That which happened BEFORE:

22 June 2010: Well. Lesson of the day---the COWYAK provisional cast-on is right bollocks. And I am unanimous in that.

Whole project tinked. No. Correction. Whole project wadded up and thrown in the trash can after spending over an hour trying to tink it.

Never have I wasted yarn like this before, but this was too much even for me. I was not going to lose any more years off my life for a hundred yards of cotton string (I first tried this project with some Peaches n’ Cream Cotton).

Will cast-on for a top-down hat as I should have done in the first place. That’ll teach me to listen when I’m talking to myself.

AFTER lessons learned:

August 30, 2010: Cast-on new yarn---Knit Picks Risata. Love it. Increase method for the hat pattern is based off of Karlchen, as usual. Handiest hat pattern ever.

Am somewhere around 9.347 st/inch mark. I increased to 160 stitches (Nugget has an 18 inch head). Knit stockinette. Right before the ribbing, decreased 16 stitches (10 % of the total number). On next row, used Techknitter’s method for making a nice ribbing transition---aka slip what will be the purl stitches. In this case, I did a 1x1 ribbing, so i knit one, slipped one for this row. Then I worked the regular knit one, purl one rib for about an inch or so. And then on to…

How to knit a ruffle

Except that this isn’t how I actually knit the ruffle, is it? Of course not. Follow a pattern? Me??? And bring down the apocalypse?

The linked ruffle is knit flat. Mine was knit in the round. So, I invented a ruffle very, very loosely based on what I learned about ruffle construction from the linked ruffle above. If I were to knit a ruffle in the round again, this is what I would do:

First, pick up stitches for the ruffle. I think picking them up gives the ruffle a bit more structure to do it’s ruffley thing. I picked up 144 stitches at the top row of the ribbing. Since my ruffle is done in a multiple of 6, I had 24 repeats.

Row 1--Row 5: K3, P3
Row 6: K3, YO, P3, YO
Row 7: K3, P5
Row 8: K3, YO, P5, YO,
Row 9: K3, P7
Row 10: K3, YO, P7, YO
Row 11: K3, P9

See the pattern? So, I did that until I had the ruffle a little bit longer than the ribbed section underneath it. Then I bound it off using EZ’s sewn bind-off. Yeah, I know people say to bind off in pattern, but you know what? I don’t like how it looks. EZ’s sewn bind-off is always tidy and lovely.

The reason for this design was that I wanted to knit Baby Sophie a ruffled hat, but other ruffled hats I’ve seen didn’t seem to stay on the babies’ heads very well. I want her hat to stay on, cover her ears, and be relatively warm. AND to have a ruffle. So I decided to knit the decorative ruffle OVER the functional ribbing. The result is that you can’t even tell there is ribbing underneath unless you lift up the ruffle. Pretty sweet, I think. I am feeling fairly clever right now. :D

Whereupon commences the tale of dre learning to crochet…

So, first I tried to knit a flower. I knit all the petals out of this same blue Wool of the Andes. And then I tried to felt them, you know, to make a cute little felted flower. Only they would not felt. A washed them on hot---twice. I dried them on high---twice. I poured boiling water over them and agitated the shit out of them with a fork. Finally, I poured straight dish detergent over each petal, poured scalding hot water over them, and then scrubbed them by hand until they kind of felted up a little bit. A very little bit. The blisters are still healing.

And so I asked my gran to teach me how to crochet a flower. And while I am still convinced that it is some sort of witchcraft, it was not as difficult to understand as I feared it would be. It only took me three tries to get a flower with the number of petals the pattern actually called for.

I now know how to chain, slip, single crochet, double crochet, triple crochet and half-double-single-triple-double crochet. Seriously, who got to name these stitches? :P

Thanks, gran!

Knit and crochet’d while listening to/watching:

Princess Ben, by Catherine Gilbert Murdoch
Firefly
Master Chef
Husband make fish tacos for dinner. Yum.