I’ve finished a few things lately:
Master Level I Hat Project
This was a Ravelympics project. I finished it in just a week. I was surprised and pleased to have done it so fast. I got good gauge, and most of my “jogless joins” went pretty well. I’m a little nervous about one of the jogless joins, but hopefully it will be ok.
Oh, and despite my whining in a previous post that this was a fugly hat design. It’s actually really nice looking on my husband! I guess I don’t have an eye for “guy” hats. Or maybe my husband just makes everything look good!
As a pre-Ravelympics warmup to the hat, I finished swatch #16, the colorwork swatch. I learned that a “bi-colored purl” is when you get those little mini-stripes across the purl side when you change colors in stockinette. I finished the final questions.
So then, I cast on the Level I final hat project to the inspiring sights and sounds of the Winter Olympics opening ceremony. And over the following week, I watched much Olympic glory and heartache. (We also watched a lot of Project Runway glory and heartache, as we’ve been getting the old seasons from the library, but I digress.) And at long last, my hat was done, blocked, labeled, and sent off in the mail with the rest of my TKGA Master Hand Knitter Level I work. (And the eagle has landed, BTW, I just got an email that they received my work at TKGA headquarters and are sending it to committee members for evaluation! Squeeeee!)
All swatches for Level I
I felt triumphant. It was glorious. Over a year in the making (although there was a big fat hiatus for 6 months in the middle), I had achieved the crowning glory of my Master Level I project! But I had week of Olympics left!
So I cast on Ravelympic project #2, a fair-isle hat that I designed the week before the Olympics began. My husband wanted an earflap hat, and I offered to make one with his favorite boardgaming icon, the purple meeple. Meeples, if you are not familiar, are little person-shaped wooden tokens common in many German/designer/”euro” games. And my husband plays purple whenever it’s an option. We play a lot of boardgames.
Meeple Hat
I’m very happy with how it came out (the flash washes out the color a little, sadly), and at my husband’s request, I added a pom-pom to the top after this picture.
With the earflaps and the purl ridges in it, it has a pleasing structured quality. I was concerned that the earflaps would look “tacked on”, but I think the purl ridges around the brim really helped it look purposeful and the color-scheme keeps it looking very “tied-in”.
I think the biggest accomplishment here is that this is not only my first ever fair-isle design, this the first time I’ve ever knit fair-isle!
I think next time I’d do the meeples in intarsia, too much “catching floats”. But I really enjoyed the other parts of the fair-isle once I got the hang of two strands of yarn.
I tried at first to do a strand over my first and second fingers on my left hand in continental style. But my middle finger is apparently extremely inept, because I just couldn’t get any kind of tension. I referred to good ole’ Montse Stanley, and her section on colorwork reminded me that I could put one strand in each hand. THAT was a lifesaver! I started my knitting life as an english knitter, so knitting one english and one continental worked very nicely for me!
Once I had worked out the 2-stranded knitting, the rest of the knitting went quickly… except the parts where I had to rip out large sections and redo my math (the meeple section and the crown decreases both foiled me temporarily). I finished my 2nd Ravelympics challenge with time to spare on the afternoon of the last Olympic day.
Ravthelete in Ravelympics 2010
I am a proud 2010 Ravthelete. And this was such great motivation, that I wish they had Olympics every year!
My waiting-for-my-level-I-results-with-bated-breath projects will be to try to finish some long-standing WIP’s and play around with knitting machines. It will be anywhere from 4 weeks to 3 months before I get my results back, so let’s see how much I can accomplish before I tackle whatever re-do’s the committee decides I should do!
Until next time, keep those needles clicking!
