Category: <span>Hats</span>

Naughty Deer

A friend of mine wanted a knit hat.  Jokingly, I suggested using this specific chart to make him a hilarious hat and then offered a few other options for hats that were more tame.  He decided on the original joke idea and I went ahead and knit it for him.  Here’s the finished result!

Pattern: Basic hat, no real pattern, used Fornicating Deer Chart
Designer: Anne Rutten
Needles: US #7 (4.5mm)
Yarn: Knit Picks Swish Worsted, Jade and Gold
Ravelry Project Link

This was super easy to knit and it was a ton of fun to watch the chart shape up and turn into a pair of naughty deer. I did modify the chart to make the deer on the bottom antler-less.  Cast on 96 sts for three repeats.  The recipient loves it and said that he got a bunch of compliments on it while he was out over the weekend.  I find it completely hilarious and have already gotten a request to make another one for another friend!

EDIT 02March2009:
Recipient of the hat made a video about the joy his hat has brought him.. I nearly fell off my chair laughing.
Myspace Video

EDIT 19April2009:
I had gotten a bunch of hits from a UK knitting forum.. linking back to the post for posterity   🙂     *waves  to visitors from the Knitting Forum*

EDIT 02November2009:
This post was linked again and I noticed a HUGE jump in visitors to the site today from an Icelandic website.  While I don’t speak or read Icelandic, Hello there to you all!

Thorped

There’s this great thread on Ravelry that shows a project from roving to spun yarn and the finished object.   It’s without question my favorite thread on Ravelry and is really inspiring for a spinner to see what people spin with what fiber and what patterns they’ve adapted to their handspun.   REALLY creative people   there.  

Sometimes, you get a batch of fiber and you just know what it’s going to be – like Michelangelo said about his sculpture, “I saw the angel in the marble, and I carved until I set him free.”   This may sound a bit strange (if it does, then Michelangelo was strange and that’s a club I don’t mind being a part of), but you knitters know what I’m talking about.. The  times  when the yarn speaks to you and tells you precisely what it  wants to be.   It’s just like that with roving and spinning fibers.   The finished article is in there somewhere, waiting to be let out.   Sometimes it just wants to be yarn.   Sometimes it wants to be a finished object and you just KNOW it the second you lay eyes on the colorway and the texture of the fiber.

So, here’s my most recent Spun-to-Finished entry  and the first one for the blog.

Fiber:
IMG_3705
Superwash Blue Faced Leicester (BFL) from dkKnits – January installment of the fiber club.
Colorway: Burnt Blueberry Baa’Hill (baa’hill.. baaagggellll.. get it? :-P)

Yarn:
IMG_1379
8wpi, Heavy Worsted, 167 yards, navajo plied, spun on my Spinolution Mach 1 wheel.

Finished Object:
IMG_3733
Pattern: Thorpe
Needles: US #8 (5mm)
Trimmed with a bit of leftover Cascade 220 Superwash.   I have NO idea of how to  crochet, so I used a helpful video on YouTube.

In other news, a family friend sold her sheep farm and moved recently, bringing with her A LOT of fleece.   I graciously offered to take some off her hands and came home with just about five pounds of raw wool from Border Leicester mix sheep.   There was about 1.5 lbs of black fleece and  about  3.5  lbs was white.   I decided to mix them together to save on processing and shipped it off to Zeilinger’s for cleaning and to be drawn into roving.   I hadn’t heard anything back in a few weeks, but sure enough, today, a box showed up on the doorstep containing my roving.   Dog for scale, but there’s a ton of it.   I believe this roving is begging to be a sweater.   It hasn’t decided on a color yet though, but I’m sure it will let me know once it’s ready. (The dogs are North American Standard Mutts by the way, weighing in at about 50 lbs each)
IMG_3736