Afghan Progress & Some New Hats

Oh, I just LOVE my Infinity Loom!!! I'm working on an afghan for my hubby -- so far I've used six skeins of Homespun yarn in colors he chose. Only three more skeins and we're finished! Unfortunately, I don't think he'll be using it alone. Miss Whiskers has claimed it for herself.

I love the way this baby is turning out. At first I was afraid the colors were too bland, but it's really looking rich and plush. And it's so SOFT!

I finished two baby hats last night.

I saw a candy cane hat on the Good to be Girl blog and decided to try it out. Being the big chicken that I am, I made a small version on the red knifty knitter just to make sure I was smart enough to recreate the pattern.

For the pink and white one, I started with two strands of pink and knitted enough rows for the rolled brim. Then I wrapped two pegs and skipped one peg around the loom. Since the red KK has an odd number of pegs, I had to improvise when I came to the end and left two blank. Then I added the white yarn (holding two strands as one) and wrapped all the skipped pegs. After knitting off, I started the next row with the white yarn and wrapped the peg just before the peg in the previous row that had a white loop. (Does that make sense?) Then I used the pink to wrap all the skipped pegs. In other words, you're changing where you wrap the white yarn on each row by one peg. Since the red KK has an odd number of pegs, I had to wrap the last two pegs with white.

So the pattern goes like this on the red KK with 31 pegs:
P = pink, W = white

P P W P P W P P W P P W P P W P P W P P W P P W P P W P P W W
P W P P W P P W P P W P P W P P W P P W P P W P P W P P W W P
W P P W P P W P P W P P W P P W P P W P P W P P W P P W W P P

and so on until you reach the desired length.

When the hat was about 6 inches long, I did a complete row of pink with regular e-wrap, then a row flat knit, then finished with the gathering removal method.



For the blue and white hat, I started with the cable cast on and did a few rows of K1 P1 to create a ribbed brim. Then I started the pattern, this time wrapping two pegs white and one peg blue. The rest was the same as with the pink and white hat.

When I do this hat again, I'll use either the green KK or the travel hat loom that should be arriving soon and make it with my son's basketball team colors. Instead of wrapping two, skipping one, I think I'll wrap two, skip two so the stripes will be the same size.

Okay, this has nothing to do with knitting, but don't you just wish you could learn to relax the way a cat does?

Bud makes napping an art. That's why we knit, isn't it? Because we don't have that inherent ability to release life's stresses and just chill out on demand. Oh, to be a cat!