Weekend Projects

This weekend has been busy with crafting! On Saturday I got some roving ready to be made into sock yarn by mixing 3 oz of superwash wool with 1 oz of nylon with my new drum carder. I even got it dyed and it is now ready to be spun. (Pictures will come later once it it spun!) While I have a few different projects going on right now, I decided to cast on an entirely new project. I have been wanting my own wool hat and decided to make it with some yarn that I spun a while back. It was one of the first yarns I ever spun and was a bulky weight.

So, Saturday afternoon I grabbed some size 9 needles and did a super fast swatch to figure out that I was getting about 4 stitches to the inch. I then decided to cast on 88 stitches. (88/4= 22 inches around which is about the size of my head). I wanted cables, so I made up a cable pattern that would repeat evenly into 88 stitches (11 stitches per repeat of my cable pattern).

I started knitting a 1x1 rib for about 1.5 inches, then switched over to my cable pattern. Once I got to the top I switched over to stockinette stitch for the decrease section.

I finished the hat by Sunday afternoon and was super excited to have my own wool hat (I have made a few for other people, and have acrylic hats that I have made but until now I had never made myself a wool hat).

  

(Of all the pictures in this post, the one on the right here shows the true color the best. I was lazy and took all of these pictures from my phone this week which is why the quality is not so great.)

After the hat was done, I looked at my yarn and decided that I would probably have enough for a matching pair of mittens. So, on Sunday night I started on mitten #1.

I used the same size needles and cast on 28 stitches. Did the 1x1 rib again then knit up to the bottom of the thumb. Increased a few stitches for the thumb gusset, then kept knitting to the point of the hand where the thumb branches off. Here, I put my thumb stitches on a holder and just knit up to the top of my fingers. Then decreased and gathered the stitches together. After going back, picking up and knitting the thumb stitches and gathering them together, I was done.

Since it is a holiday today, I cast on mitten #2 this morning. Now, I have my own set of Corridale wool mittens with a matching hat.

This is the great thing about bulky yarn- it knits up fast!