Thank you …

…to whoever posted Elvira on KnittingPatternCentral.com

Thanks to you, this is the third fastest-growing blog on WordPress.

Amazing. I’m off to bed.

Robot

You might have spotted a few posts back (or if you Ravelry-stalk me) that I managed to badger my housemate into drawing a custom picture of one of his graphic novel characters for me – a very cute knitting robot.

After I eulogized about the statistics functionality on WordPress, he started up a new blog at Lobster and Cheese for his long running cartoon series and some new work.

The original Robot comic can be found here.

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Elvira

Two patterns in two days – I’m on a roll!

This is the former unsizeable hat. And I am so pleased with the way it came out in the end! So worth the effort.

In the end I decided to name it after Elvira from Don Giovanni. It’s just a bit of a co-incidence that I went to see it at the weekend, but a few years ago I played a role that was certainly not the title role in Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit, so I’ve always loved the name. I don’t think I would have made a very good Elvira, but I played the role of dinner guest pretty well. Going round to someone else’s house and eating their food? It’s the part I was born to play.

The link for Elvira can be found here.

My project page on Ravelry can be found here

And my other designs can be found here!

Titanic

My other half decided to go to the Titanic exhibition at the O2 today. Sadly, that meant I had to take photos of my complete unsizeable unnamed hat myself.

That didn’t go quite as planned.

Take a bow

I’m being kept busy by a few too many knitting projects at once at the moment. One of these is the Saucy Librarian jumper with a lovely, if tortous, moss stitch neckline. The pattern suggests covering the seam with buttons but I decided to go one better and make this to cover it.

But now I look at it, I think it would look good on a Christmas Tree, or an embellishment on the scarf I keep wanting to make to go with Hermine (a Pickles style set that goes together but doesn’t feel obliged to match).

This takes scraps of yarn and not a lot of effort!

The gauge isn’t very important for this, but if you find the ribbon of fabric you’re knitting is a lot narrower than 1.75 inches (which is how wide mine was), then make sure to reduce the size of the ring of fabric that covers the centre of the bow.

Take a bow

Using 4mm needles and dk weight yarn, c/o 9 stitches and knit in moss stitch for 21 inches. (You can cast on any number you want really, but I chose to use an uneven number because then I never have to question whether I should be starting a row with a knit or a purl stitch).

Cast off and sew in all ends neatly.

Lie the piece flat and fold into 3rds (See below pictures) and tie a bit of waste yarn around to hold the centre together. Dress it by pulling the ends down and opening up the loops.

Using some waste yarn, put a few stitches through the centre to hold it put.

Then to make the centre, c/o 5 stitches and work in moss stitch for 3 inches. Cast off and sew the edges together (this can be messy – you won’t be seeing this bit). Slide this loop over the bow and sew in all ends.

Pain therapy

I had a moment of madness.

I’ve been working on the unsizeable hat for a while now, and truth be told it’s been driving me a bit mad. I still love the way it looks, but I couldn’t figure out a way of decreasing that looked good. Eventually it came to me – a way of integrating the decreases into the smocking pattern – and today I embarked on it. Here are the notes I made: note, these are four entirely separate sheets of notes.

I finally got to the last row when I was planning to thread through and be done, and in a moment of madness I decided I didn’t like the way it looked. The decreases weren’t neat enough – I love the neatness of the smocked brim – and it all just looked a bit messy. And on top of that, I wasn’t sure my notes would turn into anything approaching a proper pattern.

So I ripped it all out.

Almost four hours’ work, gone in the blink of an eye.

I’m a little bit in shock. In fact, I almost started hyperventilating when I realised what I’d done. But I’m back knitting it already. I saw a physiotherapist on Wednesday who told me (completely incidentally to what we were talking about, mind) that if you suffer whiplash in a car crash, it’s an important part of pain therapy to get back in a car as soon as possible. So in a way, that’s what I’m doing – I’m not going to try and forget the car crash of a frogging I just did on this poor little hat – I’m getting right back in there and I’m going to knit until I’m over it.

How can I possibly resist…

…a pattern called the Saucy Librarian? And I’ve got the yarn and needles handy, and I know I knit at the right gauge. Honestly, if I wasn’t going out for dinner this evening I’d cast on right now.

The morning after

Unsizeable hat was knitted inside out – the cast on was all messy and bumpy. Frogged a third time, but I’ve managed to get back to row 5 this morning already.

Update from X Factor time:

In my defence, my housemates are watching it. It’s not my choice.

Fighting the unsizeable hat

That’s what I’m doing right now. Basic calculations based on the gauge and the size of my head resulted in a bracelet-sized brim. Upscaling this to a ridiculous number of stitches has made a garter sized brim. Next plan – wear it as a garter, measure how many times bigger it needs to be to fit on my head, and hopefully third time will be lucky.