it's the same old circle going round, but

This hat is an amalgam of the Turn-A-Square pattern, which I've greatly enjoyed knitting before, the Purl Soho Simple Pleasures brim, and the Dessine-Moi Un Mouton sleeve stripe pattern.  I was concerned with fit, and my diagonally-upstairs neighbor suggested that I could knit in some flexibility by giving the recipient an option to wear the hat slouchy or to fold the brim and have a more fitted look.  She recommended a Purl Bee pattern with a long stretch of ribbing to start, which led me to the Simple Pleasures.

Because I was using fingering weight yarn (Plucky Knitter Bello in Pollen with stripes of Heartstrings, Old Copper, Fisherman's Wharf and Bastille), I cast on 140 stitches and then did almost three inches of 2 by 2 rib.  After that, I pretty much followed the Turn-a-Square pattern exactly, except that I used an idea for striping from the Dessine-Moi Un Mouton Pattern.  I'm in the midst of knitting a Dessine-Moi sweater and have loved the combo of stripes with blocks of the main color.  (I actually meant to follow the Dessine-Moi stripe pattern more closely, with some sections of 5 stripes and some sections of 3 stripes, but I forgot to switch to 3 when I started my second group of stripes and decided there were too few stripe sections to make it look intentional if I switched for the third group.)

All together, I'm pretty happy with how this turned out and the recipient seems to enjoy it as well, so I'll call the amalgam a success!

 To slouch or not to slouch?

Slouchy back view

why do my fingers ache for the cold?

Here's some actual knitting for the knitting blog.  When I stumbled upon a skein of the Plucky Knitter's much-beloved and now-discontinued Well Read colorway, I couldn't help but finally knit something for someone who has been pestering me for handknit goods since, oh, approximately our fourth date.   Knitting for him does, of course, break all of my rules about who I'm willing to knit for: he isn't another knitter, a small child or an elderly relative.  (Truth be told, he did briefly learn to knit so that he could gift me the world's most ridiculous scarf and then declare that he was now a knitter so he fit within the categories of people I was willing to knit for.  But I had a hard time thinking of him as a knitter when I couldn't get him to start a second project.)

However, he has made up for it by showing a degree of appreciation that I never expect from people who don't fall into those categories, and, until we hit a spell of 80-degree weather, was pretty much wearing this hat every day.  Even if it made him look a little bit crazy, it did mean that I got to look at this pretty yarn every day, so I didn't argue.  And when he brought the hat back out for our trip to Madison last week, I realized that I had missed seeing it a little bit in our unseasonably warm weather.  (I know, I know, I could still live on the East Coast if I wanted to have snow showers over Easter.)

It's the One Bourbon pattern from Thea Coleman, knit with six pattern repeats rather than seven, and ravelry details are here.  Here's hoping that you all have non-hat-wearing weather soon!

and if I haver, well...

A bit of a crafting hijack here, which will almost certainly continue in future posts.  I was the lucky recipient of a rigid heddle loom for Christmas (the Glimakra 19" Emilia) and I've been working on getting my selvedges to be decent, so that's taken up a good chunk of my crafting time.

I had planned to weave a long strip and then sew the ends together to make a cowl.  Unfortunately, I'm also still working on figuring out how to estimate the final size of a weaving project correctly and my first piece definitely came out too short.  Since I still had plenty of the warp and weft yarns left, and since I had wanted to see what it would look like if I reversed them, I wove a second piece and sewed them to each other to form the cowl.

Here you can see the original piece: with a warp of some random yarn that I think is probably Madelinetosh DK or light worsted and a weft of Plucky Knitter MCN Sport in Jewel of the Nile.  (The colorway has certainly been discontinued and I think the yarn has, too, but, oh, are they lovely!) 

Here's the piece with warp and weft reversed.

Here's how I finished it: sewed two seams, pressed them flat, sewed them down with two lines of reinforcement stitching, and chopped off the fringe.  It was mildly nerve wracking to cut, but probably not as bad as steeking.  You can see the warp yarns more clearly in the photo with the seam.

I'm looking forward to making a dent in the yarn stash with a few more weaving projects.  I've got one more that is ready to be blogged, and a project that is halfway through heddle-threading right now.  And then I have big dreams of creating a woven version of this knit vest, since it is fundamentally just three rectangles.  (Shhhh... if I'm successful at that, it will be a gift, but for someone who I'm confident will never read this blog.)  And maybe a table runner or two?