Knitting in the News!

A couple days ago, the increase in popularity of knitting hit the Canadian news!! Yeay for knitting circles across the globe!

http://www.globalnews.ca/knit+your/3952492/story.html

PS: Due to the recent sprain-ish problem with my wrist I haven't been able to knit. It's probably an understatement to say I'm going crazy.

Real men knit.

Jordan's mom just returned from a trip from Peru, and brings with her a tale of a very interesting tribe. Only the men can knit!

If you want to read more, check out the wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taquile_Island

Felting fail?

The Hermione hat is finished, and was a moderate fail. As per usual, I encountered any number of disasters while making it. Hopefully I'm not the only knitter who this happens to...

The first problem was my inability to read patterns. As Ashley can attest to, even things like K1,P1 are hard for me to grasp....So there I was, cast on and ribbing away, when I decided to recount my stitches for fun. The pattern called for 82, but I was going to do 84 to make it a multiple of 4. To my delight (...) I discovered that I had only cast on 74 stitches (???). But since I had already knit an inch or so, it (for some reason) didn't make sense to start over, so I kept going. I wonder if anyone can guess what happened? Yes! My hat was too small!!!  Classic Jen. Actually, I could have dealt with it being the circumference it was, but the real problem was that it was more like a beanie than a beret. I knit the full 5" the pattern called for, and was disappointed. This is what it looked like when I was done:

So all in all, it was alright, but more beanie-ish than I wanted. Next, I decided to felt without fear, since I didn't feel particularly attached to the hat. I put it in a hot wash and set the timer for 5 minutes. At some point, a fuse blew, and the wash stopped, but I'm not really sure when...so the timing kind of went out the window. It wasn't felted at all the first time I checked it. When I went back down a few minutes later it looked like Super Felted Man, the superhero of speedy felting had arrived....my hat was WAY felted. And bonus, it has shrunk. Disaster! Hahaha...so now my hat was doubly as small as I had hoped, and so felted you could barely see the lovely pattern I had worked. Le sigh. Here it is on my makeshift hat blocking set up (aka a towel stuffed inside the hat):

Things I would do differently next time:

• Don't use smaller needles than the pattern calls for
• Cast on 80 stitches instead of 74
• Knit for at least 6-6.5" instead of the 5" called for
• Don't overfelt...check more often...don't have power go off when felting

I would definitely re-make this hat. It's such a nice texture when it's felted, and I can imagine it would be very warm. When my long of list of things to knit has dwindled, I will be revising this pattern. 

Peace out. 

Felting Fun!

After seeing the new HP movie (The Deathly Hallows), I totally fell in love with Hermione's hat in the graveyard scene! I've decided that Hermione's hat looks a little felted.

I went and bought this really pretty pink yarn:

And then to my dismay learned that you can only felt with wool, and not acrylic yarns. Always do your research before you buy your yarn kids. So I got this one instead:

I like the colour on the first one better, but that's ok. So being quite used to disastrous mistakes, I decided to follow advice and knit up a swatch to experiment on. I am following the instructions on how to felt here. It started out looking like this:

And after 10 minutes in the hot water wash it looked like this:

I wanted it a bit more felty, so I put it in for another 5 minutes. It came out like this:

Good enough for me! I am going to follow the pattern for the hat from here. Since I didn't leave it in the wash for that long, my swatch didn't shrink, so I'm going to follow the pattern exactly and hope for the best! What's the worst that can happen? Haha.....

Well here I am. Blogging. I never thought it would happen. But after a few comments from my friends, I decided that there is no better way to describe my journey through knitting. I love knitting. Well, I'll be back when I've actually finished a project and have something to post about. Peace.