Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Oh, yes. String!

After posting on FaceBook about the pleasure I gleaned from seeing Daven wearing three knitted items at the same time (it was cold in the house), one of my cousins requested a hat. The one she chose is a fun knit, though the colours requested weren't in my stash in acceptable weights, so I got to do a little run to my LYS. When I came up to the counter with 7 100g balls of worsted weight yarn, the lovely lady behind the counter asked if I was knitting a lap blanket.

"Nope. Hat."

"...That will be a very large hat."

The problem being that I needed approximately 2 oz of the most prevalent colour in the hat, and the rest needed about an ounce each, but funnily, super wash worsted weight yarns don't come in "snippets", so I've got a whooole lotta yarn now. On the upside (as I said to the woman, later, when we were resolving a charging issue), I've now got lots of yarn for socks for my dad, since his feet are too big for sock yarn. Worsted weight is the way to go with size 12s.

Once said cousin got me her head measurement last night, I was off and running. The swatch I had done lied like a lying thing, so after tearing back the hat band, I switched to a size smaller, cast onto DPNs (which I apparently knit more tightly on than circular needles) and started over. I just finished it, and now all I have to hope is that she likes it and that it fits.

The coolest thing for me (and I may be really late to the game for this) is that some weird little switch in my head finally went and now I can cheerfully do stranded knitting with an active thread in each hand, so I'm knitting both Continental and English styles at the same time. Much quicker than my previous "Drop yarn, pick up other yarn, do a stitch. Repeat forever." strategy. Enh, I don't care if it took a long time to arrive, this is fun. Also, for straight knitting or purling, I find that I kind of prefer Continental, suddenly, after knitting English for my entire life. *shrug* I just do what my fingers tell me to do. :)

Photo of the hat will come either after she says she wants to see it before I mail it, or after she has received it.