yet more gift knitting

There's nothing like an upcoming birthday party to kick my knitting into overdrive. The one tomorrow is for a 5 year old boy, so I wasn't quite sure what to make. But after the success of the fingerless mitts I made for a male teacher at Bic's school, I thought I'd go all the way and make a pair of full mittens for Ben. I searched around for a good, basic mitten pattern, and started in with some of the 100% wool worsted I had picked up on my last trip to New Zealand. But even though I got gauge, my mitten proportions were pretty off. Not horribly, but bad enough that I didn't want to give it as a gift. I think it was my problem, and not the pattern's, because I was doing it without my handy tape measure, and was just estimating the lengths. It's not a total loss, because Bic totally wants them for herself, after I made her try them on a million times while I was knitting them. I'll post a pic when the set is done.

Having determined that the mittens were a no go, I decided a hat would suffice. I settled on Center Square over at Knitty. I've been wanting to try stranded knitting anyways, having never done any Fair Isle before ever, and thought it would be a good first color knitting pattern.





It turned out pretty well. Here's Bic modeling. I didn't knit a gauge swatch, since it's such a small item, and my gauge was WAY off. Luckily, the circumference was still good (fits me perfectly, is roomy on my Bic's 4 year old head), so I just started the decreases way early, halfway through the second row of circles. Instead of doing a square top, I decreased evenly 8 times each row, right in the middle of each circle, so it looks kinda nice even though I'm decreasing in the pattern. This is going to be a warm as hat, because it's knit with 2 strands for each color, with 2 colors, meaning it's 4 times the thickness of a single strand.

The other gift knitting I've been working on is my first Clapotis. Back in June Indu gave me this lace weight yarn, and I've been meaning to knit something with it. Now a friend of ours is undergoing chemo for breast cancer, and I thought a scarf for her would be a good use of Indu's yarn. I'd been wanting to try the famous Clapotis pattern for awhile, since I think I'm the only knitter online who's ever NOT made one. But it's written for a much heavier weight yarn. That's okay, I'm making it a scarf instead, and it's working out really nicely, though really slowly. I've been knitting it nonstop (besides the break for the Center Square hat) for over a week, and I only have about 2 feet so far. So not even a third done yet. Good thing it's a fun, easy knit that I can do while watching TV.





This is how far I was about a week ago. I'd just dropped the second stitch. I'm going through and pulling the drops all the way down each time I hit one, because the wool yarn is already having a tendency to felt to itself, and I don't want to finish the whole thing and then try to drop the stitches and find that they're all stuck. You may also notice that I'm only using one stitch marker, the first one. The additional ones were all just a waste of time, as it's easy enough to see which stitches to twist. I haven't even bothered to purl the stitches to be dropped, as I've seen suggested as an alternative to stitch markers. Again, just an extra step that makes the knitting that little bit slower, which I don't need. Really, does anyone want to knit slower?