Keeping Calm and Carrying On

Between the Queen’s death and the  Remembrance of 9/11, I was feeling a bit gloomy, so I decided to write about my knitting adventures to help you get distracted by my antics.

Having finished my Christmas knitting, I decided to spend a little time using up some of my many scraps before knitting the super secret thing for Bullywoolies and then moving on to my sweater delights.

First of all, I finished my scrappy blanket,

and I finished my giant granny square crochet blanket (I ran out of scraps and just quit):

Then I knit a hat which I didn’t read the title of carefully.

This is A Glimpse of Spring by Willow Canda, and I read ‘hat’ looking at the photo of it, but it is in reality a beanie. Meaning, it comes down to the top of my ears and looks ridiculous on me, so I think I will put it in my stash of hats to give away. Surely it will fit some child somewhere.

Continuing on with gray scraps, I knit a pair of mittens, which was fun because I hadn’t knit mittens in a while

and I tried a new-to-me DROPS pattern for a hat called Autumn Acorn, which was a free pattern knit from the top down:

I really enjoyed knitting this not only because I rarely knit top-down hats, but also because it had a very unusual and fun-to-knit method of increasing the crown:

There are really only 3 increase rounds for the crown! Amazing!

Returning to my Crunkle Socks (a paid pattern by Kay Jones) knit out of Bantam Sock by Chicken Lady Fiber Arts, I finished them and admired their sparkley-ness and have worn them, but I managed a quick photo before grinning myself into a coma from all the sparkles (which are not apparent in the photo):

 I had almost a full cake of Red Heart Fleece Hugs yarn, so I decided to knit a smallish baby blanket from it. I chose a Fleece Hugs pattern and cast on the required number of stitches and set out. The pattern didn’t say to put in stitch markers, so I didn’t. The knit skill level was “easy”.

Harumph. Arghhhhh.

 This pattern has a ripple effect, meaning it has increases and decreases, making it go up and down. Which, generally speaking, is “easy” enough to do if you just follow the pattern. 

BUT!!!

This yarn is like knitting with fur, nice furry acrylic fur that really, really hides stitches extremely well, making it impossible to see your stitches at all. Before I knew it, I had knit about 5” of the blanket and thought it looked a bit weird, so I counted the stitches (really hard to do due to all the fuzziness) and found that I had inadvertently added 20 stitches to my original number cast on. T*w*e*n*t*Y.

Oh dear.

So I briefly toyed with the idea of just throwing the yarn away because I really hated it, but then reason replaced the anger and I chose to rip it out, which was fairly difficult due to the aforementioned #%’gfk;;6^}# fuzziness of it. This time I added blasted markers to mark increases (green markers) and decreases (purple markers) to see if that will help keep it tamed. But be warned: if it doesn’t help, this blanket WILL be tossed and laughed at with glee as I dance around the kitchen. Well, ‘dance’ is stretching it; swaying from side to side waving my arms would be more like it.

You’ll see a picture if I get it done. Or you won’t, if I set it on fire. 

Anyway. Hope I made you laugh. Keep calm and carry on and remember to smile!