The library craft swap

 The library and a local craft group have a craft swap about twice a year.  So far, I'm doing good about taking more than I bring home.  This time, I took about a bag and a half of stuff, and came home with about a bag.  Only one cone of yarn, though.   

 

 

 

• Two embroidery hoops (one round wood, one oval metal)
• a handful of short, metal-tooth zippers to practice pouches with
• wine corks (someone brought a whole trash bag full) 
• Pinking shears (vintage)
• tatting shuttle 
• pack of jump rings and clasps 
• Piecework magazines 
• a couple of crochet booklets 
• beaded necklace kit 
• kit to make two embroidery pendants 
• How-to-draw book (vintage)
• Art Deco coloring book 
• fabric to make L a reticule with 
• part of a Tulip tie-dye set 
• kit to make a passport cover and luggage tag with 
• a cone of cotton yarn for potholders
• Fiskars child-size cutting mat with cutting pen 
• mason jar of beads
• pack of assorted pins that say Rue (??)
• Sculpey III for the plan to make a tiny hat and wreath for my HR Shetland 
• paper punch for edges 
• metal box with drawing pencils  

 

Highlights: 

A tatting shuttle - saves me from buying one 

 

 

 

A Fiskars kids' cutting mat with cutting tool 

 

Beads for someone's friendship bracelet fascination, and I'll keep the jar. 

A vintage, made in the US, pair of pinking shears with the original box. 

A bead kit for a necklace that L will probably love. 

 

Estate saling

This week's haul at the thrift and estate shopping:


Goodwill:

• Wrebbit lighthouse puzzle
• Pippi Longstocking, early HB from Oxford Univ Press
• The Silver Gryphon
• neat Japanese/Chinese picture of a bird, half price

Upscale

• 3 shot glasses
• Jacqueline Cochran autobio from the 1950s
• something else
•  
•  

Estate sale #1

• 2 nail polish ($1, .50)
• 2 crochet booklets .50 each
•  

Estate Sale #2

• 2 boxes of staples $1 each
• ceramic origami crane ornament $1
• beaded bird ornament $1 
• mustard can .25
• woven basket with lid $1

Crochet - Name Doily number 5 or 6 or something

Finished this one last week, just got the ends tucked in and blocked it this weekend.  Had to try three times to block it, couldn't get things to line up correctly. 

I really like the Crochet Dude blocking squares, but they might be handier if they were printed in half-inch grid instead of one-inch.  But overall, love them.

Crochet

I've been working on a scarf, a pattern I've used once before. It's been a while, though, and current-scarf is rolling up like crazy. Just figured out, I've been doing the long-single crochet stitch all wrong, and it's pulling the scarf into a curl. And, since it's a stripe scarf with the yarn cut after each row (for fringe), it's going to be an absolute beast to fix. I don't have enough yarn to scrap it, I'll have to re-use.

I've got Eeyore and a moose in my freezer!

or, Today's Yard Sale Haul :)

(Yes, there's a plush Eeyore in the freezer, along with the moose - kill any dust mites or whatnot)

The church where El Burrito's preschool is was hosting a fundraiser rummage sale today, so I stopped in after I dropped of Mr. Crying El Burrito. I got the following stuff for only $6 total:

• Plush reindeer (for me)
• Plush Eeyore, with tags (okay, also mine)
• 4 clay plant saucers for $1 - would have bought the clay pots, but they were nested and stuck together :(
• Metropolitan Museum Of Art hieroglyphic stamps set (too cool) for $1
  
• mini-van for El Burrito's dollhouse 25c (after I remove the batteries)
• Lizzie McGuire DVD $1
• 2 other books
• tiny Eeyore figurine
• watercolor paint set 25c
• whole bag of craft stuff for $2
  

There were a couple of pattern booklets, one new skein of baby yarn from Bernat, 4 or 5 partial skeins, a new roll (word?) of crochet thread in sage green, a partial roll/skein/ball in white, a pack of 5 darning needles, and 5 steel crochet hooks in assorted sizes. The hooks alone were worth the $2 price, even if a couple of them are tiny enough that I'll never be able to use them (unless I can crochet my own hair - they're that tiny).

I'll have time to hit a couple of local yard sales on Friday mornings now. Whee!

Puppets!

I seem to be on a puppet kick. It's partly due to El Burrito's upcoming birthday - he's asked for a puppet or two, and likes to play with the library's puppet collection. I've managed to come up with three so far, a dog, an elephant, and a Tweety bird. Paid 50 cents each for them - one at a yard sale, the others at Goodwill this week.

The dog originally had a barker attachment, so that he'd bark every time his mouth moved. I took care of that easily enough; it wasn't sewn in well at all. I spent half an hour htis morning sewing his mouth back together and re-stuffing his head, since I had to de-stuff him in order to flip him inside out and de-bark him.

And now it occurred to me (last night) to search Ravelry for crocheted puppet patterns. It's a slippery slope, but fun. I've found one that looks almost exactly like Kermit, a sock monkey, a really neat (but not free) parrot, and some others. Then I went looking for amigurumi. The slope got steeper - a whale (chart only, and the notes are in Japanese), horses, moose, penguins.

And do you know the kicker in all this? 95% of my yarn is unreachable. I can find two skeins of brown, one bright red, and one green/blue variegated right now. And none of it would work well for the patterns I've found. Makes the no-new-yarn ban kind of problematic.

Crocheting

I got quite a bit of crocheting done last month and this past week, mostly during the Olympics.

Finished:

The "Curling Scarf" (because I watched a good bit of curling while I worked on it):


Done in Naturally Caron's Country, a mohair/microdenier acrylic blend, in two shades of purple plus off-white. The pattern is the Stripes and Bars No Weaving Ends scarf from Crochet.about.com. Haven't decided yet if I want to leave the fringe as-is, add more, or weave it in. I blocked it once, but it was a half-baked job and needs to be redone to get rid of the curl at the corners. And of course, now that it's finished, temps are in the 50s and I don't need it.

Then my mom and one of her sisters came to visit, and Auntie wants a hat like El Burrito's. Her breast cancer is back, and has spread all over (jaw, shoulder, etc.) and she wanted a nice soft hat to wear. I used Red Heart Soft in Toast and Paprika (love the names!). I tried something new - I made center-pull balls out of the skeins, then put each ball in one half of a pair of super-cheap knee-high panty hose to keep the outer layers from unwinding (had that issue with the Caron). It worked pretty well, and only cost 50 cents.


I used the earflap hat pattern from the 2008 Pattern-a-Day calendar; it's turning into my go-to earflap hat pattern. Here's the finished hat, modeled by El Burrito:


and by El Burrito's newest pet (El Burrito seems to be on strike as a hat model):

The colors looked really well; the Toast isn't as olive-green as this picture looks on my screen.


Next up: possibly a Scandinavian Hat for me, done in purples; or the Gaelic Bay Afghan in Lion's Fishermen's Wool; or a hat for my mom; or lots of dishcloths to use up this pile of Lily Sugar 'n' Cream that seems to have bred in the closet.

More crocheting

Olympic update: the Scandinavian hat is done (I think*), and I'm 80% done with the scarf. Then I'm starting a hat for an aunt who's having a recurrence of breast cancer. She was admiring El Burrito's earflap hats and wants one of her own, so I'm shooting to have it done by the end of next week. The scarf may be done tonight, depending on how exciting the curling matches are. :)

* I think I finished it before I sent it off. I may have forgotten to seam the inside lining of the hat, but I'll have to wait to find out. Oopsie.

Olympic crocheting

I didn't manage to get organized in time to sign up for any crocheting Olympics, but I have done some.

The Scandinavian Hat #1 is finished. It was my first hat that wasn't worked in rounds, and came out fairly well. I did have issues with the cross-stitching done for decoration, since I had to drop some rows because I couldn't make gauge for love or money. The X design on the brim came out a bit off, since there was a different number of stitches than the pattern needed.

Then I started what will probably be called the Curling Scarf, since that's 95% of what we've watched this Olympics. It's a pattern from Crochet.about.com, done in long rows with fringe (so no weaving-in). I'm using Naturally Caron's Country, a merino/acrylic blend, in two shades of purple, plus a winter white. This is my first shot at treble/triple crochet and spike/long stitches.

Crochet: the Scandinavian Hat(s)

True to form, I started a new crochet project before the last three (ha!) are officially finished. (The tan/brown/rust hat for El Burrito needs a pompom, maybe. The wool blue & purple hat for me needs a pompom and longer strings, and the wool hat Version 1.0 for El Burrito needs a pompom, maybe.)

Last weekend, I started on another hat, this one for my brother's girlfriend/fiance. It's the Scandinavian Hat pattern from Red Heart, which we saw in a Crochet Today magazine ad. I couldn't find the Red Heart Soft yarn at Hobby Lobby, so I ended up with Hobby Lobby's "I Love This Yarn" store brand. The hat is mostly black, which I swore off after doing a scarf for my sister in black and iris Microspun. Turns out most of the problem there was that Microspun is a really loose twist, and splitty as all heck. I Love This Yarn doesn't have that problem. It's easy to work with so far, in spite of using a dark color and having the crappiest indoor lighting ever.

This is the first hat I've done that was seamed instead of worked in the round. My big issue so far is that I could not make the pattern's gauge for anything. I started over three times, ending up with a hook 2 sizes smaller than listed, and still wasn't hitting gauge. So I got a measuring tape and dropped a dozen or so stitches off the foundation chain in order to hit the 22-inch length I needed. I also had to drop a couple of rows out of the pattern, which meant winging it on the decreases at the top. Seems to be working out so far, I'm doing the border right now and will start on the lining when that's done.

After I get Future Sister-in-Law's hat done, I'm doing one for myself. I may need another skein of black, but I'll have plenty of red and tons of white left over.

The other nice thing about HL's I Love This Yarn is that they make the center-pull end so easy to find. Lovely, so I don't have to spend an hour unrolling the skein and rolling it back into a center-pull ball.

I've been assimilated

Like I need another hobby!

El Burrito and I went to Hobby Lobby the other day, for one thing: a skein of the cheapest natural-colored wool yarn we could find. Slim choices, but we found one (I Love This Wool in winter white, which is actually only 93% wool, as I just discovered). I've got a plan for some crocheted wool Kleen Kanteen covers, and some dabbling in Kool-Aid dye, which won't work on the Peaches & Creme cotton (found that out too late - so I'll try tea dying, or the plant dyes suggested for Easter eggs). If this all gets done in the next month, I'll enter them in the county fair Home Arts division.

So, I made the mistake of browsing the yarn section with El Burrito, and somehow we came home with two sets of knitting needles. Not sure how it happened, I'm still iffy on crocheting at times, especially counting stitches. But now I'm the owner of a set of Susan Bates 10 inch, 9mm Crystallites in orange ($1.07, or 80% off of $4.99) , and a set of SB 14 inch, 3.75mm metal needles ($1.43, 65% off of $3.99).

And it gets better! My sister scored a few hundred sets of bamboo knitting needles from Craigslist this week (for $20 total!). She and a friend are going to keep some and sell the rest, and I think she's giving me a few. It's like I'm being sucked in by a black hole of knitting!

Reading on Tuesday

Today's library stats:

Checked out: 37
On hold: 10
I'll be waiting a while for two of these; I'm #23 on the list for the new Sophie Kinsella, and #15 on Peter Walsh's new book.

Returned: 5
Checked out: 7

I need to hunt for one book that's still showing up on my account; I'm pretty sure I returned it, but I'll look around to make sure it's not under the seat of the car or something.

Returned:

• Drive - a picture book about a father who drives a tractor-trailer rig. El Burrito wasn't as crazy about it as I thought he'd be.
• The Books of Great Alta (combo of Sister Light, Sister Dark and White Jenna) - never got started on this one, but I picked up the 3rd book of the series at a sale and thought I'd start at the beginning.
• 2 crochet books
• 1 photography book

Book cart sale: $3.50, for 5 books (3 for me, 2 for El Burrito in the future).

***

It's warm here, almost 80 the past two days. The problem with the lovely weather is that the condo heats up easily (we're on the sunny side, and the shade trees haven't leafed out yet). Since there's no decent air circulation, it takes forever to cool down at night. With both doors open, it was still 80 degrees inside at 2 a.m. (down from the 81-degree high at 9:00).

We've been strollering around the neighborhood almost every day, too. El Burrito likes it. We've seen so far that there are at least 6 units for sale, and a minimum of 16 flowering pear trees in the complex. They're pretty, but the fragrance isn't much to speak of. I much prefer the redbuds and dogwoods anyway, and lilacs for fragrance.

The rain this morning knocked a lot of petals off the pears, and they sort of drift in the breeze like snow. It's pretty to watch. We're also waiting to see if the robins nest in our shade tree again this year. Last year's nest is still there, but looking a bit rough. We did see a songbird of some kind this morning - yellow with black wings. I can't remember the name of it, and our bird guide is boxed up somewhere.

And now it's back to digging through paperwork. I'm on the list for potential jury duty next week, so I need to find the notice they sent. I have to call every night and listen to a message that'll tell me if I need to go to the courthouse the next day. I've done this once before, spent a few hours on hard plastic chairs before I was sent home. I'm not sure what kind of trials are coming up, but there's been a rash of crime lately. I've got books to read and patterns to crochet, if I can decide on yarn, and I guess El Burrito can spend a few days with his grandparents.

I just wish I could find a decent wool yarn that's soft, washable, and doesn't pill like crazy. I've considered Mission Falls 1820 and one other, but they reportedly pill badly. I've got a skein of Patons Classic Merino to try out, even though it's hand-wash only. I'd like to make El Burrito a hat to match his coat for next winter, and machine-washable wool would be a big plus.

Flowers & other photos

Catching up on photos from the past couple weeks.


****

I broke down and bought a pair of potted shamrocks (Oxalis regnalis, specifically) after St. Patrick's Day. They were $1 each and a different variety from my other shamrocks, so I brought them home. Still planning to buy some bulbs of the purple variety, though.


***

One of my amaryllis bloomed this week. It was a bit of a shock, since I'd forgotten to water the bulbs for a few months. (The hazard of putting them in a cool out-of-the-way spot.) Of the 7 potted bulbs, 4 are alive. The other three are still iffy, and I won't be surprised if they're dead.



***

I cooked corned beef instead of the usual Irish Stew (with beef, not lamb) this year. It's an interesting taste, but I think I prefer the stew right now. I even got a few parsnips this year, but they tasted more peppery than I remembered (unless that was the seasoning from the corned beef).
Sadly, part of the leftover veg hid in the fridge until they were past their prime.

***

Cute El Burrito story time. We went to the condo lunch this month (Bob Evans - not bad, the chicken & noodles was yummy. Plus, smiley-face kiddie fries.) and had a good time. El Burrito took his toy bus along, and it had some adventures. First it got to drive into the butter packet. Then it got a trip to the Bob Evans Car Wash, courtesy of El Burrito. (This photo is a re-enactment, though.) Luckily, it's dried out nicely, but I had to inform El Burrito that he wouldn't pass Grandpa's bus-driver exam if he kept driving off the table or into the butter.

Then we stopped at JoAnn Fabrics on the way home, and the bus landed on the floor a few times. Found out that Elmer's Glue isn't good for sticking wheels to axles, so it's time for plan B. This bus has one whole screw holding it all together (4 or 5 pieces). The screw fell out at the library one day, and little bus bits were everywhere. Most of them landed in the stroller basket, since the footrest sort of acted like a funnel.

***

I bought some Moda Dea Ticker Tape on sale last month, and tried it out. It's pretty yarn, but my hands aren't suited for it at the moment. Even with a daily slathering of Eucerin, the yarn was still snagging on my fingers. It's another one of those yarns that are pretty, but what do I make with it?

I also tried some Bernat Bamboo, but I really don't care for it so far. It's amazingly soft, but the slubs just throw me off or something. Good thing I bought them both on sale.

***
El Burrito got to sit on a tractor last weekend, and he's still talking about it (and about riding in the truck). I guess the first thing he did was push the steering-wheel nut to see if it honked like Grandpa's truck. Dad got a kick out of that. :)

***

One of his "things" lately is a fondness for laundry baskets. He likes to push them up and down the hall, or sit in them. Sheepie got to ride in the laundry basket one day.

Updates

So, it's Thursday.

El Burrito spent a full 90 minutes in his crib before he finally fell asleep. That 90 minutes included about four trips in to give him two toy cars, his "grumpy book" (Winnie the Pooh), another book, and the truck he dropped. Sigh. He's on a tear this week, wanting to be read to almost half the total time he's awake. Not that I'm going to stop reading to him, but jeez, it makes it hard to get anything accomplished.

I just finished the earflap hat for my sister in Cold Detroit. I'm weaving in the ends right now, then I've just got to braid the cords and make the pompom.

I was watching some more of my Due South DVDs, and I'm just going to have to buy another copy of Season 1. I haven't gotten any reply from the studio, and it's been five years since I bought the set, so it was a long shot anyway. I was watching disc 2 today, and the last two episodes on both sides (*) are unwatchable. No visible damage to the disc, so I guess it was a burn error. That makes two discs with errors out of three in the set, so I may as well just buy a whole new set. Gah. I'm almost sure I checked these when I got them, but I guess I missed some episodes.

* I may have said it before, but I'll say it again. I absolutely HATE double-sided DVDs. They're touchy and finicky, you can't put them down anywhere for a second without chancing a scratch, and I can never remember which side is which, even when they're labeled. I was this close to really getting it once. Then I got the first season of Northern Exposure, with a production error that labeled the A & B sides of the first disc backwards, and that just fried whatever cell in my brain was keeping track of which side goes up.

I finally remembered to note what time I filled up the new humidifier. The big difference between warm-mist and cold-mist machines seems to be noise and speed. Our Holmes warm-mist could put out over two gallons per day - we had to fill it up daily, and a fill-up wouldn't last 24 hours. It was also quiet, since it worked on a heating element. However, the drawback was the filter - it got gunked up and had to be cleaned almost daily, with a new filter every two weeks or so (at $5 each).

The ReliOn is a cool-mist, so it's powered by a fan instead of a heating element. It only puts out about half a gallon per day on low - it's a 1-gallon model, I filled it up at 6:00 Tuesday night and had to refill it at 5:00 today. It might go faster on the "high" setting, but the fan on "high" is kind of noisy. Great if you need white noise, not so great otherwise. On the other hand, the filter only has to be changed once per season unless it gets lots of build-up, and ours still looking pretty good. Plus, we got some filters at Walmart last month, $2 for a 2-pack on clearance; not the same model, but with a bit of trimming they'll be the same size.

Pros and cons. I wish we could get more moisture in the air, but the filter costs on the other machine were a little steep and I'm not sure there's any way around the water build-up, other than buying filtered water for the silly thing.

Crocheting & Stuff

Cool news in the mail today: the interest rate on our mortgage is going down. Granted, the balance on our loan is extremely low, since the condo wasn't that expensive to begin with and it's over half-paid now. Still nice, though. On the other hand, my shock when we buy a house will probably be extreme, since DH figures we'll be looking at houses that cost around 10x what our current balance is.

Yeah, I'm the one who got a little freaked at signing the check for a Ford Escort. The six-digit numbers on mortgage paperwork may blow my mind.

More good news - I finally figured out which crochet book I'm looking for, and I'm on the wait list for it at the library. I checked out a bunch of crochet books last year, and one of them had a pattern for a bath mat that looked nice. Fairly easy, plus useful and a nice change from hats. Of course I forgot to copy the pattern or write down what book it was in, so I've been trying to remember it for a month or so.

I spent a few hours digging through the library's online catalog, which doesn't often include things like tables of contents, and put a dozen or so on hold to look at when they're finally checked back in. This week, I had time at the library to go up in the stacks and look at every crochet book on the shelf, which wasn't many. (Either 100 books only take up one shelf, or they spend a lot of time checked out.) No luck there. Then I get the bright idea to take my hold-list books and look them up on Amazon, on the chance that I can get content information there.

Bingo! I'm waiting on First Crochet. I'm pretty sure this is the one. The bath mat is done in cotton, I think two strands together, and there's a star done in puff/bobble stitches. I've got all this Sugar N Cream yarn, you see. Michael's had the big 12-oz skeins in fun colors and I couldn't resist. Usually it's just the dinky 2-oz balls, or the big 1-pounders in white or off-white. I got a big skein of Key Lime Pie, variegated greens and white, and I think it wants to be a bath mat.

In the meantime, I've got 34 items checked out (some are El Burrito's) and 18 on hold, including the last 4 books of the Spiderwick series and a dozen or so crochet books. I've gotten pretty good at plain scarves and hats, and I need to find something to do with that Bernat Satin Sport. Lovely stuff, but as I'm not a shawl person and probably not skilled enough to do anything not-square (it's the counting that loses me), I need some inspiration. I'm tempted by the sweaters in More Crocheted Aran Sweaters, but I'm also intimidated by the stitches. Plus, not really a sweater person either. There is a vest, though. And the blurb says it's pretty simple . . . .

And now I'm off to dig through Corel's website and see if there's an upgrade that will convince Paint Shop Pro 9 to read ORF files (the RAW format that Olympus uses). The Olympus software will, but it's very basic and a little irritating. I don't usually use the RAW format, but I do for astro photos on occasion.

Oh, and think of a birthday gift for my brother, since I'll be seeing him this weekend.

Cold ?

Here's a puzzler: Last night, while the thermostat registered the usual 73 degrees (we let it get down to 71 overnight), DH was cold.

Now, understand that this is the same hot-natured man who wears short-sleeved shirts all year, and usually sleeps with one sheet over him while I've got two or three (thin) blankets. Very odd situation, in other words. He thinks it was related to the niacin-induced flushing reaction that he had last night (cholesterol meds), although the chill part hasn't been this bad since the first time he had the reaction. The reaction that had us going to the ER on the coldest freaking night of the year. He was so cold then that his teeth were chattering, and not just from the weather.

So last night, he got one of my blankets, plus the polarfleece Incredibles freebie blanket, and stayed under them both all night. And I had just one blanket. Which is why, at 3:15 in the rotten morning, I was up scrounging blindly (no contacts!) for another blanket. Because it was still warmer than usual in the house, and I was still freezing my toes off too. I ended up with a baby quilt, because it was the best I could find.

It was just weird, because it wasn't colder than usual in the house, but we were both cold. I'm stumped, especially since we've got draft blockers on all the doors. I know our thermostat is a little inaccurate, but that was just odd.

I wonder if this is a sign that I should start working on that afghan I've been planning to use the Ebay yarn for?

Library day

Today is Tuesday, and therefore library day. So El Burrito and I got our act together and went out into the wind. (Proof of weird weather - 50 yesterday, 30 today, 60 this weekend. Oy.)

Returned: 2 DVDs (one of which I need to re-request, I forgot to look at the coloring pages) and 1 book.

Checked out: 3 crochet books, an Andre Norton novel, and Ancient Egyptian Cross Stitch, which has some beautiful designs. Of course, they're probably complicated enough to stop me in my tracks, but I can look at the pictures and dream of the day when I'll have enough time to do cross stitch again. The "Regal Falcon" and "Tutankhamun" are especially striking, but I don't know that I'm ambitious enough to try Tut's 21 different colors of floss.

Right now, as a matter of fact, I'm digging through the online catalog in search of a crochet book I checked out a while back. It had a pattern for a bathroom rug, done I think in two strands of cotton, with a star motif done in clusters. I apparently didn't copy the pattern or write down the title, so I'm just looking at every crochet book in the catalog. Needle in a haystack. El Burrito and I went up into the 2nd floor stacks today and I checked every crochet book on the shelf. No luck, so the one I'm looking for must be checked out. (And the collection is skewed towards knitting - 3 or 4 shelves of knitting books, 1.5 of crochet. Unless the crochet books are always circulating.)

We hit a small jackpot at the book sale - we bought 5 books from the "Sesame Street Book Club" for $1 each, and left 3 or 4 behind. Also, a Tigger board book, a Pooh book, and Wolves of Willoughby Chase. Grand total $7. (I meant to pick up the Archie digests that they had, but oh well.)

The only reading lately of any substance was finishing A Walk in the Woods. An insanely funny book at times, but also really depressing during the parts about environmental changes along the Appalachian Trail and related topics. It's one of those things that bugs me because I wish I could do something about it, and don't know where to start. (See also, my weight, lack of friends, and house-hunting, for starters.)

Crocheting

Another crochet project in progress. This time it's a hat for Dear Sister, who is currently freezing her ears off in Michigan. She thought El Burrito's earflap hat was cute, and asked for one just like it. I had an extra ball of the same yarn, so if she's lucky, there'll be enough for her hat too. I had a bit left over from the first ball after El Burrito's hat was finished, but his was a smaller size and I left out a few rows to make it fit better. If I run short, she may get earflaps or a pompom in a different color. I think she'll live. :)

The Earflap Hat

Finished today, officially - I tied the pompom on after lunch.

Right now, the earflaps are big enough to double as cheek warmers. Which, since it's snowing here right now, is probably a good thing. We'll see how he likes wearing it.


This is the back view, after I finished the earflaps. Now, the stitch markers are in the joining row for each round. I can't figure out how, after re-doing the bottom 10 rows or so (of 17 rows total), making sure I had the right number of stitches, but the earflaps got off-center somehow. I had to move them back a bit - 3 stitches each - but they still should have been equal distances from the joining row.


The pattern is from the 2008 Crochet Pattern-a-Day calendar, designed by Kimberly Pressley. I left out the second round of alternating front- and back-post DC, to make the hat short enough, and I ended up with about 60 loops instead of 40 for the pompom (which still looks skimpy). I used Bernat's Softee Chunkee Twist in denim ragg, and now I've got another whole skein of it with no intended use. Silly me, trusting the label when it quoted 2 balls for a hat.

Finished Hat

Well, the new hat is 99% finished. I just need to make the pompom for the top, and it's done.

I made a few adjustments to the pattern, mostly leaving out one row of back-post and front-post DC, and moving the earflaps back a bit (3 stitches each, to be precise). Pictures soon.