and I figured I could make a couple of wash cloths to make up for the orange hat debacle.

At the checkout, the clerk pointed out that the yarn was scented. If you have ever stood in line at JoAnn, you will understand why I did not interrupt the checking out process by fetching an unscented yarn. Plus the same colorway might not have been available in a non-scented version. Plus, how bad could it be?

I'm not sure what the manufacturer was thinking when deciding to add a scent to the yarn. It wasn't a fresh scent like "clean linen" or citrus or lavender, but a decidedly perfumey one. Knitting with it actually gave me a headache. I hope the smell washes out quickly.

I was able to knit a couple of wash cloths in short order, though, which restored my knitterly balance.

Moebius hat?

The bright orange hat was supposed to be a quick and easy project, something I could pick up and work on here and there, an object to give me a sense of knitting accomplishment while also working on the Easy as Pie blanket. But no. Sometimes nothing is ever easy.

The first problem cropped up when, instead of following the pattern instructions, I tried to do my own thing. This hat has a hemmed edge, and the directions suggest starting out with a smaller needle for the section that gets folded under. I did not see that suggestion (because it came late in the pattern, not at the beginning), so instead I cast on four extra stitches after the "fold" row, then later decreased by four stitches to align with the rest of the instructions. This resulted in a ridge, a ridge I told myself did not matter, it was just a HAT.

Of course, by the time I neared the crown, that ridge was eating away at me. It glared at me, it yelled at me, it told me I could do better. So, despite being nearly done, I started over. And instead of redoing the hat on DPNs (stitches kept falling off the ends) or a 16-inch circ (which has a short needle length that is a challenge for my man hands), I decided to use two circs, just as I have used on some toe-up socks.

So away I went, fat, dumb, and happy, for about an inch, then tried to admire my work by unrolling the stockinette. That's when I realized there was a twist in the stitches. In disbelief, I kept trying to flatten the stockinette, thinking surely, *surely* I had not made that newbie error. But alas, it was true.

So the hat is in a time out. Me, too. Gonna move on, at least for a while.