Trying but failing: how not to knit a hat

I predicted a few weeks ago that if I were to order from Bendigo Woollen Mills, the order would arrive before my Knit Picks order made at Christmas time. I was correct - I am still waiting for the Hawthorne Bare I need for my Japan Sleeves but four balls of Luxury 10 ply arrived on my doorstep five days after ordering them. My desire to get started on knitting some clothes can finally begin!

Unfortunately, to knit clothes that fit, one must knit gauge swatches. I hate knitting gauge swatches (which is probably why I knit so many socks and do not have a single hat that fits me properly). However, I have a lot more yarn that I need to finish the jumper, so I decided to follow the advice of the great Elizabeth Zimmermann and knit a hat as a gauge swatch. Even better, there is a hat pattern in the Home and Away pattern book: the Knitbot Simple Hat.

Perfect! I grabbed the recommended needle sizes for the jumper, cast on the number of stitches for my head size, and started knitting. I knit to the hat length recommended before doing the decreases and looked at what I had produced. It seemed a little big...

.. so I pulled out the cables and blocked it.

It's huge! I didn't check the needle size recommended in the hat pattern and it (unsurprisingly) is different for the jumper - 3.75mm and 4.5mm for the hat instead of 5.5mm and 6mm for the jumper. I had effectively knit the first 7 inches of the jumper. Grrr! So much for saving me time on knitting a gauge swatch! 

I have now cast on both the hat and the jumper with the correct size needles and learned my lesson: read the pattern properly to save both time and my sanity. Never again...

FO: Big Bad Bubbles Baby Shawl

Today I am super pleased to share that I finished the big white blanket.

 The pattern is a very old one from Patons. Like the original pattern suggests, I knit the shawl in 3ply, but instead of using Patons I used Bendigo Woollen Mills in Luxury 3ply in Frost (about 180g of a 200g ball). I used 4mm needles. 

There were a few things that I did in this shawl that I would do differently if I did it again. When I cast the shawl on, I had just moved and I didn't know where any of my crochet hooks were (I still don't - I ended up buying a new set). Therefore, I used Tin Can Knits' directions for a circular cast on that uses knitting needles instead of crochet hooks to do Emily Ocker's cast-on. I'm sure the fault is with me and not the instructions but my cast-on is really loose and looks a bit gappy in the middle of the shawl. I wish I'd waited till the crochet hooks arrived and I'd started the way I'm more familiar with.

 The construction of the shawl is quite easy. In the centre panel, you increase eight stitches every second row until you have 220 odd stitches. You then use the principle of the Pi Shawl and double the amount of stitches in one row and then just knit until you get to the edging, so there are no increases in the feather and fan pattern at all. While I was knitting that section, I used four stitch markers, with one marking each quarter of the shawl. That was super useful and allowed me to catch mistakes when they happened. Then, once you have finished knitting the 440-odd stitch rows to the desired length, you knit about an 880ish row knitted on border.

I hated knitting that border. Flipping a giant blanket back and forth every eight stitches almost 900 times was not fun! I powered through most of it in a few marathon podcast sessions (thank you Knitting Go - the first and only video podcast I have ever watched but I wouldn't have been able to finish without it) and ended up three stitches short. I knew I'd started with the correct amount of stitches, so I'd obviously lost three stitches along the way. The thought of undoing the border made me want to cry so I just fudged it and hoped they weren't very important stitches. Once I blocked it, it was pretty easy to see each of the three stitches I dropped (in the middle right and bottom right of the above picture). However, since the recipient is a non-knitter and so they won't know it's a mistake, I've decided to call it a design feature and let it go.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with it. It looks all pretty and shawl-y now it's blocked and stretched but, once it's been washed a few times, it'll be soft and round and more blanket-like, which is perfect for a baby's security blanket. I just hope the mum-to-be (since she's American, really mom-to-be) likes the Bubbles Baby Shawl as much as I do.

WIP Wednesday: The Welcome Back Edition

Hello! It's been a while since I posted. The last two months have been busy! I moved house, which is always insane. Even now, five weeks after moving in, I still don't know where all of my stuff is. The funniest thing was as soon as we moved, people wanted to just drop in. The day after I moved in, I had a guest pop over uninvited who wanted to stay for a chat. This is what I looked like that day (in the mirror on the middle left):

It was not a good day to visit and I was not a gracious hostess! Now, though, everyone's welcome - the more the merrier.

In the last five weeks, I also found out I am going to be a step aunt. It's an odd situation - my dad, who lives in France, married a woman who also lived in France but whose children live in America. I have met my dad's wife, but not either of her children, who are my step sisters. One of them is up the duff (do they use that expression in America?), so I thought the step sisterly thing to do would be to make her a baby blanket.

Because the blanket needs to be mailed, I wanted something lightish but still pretty. I settled on the Baby Bubble Shawl, which I think is both pretty enough to be ornamental but not so lacy that it is only good for special occasions. 

I am using Bendigo Woollen Mills Luxury 3ply in Frost. As always, it's lovely to work with. Plus, it's machine washable, which is super important for babies.

Because it is so very white, I wanted a really strong, protective project bag to hold it, so I popped an old rice bag in the washing machine, dried it thoroughly and Bob's your uncle (do they use that expression in America? I clearly need to do some research).

I have now done 14 of the 18 repeats of the lace panel, then I just need to do the 900 rows of the edging I'm done. I need to get it in the mail by 1 September, which I should be able to do without problem but it is so relentlessly white I might need to do something with a bit of colour just to take the edge off.

Lucy kind of hates it, but she hates everything at the moment because it's winter and she's not allowed outside. Poor little thing :)

FO Friday: The Knit-Purl Blanket (2014 FO #13)

I am back! But only briefly, so please don't tell my supervisor I stepped away from my thesis for a bit. This is our little secret.

The last few weeks have been pretty crazy, uni-wise. I have put on without exaggeration 1.5kg from spending so much time sitting on my arse (both working and eating chocolate). I've been trying to take breaks and go to the park and the beach but the truth is that the final part of any research project requires a bit of slogging to get to the end and there's no just no way it can be avoided. Fortunately, slogging away is an activity that goes remarkably well with stockinette stitch, which means lots and lots of finished projects.

For example, this baby blanket is finished TWO MONTHS before the baby is due. This is an event that surely has never happened in the history of knitting baby blankets before.

Where's the tension? Where's the desperate race to finish it before the mother leaves hospital? 

The pattern was simple - I cast on 100 stitches and then knit it until it felt big enough. I then picked up stitches all the way around and knit the border in garter stitch until I felt it was big enough, then I cast off (yarn is Bendigo Woollen Mills Luxury 8ply in Citrus, Frost and Ghost. I used maybe half a ball of the Frost and Citrus and about 160g of Ghost. There are lots of leftovers).

It felt seriously weird not to be weaving in ends on the way to meeting the baby for the first time.

Of course, Lucy helped me block the blanket.

She is going to be so annoyed when she realises the blanket is not actually for her.

Have a great weekend, everyone!