Post-Christmas Knitting Update

I believe it may have been Franklin Habit who said, "blogging over the holidays is a pain in the ass," a sentiment that I'm sure many knit-bloggers share.  So if it seemed like the knitting content of the posts went down a little bit, or I became desperate enough to show you images of yarn oddments from my early knitting days, well...I had my reasons.  Because unlike Mr. Habit, I am not clever enough to create holiday knitting mad libs!  So, at long last, may I present:

Like the last flowered hat I did, the flower is actually a pin that can be removed:

I made this as a Christmas present for my mother after she admired mine.  So she knew she was getting a hat, and what the design was, but not the specifics of the colors.  And for a couple weeks, neither did I!

I already had a bit of oatmeal colored yarn left over from something else, and I very carefully selected two different skeins of Lamb's Pride yarn - one for the main color, and one for the contrast stripe and flower.  I ordered the yarn online, from a location which shall remain Nameless, and really believed I was giving myself plenty of time.  (That last phrase has been the downfall of legions of holiday knitters) However, I had never ordered from Nameless before, and was unaware that they tend to take a leeeeetle bit longer than others to ship.  So as the days went by, and my yarn did not arrive, I started to get a leeeeetle twitchy! I was particularly frustrated on the day of the Open House at the Inn on Mt. Ada because that was a clear 3-4 hours of potential holiday knitting time that went to waste for lack of yarn to begin the project.

With nightmarish visions of knitting into the wee hours of December 24th, I came up with Plan B.  I casually asked my mother if she still had the leftover bits of Lamb's Pride from the socks she had made me a year or so earlier.  (It was a really great denim blue color, and she wears jeans much more than she used to.)  She did, and handed it off to me.  So when I went overtown to take my Art History final exam, I tucked the other bits of yarn into my bag and included a trip to the Slipt Stitch in El Segundo just to select another skein of yarn for the main color.  (Because of course they didn't have that yarn in the colors I had ordered from Nameless, that would just take all the freakin' challenge out of it - and we can't have that, can we?)  Obviously I found something that went well with the blue and the oatmeal, and a really nice shell button for the flower that picks up all the colors.  I was so happy to finally get started on the project I cast on and knit the first few rows on the boat on the way home!

The yarn from Nameless showed up about a week later.  (Sigh).  And now I have a couple skeins of Lamb's Pride in my stash looking for a purpose!  I don't think I want to crank out another one of these hats right away, the pattern needs a little work first.  But there's a couple other hat patterns I've been looking at like the Beaufort Hat, and the 3 A.M. Cable Hat, ohh, and then I've been wanting to try the Calorimetry, and there's an Irish Hiking wristwarmer pattern that looks interesting, and someone on Ravelry suggested a knitalong of Carissa Browning's Cable Fingerless Mitts, and...and...and...oh yeah blogging about my knitting - I remember this!