Adventures and exploits with yarn, knits, crochet and other crafts.

Monday, August 30, 2010

New hat, needs, wants, and questions.

So I'm back and I hope I won't have another hiatus from knitting (as well as this blog) for a while. I can at least explain why I haven't been knitting in the past three months. I was working from June to August at a horriblly run summer camp, averaging about ten hours a day. There was no real time to knit during the day, being out in the sun and needing to look after all the little kiddies and by the time I'd get home wadding through an hour of traffic, I was just way to tired to concentrate on mi knits. Pretty sloppy, I know. But I'm back...so yay!


Here's the hat I'm knitting for el bf, Jim, in exchange for his old ipod nano.


I picked out the fibres - cotton (it was june when we shopped for the yarn and I had planned to make that month), he picked out the colors - an earthy palette of brown and green, we picked out the pattern - cocoknits simple slouchy hat, though I'm changing it up a bit. Firstly, due to the massiveness of Jim's head I cast on 90 stitches, which might have been overkill but we'll see. Secondly, I'm striping obviously. Thirdly, I'm not doing the twisted rib throughout it. I did a twisted rib rim then switched to stockinette for fear of how striping would look with the rib. What can I say? I'm a wuss. I will use cocoknits finishing technique though, because I've never seen it before and it doesn't use decreases. I do experiment sometimes! Basically, you turn the hat inside out, divide the stitches in half and use a three needle bind-off on them, then finally whip stitch the corners together. I'm interested in seeing how it'll turn out.

So I feel a lack of heathers in my life. I feel as though it's been years since I worked with heathered yarn. In reality, I think the last time I worked with them was actually in december when I drove back to Philly with MSP_Import before New Year's and I started to knit some convertible mittens. So my need right now is yarn with some pretty heathers in it.

My want is to be faster at knitting. I watched a tutorial today and the host of it was just flying with her continental style. I'm somewhat of an ambidextrous knitter now, though I'm usually english only when the pattern involves any yarnovers, though I can fake them with continental. I just wanna be a super fast knitter like this lady was. I guess I'll just have to keep practicing.

Lastly, here are some questions for this post. One of my works in progress had an accident with something that was red. I have no idea what it was, but it left a huge stain on the lace shawl I was working on. So I was just wondering if you ladies had some tips on getting mystery stains out of your knits? I'd like to finish it, especially because it was intended to be a gift. Any suggestions would be really helpful.

Also, where your knits at?

2 comments:

  1. Is it possible that the stain is blood? If so, you can um..spit on it. There's something about your own blood that is broken down with your own saliva. If it's someone else's though, you're out of luck.
    Depending on the fiber, you can try other cleaning things. You can do bleach on certain fabrics--I bleached a cotton/linen blend that I had and it worked. Obviously can't do that with wool. Always use cold water whatever you do. If it were just pure mystery and testy fabric though, I would probably dunk it in cold water with some shampoo and try to lightly scrub it out with my fingernails to be sure not to felt it. Good luck.

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  2. Also depending on the fabric, you can go the "roll with it" route and try dyeing it redder with Koolaid.

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