A knitting-loaded post

It's time I updated my knitting progress here. I have two projects officially on-the-go at the moment, but I digressed yesterday with some baby/kid hats to give to my neighbour who's due to have a boy in a few weeks.

I've started a red sweater with very cheap acrylic yarn. It feels soft enough so I'm hoping that I don't do all the work then regret it! It'll be a seamless bottom-up one, as per Elizabeth Zimmermann's books, knitted in a K4, P1 rib. Raglan sleeves. Big foldover collar. I hope.


The first blue sock (elann esprit) is nearly done - just the toe shaping to go, along with some woolly nylon for reinforcement.


Yesterday afternoon, after I had finished all the cleaning, I spent a while in my sewing room downstairs (I should probably rename it my "knitting room" as I knit more than I sew these days). I ran up this hat - used the Bond to make a rectangle about 18 inches wide by 12 inches tall, leaving the live stitches to be picked up top and bottom with knitting needles. I knitted a crown on each end, sewed up the side seam, pushed one half inside the other and, presto, a double thick hat.


And in the evening, I went to knit night at my local yarn store. Feeling like a change of scene (yarn) I picked up a 100g skein of S R Kertzer's Northern Worsted in a variegated blue and started another hat. This time, I used a loop and crochet hook to start with 6 stitches, transferred them to a circular needle, and magic-looped my way around the crown of the hat until the increases were done and I could change to a 16 inch circ (thanks to Denise interchangeables)! After a couple of inches of straight knitting, I switched to garter stitch, added some short rows at the back, and it was done.....at 1am this morning.


There's enough yarn left on the skein to make a pair of thumbless baby mitts, I think, so that's what I'm going to do as soon as I get the chance.

That photo at the top is the pile of knitting library books I currently have. It's good to have a stack of these around while they're closed over Christmas.


And this is a pretty blue glass "bowl" which a friend of mine gave me today. I decided it would look nice on my coffee table with small balls of leftover yarn in it. (Better than a flower arrangement - no water required.)