Not done yet!

In the last post I wrote about a hat I made out of leftover worsted weight yarn. When I finished the hat, I still had a bunch left of three of the colors. It was perfect to make Kate from Knitty. The pattern is old, from 2005 and I have to say that it's not as well edited as more recent patterns. There's nothing really wrong with the pattern. There is not an error per se, but there are differences between the instructions and how the item looks.

You start at the bottom of the body and increase. The increases don't look like the increases in the pictures. The increases in the pattern are 'knit in front and back - kfb' while in the pictures you can see that the increases are directional and they don't look like 'kfb'. So I just made up the increases as I went. I didn't know which way they were supposed to be but I more or less made the increases on the first half of the stitches one way and the other half of the stitches the other way and that worked out all right.

The decreases at the top of the body were directional. It would have looked funky if the bottom half all increased in one direction and the top half had some of the decreases in one direction and some in another.

It was by no means a bad pattern. The rest of it was a smooth sailing and I did learn a great way to attach extremities.

Friend of mine is having a baby in November. Actually a friend and a co-worker's wife. Plus couple of other people I know, but I don't know them enough to knit them anything major. Maybe a bib? So anyways, Kate (whom I call Kata rokkar in Ravelry - Icelandic for Kate rocks) will be a present for my friend's baby.

Kata rokkar is also a name of a song Björk recorded on the jazz record Gling Gló in 1990.

Clearing out leftover stash

Last month (May) I have been in the mood of clearing out my leftover stash. In particular the worsted weight leftovers (I organize my leftover stash by weight). The leftover stash was taking up too much space, in most parts because it was kept in too large of a bags. Some of it I moved to a plastic box, but the worsted weight I started to use up.

It started because of a rather large skein (large for leftover yarn) of bright green yarn that I always wanted to make a hat out of, preferably patterned hat.

When I was looking around Ravelry for a good pattern I came across the fish hat from Knitty.

It wasn't quite what I had in mind, but it was the perfect hat to use up the leftover yarn. I only used the bright green yarn as the tails and fins. I finished up knitting him at the very beginning of June, but only put the eyes on him and blocked him yesterday (June 23rd). I needed to buy white felt and black buttons for his eyes. The pattern has the fish being dead (eyes are crossed out), but knowing my kids, that would not do. I was right. They were horrified with the thought of making the fish dead.



I didn't really make it with anyone in particular in mind. But after I had finished putting the eyes on it, my older daughter (who's 8 almost 9) took a big fancy to him so now he's hers I guess.



It shouldn't be so surprising to me that she liked it (she wasn't so interested before I put the eyes on) since she's taken up a liking to fish lately. This spring she wanted to get a fish tank really bad. She started to save up some money and we borrowed a tank from my friend, but it was just the tank. We still needed a pump and filter and a lid, and these things add up!

Then a few weeks ago, she went fishing with her dad and younger sister in a lake next to our little village. She brought a terrarium and scooped up two tiny little catfish, very newly hatched! So she got her wish! Her dad fitted the fish tank with blue pebbles (blue is her favorite color) and put a large rock from our garden in it. The catfish love to stay under the rock. We needed a pump/filter and pretty soon we got an aerator too, as well as a sucker fish and couple of live plants. We still need to get a proper lid and maybe a few more fish.



Here are couple of more photos of me and Kamilla wearing that silly fish hat