Finishing things and my first design

My blog was featured in the Irish Independent! Thanks to Marie Boran for featuring it.

January seems to have been a month of finishing off various projects so that when the end of month comes I'll have no works in progress and can decide to make any new project I want. I finished the alpine frost scarf which worked out nicely. Radcliffe the bear volunteered to model it. It's very soft and lovely to wear.



I hope this scarf goes with the ceangealtas mittens I made a while ago but I'm worried now. The Yarn Harlot says her daughter asked her to make her a hat and mittens but that it wasn't to be too 'knitty'. She's right, I'm marked as a knitter with my mismatched hats, scarfs and gloves.

To remedy this I have been knitting a hat to go with the mittens from the same wool so they are definitely going to match. The Brown Sheep Lamb's Pride is a lovely wool with a nice fuzziness from the 15% mohair. I don't think I mentioned this hat before even though I've been working on it since before christmas. It's my own design and well I'm quite proud of it.

I used to have a hat with bits sticking out the top so I wanted something like that. I also wanted to try a bit of fair isle stranded knitting. I found a chart of a snowflake so decided to put a ring of them around the hat.

I cast on in the round and did a few rows of ribbing before starting the snowflakes. I even managed to do two handed fair isle knitting. I used this knit picks video to figure it out. I decreased a bit at the top of the hat then I stopped working in the round and knit all the pointy bits back and forth. I french knit a tie for the top to keep them all together while on.

One thing I didn't account for was that the fair isle part of the hat didn't stretch as much as normal knitting would. When the hat was finished it was a bit tight and it needed a bit of aggressive blocking. I found a pudding bowl in a shop that was the same size as my head, yes I tried on the pudding bowl in the shop. I hope nobody saw me, they would rightly conclude I was a lunatic. Anyway I blocked (this is where you wet a piece and dry in the shape you want) the hat on the bowl for a while and then pinned it out to dry completely.





It came out really well and I'm pleased to have a one off hat. Also it may save me from looking too knitty when out and about. I now have no old projects that I need to finish off lurking in my knitting bag. It's exciting thinking about what I'll do next. I have some plans but that's a whole other post.