freehand

In which I do not knit a hat

/ Christine Pennylegion

This week I started thinking about winter hats. It’s getting nippy where we live — not cold enough for me to bring out my heavy coat yet, but cold enough that most mornings I get a block or two into our walk to school and think “hmm, maybe I should have put a hat on.” Last year or the year before I made myself a toque from some alpaca yarn, and while it generally fulfills the brief I don’t love it. The winter hat I love the most is actually my mother’s; she left it at my house after a Christmas visit one year, and I wore it for the next winter or two before finally resigning myself to giving it back. That hat is a four-hour drive away now and, yes, technically somebody else’s property. I miss it.

So then I thought, well, maybe I could just knit a hat like it. I’ve got some lovely yarn left over from my last baby blanket; I’ve got needles in the correct size; if I just knit a panel and then sew it up construction will be easy; what could go wrong? So I found my needles and got out my yarn, watched a video to remind myself how to do the long-tail cast-on, and began.

Those of you who have been reading for a while may have questions at this point. “But Christine,” you may ask, “I thought you hated knitting! Didn’t you have a whole post about how much you dislike it? Didn’t you write it less than a year ago?”

Well, yes. All of that is true. All I can say is that the memory of my knitting pain had faded and I was focused on the hat-to-be — perhaps in the same way that a woman will forget the pain of labour in her eagerness to have another child. And much like a woman in labour, there came a point where realization set in, as my text messages with my super-knitter friend Rebecca attest:

So that went well.

Anyway, here is my new hat. Which I crocheted.

Stay tuned for the next time I forget I hate knitting, ETA 8-12 months from now.

Simple knit scarf

/ Christine Pennylegion / 3 Comments

I’m done knitting my second-ever project, and my first scarf! Incidentally, I figure I’m also done… knitting.

This is just a shortie. It started out as a generic scarf mostly for the purpose of building my knit-and-purl muscle memory (which, I have to say, it did). But Perpetua took a shine to it, so I stopped when it reached a good size for her.

The pattern is very simple. I cast on 30 stitches, and started with three rows of garter stitch. Then I moved to stockinette with a three-stitch garter border on each side. This meant that on odd rows I would just knit straight across, and on even rows I would knit 3, purl 24, and knit 3. Finally I did another three rows of garter stitch so the ends would match, and cast off. A quick wet and some improvised clothesline blocking, ends sewn in, and there you have it. It is a scarf.

Above: something going wrong near the end. It turns out I didn’t care enough to fix it. I fixed other mistakes, earlier — and got through large chunks without any mistakes at all, which was gratifying. But around the halfway point it became clear that while I had acquired a basic knitting competency, I was also having zero fun. It was stressful when it wasn’t incredibly boring. If it hadn’t been for Perpetua asking to have the scarf, I doubt I would have finished it at all.

Learning to knit was one of my goals for 2022. I did it, and now I’m going to put my needles away. It’s always nice to add another skill to your repertoire, and if there is ever some sort of… global… knitting… emergency… ? … I’ll be able to step up to the plate. Until then, though, this craft is just not for me.

All that being said, I’m still pretty satisfied with the finished product — though I may crochet a little flower or other embellishment to cover that hole.

The yarn is from the Ella Rae “Seasons” line in the colourway “carrot cake”. It was leftovers from my stash; I used it several years ago for a lap blanket and you can see how different it looks when worked up in crochet! As before the yarn was a pleasure to work with. I knit this piece on size 7 needles and it is safely tucked away until called for this winter.

Car blanket for Perpetua

/ Christine Pennylegion / 2 Comments

With impeccable timing, I’ve finished this woolen car blanket for Perpetua just as the weather here is finally getting consistently warm. Ah, well, that’s the way it goes sometimes…

About a year ago, a neighbour of my mother’s gave her a box of yarn to pass on to me. Inside were about a dozen skeins of “Lamb’s Pride” yarn from Brown Sheep Yarn in Nebraska. It’s an 85% wool 15% mohair blend, so very warm and very heavy (Lamb’s Pride comes in multiple weights but my skeins are Bulky). I wasn’t sure what to do with it for a long time; it’s a lot heavier than I would personally use for a garment and I only had about 500 yards of each colour. According to what I could find on ravelry, a lot of people use this yarn for felting.

But as we moved into fall and winter it struck me that it would be perfect for small lap-robe blankets that the kids could use in the van in the winter. Our old girl can take some time to really warm up and since you’re not supposed to use winter coats in cat seats things can get pretty chilly! (We do lay their winter coats on top of the buckles, don’t worry.) Perpetua is the one who is most bothered by the cold, so I decided to start with hers. And then I put it away halfway through because I was bored. I recently pulled it out and finished it in like two evenings, but least it will be ready for this winter. I’ve got some nice green and dark blue to make blankets for Tertia and Anselm as well.

This blanket was done in moss stitch with a K (6.5mm) hook.

Season of small projects

/ Christine Pennylegion / 1 Comment

I’ve been making and finishing small batches of things, lately.

With my machine (and a small amount of hand-stitching to finish) I made a dozen double-sided cloth napkins out of fabric I had in my stash. The gold stripes and the blue were both pillowcases. The green and the brown stripes were… I don’t know what. Bolt leftovers, I suppose, that I think I got from my friend Kendra many years ago.

I crocheted a hanging basket so that our hats and mitts would have somewhere to go besides all over the floors. This is yarn from my stash and it’s either Red Heart Super Saver or a similar acrylic from Bernat. It’s too rough and stiff to use for a garment — the sides stand up on their own! — but it’s great for this kind of household storage.

I darned a favourite pair of tights for Perpetua, using three stands of embroidery floss and a wooden darning egg. It is a very amateur job but got it done. She says that it feels “great, but more tickly!”.

I made Perpetua an ear warmer and she hated it, so I turned it into a hat for me. The first picture (a mid-construction fit check) is more accurate to the colours. The yarn was a small skein of some soft and lovely 100% alpaca given to me by friends a number of years ago. It can sometimes be hard to find good projects to do when you only have one skein of something, but this ended up being exactly the right amount of yarn. This was made without a pattern.

And finally, after many many months of hiatus, I’m working on my Eastern Jewels blanket again and determined to complete it. There are sixteen of these octagonal tiles, and I had finished them all through to row 9 — and then just got the most terrible mental block when I tried to move on to row 10. There was something off in my counting, I think, but I just couldn’t figure out what to do! But recently I looked at it again and it just clicked, so we’re off to the races. I can finish one tile (rows 10-15) in an evening and it’s been really fun to see them come together. I have some plans to expand and slightly alter the pattern so… stay tuned for that 🙂

A morning’s work

/ Christine Pennylegion / 2 Comments

We seem to be in a bit of a transitional season here at casa Pennylegion. Tertia is a sturdy toddler now, and so I have had to start deciding to do with all our baby things: what to sell, what to donate, what to put away for sentiment’s sake, what simply needs to be thrown away. And of course, in late October, the season is in full transition as well; after some unseasonably warm weather we are now indisputably into fall. And while it’s still warm enough when we’re walking Anselm to school in the morning that snow suits would be overkill, it’s still cold enough that little legs need a little more coverage in the stroller.

Happily, this all afforded me the chance to kill two birds with one stone. After a morning’s hand-sewing, Tertia now has a lovely warm stroller sack, and I have three fewer flannel baby blankets in my cupboard.

These blankets were all square, which meant a certain amount of experimental folding and pinning before I got a shape with which I was satisfied. The sports panel in the middle is folded in half, and the outer striped panel is folded to meet it, which gives three layers of flannel over the portion that will cover her torso. The back half is a leg pocket, made of the dotted blanket. That was been folded in half one way and in… sixths?… the other, which allowed it to join up nicely on the sides with the front half, and will leave her legs with three layers on top and two behind.

From the front the whole thing is much less busy — all you see are white and grey stripes, with some purple stitching (blanket or whip, depending on the section). And while getting my sewing machine working would certainly have made this a lot quicker, there is something about hand sewing that I find very satisfying — perhaps not despite, but because of its slowness.

A few recent crochet pieces

/ Christine Pennylegion

None of these were intensive enough to warrant their own posts, so here’s a quick roundup.

1. Hat for Tertia

I started by following the pattern for this hat from Five Little Monsters, but I got bored/annoyed eight rows in and just freehanded the rest. Yarn was Lion Brand Mandala in ‘Thunderbird’ (left over from Anselm’s afghan) and I used an I/5.5 hook.

She thinks wearing hats is hilarious. It’s the best.

2. Dishcloths!

I wanted better dishcloths so I bought some scrubby cotton yarn and whipped these out over a couple of evenings (not pictured: a few more that are either in use or in the wash). It was a good chance to also get in some practice with changing colours! This is Red Heart Scrubby Cotton in the colourways ‘Sunshine’ and ‘Blissful Print’. I used a G(4.25) hook and they’re all just simple half-double crochet squares.

3. Tertia’s Christmas stocking

Only briefly alluded to in my Christmas-rehash post, here is the thing itself, hung by the chimney with care. Obviously it’s got her real name underneath my hasty scribbles; this was the first year I remembered to do the embellishment before crocheting the two sides together. To absolutely nobody’s surprise, it was much easier that way. Yarns were random basic acrylics from my stash (probably Red Heart and/or Bernat) and I probably used a G hook. Maybe. I don’t know; I just wanted to finish.