A Beautiful Day

Lots of news - lots of projects in the hopper.  I am now keeping a pretty accurate project record at Ravelry - the address is Violets Dyed Ravelry Project List. 

I'm super proud of the Chemo Cap that I did.

I started this simple cap - 1" K2 P2 ribbing followed by 5" of stocking stitch on circular needles.  I was given some yarn by Suzoo's Wool (the company sponsoring the project).  And got to work.  I got all the way through the 6" of ribbing and stocking stitch and was preparing to do the decrease.  I did the first half of the decrease and somehow - I'll be damned if I can figure out why - the project somehow reversed itself.  I found that the side I was supposed to be knitting was on the other side.  I was perplexed, confused, and completely frustrated.  I'd been working so hard on this project and really wanted to have a cap to donate to the kids with cancer.

After some tears and a couple glasses of wine I decided to grab a ball of yarn out of my stash (Knit Picks Chroma - Galapagos).  I thought this yarn had a nice "kids" quality to it and that it would knit up into a really comfortable cap.  So I proceeded to knit like a maniac - used size 8 needles on a worsted weight yarn so the stitches were loose but not too loose.  I worked like crazy and I actually finished the scarf in a mere six days, which is I think a record for me.  I was just livid with proudness at looking at the hat and my wife, Patti, said that she just knew that whoever got that cap would be so happy!  Anyway, here's the finished cap:

The base is 17" which is about the size of a child's head.  All in all excellent.  I gave the cap to Jennifer at the wool store here in Costa Mesa and she just loved it.  Everyone that sees this Chroma yarn loves it, and it comes in so many different flavors. 

 I'm knitting a midwinter scarf for my sister in law:

and I'm knitting a Lollipop scarf for my niece:

And that is not even counting the cat, Petunia the monster, Happy Pill, and dragonfly I'm working on.

I'll get to the toys in a later post.  But I wanted to leave you with one last scarf I'm working on called the Zig Zag scarf.  I'm using a Chroma wool called Urban on this one.  It's the first "complex" scarf I've worked on and I just love the design:

It's an alternating K3 P3 rib with a different stitch at the start of each row.  This is what creates the zig zag pattern.  It's been very fun and I'm really enjoying getting into more complex projects.  However I always need to have a simple project lying around when I'm in that Zen relaxation space.







See you next time and HAPPY KNITTING!