SpaceMika

I am so going for a Yip Yip monster some year.

This is an awesome story.

I am very excited to soon be leaving the rain of Vancouver and head down under for sun, fairy penguins, reefs, jungle, and… yeah. I’m excited.

I’m trying to get last-tasks finished before I go, but today has turned into one of those Disaster-Prone times where everything I touch goes off-kilter so I’ve been cruising DIY sites instead. Some cool finds:

• a use for scrap yarn
• fabric birds
• eraser stamps (which can be paired with stamped coasters
• monster booties (with claws! death by cute)

Greg, in his newly-knitted hat.

The hat is a flat-variation of Swell from Knitty in 100% wool. The hat took three days to make, and I liked it so much that I’ve bought some yarn to make a more colourful variation for myself.

The hat is inspired by the Knitty pattern Swell modified to have a straight rib brim (6 rows) instead of earflaps.

My excessive knitting can be taken as either procrastination or a sign that I’m working really, really hard. Either way, there are lots of tasty hats!

This is a detail-photo of Greg

This hat was knit up on 4.5mm (US size 7) circular needles with three balls of the Eskimo wool (I have half a ball of each colour left over). The variation to make it flat with a ribbed brim instead of ear-flapped is:
Cast on 77 [88, 99] stitches
Knit one row
*K2, P2* , repeat to end of row for 4 rows
Knit one row
then continue with the regular pattern starting with the 2nd line of directions in “Hat” (ie, ” K 12 rounds.”)

…can you tell I love this hat? Mine is going to have one colour for the brim, and try to fit in a full three bands of waves instead of two, all in different colours.

Gran in Magic

This hat is inspired by the yip-yip martians from the Muppets and is a variation of that Furry Fury hat I’d made before. Once I watched the skit, I just knew I had to knit one up for Magic. Later my gran saw it, and decided she liked it far better than the 100% cotton lavender cap I’d knit for her.

In the words of cousin Sarah, she’s a druid! Or maybe a fuzzy blue marshmallow!

This is by far the geekiest project I have made. The code is binary encoding for ASCII letters. They spell out “Big Brother” along one end, and his name along the other (yes, with proper capitalization and spacing).

With the scarf

The idea is inspired by the Knitty pattern “Binary” although the actual implementation was fairly different from the suggested pattern. To start with, it’s flat instead of tubular, and it’s knit up in Lion’s bulky (and a neon green yarn tripled to match weight).

The scarf is extremely heavy, and far warmer than anything Big Brother will possibly need in Vancouver.

I started this skirt in white fluffy yarn with ribbon striping, and restarted when I discovered it was a mobius strip. When the second attempt was miniskirt length, I concluded that I hated it (although it’d make an adorable pillow case). I switched yarn, and started again, and again was thwarted by the mobius strip. The next attempt I followed a pattern exactly (including a gauge swatch, how novel!) and it came out with a 90″ waist. As I’m not that big, I started again this time generally inspired by Knitty’s Intolerable Cruelty pattern but doing all the sizing entirely on intuition and eyeballing it. Of course I mobius’ed again (this time discovering that although I’d been super-careful in the original join, I’d been letting it twist somewhere in the first five rows! grrr…) but instead of restarting I took some scissors to it, untwisted, and kept knitting! Afterward I lined it with some iridescent lime-magenta fabric.

I like the end result, although there are many things I’d do differently if I were to make a skirt again. I’m pleased with the product and will probably wear it in daily life as a fall/winter skirt. What was most amazing to me is that the actual knitting really didn’t take long — Monday of last week to Tuesday of this week, then about two hours of making the lining and doing the detail-work (mostly on Thursday afternoon for a Thursday night outfit).

update a year later: I ripped out the lining as being ugly and having people decide I was accidentally flashing my iridescent panties, but I’m still loving the skirt. It’s feeling a little bit big so if I were to knit another skirt I’d probably go a size smaller and do more rib-knitting along the top few rows.

My roommate borrowed my yellow fuzzy hat for skiing last winter, and liked it so much that he asked me to knit him a similar hat in red. It’s double-layered and thickly ribbed with a full back (to keep the neck warm), all designed to keep out the biting winds of a Montreal winter.

Josh modeling his hat.

The hat pattern is mine, an improved version of my yellow fuzzy hat that I knit during the EOS Grads ski trip in winter 2006. The hat was knit during the Rock Mechanics Conference in Spring/Summer 2007.